Yeah

Looking at this screenshot makes me realize how much GNOME has evolved (for the better).

The web search menubar option would not fly nowadays.

Setting the obvious fascism thing aside for a moment (capitalists love fascism, news at 11), I think it might be helpful to actually look at this from the perspective of a labor struggle. The Free Software community at large has been doing a pretty lousy job of resisting LLM slop, but this is very inconsistent across the board. Some projects have rolled over and embraced the slop fully. Others have taken an infuriating “centrist” position which only demonstrates how little your average techbro knows or cares about sociology, and others still have taken a solid principled stand, that we are humans who make software for humans and the corporate practices of churning out the lowest quality product at the highest possible speed is NOT THE FUCKING OBJECTIVE of building software for the commons.

This is inconvenient for the AI boosters. For better or worse, Silicon Valley in the 2020s is built on the back of Free Software and the (frequently) unpaid labor of volunteers. The tech stack of every major company relies on it, and they behave as if they own it. The fact that there are projects out here resisting this drive to slopify - refusing to comply because of ethical and moral principles - is unacceptable to them. They were happy when Free Software was largely a homogeneous corpus of technology they could appropriate at their own will. The fact that they now have to worry about individual projects refusing to embrace this technology has suddenly made Free Software an arena of political struggle in a way it hasn’t been for a long time.

These corporations can pay people to develop Free Software. Many do, when it serves their own interests. And when you are paying someone to do the work, you can dictate the conditions and practices of that work (e.g. If you’re not using Copilot, you will be replaced by someone who will gladly shit out 100x as much code). But an innumerable amount of responsibilities in the Free Software world are not paid. And you can’t force a volunteer to use LLMs if they are convinced it is a socially and ecologically poisonous technology.

That ultimately is what this is all about. The fact that Free Software projects exist which will not accept these labor practices means that there are now some substantial pieces missing from the stack. The fact that the average software company has transformed most of their software engineers into LLM zombies means there are a lot of projects which will no longer accept their contributions. You can’t simply pay them to land a patch in (many components of) GNOME anymore (for instance). Any project which digs in against LLM use needs to either be forked or substituted (or infiltrated).

They need to recuperate the tech stack and plug these holes. That is the point of throwing millions of dollars at a vibe-coded fashslop dotfiles distro.

Sorry for the length I got very into writing this before I call it a night.

In my view there is a fundamental flaw in the original comment: their idealist misinterpretation of the concept of ‘unprincipled peace’ (taken from Combat Liberalism) and a failure to apply dialectics to international relations. The ‘liberalism’ criticized by Chairman Mao in Combat Liberalism was an unprincipled attitude characterized by the abandonment of the Marxist stance and compromise with erroneous ideas within the ranks of institutions. Applying this internal critique to contemporary China’s external diplomatic strategy is a category error. The CPC has never abandoned ideological struggle; rather, it correctly distinguishes between internal ideological purity and the external reality.

Maintaining a stable external environment is not an unprincipled concession, it is a necessary material prerequisite for defending the fruits of the revolution. As noted by Professor Cheng Enfu, the core task of the primary stage of socialism is to liberate and develop productive forces. Only within a peaceful international environment can China concentrate on economic construction, providing the material base for the global struggle against neo imperialism. Take, for instance, the ‘Luban Workshops’ in Africa, a strategic move to break the knowledge monopolies of neo-imperialism. By exporting practical technologies, China helps the Global South cultivate endogenous development capabilities. Without stability, such internationalist practices could not be carried out replaced instead with the constant proxy war that was emblematic of the 50s-90s.

Regarding trade with countries whose political systems are reactionary, the commentary falls into the metaphysical error of equating economic interaction with political endorsement. In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin pointedly defended the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (making a compromise with the German Kaiser) against the ‘pure’ leftists who cried betrayal. The proletariat must be adept at making necessary compromises with even reactionary states to preserve the socialist state. Chairman Mao similarly distinguished between economic engagement and political support. In the international economic cycle, we adhere to objective economic laws, utilizing capital and markets to develop socialist productive forces. This is grounded in a scientific assessment of the global balance of power, not an endorsement of any foreign superstructure.

I know you didn’t ask but I felt it prudent to add regarding the specific topic of Alibaba’s investment in Omarchy and lack of CPC intervention, it is essential to analyze this through the lens of Marxist political economy and the state’s regulation of capital. Within the socialist market economy, the state does not micromanage private capital so long as it complies with national laws and does not threaten the fundamental achievements of the revolution. Allowing the non-public sector to determine its investment direction based on profit-seeking objectively drives the socialization of production, creating material conditions for higher levels of socialist transition. This investment stands in stark contrast to the one which sparked regulatory crackdowns against Alibaba a few years ago. The fundamental reason for that state intervention was to prevent the disorderly expansion of capital and curb the aggressive financialization of the private sector, which threatened national economic security. Curbing the financialization of capital safeguards the economic foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, whereas permitting investments in other sectors (even if misguided) represents a necessary stage in utilizing market mechanisms.

While comrades frustrated by contemporary international engagement may yearn for the seemingly purer Soviet model, we must analyze the USSR scientifically. The Soviet project was undeniably heroic in defeating fascism and advancing Marxist-Leninist theory. However, burdened by imperialist destabilization and exhausting constant geopolitical confrontation, its leadership eventually diverted from dialectics. A critical error was the rigid, administrative expropriation of small producers (held over from the war economy), rather than patiently leveraging the market’s inherent socializing tendency. These deviations alienated the masses and contributed to the project’s tragic collapse. Simply repeating past methods simply because they “feel” ideologically purer leads to stagnation.

When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.