Title of the (concerning) thread on their community forum, not voluntary clickbait. Came across the thread thanks to a toot by @Khrys@mamot.fr (French speaking)
The gist of the issue raised by OP is that framework sponsors and promotes projects lead by known toxic and racists people (DHH among them).
I agree with the point made by the OP :
The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.
I’m disappointed in framework’s answer so far
I don’t buy that DHH is supposed to be racist. Source please.
I’m posting my take here before reading any comments, but I will be looking for validation or good counter arguments:
This feels like Framework admitting that the opensource community is too small to exclude anyone, or maybe that they feel they can’t exclude anyone because doing so would damage their ability to do business? I’m not picking up a “we love nazis” vibe, I’m picking up a “nazis are fucking everywhere, what do you want us to do, for fucks sake” vibe.
I don’t know how I feel about that yet.
I would say most of the customers of Framework are the kinds of people who espouse the kind of antifascist ideology that that guy that started the thread does.
I don’t think that the fascist sympathizer circle and the “willing to pay more money for an ethical laptop that isn’t beholden to a big corporation for repair” circles have much overlap.
This is easy, “Framework doesn’t support fascism or racism in any form. We support open source software and right to repair. Due to concerns with ideology in some of the projects we sponsor we are reviewing the projects we sponsor to make sure that they align with our values as a company.”
The fact that they aren’t willing to say so says plenty.
isnt steam comments having the same far-right comments, honestly they are infesting every online space, with comment sections, with anti-woke comments, far right comments
Did the author bother contacting them first before treating them like utter garbage and trying to rile up a public lynch mob? Just because something is well known to you doesn’t make it well known to everyone. If there are no alternatives with the feature set you are looking for, then sometimes you even have to overlook questionable authors, sort of like Lemmy. If it’s open source and has a license that allows forks, it doesn’t matter that much.
You use open source because of functionality. It didn’t used to be too long ago when people bothered to prove other people wrong through example instead of persecution. If you never convince people they are wrong, you just favor them creating and being in as much of an echo chamber as yourself. Even when they can’t be convinced, there are other people listening to the conversation.
We support open source software (and hardware), and partner with developers and maintainers across the ecosystem. We deliberately create a big tent, because we want open source software to win. We don’t partner based on individuals’ or organizations’ beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software.
Even just from looking at it from a practical standpoint, it would sink just about any company if they have to go full FBI investigation for every single member. If you agree with OP so much, then why do you not agree with OP?
perhaps it is indeed best to let it rest for now. i’ll certainly sleep on it now! :slight_smile:
Some people want to watch the world burn bridges.
Wow framework sells a lot of computers to real fascist psychos. That thread is rough. Comment about ICE only arresting criminals would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic. “I have immigrant friends” lol.
i guess no more framework for me.
Well I guess now I’ve gotta transition away from Hyprland. That fucking sucks, I just moved to it a month or so ago and really like the workflow. Anyone have suggestions for alternatives? Or I could just go back to KDE.
First rule of a PR crisis that has high online visibility is to stop talking.
This is unfortunate for sure. I want to give them a few days to respond for real, it’s always possible they just didn’t know about the issues here, but even in that thread they’re brushing it off as though it doesn’t matter. I’m not really sure what they get out of donating to these projects other than potential PR, anyway.
On a personal level I’ve recommended their laptops to people who have later bought them, and I was even looking at buying one myself to replace my aging macbook, but I don’t think I can do that anymore while this is unaddressed.
i dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac
Yeah I don’t think you get how this works. They had time to research the tool they are recommending but literally nothing about the backers or community? Framework will absolutely have a legal team whose job would include vetting these orgs.
But let’s say you’re right and framework is operating a company with no legal counsel (which is also a giant red flag): their response was “we are chill with terrible people in our space, we have a big tent”. Not “you’re right, we didn’t do research on these guys thanks for bringing it to our attention we’ll do some research”. If they said that, this wouldn’t be a thing. Instead, they said affirmatively “we don’t care if they are white nationalists, we want to include white nationalists in our tent”.
…a legal team checking out linux forums and discord servers for anti trans actions…you ok buddy?
Before they invest money? Yes
Lesson learned: don’t support open source projects. One apparently has to get legal, pr, and a whole investigation (on an ongoing basis!) for every project. Better and cheaper to just not.
Have you…never had a job? I’m really really confused by your aggro response. This is standard operating procedure for any company with more than like 15 people (or with any large assets they can be sued over). I regularly get quotes delayed due to companies having to get their own quotes for their own off the shelf hardware through legal approval.
Have you…never had a job?
Yep. And if customers are getting pissed due to charitable donations we are doing…that incurs a significant cost and becomes a massive hurdle for any future charitable donations.
So, as I said, lesson learned: don’t support open source projects.
Edit: Next meeting about supporting open source project: “Hey this author has opinion x, anti-x is going to hate that. Let’s just spend the money elsewhere.”
Following meeting about supporting a different open source project: “Hey, this author has opinion anti-x, x is going to hate that. Let’s just spend the money elsewhere.”
If that’s the takeaway you want rather than “standard business practice is to vet organizations you support to make sure your goals are aligned”…uh…good for you?
I hope they at least cut their funding now that they know about DHH’s behaviour
100% this. They support many many different open source project and I read people are bitching when they havent had mich time to even respond?
They immediately responded
Anyone who read the thread will see that the OP pretty much dropped it after Nirav’s response. Framework is a tiny company without a PR machine for these occasions, and I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies. Let’s all take some deep breaths.
I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies
But now they should know right? But the response makes it clear they don’t really care. They want to include everyone in the “big tent”, which clearly runs afoul of the paradox of tolerance. I am not a fan of their response.
Their response was “we’re ok with supporting white nationalists”. It doesn’t take a complex pr machine to accept that white nationalists are bad people.
That’s a really piss poor excuse though. It’d be one thing if it was “I like Hyprland, I’ll support that” but then it’s also “I also like Omarchy” annnnd now you’re starting a trend that isn’t a great on to start. THEN you have people in the know who see this trend and being to put two and two together.
Saying that Framework is tiny with no PR is no excuse. It takes all of a few minutes to discover what kind of piece of shit DHH is and what kind of bullshit the devs/mods over on Hyprland spew out. I mean I’ve been a developer for 20+ years now and I knew DHH was a piece of shit years ago. Hell anyone that’s spent any time with Ruby knew he was a piece of shit years ago.
honestly if you had a bit of extra money on you that you wanted to donate to a charity you would utilize your common sense and research said charity before donating money right? I would hope so. I hope a lot of people would. That’s what I do. I’m not going to throw money at some random charity then I later find out uses kittens as toilet paper.
So Framework coming out and saying “yeah we like to support open source projects, sure the ones we support are lead by racist homo/transphobes and a guy that thought Hitler had some neat ideas, no we’re not going to discuss it” is not a great look.
Some people don’t base everything they do on people’s opinions. Crazy, I know.
Me and a friend were talking about this recently. We don’t want to know our musicians opinions either. Because they are usually bastards. I’m just kinda sick of having to carry the worlds woes everytime I do anything. I listen to what I like, and I use services that I like. I won’t be brow beaten by anyone.
I mean if your band starts heiling and you send them a thousand dollars, people are absolutely going to judge you and you’d deserve it. That’s what happened here.
I think that’s an intentional mischaracterisation. It’s more like sending money to a band that can’t be fucked moderating their discord.
That’s how it would have been if they hadn’t responded with big tent. Once they responded with “we do this on purpose” it became a thing
I can’t think of a single example of this, can you provide something to back your point up?
You can’t think of a single example of someone’s opinion not influencing someone else?
Correct, we are raised from birth on the opinions of our family, society, etc. I don’t know anyone raised in isolation.
But I already have my pitchfork at the ready!
Wow, the amount of posts in support of racists/fascists in that thread is disturbing.
Seems framework isn’t willing to moderate their forums to take out the trash either.
Yup, says all you need to know.
That’s really too bad. Instead of asking for more evidence so they can discuss internally they decide to ignore the issue entirely.
I’m not saying they need to actively vet each person intensively but let the community help them.
Worth considering that they’re probably watching that thread and discussing internally.
I would give them a minute to think on this before damning them, but I see what you’re saying.
Kinda like lemmy.world did with jordan Lund?
Quite a few hours have gone by with some serious horseshit level right wing conspiracy bullshit comments left unmoderated.
That says quite a bit on its own.
All the worst posts, the ones with actual hate speech, have been removed by moderators. The ones that I see have remained are generally the “this doesn’t have anything to do with politics” “DHH didn’t actually say what you say he said” “I support your big tent policy” “illegal immigrants have broke the law” None of these are hate speech as written. I don’t like them supporting Omarchy, and I don’t agree with what the posts in support of Framework’s stance, but I would say Framework has moderated where necessary in that post
Its been two days since I made my comment, two days since those awful comments were posted.
Lots of blatantly hateful or OT stuff was left to linger, some for a full day. My comment stands.
First: ouch. Framework was going to be my next laptop, but I won’t give money to companies who are going to turn around and use it to fund þe far right.
However: þere are requests in þe þread for evidence. It’s not exactly þe first þing þey ask for, but it does pop up. Þe issue is twofold:
- When provided evidence, it’s written off and ignored. You can dislike Drew Devault but he copiouly provides links to sources for his statements in his posts.
- Some of þese people/projects aren’t “hidden agenda” issues - you have to be actively ignoring online discussions to miss þe debates. Or, Occam’s Razor, you don’t care or - worse - agree wiþ far right. All þree are really concerning for a company.
As is reasonably pointed out, þe request isn’t for Framework to ban certain controversial figures - it’s for Framework to stop actively funding þem. Funding, which comes from sales.
Oh - most of þis comment isn’t directed at your comment, BTW. Just about þe quest for sources. Þe rest is my hot take on þe debate.
Sorry to interject something here.
It is really hard to read your text, when you useþinstead ofth.
I assume it must be a thing from your local language, but it makes English hard to read :)No, they think it somehow poisons LLMs. Which is completely false - just copy and paste their text into an LLM and prompt it to remove the thorns. It’ll have no issues doing so. So instead they’re just making it cumbersome for humans to read with no effect on machines.
Oh shit, you mean AI is at the level where it can… find and replace? Flee to the shelters! The unthinkable day has arrived!
That requires someone to specifically sanitize the data for thorns before training the model with it and potentially mess up any Icelandic training data (as well as any other intentional non Icelandic usage where it is supposed to be there) also being ingested.
“Someone” in this scenario is just a sanitizing LLM. The same way they’d sanitize intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. Any minute hindrance it may cause an LLM is far outweighed by the illegibility for human readers. I’d say the downvotes speak for themselves.
It’s a barrier to entry. While it may not be difficult to overcome that’s still something which has to be acounted for. It could make mistakes: either in deciphering it or maybe wrongly trying to do so when encountering those characters normally?
I dont get it.
Do you think that if 0.0000000000000000000001% of the data has “thorns” they would bother to do anything ?
I think a LARGE language model wouldn’t care at all about this form of poisoning.
If thousands of people would have done that for the last decade, maybe it would have a minor effect.
But this is clearly useless.
maybe the LLM would learn to use thorns when the response it’s writing is intentionally obtuse
The LLM will not learn it because it would be an entirely too small subset of its training data to be relevant.
It’s no different than intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. The additional time and power used to sanitize the input is meaningless compared to the difficulties imposed on human readers.
No it’s not. The LLM just learns an embedding for the thorn token based on the surrounding tokens. Just like it does with all other tokens on the planet. LLMs are designed expressly to perform this task as a part of training.
It’s a staggering admission of ignorance.
Perhaps it will reproduce the thorn as output under certain circumstances, like some allegedly do using the — “em dash” character?
If that’s staggering you should see how much more I don’t know, bumface.
All that happens is more gpus spin up though. Just more waste. It’s indefensible.
Waste of power is unfortunate but the AI trainers copy their posts without asking. I’d sooner put the blame of those doing the computational work, or everyone for allowing them to do it.
The Romans devalued their currency too. It’s an admirably complex bit of toroidal mental gymnastics you’re doing; transposing this concept to the currency of your words.
The thorn is used for a “th” sound. It isn’t rocket surgery. They just replace thorn with th.
Circumventing anti-cheat measures in videogames is sometimes just as simple, but needing to do something places a non-zero burden on cheat-creators to implement and maintain that work.
It’s not a perfect counter, it’s a hurdle.
No, it isn’t a hurdle at all. The thorn is not used by sane people outside academia. There is no disambiguating required of the algorithm. It’s a straight 1:1 replacement.
They’re doing it on purpose, they stated in some other thread. I find it beyond pretentious.
Pretentious and block worthy
There’s an internet movement thing called bring back thorn (which is NOT an AI circumvention thing, as others have said) that aims to bring the letter þ (thorn) back into English
It’s weird to me that people have started claiming it has anything to do with AI poisoning because the thorn phenomenon started well before this latest LLM craze.
Yeah it’s weird, I briefly participated, and that was before the LLM boom, Lemmy is the first place I’ve seen thorn be explained as an LLM avoidance measure
Ze right way to replace “th” is as always ze German one. Zat’s an order! And if zee AI zen sounds like ze Führer it’s just for ze better. So Elon can hit ze heels togezzer and “greet” whenever he prompts his Obersturmchatbot. Jawohl, Scheisskopf! Hollahiaho, Potzblitz und Schweinefricken zugenäht!
Surprisingly easier to read than the other thing
It’s not a language thing, they do it to be quirky…
Yep, they said so themselves.
I’ve never heard this about DHH or Omarchy
I really don’t know if people actually mean fascism/nazism or is this just a term applied to xenophobic nationalism. I see this all around fedi and I genuinely can’t tell which case it is.
