Link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Claude-Code

It seems Linus's position is very clear now

Fuuuuuck.

In theory I could drive over to his house and knock on his door and ask him to stop using clankers, but I’m sure I would be trespassed immediately.

the decay of humanity

Maybe ask him for a cup of tea and hear him out?

No. This heretical abuse of human labor and planetary resources has absolutely no place in society, where it creates lumpy and awkward abominations attempting to replace intent and care.

Fuck AI.

I also live right outside Portland. This triplea the performance. He correctly documents its use. I see AI being used properly here. People complaining on Lemmy about it still use every piece of technology that make AI possible. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

I can assure you, I haven’t used liquified distilled human text in the same way that AI does. I never will.

The entire concept is terrible.

Goddamn slop apologists coming out of the woodwork all the time. :/

The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical considering this is an experimental branch on his own repository. I'm not surprised he might experiment with using AI agents to solve a particular pain point to see how it does. This is using agents to experiment with things that you might not have time to address normally.

Another recent example is the build system where the author said:

An LLM was used to first determine where the bottlenecks were then to figure out how to improve them.
It generated a lot of code, much of it hideous.

I extensively audited and rewrote a lot of it, and heavily edited commit messages, the cover letter and comments.

off-loading the boring grunt work of identifying bottle necks and trying new approaches seems like an ideal task for a junior agent to deal with as long is you don't YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.

The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical

i FULLY expected more hate. lol

as long is you don't YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.

(Or not de-slopify at all.)

There's literally no one I trust more to handle llm code more than Linus.

He's not going to pass off shit in his name. He'll use it in the best possible way.

Lots of reasons to be anti-AI, but it's not all black and white. It's here to stay and it's useful. (But we ain't gonna spend 400 billion a year on it.)

People cannot seem to grasp that there is a difference in using LLMs to experiment and just blindly using code written by an LLM. You'd think they would realize Linus is never going to do the latter. Binary thinking leads to this...

AI is a hideous abomination tainting everything with its existence or our lord and savior that will soon™ solve all of humanity's problems. There is no middle-ground anymore.

And the notion that a tool can be useful for one thing if properly handled, not so useful if used carelessly, and absolutely stupid when used for a purpose it cannot actually fullfil is somehow (magic? collective brain-dead?) deemed crazy now.

PS: The only thing more insane than the discussion itself are the arguments about AI-use being unethical as it is trained on stolen data usually made by the very same copyleft guys that claim that no copyright should exist, all data should be free, and copying something is no theft!

For me, there's more to it than just the output. But I'm sure Linus won't let his mind rot in LLM. Yet. Still... Lots of reasons to object to using AI at all. Use a computer responsibly, folks.

My issue isn't with using AI to work on the Linux Kernel. My issue is working on the kernel with proprietary AI which enables Sam Altman to claim Millennium Prizes.

I can absolutely understand some of the objections and I understand why writers and artists are pissed. My code has always been free software so I don't object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.

The power usage is definitely a concern but that holds up for all computing. I don't see people up in arms about inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!

Yeah, I’m quickly seeing a future where stuff like this AI rewrite of the Adobe suite may need to be distributed as the model that makes the software and not the software itself. If that becomes the case then we really will have entered into a world where tech bros control everything as you will quickly find yourself in a world where you can’t use the software if you don’t have the compute to make it.

AI like this is very quickly becoming the One Ring in my mind. Like there’s a bunch of people who have convinced themselves that they can use this plagiarism box in a good way, that the outcome will somehow justify the means. But the reality is that this machine was created by evil for evil reasons and as it stands right now you can’t use Claude or ChatGPT or any of that shit and not participate in the plagiarism, in the outright theft of all of the art and creativity of humanity, and the destruction of our environment.

I wish that more people would understand that the jump from the novelty of Watson beating Ken Jennings on Jeopardy to here wasn’t technological innovation. It was purely capitalism.

It's a good thing Sam Altman isn't Anthropic !

It seems like the tide is finally starting to turn here in terms of LLM usage. Even 4 months ago this thread would be a nightmare lol

Love this, opus 5.5 is absolutely nuts at optimization. I was able to use it to get some 10x performance improvements recently.

How much has he dumbed down his capabilities already? When will he replace himself by an LLM?

is there a difference in the environmental destruction when used this way? no? these things have so many negative effects on the world in so many areas that making life more convenient for coddled computer touches doesn’t excuse literally any of it

Maybe he just diffs it to the latest commit and actually only manually reads through what Claude changed? No idea...

LLM companies will legitimize their shit by saying "look, Linus is using our model to make Linux better".

I personally -do- think copyright shouldn't exist. But it does (for Marvel or whatever), but not for GPL licensed projects once it is encoded in a matrix, and that's pretty messed up. "Loki is a copyrighted Marvel character, I can’t create a new, full-length story using him as the main character.", Yet if I ask it to write a text editor based on GNU Emacs it has very little problem doing so (edit: and technically failing, but still).

Linus is - always was - a sellout. Never ask what the Finns were doing during the WWII.

is there a difference in the environmental destruction when used this way?

Yes. There is no doubt that if you use an LLM for everything that will use several fold more times electricity than someone who uses it a few times a year.

Like I said, binary thinking. You're literally saying there is no difference in 1 and 1000000 because both are more than zero.

Okay, and? So he should either change his own processes or keep them secret because some dickbag might claim he's legitimized their product?

I think people in a bubble like this platform seem to miss that AI tools are already "legitimized". I am not stating an opinion, I'm just saying what the average person thinks, which is that they are useful. The reality is a lot more complicated than that and I think they're leading us bad places but I don't think your argument works at all

so the less you use it, the better? glad we can agree

Right, so we know Linus has used Claude for one project. You are saying there is no excuse for that and I don't agree. I don't think it makes sense to take absolute stances against things that will undoubtedly be used by most everyone eventually. Just like I think cars are generally bad, I'm not about to get pissed off at everyone who drives them.

the earth doesn’t care if you think this is a good use or linus is somehow worthy when the regular plums aren’t.

dario and his epstein wife sure do though. so keep going to bat for them

I love how you refer to people who give you things.

I haven't seen your kernel and OS yet, so let me know when it's ready.

Your absolutism will take you nowhere. No one will bother to even listen you because you aren't able to communicate about this topic.

i’m glad you have a word to hug and hold when you feel threatened by people who are different from you

Lmfao dude you are demonizing anyone who uses any LLM the same as someone who uses it constantly and irresponsibly. Who is threatened by people different from them? You're embodying exactly the out of touch rage I'm criticizing.

the issue is the use, not the user, and who and what it supports, directly and indirectly. you’re just trotting out a word so you don’t have to think anymore. you like the tech and don’t want to feel bad about it

tough

you’re just trotting out a word so you don’t have to think anymore.

Firstly, it's an incredibly accurate description of what you're doing here

Secondly, you have no clue what views I hold and you're not even slightly curious. The only reason you commented here was to make my day a little worse. You think it's justified because of your pigheaded refusal to accept reality. But it's not.

plagiarism

outright theft

It frustrates me to see that people are suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property right of people to control creations after they've been created.

I'm pretty skeptical of AI and have my doubts that it will be a net good, but I'm definitely not gonna suddenly be pro-copyright as part of that fight. Copyright has traditionally been used to entrench corporate interests, and strengthening those protections isn't going to suddenly win a fight against some kind of AI dystopia.

you don’t know me, my thinking, or my motivations, and yet have no problem accusing me of absolutism

irony ain’t dead yet, and projection ain’t just a river in egypt

I have no problem pointing out precisely what you've said. I'll freely admit to having zero curiosity about a zealot's views or motivations. Nothing could bore me more.

Exactly. What happened to "restriction of what a user can do with software or its source code is an infringement upon the users' rights"? I'm not saying that AI companies are acting in the spirit of FOSS, they're not, their models aren't even open-weight (for the most part), but the issue is not the training on materials that ought to be public domain anyway. There's plenty of ethical issues with modern technology. It's not sustainable at all, the supply chain is full of slavery, it generates huge amounts of emissions, etc. People's primary concern being pearl clutching about "plagiarism" shows where their priorities lie. If AI companies have plagiarised then I couldn't care less. It's everything else they're doing that's the problem.

I think it's more about the unequal application if those laws. People have had their lives ruined for sharing an mp3. These companies infringe on literally everything and they get rich.

I bet the next step is that the folks vibe coding emulators and replacements for major software suites are going to get serious fines, while artists are going to continue to get ripped off in the name of "innovation".

My code has always been free software so I don't object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.

But what about the output of an LLM that was trained on free software, then being used in closed source, commercial software? 🙁

inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!

Oh yeah, I'm definitely with you there. Oh gosh.

They probably should be up in arms! Both are bad things, simultaneously, as two things can be!

The community gave things, Linus is just a small part of this. Westerners, smh.

.ca

Learn solidarity and communality, drop your liberalism, and talk again.

I am not sure it was initially created for evil, I do believe that its discovery was mostly academic and in that it was, and still is, a pretty significant/interesting one. It was very quickly and very strongly made into the perfect weapon for the information age for sure, but i doubt that the original researchers wanted that, or just really thought of the implications outside of information theory. But it was indeed Google, surveillance capitalism incarnate, that initially gifted transformers to the world and kickstarted the whole thing...

Edit: I realised that I inadvertently made this comment about "AI" by way of pronouns when I'm really talking about LLMs. Google of course did not invent AI, and I more strongly disagree that AI in its actual sense was invented for or is inherently evil.

Well i think the issue is if licenses become worthless then that's also bad for the GPL

The tools are "legitimized" by a mass ad campaign to shove LLMs down our throats.

Linus is a very influential person in this space and hin using Claude for whatever project he has will legitimize the massive ad campaign that LLMs companies are pushing. It's a jackpot for them. Organic publicity by one of the biggest nerd of the world.

Any push towards LLMs is only benefiting the ultra wealthy and destroying the planet. And this is exactly what this piece of news is doing.

nitpicking doesnt change the point being made. A corpo getting more control over FOSS is a huge loss for everyone

Let me see, would you do what the Finns were doing if given the chance? Good to know. The russo sino phobia is to be expected.

People are not "suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property". Instead they wonder why some companies can violate those rules on an unprecedented scale whiteout consequences.