For the last few days I was thinking (and feeling bad) about my inability to contribute code to FOSS projects because I don’t have enough spoons for programming (except for some minor personal projects).

What I completely forgot is that I still contribute to shared commons, only not the code. I contribute to:

  • Wikipedia: editing/updating some obscure wiki pages,
  • Wikitree: adding genealogical information to my ancestor tree (which became so broad I found my relatives in the US). I used to contribute to FamilySearch, but I transitioned to WikiTree last year,
  • OSM (OpenStreetMap): I’m adding local (less) known paths, water sources and other POIs, completing StreetComplete challenges. I used to contribute trail descriptions/photos to Komoot, but when it was acquired by Bending Spoons (and started to nag with subscription despite I bought the app few years ago), I stopped. I’m still looking for the replacement.
  • MusicBrainz: I’m adding missing song info/album images.
  • Bookwyrm: I’m adding Slovenian books (that I read).
  • Github/lab: some minor / unimportant projects; process models; scripts; sticker designs.
  • Finding bugs / publishing issue reports for some Home Assistant components.
  • All my work-related e-books and majority of teaching materials are under CC (Creative Commons) license.
  • + this personal blog and another blog with short stories.

In total, it is not much, but it is not nothing either.

Lately I started to wonder if I still care about participating in generation of training data for large language models. I like helping other people, but I don’t really like to contribute to current LLMs and companies behind them.

Maybe (LLM bot scraping) wouldn’t bother me if the LLM models had open weights, wouldn’t be so energy hungry/environmentally damaging, behaved well, considered copyrights and wouldn’t caused all sorts of societal issues.

But now … I’m seriously considering to quit contributing to the commons. Maybe even removing all my contributions (if/where possible). My contributions are insignificant from a global viewpoint, so there would be no damage.

I’m split. A part of me wants to continue contributing to shared commons, because that’s who I am. But another part of me wants to quit because I really despise the current situation; the people who run bigAI companies; the whole hype around ‘AI’.

I’m not looking for advice what to do. I just needed to say it out loud.