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points by aroman 23 hours ago | 0 comments

Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.

The whole reason why people are trying to replace them is because they have stubbornly refused to use AI, which has directly impeded progress in getting M3/M4/M5/M6 working. It's fine of course for them to continue pursuing their hobby of doing everything manually, and honestly it is insanely impressive.

But most people just want stuff to work, so it's odd to complain about it when others do manage to get it to work using AI to build on top of their prior permissively-licensed work.

[–] nsbdhciebsbdhc 22 hours ago

Wanting stuff to work is a valid reason to not use AI for more sophisticated development projects. Having a computer that kernel panics once every three days is useless to me, even if it works for you.

[–] Kwpolska 18 hours ago

A kernel panic is the least of your worries with this hardware. Asahi had to introduce a custom daemon to avoid frying speakers. Apple doesn't need to care about making the hardware interfaces safe if they control the entire stack, so they don't, and expose dangerous capabilities to the OS.

[–] Wowfunhappy 13 hours ago

Does this generalize to basically anything outside of speakers though? I think a pretty easy solution is to not use AI for that specifically.

[–] orangea 11 hours ago

thermal management is the first thing that comes to mind. and battery management

[–] getcrunk 1 hour ago

You would hope both those systems have built in hw failsafes

[–] LoganDark 18 hours ago

There was a fun period of time where Boot Camp still existed, but Windows could fry the speakers because it didn't have any of macOS's thermal protection. I think this was after the 2016 redesigns, as I had a mid-2015 with no such issue.

[–] perching_aix 3 hours ago

Good thing they only ever write correct code which consistently obeys every invariant in that entire stack ever. Excellent design, meet perfect engineering.

[–] gloxkiqcza 22 hours ago

Linux kernel itself is AI development friendly.

[–] tonyedgecombe 21 hours ago

Some of us think that is a mistake.

[–] aeonik 19 hours ago

Hmm very vague. "Some of us".

Do the massive amount of vulnerabilities not make you think twice?

At this point, I trust human code less than llm code. Design and architecture of the code still greatly benefit from a good human touch, but I'm not sure how long that will remain true.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenAI-948-Linux-LPE-Bugs

[–] nsbdhciebsbdhc 16 hours ago

So validate with an llm and humans. People committing code they haven't read - which will inevitability happen - is dangerous and hard to remotely verify.

[–] zdragnar 4 hours ago

People using LLMs put up much larger changes, and much faster. Depending on the LLM used the quality is often much lower.

A lot of projects just stopped accepting any outside contributions rather than deal with the tidal wave of slop they were getting. Choosing to not accept LLM code is IMHO a better compromise.

[–] rowanG077 13 hours ago

In the end there is always a separate reviewer. Even if the producer is adversial and not even looking at the code then this process exists to catch it. This is not at all different from people attempting to get backdoors into Linux.

[–] codedokode 9 hours ago

LLMs will introduce new vulnerabilities. What Linux should have done is stop using non-standard C, or better, stop using C completely in favor of Rust, support code analysers.

[–] palata 8 hours ago

And humans can introduce new vulnerabilities, too. Linux maintainers accept patches from random people over the internet. They already have to just the patch on its technical merit, not on who submitted it. For them I don't think it makes a difference (technically) if the patch was written with the help of an AI.

I believe that there may be valid reasons to refuse anything that was touched by an AI, but that's not about security. It's more about the non-technical problems coming from AI (centralising power, increasing inequalities, carbon footprint, ...).

[–] jasonvorhe 19 hours ago

Some people will always disagree with something. That's what's great about free software. There will probably be some Luddite anti AI Linux fork at some point.

[–] cromka 21 hours ago

That's not what they meant. It's AI friendly, not slop-friendly.

There's a reason no Omarchy patch of any kind has made it to the kernel list yet. I did personally look into some of their code and it is certified, hacked-togeter slop.

[–] ffemac 12 hours ago

Exactly. As an example, read that Gravity Linux guy's responses here. I will never ever trust him. I will stay away from his code as far as possible. Asahi team: I have my trust in you.

[–] ChocolateGod 20 hours ago

How do you define the difference between ai friendly and ai slop?

[–] dj_morocco 20 hours ago

I'm pretty sure Asahi devs experiment with LLM tools, but not to Omarchy's extent. LLM ban is purely a filtration filter, so that they wouldn't be spending time overbearingly exhausting number of patches generated with AI, and not someone who cares about this than a shiny tool.

Everyone understands that LLM is a mean to an end, but it's clear that Omarchy got two confused and it's showing.

[–] saagarjha 1 hour ago

No, they’re pretty against AI in general.

[–] inejge 20 hours ago

My definition, FWIW.

AI-friendly: you can use the LLMs however you wish, but you must thoroughly understand every part of submitted code.

Slop-friendly: understanding anything is optional.

[–] ChocolateGod 9 hours ago

I also agree with that definition. But for example if I get an LLM to generate 95% of a program, but I understand and have read every line of code, is it still slop?

Some would say yes unfortunately.

[–] flykespice 10 hours ago

Ai friendly patch:

* Author posts patch with a manageable number of lines so maintainer doesn't gets burned out reviewing it.

* Tries to outline on the body what the patch is about and his rationale for the design decisions on the code.

* Promptly answers any maintaners questions about the line changes.

* Discloses which AI model he used to assist on the patch and how was it used.

AI slop patch:

* Submits patch with huge lines of code without explanation.

* The body is written in a self-patronizing tone with superfluous formatting that helps nothing but annoys who is looking for the actual substance of patch

* When questioned by maintainer about some line changes either goes radio silent or reply with the usual AI tone of marketin salesman.

* rarely if ever discloses AI usage.

[–] tkel 20 hours ago

experience

[–] BluSyn 2 hours ago

Human slop is far worse than then AI slop.

[–] orangecat 10 hours ago

It's amusing that people still default to "human-written code is solid and AI code sucks" after the enormous quantity of bugs that AIs are finding in human-written code.

[–] bigstrat2003 7 hours ago

Nobody has ever said human code is perfect. But it is empirically the case that code written by LLMs is on average lower quality than code written by humans.

[–] habitue 3 hours ago

That's not really true, and it's only even potentially true if we talk about the absolute cream of the crop developers. Most human written code is quite bad actually

[–] saagarjha 1 hour ago

> absolute cream of the crop developers

You’re reading their blog

[–] BluSyn 2 hours ago

This has not been true for 6 months. Update your priors.

[–] kcb 6 hours ago

Having a computer where half the features don't work isn't particularly great either...

[–] nickysielicki 9 hours ago

Ok boomer

[–] codedokode 9 hours ago

So why those people using AI do not write the code from scratch without breaking the license and without vibe-copying existing code?

[–] habitue 3 hours ago

What is vibe-copying? The code was permissively licensed specifically so other people could do what they want with it. I'm so confused what people think permissive licensing is

[–] Danox 2 hours ago

No talent. no skills is why?

[–] mythz 2 hours ago

> exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work

You cannot exploit permissive licensing when its entire purpose is to encourage others to use it.

[–] WhyNotHugo 7 hours ago

> I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.

The intent was for their work to be usable on non-GPL distributions and OSs (including the BSDs).

The new licence is pretty restrictive — proprietary platforms will just regurgitate it with LLMs, but other open ecosystems will have to re-invent things from scratch.

[–] tommica 23 hours ago

Its the monetizing part that makes me think its not Omarchy - they have no monetizing things.

[–] ADevWithAnIdea 23 hours ago

They're referring to Omarchy, it's very clear on their IRC

[–] kombine 22 hours ago

I saw that's there is an Omarchy for Mac "team" consisting mostly of one guy who is active on Twitter (and quickly amassed many followers) and seems to have no prior experience of working on Linux kernel. They do not mention Asahi anywhere which isn't surprising to me given the reputation of DHH and Omarchy. This hijacking of open source by bad faith actors is very concerning.

[–] saagarjha 1 hour ago

It’s a little more complicated than this (but not better IMO)

[–] jasonvorhe 19 hours ago

Nonsense.

> Omarchy on... > Apple M1/M2 chips# > Asahi Alarm is a version of Arch for Apple M1/M2 computers built on top of Asahi Linux. You can get Omarchy running on top of that with some effort. See the user-driven guide.

Source: https://omarchy.org/manual/omarchy-on/

> [...] You finished what Asahi started, and you’re already pushing on to M4, M5, and M6. Thank you!

Source: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/11/marcelo-alcantara-and-birk-...

[–] cromka 21 hours ago

Yeah, on their GitHub for example, in their m1n1 fork they tend to refer to "upstream" as... the main branch of their fork.

Very interesting choice of words, but again, all their work including all issues and docs are LLM-generated.

[–] petterroea 23 hours ago

Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.

edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...

[–] SXX 22 hours ago

DigitalOcean obviously cut their OSS support because they gave it as credits for a year and it required constant human review and interaction.

At the same time it was mostly to small OSS projects that dont have formal non-profits so no tax exemption benefits to DigitalOcean.

[–] petterroea 22 hours ago

It is worth noting the same article's discussion of nodejs reads as "DO shut down a program, possibly planning a v2 of said program, but failed to communicate it to its dependents and didn't realize until they started planning to leave". Or they were just fighting the fires caused by a github issue named "Transition off of Digital Ocean" caused \o/

[–] burgerone 23 hours ago

They do have large entities donating to them

[–] throwaway13337 23 hours ago

Is Omarchy trying to monetize Linux?

I mean, I get the poisoning the well of open source thing that some companies do. I didn't think Omarchy was trying to do that.

With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward to being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.

Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only to take action.

[–] lionkor 21 hours ago

The same LLMs you have to rent from the very richest people on earth? I would be careful to call that freedom

[–] jasonvorhe 18 hours ago

There's people running close to frontier model grade local AI on consumer and prosumer hardware, let's not act as if it was impossible to skip having to rent from OpenAI or Anthropic.

[–] papyrus9244 19 hours ago

You know you can run LLMs on your own computer, right?

[–] palata 8 hours ago

If you can afford a computer that can run LLMs, sure.

[–] flossly 1 hour ago

"afford" in this case has to be compared to the cost of renting.

[–] vasco 23 hours ago

I really don't get why people even start with permissive licenses if they have people they don't like to use their software or if they're just going to go "not like that" at the first real use.

It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".

[–] palata 8 hours ago

They say:

> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin.

Permissive licences require attribution. It's okay to complain when people publish your permissively-licenced work without attribution, and hence without honouring the licence.

[–] nextaccountic 23 hours ago

They explain that they expected that MIT licensed code would encourage contributions from BSD OSes

I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice

[–] bentley 23 hours ago

Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t actually believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…

“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”

—Theo de Raadt (2001)

[–] SXX 23 hours ago

That'a weird how you placed copyleft next to source available side of spectrum.

That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.

GPL wont help Asahi team for a bit.

[–] nextaccountic 23 hours ago

> That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.

Yeah, the whole idea of GPL is to restrict developers from doing certain things, because it would be harmful to users

[–] jwrallie 4 hours ago

Yeah, the whole point of GPL is that people can fork it and improve it as long as they share the code back.

If Asahi is rejecting LLM produced code, then they will get the modified source but will be unable to use it because of their own rules.

[–] dingi 23 hours ago

I don't get this complain. MIT does not forbid commercial use. So what's the fuss about?

[–] aroman 23 hours ago

From TFA:

> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

[–] geerlingguy 22 hours ago

It's one reason I've favored GPL of late, after many years using MIT. Not that many people these days would explicitly follow the terms of any license.

[–] saghm 9 hours ago

There are licenses that require attribution without being copyleft though. I'm not saying the Asahi developers are wrong to use copyleft, but it's weird to me to mention "without attribution" as a sticking point when there are fairly standard permissive licenses that require attribution like Apache and BSD.

[–] tredre3 7 hours ago

MIT isn't copyleft and it does require attribution, it's basically the only requirement of it. I guess they just don't like that attribution means "put the license snippet deep in a secondary readme file hidden somewhere, along with 50 other licensees used in the project".

I think it's clear that they don't want people to use their code and close the door behind them. They also clearly want clearer attribution. I'm sorry but if those are things you desire, then deliberately choosing MIT because of a GPL hate-boner was plain stupid.

[–] theptip 9 hours ago

Right, this seems deeply confused. If you care about how your code is used, don’t use MIT. Especially, if you care about monetization, probably use GPL or AGPL.

[–] hparadiz 22 hours ago

They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.

[–] robbiep 22 hours ago

Sort of fair? Or actually fair because attribution for work is… fair?

[–] hparadiz 22 hours ago

Your credit is your first commit. After that people copy/paste patches back and forth as they will. It happened before AI. I've run patches in prod that were basically someone's random RAID controller patch posted to the Gentoo forum. If it works, it works.