I just want to say I was here before the downvoting started.

Strangely idgaf about whether he respects me

This is really an ignorant and arrogant take at AI.

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.

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.

Windows still dominates the market,

What market?

Desktops? Sure.

Servers? Definitely not.

Supercomputers? Like, none of them.

Lmao your hero is here to call you out on your dogmatic Amish stance and you lot just outright reject him. Absolutely wild.

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

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.

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.

I don't think he thinks about you at all

He's a hero to a cult of tech bros. He's never been my hero and there's many in the Linux space who have been calling him out and asking for a democratic succession plan for ages. He's not some all knowing perfect being.

I feel like Linux having a guy is antithetical to Linux but I guess I'm just in the minority.

You dont know shit ^^

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!

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.

When can we get an OS truly developed by AI? ...like ground up from Claude or OpenAI?

I know what you mean but he literally created it and still runs the show and it's named after him so like 🤷‍♂️

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.

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.

Why do you say that?

Might still be better than Windows 😅

is Greg Kroah-Hartman not the succession plan?

So not being thrilled about huge corpos throwing billions of dollars destroying the environment, ruining people's minds and jobs and potentially killing us all in 10 years is a "dogmatic Luddite stance". Got it.

Very well put

linux has a succession plan, though?

When people say desktop laptop is implied in that too.

Blasphemy!!

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.

You could say the same about the railroad bubble, when companies got over excited about rail.

Or the dot com bubble, the Internet destroyed many many jobs.

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.

Man, that's a shame

It's one thing to think AI is good. It's another to call others stupid for rejecting it

That’s weird, I didn’t see anyone approving of those things in the original posted text and I definitely didn’t imply any of that with my comment.

Unless I was mistaken this was about Linus saying that using ai is akin to using any other tool.

Actually with some thought, you’ve convinced me.

Hell the printing press is being used by our oppressors to kill the earth. I will be deleting my account and from here on out I will only communicate and read through hand written notes.

Gamers are about to step into this conversation....you sure you want to continue? :-)

When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.

Guess we'll just have to stick with spark for now.

...

Phones? Nope.

IOT? Can't even run on modern laptops right.

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.

He's not calling people stupid for not using it, he's calling people that call for blanket bans on anyone submitting code that was made with AI stupid, since it should be judged off quality instead.

Sort of. The plan is "convene to make a plan" 72 hours after Linus's git stops updating. I should have been a little more clear though that people have been calling for a democratic secession plan to happen now instead of when Linus passes or steps away.

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.

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.

ah that does make more sense

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.

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.

Slop harder, Torvalds. You fucking lost it, and you're ruining Linux for everyone.

At least the other kernel maintainers still check things and catch problems, because clearly Linus Torvalds doesn't care anymore and would rather make false equivalence excuses.

Linus Torvalds is not an intelligent person. His argument style is extremely feeble, propped up solely from an ulterior, omnipresent appeal to authority. If he was just another poster, we would handwave his politics and social arguments as utter drivel.

He created some awesome software. Git, Linux. But the dude should have been kicked out of Linux dev a while ago. He is no longer required, and just runs his mouth constantly.

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.

He's not a hero. He's an old man past his prime.

The Luddites weren’t opposed to technology. They were opposed to, in their words, “machinery harmful to commonality”.

It’s a shame that their name and cause has been totally contorted by the capital forces that opposed them, cuz it’s actually a pretty good lens for analyzing the societal impacts of AI.

After all, you can’t spell “machinery harmful to commonality” without AI.