Cricket [he/him]

In the US at least (which sounds like the OP’s country), you can be sued for anything and everything, regardless of merit.

That’s fair. I just thought that it was a very prolonged back and forth between you two for a small thing. I only added it to it though, lol.

How did English become the most widely spoken language? Most certain through far more bloodshed than anything to do with the production of AI systems. If Rust’s association with AI is a reason to avoid using Rust, then yes, the social conditions surrounding English usage are sufficient grounds for a movement away from English as the lingua franca.

Sure, but this is way too much arguing for a minor and harmless statement. You seem to be making a huge deal out of one person on the internet saying that they stopped programming in Rust because they felt that rust projects were getting dominated by LLM output. They weren’t advocating for others to do the same. They simply stated a personal choice. I choose to let people make the choices that they want to make and state their reasons for doing so, especially if their choice has no effect on me.

Even the joke meme in their original post wasn’t making an accusation towards rust but simply saying that rust use in combination with all the other indicators in the meme (i.e., “I made”, “open source”, and “in a month”) point towards a project being vibe-coded.

Not at all, but that’s not what the conversation was about. It was about whether someone stopping using Rust was the same as someone stopping using English.

I’m not a free software developer (or a developer at all), but the idea that gen AI doesn’t concern the free software movement seems odd to me. I think there’s a pretty big space between being a big “intellectual property” proponent or copyright cheerleader and just not wanting to have your work taken without any regard for the conditions you set for sharing it. Someone may be fine with sharing their code for free as long as they get attribution or the derivative shares-alike, for instance. AI ignores the licenses that people release their code under, both copyleft and permissive.

This article mentions some of the concerns that the FSF has regarding gen AI: https://lwn.net/Articles/1040888/

This more recent article indicates that the FSF seems inclined to push for gen AI companies to open up their models: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/16/fsf-urges-ai-vendors-to-liberate-llms/5221192

Edit: PS Consider that if all IP law went away, all open source licenses would be moot. At that point, a lot of people who develop and release their software under open source licenses may stop doing so. Gen AI is already having a chilling effect on all creative endeavors that can be output as a digital output. The elimination of IP laws would make this chilling effect much more severe.

I agree that calling it “universal” is both an exaggeration and chauvinistic, but English is the most widely spoken language in the world, both in total combined as first plus second language and it’s by far the most spoken as a second language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

Rust is not in the same position among computer languages. Javascript holds that distinction, with Rust being way down, outside the top 10: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology (it’s still outside the top 10 in the 2026 survey, but the 2025 chart is much easier to read and interpret at a glance).

So Rust is indeed not the same as English, which makes it not an apt comparison. One can much more easily completely ignore and avoid Rust as a programming language than they can ignore and avoid English as a human language. They can surely both be ignored and avoided, but it’s much more difficult to do so with English.

I just heard on the radio this morning about Dhillon and how she had gotten rid of 300(!) career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division and installed a bunch of Trump cronies. This is going to take a while to clear up, despite them leaving.

This is a really good point. AI has opened a Pandora’s box, multiple boxes even, and I don’t think it/they will ever be closed again. At least the confusion and noise that it generates seems like it will never go away. It will eventually become impossible to determine if something contains AI or not, if it isn’t already.

Then there’s issue of someone running a local model trained on their own original content and then having AI crank out work in their style, which to me would seem to be even harder to spot.

Aside from other reasons that other replies have mentioned, I’m going to guess that a good part of it may be people who have at least one favorite game that uses some type of kernel anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux. I think that that would stop many people from switching from Windows to Linux.

I hear you. Something that I’ve been thinking about lately is how certain philosophies which sound good at first sometimes end up leading to strange or undesirable places, either because their original characteristics already pointed in that direction, because other groups co-opted the original idea for their own purposes, or both. I haven’t reached any conclusions, but it’s something that I wonder about occasionally.

Almost certainly a libertarian.

Incidentally, here’s a nearly 30-year old internet essay related to this (please ignore the old-school ableism in the piece): Libertarianism Makes You Stupid

A version of this has been available for Linux servers for a while.

Yikes, I wasn’t aware that he had said that. That’s a completely terrible mistake. It’s the same mistake that corporations have been warned about for a while now: if you stop hiring and training junior developers, pretty you won’t have any senior developers because the pipeline that produces the seniors has been dismantled. What a terrible thing AI is turning out to be. The comparison to asbestos was apt.

Yes, that’s a fair point. Depending on industry behemoths is a precarious situation. Skating on thin ice if you will.

Hoo boy, this is the scariest take of all that I’ve seen so far about this story. This could spell the end of proprietary software on personal computing devices, which would eventually lead to a major threat to personal computing as it currently exists.

In other words, if all proprietary software were to stop releasing versions that we could run on our own devices, the big moneyed interests that currently still promote personal computing (i.e., Microsoft and Apple) would all of a sudden have no reason for doing so. Personal computing hardware manufacturers, who would also have an interest in this, could simply switch to producing server hardware instead. This would leave us with only open source software and hardware for personal computing. From a certain perspective, open source software and hardware sounds like a good result; however, the problem is that it leaves no industry behemoths (read: big money) defending personal computing from future waves of “let’s protect people / the nation from child porn, hackers, and scammers” legislation. Scary scenario for sure.

I see, thank you!

Thanks! What do you mean by switching to open-source kernel modules? I’ve heard of people having to lock packages with tumbleweed before. I’m glad that I haven’t run into these issues so far.

It seems that nvidia drivers are a common cause of issues in many distros. I had heard of Fedora being a difficult one to work with nvidia drivers, but then if I search the web for <distro name> nvidia issues, a bunch of message threads about exactly that come up for each distro. I would love to switch to AMD GPUs, but apparently they don’t work as well as or aren’t as widely supported as nvidia ones for graphics and video applications. The whole thing is a pain.

SCO was a UNIX company that tried to destroy Linux through lawsuits in the early 2000s. This was a huge saga in the tech world for years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group

Can you tell us more about this? I’ve been running tumbleweed with an nvidia GPU for a few months and the only issue I’ve run into was once recently, when the key for the nvidia repo had expired, preventing me from updating at all. I tried again the next day or two and it had been resolved. I would like to know what else to expect. I’ve heard of occasional issues with tumbleweed and nvidia driver versions before, but didn’t know if it was something that had been resolved.

Much like, for example, Richard III from Shakespeare’s play and the actual person.

Good insight and analogy, thanks!