Kit 🔻 (32)
"There's no Claude, there's just other people's code", Leenaars offers a reality check
Curious (or not?) that one of FOSDEM 2026's sponsors is google, which provides part of the tech infrastructure for israel to commit genocide in Palestine through its participation in project Nimbus...
some refs:
FOSDEM starting in a bit!
Some talks that could be interesting for workers:
31 Jan, 10:00
FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI -> war always most hurts working people
We need to talk about war. And we need to talk about companies building bots that propose to rewrite our source code. And about the people behind both, and how we preserve what is great about FOSS while avoiding disruption. How do geopolitical conflicts on the one hand and the risk of bot-generated (adversarial) code on the other influence the global community working together on Free and Open Source software?
cc @techwerkers
Sensitive content : disordered eating
These models are ingesting everything and anything, indiscriminately. They're over-eating
At a certain point they'll be ingesting their own excrement & barfing that up, suggests Leenaars
But don't fall into the trap of jumping into European-based big tech!
That'd be the same predators, just based in a different location
Instead, what this moment needs is social initiative, not more 🤑 says Leenaars
What happens when people use LLM's to recreate thousands of open source projects in seconds, and relicense them all to more permissive licenses? 
Dipping in to this #FOSDEM talk:
Let's end open source together with this one simple trick
live here now: https://live.fosdem.org/watch/ub5230
The pager explosions in Lebanon in 2024, during which thousands were wounded an many Lebanese people got killed, was a zionist supply chain attack
What does war look like today?
"It's not [just] enemy lines, it's your lines of code that are causing real-world damage", says Leenaars
As a form of warfare, code & computation is:
- Super cheap
- Very low risk
- High yield
Another talk relevant to workers:
1 Feb, at 16:05
Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together
This talk identifies 6 factors that contribute to developer burnout:
- difficulty getting paid,
- workload and time commitment,
- maintenance work as unrewarding,
- toxic community behaviour,
- hyper-responsibility
- pressure to prove oneself.
Recommendations for structural changes to address developer burnout:
- pay OSS developers
- foster a culture of recognition and respect
- grow the community
- advocate for maintainers
Leenaars discusses the early days of the internet, how much optimism there was.
And how much, in retrospect, naïvité in choosing partnerships -- both with what became Big Tech and with governments