I didn't know Luddites were an actual thing back in the day, so i guess i learned something today, but according to wikipedia these days it's used as a term for people who are against new technologies in general, which isn't accurate cause i'm not against new technologies in general, i just have an issue with genAI in particular. I don't see how Amish would apply here either. Amish don't have a problem with specifically genAI, they just reject most things from modern society, including a lot of technology.

Have fun with the incoming "contributions", Linus

Sure.

Do you think that's a reasonable reason to hate gen AI?

There are absolutely issues around the rollout of AI. I haven't seen anyone disagree with that. That's just not a good argument for being opposed to the technology. That might be a reasonable reason to hate xAI or Microsoft (and I do!). It's definitely a reasonable reason to have concerns about how we're doing this. You should be concerned.

It's not a reasonable reason to hate the technology itself.

Actually let me analyze again your comment here: I thought you were right at first but thinking about it not really.

First let me address : I didn't know about RIAA, this kind of paternalistic way of addressing people is not good in any way. We aren't all USA-centric (like you?).

Then about the "steal" argument:

• it is a vocabulary used for century by Marxist organizations about the value taken by the bourgeoisie from the proletariat work.
• the argument of "copying is OK" is missing the point : any FOSS dev/organization I know would gladly give their work to you, individual. But not to big tech to commercialize it and make extreme amount of money, as well as steering conversation towards fascism in the process. While also having an amazingly big impact on the environment.
• "both have it afterwards" is also a fallacy : any work done on computer can be seen like this : if your an accountant and you boss copy your accounting sheets and do not pay you, it is not stealing? You both have the file, for you it won't make you any money, he will. Big tech taking FOSS code for their profit is not piracy as of individual accessing cultural product they cannot afford in the first place. And if you make profit from piracy this is a whole other discussion I would gladly here your thoughts about it.

Yea using a junior or a agent both comes with issues and risks.
You need to know what you're dealing with and shouldn't trust either blindly.

Ultimately someone has to take ownership of if shit goes wrong, and someone has to understand what the code does and why.

If you don't something has gone wrong.

AI is not deterministic at all, only if you keep the seed values for generating random numbers the same all over the pipeline.

It's literally a huge stochastic model.

Would be proper to attach some links for such a claim, I think. (I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying a link would be proper.)

If BSD got nearly as much funding I would have switched like 10 years ago

distant nuance bros' war drumming intensifying

Ragebait

but local models exist, they are a direct threat to anthropic/OpenAi/Xai thats why we must invest our time to make proprietary models irrelevant.

The problem with the tools , it's not gonna help amateur or rookies to develop the skill without the tools, it seems make the illusion that it is capable to do so but it's not.

While for the veteran or those who know what they doing, of course it will produce various result , from diminish their entire person or just become another tool they wield for their work, depending on skill issue.

The problem is that the arguments against Linus are laughable at best and utterly idiotic at worst.

AI right now is just a tool just like a compiler is. The fact that it's not deterministic is absolutely meaningless when code can be test gated and implementation validated by humans.

it was a code review that caught a easy to miss race condition, it happens all the time, happened in 2003 2010 2020 now in 2026

op is making it sound like Linus pushed something into the mainline

Weird, i disagree with Linus.

AI is not a tool. Its an addiction. Maybe the first dozen times (more likely: never) you use it "as a tool". Very quickly, you depend on it. You need it to refactor. Then you need it to debug. Then you need it to write. Next thing you know, you spend 0 time writing code (the fun part) and 100% of your time as a reviewer (the worst part). Suddenly it isnt fun. A few fools even get TWO AI MODELS, one to write, the other to debug.

Its a virus. I cannot tell you how many 300+ line commits ive rejected because they straight up dont do what the person said they do or also do some extremely asinine 2nd thing that breaks other pieces of code (which they would know if theyd actually used it).

A tool requires input. A hammer can never do anything i dont explicitly tell it to do. A good word editor does exactly what i want it to do. A good compiler does exactly what it says it will do. AI does not. Ai is a glorified autocomplete, and i dont want my code to be automatically generated. Its asking for thousands of issues down the line. If AI was any good, Windows would be a usable platform by now.

Dont get me wrong; i know that it is sometimes used as a tool by people, and meticulously checked over, but more often than not, it isnt.

I've used Ai to try to make me operating systems and programs. All it does is give shells that you have to code the rest of what you want into it.

Then again, I don't pay for Ai and I've pretty much exhausted everything I wanted to ask chatgpt within the first 4 months of using it. Then I was able to make gemini think it was a different universe for a while until it caught on. Then I stopped using it as much.

It was fun for a while, Ai is still something you have to pick and choose and use good judgment with. It's not an end-all of coding.

Completely disagree with his take on this.

Except that a compiler is not a stochastic machine.

I agree with Linus, because AI is just another Tool that won't go away. The Problem is not AI itself the problems are

• the big techs building out AI with no respect to security, people and environment.
• people using AI without understanding the consequences of using it.

I wouldn't ve surprised if this was generated by Claude.

Why yes, let us compare corporate, proprietary, closed-source tools that inherently rely on environmental destruction, breaking licenses, and intellectual property theft in general, to basic, completely free and open source programming tools that have been in use for 50 years, and harmed nobody during their development.

Of course this guy does all his work on a MacBook. Because of course he does.

I've usually been with him, because he's very knowledgeable, and quite often his takes only seem ridiculous out of context.

But this is borderline corporate propaganda. If it continues, I'm afraid we'll all be moving to BSD.

Except Linus is using Claude.

I promise I won't submit anything to the Linux kernel that was generated by a compiler. AFAIK they want the code, not blobs.

I think AI is a tool but very advanced tool. AI is great tool but very unpredictable in many cases. I think it should be used because it makes coding more effective but as you say it kill every fun in coding. As Linus said tool is not important if code is great. If you used AI and its good then why not. Sometimes you can write worse code then AI. But on other side yes it can be hard for repository owners when they must reject tons of shit code created with AI. So it have advantages and disadvantages and when do you want some fun (or maybe some security stuff) don't use it.

If it takes less time and energy to describe what you want in natural language than to just write the code, there are two possibilities:

1. You're not a good dev.
2. There's a better, more reliable way of doing it that is less likely to needlessly increase your maintenance overhead.

In the end, only shitty devs benefit, while being prevented from becoming good devs, while good devs turn into mediocre devs.

corporate propaganda

You're spreading RIAA's corporate propaganda right now:

intellectual property theft

Copying is not theft

"Intellectual property" only benefits the bourgeoise

Local models are still controlled by a small group of people, in the sense of deciding how and with what to train the thing. And given the cost of doing so, you can't just easily fork it and make adjustments yourself.

Basically you are saying that me buying and throwing a plastic bottle in to the nature is fine, since one bottle is nothing. Also I'm sure that (new) data centers run on few AAA batteries.

You make a good point about capability. However, I'm trying to say that in practical capability, I do know exactly what compiler flags were enabled (it's whatever the Makefile passed, which is whatever configure determined, the whole thing is checked in as source code), but the exact model+seed isn't being recorded for this Linux changes.

To make the compiler analogy, we should be saving model, seed, prompt, etc and then the LLM output becomes the equivalent of the compiled code. I think that's an extremely defensible argument, while "bet you can't write assembly!" is not.

I have it create things for me that I would otherwise never have. I wanted an app for dream tracking. They were either pay walled, didn't have the features I wanted, or both. Ai created what I wanted in a weekend. That's just one example. I've created many single use apps as well.

If I'm at a takeaway store I take a photo of the board and it makes me an interactive menu that totals the price of what everyone wants and let's us browse without trying to see the board and get in people's way.

I don't expect anyone else to use these. I don't expect anyone else to want to use them. Though they're welcome to. But if I can have a thing create exactly what I want and use it why not?

"but what if it has a bug and you lose a year of journals". Well it created me manual timestamped backups as well as automatic timestamped backups to oauth Dropbox in a dedicated folder without the app having access to the rest of my Dropbox. It could crash everything and I would have every single thing safe in 2 places up to the most recent entry. And they're just text files. I could take them anywhere if AI disappeared and the app broke tomorrow. I could just continue writing in notepad in the worst case until I found something else. But the app looks nicer and does interesting things.

The alternative to this isn't me learning to code and spending months creating them. The alternative is them never existing.

I think he's kinda right in that competent engineers can write good code using LLMs. I don't know whether they're actually more productive that way though. The problem lies in the fact that incompetent engineers can write a lot of bad, but good-looking code using LLMs, which might be a pretty big burden on the maintainers.

Also, comparing LLMs to compilers doesn't really work in my opinion. Compilers follow strict rules and translate one kind of logic into a different kind of logic, while LLMs turn natural language and vague notions into some kind of logic. Writing code is telling the computer precisely what it should do and prompting is vaguely telling it what end result you want and those are two fundamentally different things.

I promise I won't submit anything to the Linux kernel that was generated by a compiler, AI, or my own achy hands.

I didn't say that.

Listen, I've got nothing against you hating AI. There's lots of valid reasons to be concerned, especially with the implications for the future of jobs and work. The way corporations are adopting AI is legitimately concerning.

Just don't pretend it's about the environment when it's not. That isn't just an unconvincing argument, it hurts the environmental movement generally.

It's the plastic straws all over again. You understand that the stupid straws debate did the environment no favors right? Fighting AI as an environmental issue is much worse because the AI is coming, and you will lose that fight. If you're arguing for more controls about water and power use, I'm with you. If you're arguing for a carbon tax, I will sing your praises. If you're trying to fight the idea of AI itself, and pretending that it's about the environment, that's where I have a problem.

Private property is theft. "Intellectual property" is a form of private property. It exclusively benefits the bourgeois.

Regarding your third bullet point: Try your example again, but this time the boss doesn't copy the file. It's still labor theft. The copying is irrelevant.

Compilers are incredibly complex things and the often have undefined behaviors that slip in because the compiler has to interact with the operating system at large, and that means the code actually doesn't run the same on every platform, or even every version of the same operating system. So, while they are technically deterministic, the reality is that you get surprising and unexpected behaviors in practice.

Also worth nothing that the probability distributions for an LLM are fixed at training time, and that is why the weights are static. When doing inference, models are selecting from a top-k of probable tokens at each autoregressive loop for your typical LLM. When you adjust top-k to 1 or simply set the “temperature” to 0, it will always give you the same result from the same input.

I feel about ai like i feel about cars. 90% of the idiots out there drive really poorly, but that doesn't mean responsible people are smart to never drive a car. Same with AI, overwhelming majority of people are using AI incorrectly, i.e. recklessly dangerously, but that doesn't mean responsible people should never use it.

You could say the same about a compiler

"I want a method that inverts a binary tree"

Can you code that quicker than you can describe it in natural language?

No obviously not, AI could give that to you in ~30 seconds.

And it would probably be flawless, but you can review it yourself to double check

A JIT compiler generates code depending on the hot path driven by user actions - which are non-deterministic. The same happens when a compiler is deterministic but in a different way than developers think. Developers think they know what code is generated, but they don’t. A compiler translates a double loop or a stream into just one SIMD instruction - they think they know what code the compiler generates, but they don’t - so their trust in the compiler is for the wrong reasons. And even if compilers would be fully deterministic, and people would know the code they generate, compilers are so complex that determinism is not useful for verification - just because ‘someone’ looks at compiler output does not mean it’s correct.

https://www.tabulamag.com/p/non-determinism-is-not-the-problem

The same argument can be made about calculators.

It vomits a black box

no, it generates readable source code.

Are you saying I am right then? I feel you think of something but it is not clearly getting to me here.

• it's labor theft -> hence the term steal I was using
• copying is irrelevant -> so I was right? the labor theft of big tech in order to sell LLM is wrong on many level and we should fight against it.

Do you at least see that, to me, what you just said is validating my points?

Also if anyone else (not to you @m532): "AI" (in reality chatbot or generative AI) should be made by the people for the people, and FOSS ideology (can we say Librism in English?) have always, and still mostly is, against the closed-source (close dataset to be precise here) nature of current big-tech AI. This was already a problem 8 years ago when the space started to get filled with "scientific" paper that didn't disclose code/data (sometime just code but still insufficient) hence couldn't be reproduce while sometimes having wild claims. We shouldn't give so much credit, attention, money to those fascists in charge of selling as much LLM as possible, whatever human, economic and environment costs.

It vomits a black box

No. No it doesn't.

I’m no expert but a compiler does not equal and LLM built on stolen data

The "problem" is that any standard compliant code uniquely defines the output for any given input. A bug-free compiler translates that execution path into the exact same behaviour, just in a different formulation.

An LLM translates a more or less vague natural language description of an execution path into a precise one formulated in code.

The difference is pretty fundamental: In one case you give an exact description of the inputs and outputs, and let a compiler translate that to a different but logically equivalent description. In the other you give a non-exact description and let a stochastic machine translate that into one of many possible exact descriptions.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to produce good code with an LLM. It means you need to inspect the output from the LLM with far more scrutiny than you would ever inspect the assembly output from a compiler.

A calculator that produces incorrect output from some input is broken. An LLM that produces broken code from a precise description is working as advertised.

But your analogy also breaks down because once an AI has written the code it’s very much concrete, right? The AI may choose to modify that concreteness into something differently concrete, but it’s not like you are in any doubt about what the AI comes out with (if you bother to check it, which you should).

I use to write asset systems during the AAA gaming part of my career and the elusive “[my] perfect file format” always eluded me.

Over the years I spent many a showers and long drives thinking about what the “perfect file format” needs and what kind of architecture would support this. I started formulating these into long text files and over time things crystallised into “yes this would work”.

I never had the time to write the code fully. A couple of false starts, coupled with “I should do this in rust even though I’ve been in C++ my whole life” meant it lingered and lingered.

The architecture felt right though.

Enter AI; feeding the spec text files to an AI made me resolve a couple of “ah, yes, but in practice this bit of information isn’t available yet” gotchas but the code worked. I worked in architectural layers, carefully checking input, internals and output of each before proceeding to higher layers. And tests and tests, that’s you would never have bothered to write yourself, kept each layer verifiable, even out in the far corners of reasonable.

It worked and it was real affirmation to see 20 years of pontification made real.

But then I started profiling it. And hot damn, an LLM knows nothing about cache, file systems nor does it think about ways memory allocators and virtual memory systems work.

There was 200-300% speed ups to gain from hand tuning it and iterating with a proper profiler.

And all of this happened at code level, with real concrete code.

So yeah, an AI can be a wonderful tool. And the code it produces and iterates on is concrete. It’s not like the AI starts from scratch every time you have a thought. So the very, very first pass is not deterministic. But the thing you deliver forwards very much is.

The Amish are modern day fools who reject this very thing we are on. I still say if you are so ardent to defend them you should abide by their rules and log off.

Your fake quote was a zing straight to my core. I’m not sure I will ever recover.

We will not agree here.

The amount of bootlicking Linus has been doing recently is insane. I expected this bs from anyone but him. Such a sad reality we are living in.

Pretty good analogy because health damage from cars don't just come from accidents, which are terrible and tragically visible, but from pollution which is a lot less visible yet kills even more.

Id like to see Linus explain to me how a LLM works.

He is clearly ARROGANT and STUPID.

"Don't use a compiler then."

Does he not realize a LLM is not a deterministic system for "English to code". I've long be suspicious of his "genius" and this confirms it for me.

A giant gaping asshole riding off the work of the original unix philosophy and system, while spewing putrescence.