John Sullivan @johns@librem.one

One aspect of retail we've forgotten after generations of conglomerated big box stores and subsequent online conglomeration is that of curation of products.

When you went into a family-owned hardware store in 1985, you got experts who chose products based on a balance of price and quality. Maybe they only had two kinds of hammers or one brand of bolts, but somebody selected those. There was some level of trust in what you were getting.

Now that labor is on us to filter from dozens of types and brands, based on reviews that are gamed by botnets, against manufacturers who change up the models yearly to dodge bad reviews. It's a race to the bottom because we don't have local curators who are personally invested in your returning to their store.

🧵

@bkuhn this is a super important point. Many FOSS projects out there that are already, today, using LLM-gen-AI. (If it's 50/50 at SFC, I (1) speculate it's much larger overall, and (2) have preliminary data confirming it in a recent paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18341 )

FOSS leaders (including SFC) can take various stances: 1) ignore the problem, 2) tell them "don't do that" and look away, 3) provide guidance on if/how/when to use LLM-gen-AI.

SFC chose (3), which is both bold and needed.

While collecting URLs,

https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

is evergreen, and relevant.

Chat GPT to me just now: There’s no NYC mayor named Mamdani. New York City’s current mayor is Eric Adams (as of June 11, 2026). If you mean a different official named Mamdani (e.g., a borough president, council member, or candidate), tell me which office and I’ll explain...

It's okay for AI to take over the job of writing Laffy Taffy jokes.

I'm the opposite of AI, it takes me 2 hours to write a simple email and I don't consume any water at all