The other practical side of this is enforceability.
Lets say Linux banned all use of VSCode in contributions, this second. And any Microsoft tools. No exceptions. And it makes sense, because there is an evil blatantly anti-linux entity behind it… What are people gonna do?
Keep using it anyway, and just not disclose it.
This is why linux doesn’t tell people what tools they can and can’t use. Practically, they can’t dictate what tools people use. Just like (to a reasonable degree) they don’t try to police who contributes to the kernel. Other contributors don’t have to like those tools or contributors, but that is how a project like this must operate.
here is the email this screenshot is an excerpt of; the specific “X” (the thing which the message Linus is replying to here suggested perhaps AI should not be used for) was the writing of commit messages.
the thing is - no other tool in our industry, and others, out there involves as much active destruction in both the working class and environment in its use.
that’s it. that’s the bit.
Could have said the same about the invention of electricity
When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.
I got banned from the Fuck AI community for saying Linus isn’t stupid. Not that he’s right on AI, just that he’s not stupid.
Indeed, the atmosphere is toxic.
We’re on a site where people happily discuss their arr stack or transpiring the PS5 system, but bemoan AI is killing artists and coding.
There are real ethical issues, job impacts, environmental issues, property rights issues (real and intellectual), privacy, a stack of cards economy etc.
But there is also utility, and frankly the genie is out of the bottle. For better or worse.
Catching kernel bugs in Linux with AI should be seen as a good because they’re not being exploited offensively by private actors. AI review that catches the most annoying 80% of errors or issues saves human time, while not contributing slop to the kernel.
There is a lot to discuss if you show up in good faith.
Also, Linus is an asshole. Why would anyone be surprised he reacted like an asshole? His point on his expectations is actually clear and sensible to me. He probably could have said just that, but he’s an asshole, and acting how you would expect after a bunch of people are yelling at him.
Nuance is a hard concept to get in most Lemmy comment threads. It’s obvious it’s just a tool that uses an insane amount of resources that can do some good in certain applications. The problem stems from it being abused for evil and stupid things.
Can AI be used to help flag cancerous growths in x rays and help save lives? Absolutely! Can it also be used to track every human being on the planet for surveillance purposes while its proponents build massive biome-destroying data centers to act as the infrastructure? It sure can!
All that said, I still don’t feel confident about rolling in AI code to open source projects when bots aren’t accountable to their contributions. They should require a huge amount of oversight which I doubt is happening at the moment.
Agreed.
On AI contributed code I’m always confused, if I put MY name on it and push it I am stating it meets my standards. If I allow a Claude contributed commit into my code, I am stating Claude passed my standards.
If someone is contributing and it’s not up to standards, why is it getting merged? If it’s a maintainer and they’re merging crap with review or standards then you couldn’t have actually trusted them pre-LLMs.
Ever since the first iteration of GitHub Copilot it was always your responsibility to make sure contributions to your project were correct. The beauty of open source is that when a project jumps off a cliff you can fork it or make your own.
Partially what is good about Linus is historically Linux has said no to crap, and the Linux team expend considerable effort to remove crap they realized was crap too late.
I want to expand on your first thought and just say that in my experience the internet as a whole is not a great place for nuanced takes, and I’ve noticed that becoming mirrored in reality over the last decade. Perhaps its been happening for longer.
There’s so much going on, and so many actors trying to influence the masses. I don’t blame anyone for having different conclusions to my own, there’s an almost untrackable amount of sources to draw information (and disinformation) from. I just hope we can get to a point together where we can (again?) discuss nuance without ceding to emotion.
We have our share of radicals
I would like to reiterate that posting on main as an admin is obnoxious since we can’t block you.
Consider using an alt to post unless performing official instance actions.
Button is right there man
I would like to reiterate that posting on main as an admin is obnoxious since we can’t block you.
If you can’t block me, that’s an issue with your Lemmy client, because the default web client isn’t stopping you.
blocked.
It’s a pretty reductive take, that treats tools as politically and behaviorally inert. The work on understanding how cultural artifacts use us just as much as (or maybe more than) we use them goes back several centuries.
But Linus is just an engineer, after all. There’s no reason to treat him as some high-minded philosopher (and he’d probably be the first to tell you that). And for as long as the history of thought into the politics of artifacts may be, the history of engineers focusing only on solving the problem in front of them and not thinking about “where the rockets come down” is about as long.
I have mixed opinions on his stance towards AI.
I confess, I’m guilty. I’ve used AI to diagnose random issues with my little personal blog (please don’t hate me, I’m just a man without a degree). That said, I understood the simple code well enough to see what I was getting wrong and comprehend the AI generated suggestion, so it wasn’t all that different than looking things up on a wiki and implementing it. The primary difference, for me, was that I had already spent two weeks digging deeper and deeper for my answers, only finding outdated or incorrect information, and Claude delivered the correct answer in about 10 seconds.
In my opinion, the reason it was a good idea to implement the AI generated code was that I understood it. There was a human brain looking at that result and going “aha! I see what I was missing!” If I hadn’t understood what I was looking at, it could have been doing anything, and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable implementing it. If I hadn’t at least tried to the old fashioned way first, I wouldn’t have used it. But after weeks of hitting dead ends and with the knowledge that there was an extremely powerful tool that could give me my answer in seconds, it began to feel foolish to continue punishing myself with wasted time.
In Linus’ case, I think it is safe to say he understands enough about Linux to interpret the AI suggestions and be a safeguard against slop. I’m not too concerned about his contributions to the kernel if he’s using AI to think outside the box or diagnose a complicated problem.
But! There is a major risk factor when people start implementing code that they don’t understand, or when it is a crutch for their total lack of comprehension. Vibe coding and using a diagnostic tool are different things. I hope Linus gives some real thought to the realistic limits that need to be in place for people who aren’t knowledgeable enough to filter AI suggested code through their own brains, because it wouldn’t take long to destroy a reliable system like Linux if they incorporate AI generated code with no experienced human in the drivers seat.
Apologies to those who just fundamentally hate AI and think I’m a fool for using it, I just wanted to share my experience as an unschooled computer nerd who finally gave in and tried it out a couple of times.
Educated computer nerd here. AI has fundamentally changed how you do CS in industry, it’s completely unavoidable at this point and not using it in some capacity is doing yourself a massive disservice. It’s able to catch edge cases we’d never have caught otherwise. The important part is indeed understanding what it’s doing and keeping contributions organized/concise.
That doesn’t make it any less scary from an ethics and model oversight perspective, but from the perspective of the project it is fundamentally just another tool. Linus appears to feel this way too. Frankly I’d be more concerned if there weren’t people using AI on Linux, especially to validate kernel level security.
What is stupid is referring to AI as if it was just one tool when actually it’s a bunch of tools, some of which are easier to use sensibly amd some it’s near impossible to. Fancy auto complete like it’s being compared to sure, fully automated do what the fuck you want agents, yeah sooner or later that is going to go wrong and no one is going to know where or why.
They might be fun and interesting, that doesn’t make it a great idea to go all in in my opinion, certainly not for anything you would consider important.
Strangely idgaf about whether he respects me
I don’t think he thinks about you at all
👍🏻 The vast majority of people don’t.
My understanding is that AI/LLMs can generate code that works, but often that code is more bloated/convoluted than code written by a decent coder, making it less efficient and more difficult to maintain. I can see that being acceptable for many in situations where hardware/performance/maintainability aren’t a concern like a one-off app or proof of concept. But for something as low level as a kernel I would think that performance and maintainability are the most important things since slowdown in that part of the system ripples up to affect everything a user does anywhere in the operating system.
I understand that a skilled coder can take AI output and clean it up into something at least approaching the quality of their own unassisted code, and I’ve been led to believe that Linus is able to do that for himself. But I fear that other/future maintainers of Linux won’t match that caliber, and it will start to feel that AI bloat. I think I’ve also read of Linus complaining about a torrent of low-quality, AI-based submissions and so I also fear that this will lead to him restricting who can participate in the work, overcompensate, and end up in a situation where Linux becomes less open and more closed.
So here’s how I see it: There is a big difference between “AI generated” code and “AI assisted” code. Or just anything.
To put it in terms most people can more understand let’s say you were writing a book. If you have an LLM generate the book its gonna suck and be slop. But if you write the rough draft, then paste it into an LLM and say, “Look through this and find typos and other mistakes and point them out to me”. Then you go and check the things it finds and fix them yourself, that is fine. It’s just a really good spellcheck at that point. Even if you say “suggest a fix” it’s fine. For coding you could even tell it like “Take this line of code and suggest 5 different ways to do the same thing that might work better” then test them all out and see which one you like best.
I have personally used an LLM to help clean up my dotfiles for example. I don’t want to read through all that shit and find the old junk I need to remove or change. So I just throw them at an LLM and have it point things out to me. Or say you know you have a file but don’t know the exact filename. Go into the folder its in and dump the output of ls into an LLM. Tell it what file you need vaguely. Have it read them and give you the correct filename. Then check it yourself.
The problem comes from people who just generate stuff and don’t do the work of double checking it themselves.
One thing people forget is that many human coders absolutely suck at what they do and or don’t care.
80% of the code I’ve seen at clients is shit, some of it is hilariously bad, like absolute dog shit.
I’ve had a meeting where I had to explain the codebase to a new joiner, we were crying laughing at how bad the code was.
This particular fortune 500 company never cared to fix it, they just wanted more features.
So yes AI can be shit, but god I trust it more than some of the shit I’ve seen humans write.
Shit devs will make shit code with or without AI. Good devs will make good code, just faster with AI
This is really an ignorant and arrogant take at AI.
Why do you say that?
AI is much more than the quality of the code. It’s also about stealing the knowledge, overusing Earth’s resources like water and power, pollution, killing consumer computers through RAM and memory shortage in general - the very same computers that run Linux -, making average people more ignorant, risking another gigantic bubble burst and so on. And as a cherry on the top, comparing AI to compilers. Riiiight.
Have you actually looked into the real environmental impact of AI is compared to, say, eating meat, driving a car, or taking a yearly plane flight? It’s a rounding error. Have you looked into the numbers? Compared the environmental impact of your AI use to the environmental impact of taking a yearly vacation on a plane?
The RAM shortage is real, but very temporary. Check the news today! Chip stocks like Sk Hynix are way down because people are worried about over-production. The fact that a new technology caused a temporary shortage in a resource just isn’t even a coherent argument against the technology. There’s discussion to be had here about whether we should as a civilization reserve some resources for other industries. That’s a discussion we could have. But the idea that AI caused a temporary shortage in RAM, so that makes it bad is… like, really ridiculous? You must see that that doesn’t even make sense as an argument?
These are not arguments that hold up to scrutiny. You should consider whether you accepted these arguments because you looked into the details and they actually make sense, or if you accepted them because they’re telling you what you want to believe.
But Ed Zitron makes me feel fuzzy and warm when he name calls everyone and therefore he must be right
Genuine question. I’m not a developer, I didn’t study computer science, and I’m a pretty basic Fedora user. But why does everyone harp on Linus Torvald’s opinions like they’re handed down from heaven? Windows still dominates the market, but no one cares what Bill Gates says. I love A Song of Ice and Fire but I wouldn’t take writing tips from George R. R. Martin. Richard Stallman’s opinions on GNU/Linux are memed endlessly. Linus is literally just a dude.
Bill Gates doesn’t work on Windows anymore and hasn’t got years.
George R R Martin doesn’t publish books anymore and hasn’t for years.
Richard Stallman is…a weird little guy.
Whether you like it or not Linus is still the Linux guy.
I feel like Linux having a guy is antithetical to Linux but I guess I’m just in the minority.
I know what you mean but he literally created it and still runs the show and it’s named after him so like 🤷♂️
Windows still dominates the market,
What market?
Desktops? Sure.
Servers? Definitely not.
Supercomputers? Like, none of them.
…
Phones? Nope.
IOT? Can’t even run on modern laptops right.
You should add laptops to the top of your list…cause that’s what dominates on productivity…and that’s nearly ALL windows! What I think truly dominates is an offshoot of *nix…Android and IOS. Don’t you just find it funny when you walk in a mall and see a jacked up Kiosk with a windows 10 taskbar sideways? …Press any key to reboot!
When people say desktop laptop is implied in that too.
Gamers are about to step into this conversation…you sure you want to continue? :-)
Sure buddy, ever heard of chromebooks? Macbooks? Frameworks? Any serious dev that has a choice runs linux on theirs afaik
As someone who did study computer science and has worked in embedded processor space (so one of the people who’s written assembly by hand he’s talking about).
I’ve never understood it either. People take his word as law blindly and it’s never made sense to me. Yes he has skill, but so do hundreds of others. Yes he’s opinionated, that’s certainly not a reason to hero worship him.
For ten+ years people have been pointing out he’s basically a single point of failure for Linux and begging for a succession plan and he’s been too stuck up his own ass to accept that he isn’t the only one who cares about all this.
This has lead to some extreme cult following behind him for some reason.
As someone who did study computer science and has worked in embedded processor space
Using an argument from authority to denounce someone in authority and their arguments? Cool. Might’ve worked if I hadn’t seen you mention recently that we shouldn’t use AI ‘because Trump and his cronies do’.
I’ve translated assembler by hand and punched the hex codes into an EPROM programmer’s keyboard. This would appear to make me qualified to say that he’s not always right and, in most cases, fuck AI.
is Greg Kroah-Hartman not the succession plan?
As far as I know no. The plan is for the the top maintainers to gather and choose a successor. Though if you have more up to date information I’d love to see it. I could be behind the times on that.
Because he’s not some guy on the internet saying his opinion, he is maintaining the most relevant Free Software kernel. So if he goes nuts, there is great potential for great disaster. I don’t think there are Linux distributions that use forks of the Linux kernel. (What notable forks are there anyway?) At the moment, they all depend on the original Linux kernel. There is currently no alternative. It would take a lot of disruption and a tremendous effort to establish and switch to a fork of the Linux kernel that is free of Linus’ influence. Today, I’d say jokingly I will switch to FreeDOS. But if this sloppification goes on, I guess I will have to.
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#other-operating-systems
FreeDOS isn’t immune from AI either.
Linux is his.
He gets to make the rules. We get to decide whether to bail.
I don’t understand confusion or entitlement over this.
Because people’s love of cults of personality is endless.
Add on top of that the “AI” cult that saw this as an amazing recruitment opportunity, and you get a nice combo.
That’s basically the computer science equivalent of having a famous actor advertise a sect.
The difference is that Linus does not actively seem to be part of the cult itself rather than using it as the effective tool that it is for someone who already has his type of skill set. He can actually understand and double check inputs and outputs because he already built a foundation of great skill.
Most of the AI techbro community just wants an excuse to stop paying people anything for their labor and get eternal digital slaves to replace them. They aren’t wanting to use it as a tool to help them unravel complexity, they are just using it as a smash and grab for power and control. Linus… isn’t that, and maybe it’s not great that he’s embracing it now, during the height of controversy. I kind of wish he had waited for the crash an mania to die down a little and then show it as a useful tool for people who already have skills.
LLMs are useless for a lot of shit but they are pretty damn useful for code. I think some of his recent work finding bugs in old code is evidence of that.
https://nitter.miningtcup.me/twtayaan/status/2109668665951941101
I don’t follow him at all, but I’d guess he’s making a statement about it now precisely because of the mania and people constantly asking him about it.
I’m not a developer, I didn’t study computer science
It’s okay, none of the most hardline anti-AI folks on here are, but they certainly like to pretend they know the tools and the industry.
Most? Where’s the data? This hard-line anti-LLM guy has a degree in computer science and has developed neural network systems for a previous company. Many on here that I’ve talked to about it fall under similar category.
Many? Where’s the data?
Proving yet again AI bros have lost the ability to think. “many I’ve talked to” <- that literally is the data. I’m the data. It doesn’t matter what the number is.
As opposed to your comment
none of the most hardline anti-AI folks on here are
Literally me existing already disproves your comment.
I have strong suspicions you don’t actually exist.
heartbreaking: this Finnish nationalist is saying some good stuff
My last use of AI is in my post history and was fairly down voted because I was being foolishly ironic.
This said, I don’t really disagree with his take here despite keeping away from AI as much as I am reasonably able. I do my own critical thinking and hate that I have to jump through hoops on the internet to have a simple question answered without some layman’s AI summary that may or may not be even remotely correct or actionable. Even still, when I asked it to check on local real estate laws and provide summaries of possible actions based on a very strict set of parameters, it gave me information that my wife and I were able to bring to a human agent and have things work out better than we had actually expected.
I think a better way of putting it - and I’m still gonna ruffle feathers - is that AI is becoming the new electricity.
Put down your pitchfork and lemme explain.
When electricity came out, people rather reasonably pointed out that simply coming into contact with an electrical device could result in death if one wasn’t careful. On top of that, the infrastructure required for it was expensive, unsightly, and at the time incredibly disruptive to daily life. It was going to ruin and disrupt entire industries that had existed for centuries because it could do things a human could not do unaided.
All of this is to one degree or another entirely true even through to modern times, but electricity has become a ubiquitous resource that humanity would now deeply struggle to live without. I won’t dare compare AI that far as i genuinely believe humans would be significantly better off without it, but the initial Luddite response to electricity has a historical echo here.
I think Linus’ point is more that it can undoubtedly be a useful tool when used in a measured, controlled, intelligent manner, and that it is a genie that is very clearly unwilling to be put back in its bottle. Like it or not it exists, and while we can absolutely be unhappy about it, being blind to its actual real world beneficial uses because the companies that make it are actual festering waste is a bit silly - especially when in the hands of the right chaotic neutral parties these companies are about to have a massive lesson in just how messy their tools have made things.
Very well put
Turns out my organic LLM occasionally vomits out sensible things, too.
Fully agree with Linux.
Ai is a tool. Learn how to properly use it or not use it like you prefer, it’s a goddamn tool.
If you are a bad coder you will still be a bad coder using AI. If you are a good coder, you will be a faster good coder with AI.
It’s a fucking tool.
Except Torvalds is now a bad coder with AI.
AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline. Looks like we have a great example in Torvalds, outside of the research papers already released.
AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline
source?
These research papers talking about AI leading to cognitive decline seem so asinine when certain people’s productivity has just skyrocketed under AI.
Sure the hand coding capabilities decline, but that’s replaced by thinking around the actually product or architecture.
A huge sect of new Linux users and Selfhosters are talking about how much AI has enabled them yet we’re still bringing up papers on cognitive decline that were written on models from 3-4 years ago when Claude Code didn’t even exist.
literally me, i started using ai to help me self host shit. i now know how to use docker and podman essentially even without AI. i’ve been wanting to do that for years but never had anyone to help me and it felt too overwhelming to me. similarly i now have some dotfiles set and in general i have a better system. specially for a lot of shit i know how to do but it’s fucking boring to do.
I could care less of what you think is asinine.
