Pictured: Lauren Boebert’s office.

If you strip out the encoder, then you’re getting closer.

That’s flat-out not true. BERTs, for example, are LLMs and are encoder-only, just like GPTs are decoder-only. Whisper is trained on a large corpus of text and does NLP tasks. That’s all it is to be an LLM.

A transformer model being encoder-only, encoder-decoder, or decoder-only has fuck-all to do with whether it’s an LLM. In fact, it being a transformer model at all isn’t required for it to be an LLM.

Whisper is not an llm, just because it is trained on big datasets does not make it an LLM.

The training dataset consists of 680,000 hours of labeled audio-transcript pairs sourced from the internet using semi-supervised learning.

Brother, I don’t think you know what a large language model is if you think it being trained on a human lifespan’s worth of audio transcripts isn’t enough.

Its job is NLP. It is an LLM, if not as general-use as something like ChatGPT.

So you’ve moved the goalposts from “that’s not just participation, it’s [things that participation entails]” to “well this doesn’t apply unless you need it to exist”*. GN needs a major platform like YouTube to actually reach an audience.

* By the way, the comic is illustrating a man with a car that’s seemingly from the 1920s or 30s, so there goes that tenuous argument.

contributing to, and directly benefitting from the very thing they’re complaining about.

You do understand what “participation” means, right? You understand that the original comic is specifically talking about contributing to and benefitting from the very thing they’re complaining about, right?

I agree with your other point that GN should offer more alternatives to watch their videos, but this one is creating a distinction without a difference.

“… appears to work on Linux with Proton 11 as captured in my screenshot above”

The emphasis in that point was the word “finally”, not “playable state”. As in “it’s finally working after x amount of time” like you’d expect with a project that takes any appreciable time to get working.

before hearing about it

while* hearing about it. The only introduction is a bulleted list of what the project is and isn’t that Liam copy–pasted from their docs. Nothing about any anticipation; nothing about how long it had been in the works; nothing about the authors; no link to a release blog or previous story discussing it in any way; nothing about finally being in a playable state/anything related to the dev cycle. Liam talked about it like it popped into existence (true) and they were just hearing about it for the first time (true).

Combined with what I said above, it’s just basic media literacy that I’m reading about a dead-end throwaway project.

it’s deeply cynical

I gave it a shot by reading the article, which was more than it deserved.

Yeah, “as expected”. The project showed up out of nowhere five days ago and is clearly vibe-coded to fuck and back. The talk of how “oh, it accelerated development, but we checked everything, we swear” is obvious bullshit like it is with basically all of these dime-a-dozen, dead-end slop projects that are showing up everywhere.

No, it would not “just as readily have been an entirely human passion project”, because those take months to years, and you therefore hear about them organically as they’re in development; they don’t show up out of the aether to get a few paragraphs’ mention on an obscure Linux blog. Even from a statistical point of view, those passion projects are vanishingly few compared to the slop projects.

“AI models — Codex, Claude, and DeepSeek — substantially accelerated the final phase. They were given disassembly, decompiled pseudocode, surrounding reconstructed source, engine context, compiler errors, and binary-diff feedback, and helped interpret functions, generate candidate implementations, and iterate toward closer matches. Their output was never treated as authoritative: every candidate was reviewed by developers, compiled, compared against the reference executable.”

As expected: slop.

of course the marketing speak release note is going to sound like AI marketing speak

Weird. Because I’m not talking about the release note; I’m talking about It’s FOSS’ commentary on the release note. I read LibreOffice’s 26.8 blog post, and as someone who’s written a release blog before, it looks like a human wrote it. You’d think it wouldn’t if “of course it’s going to sound like AI marketing speak”.

Did you read what I wrote that you think I’m talking about the marketing note for LibreOffice 26.8?

Did you not read the It’s FOSS article we’re supposed to be discussing that’s talking about LibreOffice?

Are you objecting to this reading like LLM slop?

I’m confused what you’re confused about. This is a direct quote – formatting and all – from the article. OP stripped out e.g. the emojis when pasting it here.

How ironic, then, that this It’s FOSS article reeks of slop.

🆕 LibreOffice 26.8: What’s New?

There’s no AI in LibreOffice 26.8. Nothing about the suite talks to a remote server, and none of it needs an internet connection to work.

This isn’t an oversight; it’s a promise. TDF says that if your work can’t leave the building for legal or privacy reasons, the only way to prove that later (during an audit, for example) is if the software never gave it anywhere to go.

Anyhow, coming back to the editors. 👇

Absolutely fuck this shit.

Edit: Here’s the blog post from TDF themselves if you don’t just want an AI chewing up and vomiting out what the humans behind LibreOffice wrote.

Dude, come on. Three years is not “many years ago”.

Having never heard of it and only used the Aurora Store (recently without any issues), what does App Lounge have going for it?

Haha, it’s totally good. Maybe you got to learn a little grammatical tidbit from it, so net positive.

I mean that I know someone writing for PC Gamer (the outlet whose article this is) knows (or should know) the difference between those words.

Edit: In case you didn’t know, italicization is used to indicate (among other things) the name of an outlet. So for example, The New York Times, The Verge, and so on.

My guess is, that we are used to digital games?

I don’t know why someone decided to say “correct” on my behalf, but no, it’s baser than that: “disks” is the ellipsis for “hard disks” and “floppy disks”. “Discs” is the correct terminology for an optical disc.

The author already acknowledges what you did re: digital games.

Sony’s decision to stop selling physical disks for its games

If Sony ends physical disk sales

PC Gamer, I know you know better.

But – there’s always a “but” – before you get too excited, there’s a catch.

Both Frame and yserver were built using LLM bots.

I mean, yeah. Even X11’s own maintainers are sick of that mountain of spaghetti and are just keeping it on life support. Anything trying to replace X11 (besides XWayland) is effectively a throwaway project and shouldn’t be seriously used.