The "AI Torture Chamber" has opened an upsetting and absurd window into the effective altruist obsession with "model welfare."

Hello We had a cascaded WMS working in 2.28.5. After upgrade to 3.0.1, it is failing to load in a WMS client (QGIS). The remote WMS loads fine in QGIS direct without Geoserver cascading it. It appears to be timing out after a long delay in QGIS. Log includes: Error rendering coverage on the fast path Caused by: org.geoserver.platform.ServiceException: org.apache.hc.core5.http.ConnectionRequestTimeoutException: Timeout deadline: 180000 MILLISECONDS, actual: 180000 MILLISECONDS Caused by: org....

Music industry group IFPI has asked the EU to add the open source YouTube download tool yt-dlp to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List.

Conversations, my federated instant messaging client for Android, started out as many traditional open-source projects do: as an attempt to scratch my own itch. Development started in January 2014 in my student dormitory, and within weeks I started dogfooding and using the client as the primary means of communicating with my friends. However, when it came to releasing the app to the public on March 24, 2014—exactly twelve and a half years ago today—it was immediately clear to me that I would at least try to turn my open-source project into a business. While I didn’t invent the business model of making the source code publicly available but charging for the convenience of a compiled binary, it was certainly unusual in 2014.

Ah ouais, quand même, on en est là ! par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

KDE is on the news because of a _controversial_ proposal to define an official “AI” (LLM) policy. Other projects have tried their hand at similar policies and stances but, in my opinion, they miss the mark about the goal of such initiatives. I think that the point of these statements is shaping _social norms_ and not micro-managing developer workflows. They should be about signalling what kind of behavior we want, and what kind we reject. This proposal does not go into detail about the many problems that LLM have caused to society, workers, the environment. It goes without saying that all these ills are fundamentally opposed to the humanist spirit of GNOME. With all that in mind, here is what I _personally_ think a GNOME LLM policy could be: ## A GNOME Project LLM Policy The GNOME Project prioritizes the social and human aspects of collective software creation. Therefore: 1. LLMs ("AI") can not be used to create or modify code submitted to GNOME, or hosted on GNOME infrastructure. You might be asked to prove your code meets this requirement. You might be banned for trying to circumvent this policy. #### Example Guidelines for Contributors These are just a draft of the kind of criteria one could use to evaluate if a submission fits the policy. * You must be able to personally reason and explain your changes * You must be able to demonstrate knowledge of the problem space you are working on * You must solve the underlying issue, not just its symptoms * You must respect the time of fellow contributors * You must not impersonate yourself through chatbots, agents, or other automated systems ## This Is About The Future Of GNOME GNOME is not just software that happens to ship every six months. That is just a delusion we have been holding up for the last 30 years to keep our loose group of colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, together. GNOME exists as a collective that find joy in reaching beyond our individual limitations to achieve something bigger. These people, this joy, are the whole point of the project. Contributors are not payroll, a liability, that we hope to downsize next quarter. _“Come do free labor for a handful of corporations by reviewing chatbot output in your free time”_ is not an attractive proposition to young talented people in 2026. If we want GNOME to continue we need to create an attractive and inviting social space where people are valued as people. Just like the Foundation is moving to individual donations to stop depending on just a handful of companies, we need to look for the next 100 people that will donate a tiny bit of their time, instead of hoping that corporations will keep 10 overworked engineers on staff. We already have seen how companies will happily abandon a whole chunk of GNOME on a whim. GNOME is not just software, and it should protect the social and human aspects that make it special. Our success metric is the community and social bonds we create. In the most literal sense GNOME is about the journey and the friends we make along the way. Free Palestine. ## FAQ #### How do you enforce this? You can not. People will still send LLM generated code. This policy makes it explicit that we do not welcome these careless submissions. We have a Code of Conduct that is 80% about telling other people what our values are, and 20% about handling unwanted behavior (“enforcing”). This is similar. #### What if people simply lie about not using LLMs? This is the same problem as authorship, in the copyright sense. Whenever we receive new code we have to assume that “beyond a reasonable doubt” said code has been authored by the person contributing it. We make our best guess. The attached guidelines are a suggestion to make these new guesses. #### Ok. But what if people are really good at lying? This policy is about the majority that will not even try to lie. See previous questions.

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I’m sad to say that CSS-Tricks is stuck in limbo again. The site was acquired by Digital Ocean in 2022 and it continued to run under their ownership until February of 2023 when Digital Ocean fired the people working on it. The site stayed latent for a year before Digital Ocean re-hired lead editor Geoff Graham in June of 2024 who got the ship sailing again. Now, CSS-Tricks sits inactive again. Its future is unclear, because there hasn’t been any communication. Digital Ocean largely just went silent. Digital Ocean is a big company, and it can be expected that things get missed, especially with staff turnover. However, management is a small part of a larger picture. Only a few days ago, DigitalOcean pledged a $3,000,000 USD donation to Omarchy – a set of scripts and configurations atop Arch Linux and a range of other open-source software (much of which struggles greatly for funding). A set of scripts and configurations which are led by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). Previously of Ruby on Rails fame, but now of Omarchy notoriety and far-right, racist infamy. This isn’t a matter of effort or time; it is a matter of care. As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote announcing DigitalOcean’s funding: > But the part of this patronage that really made me smile was how quickly it all came together. I reached out to Paddy Srinivasan, DigitalOcean’s CEO, on X on Wednesday. We had a call that same night. I sent a proposal on Saturday. By Sunday, we’d finalized everything. I know Geoff has been trying to raise this for _months_ , to no avail. Atop of this, DigitalOcean has ceased the monthly $50 payments they previously gave to GNOME and Flathub infrastructure. Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon or to pay the writers and editors of their own publication. Yes, I’ve got skin in the game as someone who has written for the publication, but I’ve got more skin in the game as someone who wishes for a thriving ecosystem and who wants to read the quality work CSS-Tricks is known for publishing. There are very few quality publications about the web left, and it would be a major blow to lose another.

Investigating the use of LLMs in the Android FOSS community

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