yes i am leah rowe

That's in the previous half of the sentence you removed:

> ...it is my intention that I and others will audit these projects in the future, de-slopping them...

> think for yourself. AI will only ruin your mind and deskill you. here are some articles:

> think AI makes you super hacker? think again: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 ["Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity"]

> https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

> consider that the infrastructure for AI is economically unsustainable; when the bubble bursts, and it will, we will suddenly be left with millions of people thoroughly deskilled who will be useless. lots of reeducation needed, and lots of people will just be left behind.

> consider that it is controlled by only a minority of very wealthy individuals; with it, they have unprecedented control over human thought through manipulation of information, and control over what information is presented through filtering (what they call training).

> AI is a threat to the health and democracy of our entire world.

> libreboot will not facilitate its use. AI is the most dangerous technology ever invented by human beings.

...

They have plenty of reasons not to.

contributing to projects that have slop in them has legal liability. you'd have to essentially hardfork to remove the slop from git history and such.

for my part, when i do work on this, what i will do is this: re-use existing nuke.list mechanism in lbmk (used already to delete dubious files, e.g. code files with unclear licensing in u-boot) to delete the slopped files. then provide cleaned versions of the same files, with necessary patching re-written as necessary, and files that use it patched to include e.g. foo.deslop.c instead of foo.c - then git history is removed inside tarballs. filter out the changelogs for projects accordingly.

this is the most reasonable way to do it on projects with very little slop. with projects that become almost entirely slop, a hard fork becomes necessary.

It's possible this type of "radical" behavior is why this project exists in the first place. I'm willing to bet if the Libreboot maintainer(s) were not "radical" they'd just be using a Mac and be content with a closed source bootloader.

Not to say this "radical" behavior is helpful, and I understand why people don't like it.

AI in its current form is a commercial product created from stolen labor.

I think there are extremely legitimate reasons to be critical of that part at the very least, and I don't think it's a particularly "radical" stance within Free Software, which is fundamentally conscientious of such questions.

(I don't know whether the Libreboot authors have this particular point in mind.)

When your project is literally writing a BIOS/ UEFI alternative that exists for the purpose of making base runtime systems open and verifiable and to improve the user’s ability to trust in their system, an opposition to unverified machine generated code seems not only justifiable but sensible. If Leah were not taking steps to mitigate generated code in the project, the project would no longer meet my needs as a Libreboot user.

We've reached the godwin point quite quickly.

Yeah its quite the contrast to the recent QGIS core "no AI" policy that very pointedly had no emotive language at all.

Well, yes, this is a project to create a fully libre, GPL'd boot chain free of binary blobs. The few users I know stick with aging ThinkPads. I'm not sure what you expected.

You realize that it is their "radicalism" that gives us the Libreboot project to begin with, right?

Likewise, it if claims something is “vibe coded” when it clearly is not (such as U-Boot).

Agentic AI has allowed 86Box to make massive strides forward. This includes a substantial contribution to emulate the Intel Inboard 386 that was created by someone who describes himself as a non-programmer. The community is now bigger and stronger, although we’ve had some aches and pains with slop AI generated PRs.

The same goes for Gravity Linux which is booting in my M4 Macs with working GPU and most other peripherals. What used to take years now takes weeks, so we can do much more thorough testing and ultimately have a better end product.

I find it hard to square treating that like such a red flag while supporting free open source software more generally. The entire ecosystem is rife with ethics/morals driving the initiative. There is a lot of flag planting and red line drawing.

People say AI or not, if the thing is good then it should be used. But if a group actively rejects it (which is valid even if I’m not that militant myself) it compromises the project suddenly?

Personally I treat whinging about other people's ideals as a red flag.

It's libreboot. The entire point of its creation was to take coreboot and rip out the non-libre blobs. Its author is trans (IIRC), which also carries its own very pointed perspective on the world.

Some of it goes too far in my own opinion - I have no problem trusting AMD's final microcode for the Opteron 63xx any differently than the baked-in mask for the 62xx. But regardless, I respect someone who is pushing the whole envelope as they see it. At the very least their effort creates a lot of things I do care about!

I wouldn't trust their products simply because AI as a tool works and their refusal to use it means their software will be worse off for it.

Considering how popular many of these projects are, I (and likely many others on HN) already do!

So yes, yes we will.

>how are they different?

i do not believe you are asking that question in good faith.

and, if you are the leah who wrote the policy, i am positive this would be a completely fruitless discussion as you are obviously entrenched in your beliefs. i am not under the delusion that anything i could say, show, or prove to you would change your mind.

>the developer would be sacrificing their own privacy

How so?

RMS is extremely radical but he's also reasonable and consistent unlike these guys. There's also GNU Guix which recently banned AI-assisted contributions [1] due to copyright infringement concerns and licensing doubts. This is an entirely reasonable take for a hardcore free software codebase, it's literally built around this political concept.

On the contrast, libreboot's stuff reads like a parody or a shitpost. It's hard to believe they're being entirely serious.

[1] https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/pulls/11407

Libreboot is not a fork of Coreboot.

It's a distribution. That is, they build and distribute firmware images. Coreboot just ships source.

Coreboot's docs lists the variety of distributions: https://doc.coreboot.org/distributions.html

i don't live in a free country. the UK has enacted several laws impeding fundamental civil liberties in recent years. rolling back on several human rights laws, now they're even removing the right to trial by jury, etc. it's quite troubling actually.

I'd rather have the project that works, rather than one that has the correct political stance.

You can look at what being achieved right now with AI, GoW3 (an absolute master piece BTW) on the PS4 Remaster can be played on Linux at 120FPS thanks to some decompilation/reverse engineering framework with AI.

I am generally also fed up of politics (whatever they are) forced into projects.

Also AI doesn't make you stupid. It is bullshit, he has cherry picked information to sooth his own biases.

But they're doing it under the banner of the libre software movement, whose raison d'être is free (as in liberty) software. Having political strings attached is antithetical to the movement.

the take is don't ban tools, and technically the compiler outputs are tested by the compiler projects + the automated testing infra

Which is sad; a Pixel phone using libreboot + EDK2 to offer a "normal" boot path to Linux would be sweet.

Also the Pixelbook :)

Assurance that binary blobs and Intel ME support has been properly removed. It’s possible to do this with Coreboot if you know what you’re doing, but this is an off the shelf configuration.