publicai.co and general position towards LLMs
Pirate Praveen Thu 26 Feb 2026 11:05PMPublicSeen by 56Moving our position towards LLMs to its own topic. I initially proposed to support publicai.co as a reasonably good LLM we can recommend. But for now it is removed from the manifesto. So we can discuss it in more nuance here and come up with a position statement on LLMs.
About copyright violation aspect of LLMs in generating source code, this gives a good background https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2024/05/msg00003.html
LLMs do enable people who do not have technology or specific language skills (especially English) to be able to do things they would not be able to do without an LLM. At the same time, this uses a large amount of computing power (and electricity, water and other resources) for training. But LLM are not really the only source of huge computing power usage, how about video streaming platforms? Is it ok for entertainment industry to use so much resources, but not for enabling people to do more? Where do we draw the line?
For me I'd like to focus on publicai.co as a starting point? Do we think it is solves some of the issues with respect to ownership, bias and copyrights? We may not be able to get to an ideal solution in one go, but I think we can at least have something that we can recommend in place of proprietary things like ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok.
Draft:
We support publicai.co as reasonably good compromise at this point. This is a compromise and we will continue to evaluate the options available and update this recommendation if required.
Pirate PraveenSun 19 Apr 2026 9:06AM
https://chaos.social/@Nfoonf/116425083469424715 this a good counter.
" the problem ist the expansive nature of low quality capitalism and the vulnerability of craftmanship to industrial mass production. One day you only can get the low class slop and the many ways in which it hurts people due to it‘s shortcomings will be normalized. And we lose craft and skill in the way that will not be replaced but has to be bought from the rent seeking owners of the factories of low class goods. Of course people of wealth will not see this as a problem."
Pirate PraveenSun 19 Apr 2026 9:30AM
https://mastodon.kylerank.in/@kyle/116426168175091449
"You will get backlash, but you are right.
Free software folks will have to decide whether what they really wanted was everyone to have the freedom to use and modify software, or only that subset of everyone who had the privilege of learning software development.
There has always been this elitist dividing line in the community between people who contribute code, and people who contribute all the other things FOSS needs to thrive. Now those people can contribute code too."
AkshaySun 19 Apr 2026 11:40AM
I've used a model called Big Pickle offered as part of Opencode Zen (for free now) to develop https://opendatakerala.org/KLA2026/
It enabled me to iterate faster and build the platform much faster than what I would have if I tried to do it by hand. In that process, the team that was scraping data, etc also got motivated to do more (because they were seeing quick turnaround for their feature requests, etc) and overall the platform became possible only because of the model assistance.
I tried to also use Antigravity, but the free edition was quickly hitting limits.
This experience has taught me a few things:
The development speed / ease related improvements are real and the second order effects of these are also positive. (Third order effects? I don't know)
It does become harder to switch back to manually writing code (mind gets used to delegating)
As for copyright, I'm in the group of "people who believe all software copyright is an ill-advised legal construction that limits people's freedom". (I've told that LLMs will probably lead to the decimation of copyright and that that is good as far back as June 2023).
I think overall, the debate that LLMs make us do is forcing us to find out what exactly free software was meant to achieve.
If free software was only about software freedom, LLMs are absolutely great!
If free software was about user freedom, then LLMs get complicated by questions of access/affordability, environmental impact, effect on economy and so on.
As for access/affordability I think publicai might be an answer.
As for environment, I wouldn't shout at anyone if they hoped that within maybe a few years there would be LLMs that are capable of running without much damage to the environment. I don't know if that's a form of wishful thinking, or whether it is a possibility. In any case, the comparison with other tools and products that cause damage to the environment is a fair comparison. I believe in degrowth (and the philosophy I recently came across -permacomputing - as shared by Badri). But I also believe that this particular dilemma is very tightly interconnected with our core politics/psychology/agency and the such. Are we better off if we go off to a cave and meditate? Or is there a quota of environmental damage each human is allowed to do? If so what's that quota? Is there a way to fairly distribute that quota? And if so, is there a possibility for each individual to choose what to do with their quota?
As for effect on job/skills/capitalism, I have a muddled understanding. I do hope that like copyright becomes obsolete, all bullshit jobs related to computers also become obsolete with AI. But is it possible? I don't know. When anyone can build any software, why would we still build large software companies? Does it make sense then to pay another company to give you what can be generated by you yourself? Does all the software SaaS/library kind of opportunities then get concentrated in the companies like OpenAI then? I don't know. It's complicated to think about. I don't really worry about skill. People who want to learn/acquire skill can continue to do so as always.
Pirate PraveenTue 21 Apr 2026 8:12AM
@Akshay Recently we were working on a press release that we wanted in Malayalam and English. We drafted in English and someone passed it to Gemini for translation. It was not 100% accurate, but it saved many hours. We only needed to fix some sentences here and there. So public ai would help in cases like this, to democratize access. I think boycott will only further the Digital Divide. As for dependency, we could do the translation manually anytime if we can't access the LLM. Translation is generally a mundane and boring task, at least technical or functional text, literary translations would still need some creativity.
Pirate PraveenTue 21 Apr 2026 8:17AM
As for end to copyright itself, it might end copyright for functional material like code or documentation, but I don't think it can end copyright for music and movies.
Pirate Praveen ·Sun 19 Apr 2026 9:01AM
https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/116428838357472904
"Can it take existing source code and add a new feature? Yes, and that seems like it would be helpful for people who don't know how to code!"