A short design note and tribute to Richard Stallman (RMS) and St. IGNUcius for the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) and the ethic behind it: don’t overclaim, don’t over-trust, and don’t let marketing launder accountability.
Richard Stallman proposes the term Pretend Intelligence (PI) for what the industry calls “AI”: systems that pretend to be intelligent and are marketed as worthy of trust. He uses it to push back on hype that asks people to trust these systems with their lives and control.
From his January 2026 talk at Georgia Tech (YouTube, event, LibreTech Collective):
> "So I've come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. And if we start saying this more often, we might help overcome this marketing hype campaign that wants people to trust those systems, and trust their lives and all their activities to the control of those systems and the big companies that develop and control them." — Richard Stallman, Georgia Tech, 2026-01-23. Source: YouTube (full talk) — "Dr. Richard Stallman @ Georgia Tech - 01-23-2026," Alex Jenkins, CC BY-ND 4.0; transcript in video description.
So PI is both a label (call it PI, not AI) and a stance: resist the campaign to make people trust and hand over control to systems and vendors that don’t deserve that trust. In MOOLLM we use the same framing: we find models useful when we don’t overclaim — advisory guidance, not a guarantee (see MOOAM.md §5.3).
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Richard Stallman critiques AI, connected cars, smartphones, and DRM (slashdot.org)
42 points by MilnerRoute 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments
ESR's "many eyes" quote in his "Linus's Law" is unmitigated bullshit. And Linux Torvalds should not be blamed for it, since it wasn't his law, ESR just named it after him to get attention. Hardly anyone actually reads code, and the few people actually qualified to find bugs by reading huge piles of buggy code dumped into the public domain when a company abandons it have much more important things to do with their time.
If the many eyes that Macromedia and Adobe paid to work full time on Flash couldn't prevent the need to push out Flash security patches several times a week, the code is fundamentally flawed far beyond the point that the few much less qualified people who might actually take their unpaid spare time to look at it are able to finally find and fix all the bugs.
The major browser developers have enough on their hands designing new open standards and writing and debugging new code, without having to spend any of their time burning their eyes and brains looking at free abandoned obsolete toxic waste code dumps. And ESR certainly isn't going to chip in and help them.
>He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided.
>About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."
>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".[5]
>The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered a refutation of Raymond's dictum.[6][7][8][9] Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.[9] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".[8] Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.[10]
>Empirical support of the validity of Linus's law[11] was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular projects of the same organization. Popular projects are projects with the top 5% of GitHub stars (7,481 stars or more). Bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, the ratio of commits determined to be related to fixing bugs. The analysis showed that popular projects had a higher ratio of bug fixes (e.g., Google's popular projects had a 27% higher bug fix rate than Google's less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its code quality standards in more popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.
Man you really took issue with a small part of what I said.
Writing forty paragraphs about your opinion of the “many eyes” thing is interesting enough, but I stand by what I said. If Flash player had been FOSS I think it could have been integrated into browser standards and you’d have browser makers able to fix things and integrate better sandboxing since it could be part of the standard.
I think it is still more likely that a project can be improved if everyone has access to the source code vs not having access to any source code. Are there counterexamples to that?
Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind/MacroMedia) one explained to me something revealing about the Director timeline (their original product before Flash, later integrated with the web browser as Shockwave):
It's essentially just a BASIC program rotated 90 degrees on its side, full of GOTOs.
It opened my eyes to using Flash for procedural graphics and simulations, instead of just using timelines like a glorified graphical player piano, or like a BASIC program full of GOTO spaghetti rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise (which is how Macromedia founder Marc Canter described Director's Lingo, which also used frame numbers like BASIC line numbers).
Jared went on to do a lot more amazing stuff in Processing, co-founded Etsy, and built a toy factory!
You can't just throw RAM at embedded devices that you make millions of and have extremely thin margins on. Have you bothered to look at the price of RAM today? At high numbers and low margins you can barely afford to throw capacitors at them, let alone precious rare expensive RAM.
No, XFinity are the ones who decided their routers “““need””” to have unwanted RAM-hungry extra functionality beyond just serving their residential customers' needs. Their routers participate in an entire access-sharing system so they can greedily double-dip by reselling access to your own connection that you already pay them for:
We're talking about devices where the retail price is approximately one month of revenue from one customer, and that's if there isn't an extra fee specifically for the equipment rental. Yes, consumer electronics tend to have very thin margins, but residential ISPs are playing a very different game.
>The other issue, that Facebook was running a silent audio stream in the background, is also called out. Grant says this was unintentional, and that it was not being used to keep the app alive — yet it did as a byproduct of the bug.
How much issue tracking and scrum management and engineering work and code review and testing and deployment and maintenance went into accidentally streaming silent audio that you only stop doing after you got caught and have to claim all that successfully tested and deployed work was unintentional, without ever explaining the actual innocuous purpose of streaming silent audio and paying for all that extra bandwidth?
I was just reading a comment on HN yesterday about how MacOS had so many bugs. I guess they don't have issue tracking, scrum management, engineering work, code review, testing, deployment, and maintenance either.
I hate FB, but not everything is always a sinister plan, although this could have been. I will repeat: "with Facebook, who knows."
There is a huge difference between accidentally shipping a bug, and accidentally shipping a fully functional distributed end-to-end silent audio streaming system that works at Facebook's scale. They are in no way comparable. All the intricate crosscutting interoperating client, server, and middeware components of an end-to-end Facebook scale silent audio streaming pipeline do not just accidentally emerge without anybody noticing and magically dovetail together perfectly because nobody was paying enough attention to detail.
Large distributed systems don’t spontaneously assemble themselves without anyone understanding what they’re doing or intending for it to happen.
>I will repeat: "with Facebook, who knows."
Apparently we all know the obvious except for you. And you're not living up to your user name, which perhaps should be "rationalizer" not "rationalist". Instead of begin rational, you're bending over backwards to implausibly carry the water for Facebook beyond all credulity. It's a bad look, and shows you're vastly underestimating the complexity of developing distributed streaming software at that scale. So I will repeat what rsynnott said:
>And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
>>But his latest defense puts forward an absurd definition of sexual harassment and effectively accuses women of reporting it to fit in with the cool crowd, while claiming he’s writing in “a spirit of healing.” There’s even a tasteless plug for his latest business venture. It’s one of the most disappointing responses we’ve seen to a sexual harassment complaint, which, after the past few weeks, is a fairly remarkable achievement.
He's scrubbed it from his blog and even Internet Archive, but it was well covered and widely quoted all over:
I think you're on to something! Maybe Meta paid Scoble to embarrass Google Glass, and now Google is paying him to embarrass Meta AI Smart Glasses too! Great work if you can get somebody to finance your serial sexual harassment scandals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI
His Blender Conference talk about photogrammetry / camera projection / projection mapping was fantastic:
World Building in Blender - Ian Hubert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM
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