So a state or publicly owned AI would therefore be ok? Because this sounds a lot like a (very valid) criticism of capitalism and capitalist companies doing evil capitalist things, not of AI or LLMs in general.

We sort of, kind of have public AI with the open weight models. The way people hate on AI, it doesn't seem they care about that distinction.

I completely disagree. I am completely confident that an Opus 5.5 will code circles around the average developer.
I've also had to rewrite AI slop, but I did it with AI. Came out great. Turns out, knowing how to use a tool makes a real difference. It's like saying knifes are shit at cutting because a lot of dumb fucks keep holding it the wrong way.

20 years of experience, for what it's worth, and a vehemently disagree. But to extend an olive branch, I think a big reason for the seemingly polar opposite reception of LLM coding online is the context.

If you give an LLM all the tools it needs to write, research and verify it's code, to test the result (for example, in a browser), give it access to all the context it needs, like documentation, use it for code that is new, but not largely novel (CRUD business app vs. invent a new algorithm) and a competent person uses it, it's genuinely great. Great in a way no sane person could deny.

Inversely, if you're working in a shitty environment already, without documentation, where everything exists as implicit knowledge in peoples heads, where you can't test and develop freely, where you're forced to use shit LLMs or "hardened" aka shitty tools, for a extremely uncommon domain, you might have worse experiences.

I beg you people to just once honestly put the supposed resource use of AI into any kind of perspective. What do you think, how many prompts worth of AI did your choice to eat a beef burger instead of a bean burger cost the world? How many have you eaten, have all the AI haters eaten, across their life time?

You won't like the answer.

Well, the issue is that people want to turn off AI, but not these other things. It's like, only the newest bad thing counts. The bad things I like (like meat every day) are actually fine, somehow...

I guess Linus doesn't care about the environment or any of the other issues surrounding A.I. I'm not anti-AI just for the sake of being anti-AI. I have a huge problem with AI bcz of it's environmental impacts, intellectual property violations, job impacts, attempts to replace all employees with AI, the general dumbing down of society and worse off the internet is bcz of AI, the surveillance state being built around it. I could go on, but you get the point. I am a staunch, no AI person bcz of all those reasons and a hundred more.

This isn't an age thing, or a, I am getting older and Im stubborn thing. AI is literally ruining the planet and everything on it, and this guy thinks we should just accept that.

I say fuck off with that noise, I don't have e to accept anything.

The compiler can use rng too. From the gcc docs:

Sometimes gcc will opt to use a randomized model to guess branch probabilities, when none are available from either profiling feedback (-fprofile-arcs) or __builtin_expect.

More info here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52974259/what-are-some-examples-of-non-determinism-in-the-c-compiler

I'm willing to bet many people are not even aware that modern compiler optimizations use prng. Not to mention incorrect usage of the term "determinism" when referring to CS concepts. This is exactly what Linus is talking about when he cited lack of understanding of compiler behavior. I do believe there are notable differences between AI and compiler, but a lot of the reasons people give against AI are reactionary and not well thought out.

Intellectual property is an imperialist tool for exploitation and oppression. I see you are a fanatic zealot defending it. And you think we should just accept that?

BTW most tokens today are sold in China and mostly and increasingly produced with nuclear or renewable energy. China is also the country with the most, fastest and most sensible regulations on AI. You're blaming the ills of neoliberal capitalism on AI.

Therefor you are shielding capitalism from critique, and are preventing any sensible regulation on AI and any changes to the system that actually leads to our downfall. You people clearly have given up belief in democracy or revolution and just accept that this helpless and brainless zealotry is the only thing you can do now. Preach hate against your common man instead of the oppressors that make the decisions about how AI is used. So if you want to talk ethics, sniff your own butt first.

Is that really all you got from that? AI is stealing people's art, their video games, music, etc. I'm not talking about large companies. I'm talking about Joe down the street who's spent the last 4 years making a game, just to have an AI try to rip a slop version of his game 2 days after he released it.

I don't give a shit about Microsoft, or any other corporation for that matter, and the fact that you came in here with this aggressive long ass rant reply to me without even so much as asking a clarifying question says more about you than it does me.

Seriously? Joe down the street? Lol. That's a myth. Poor joe down the street that this despicable Linus is trampling on! He was going to make a living with his indie game! Oh the humanity! Hahaha

It's not a myth. It's a huge issue people having been dealing with in the Indie dev space, which you would know if you were a game developer. Anyway, I'm done here. You're either a bot, or an extremely unpleasant person, and I don't have the mental energy to engage with either today.

what makes you think i don’t use ai?

Yeah, former...fuck off. Stop replying to me or I will block you.

Do they require disclosure of what font the developer used for coding the patch? No one thinks it matters, but no reason not the be transparent, right?

The reason not to require disclosure is because in their opinion it doesn't matter any more than the font matters. If the person reviewing the code can't tell it's AI, and the code stands on its own, then it stands on its own. If they can tell then it doesn't meet code standards anyway.
A perspective that I don't disagree with is that "disclosure" can be a shield for the developer to hide behind. "Anything weird wasn't me being dumb, just the AI being wonky", and that's writing an excuse for subpar code. You submitted it, it's your code, and if you can't justify some dumb bit in it then you deserve the shame without the help of a face saving "it was the AI".

Because the "tool" is poisoning our water supply, burning our crops and delivering a plague unto our houses, only half-jokingly?

Also if "only" 99% of people use the autocomplete bot for nefarious/harmful uses, i fully believe the 1% should be deprived of the technology for the betterment of society. Id rather wait an extra 10 years for (insert pro ai talking point here) than let it continue to fuck every aspect of society including health, the economy, and entertainment.

I think that percentage could get as high as 33% "good actors" and 66% ignorant usage and still be valid.

All ai users are bastards, or something (obviously excluding high level STEM research, but even that is kinda sketchy; see mathematics atm)

The crashes would be inexplicable and intractable, but they'd be so damn efficient.

Now do it for the planned capacity of every AI data center currently planned or under construction or waiting for compute manufacturing by the big tech monopolists, and the trillions of dollars of labor that they’re telling the world they’ll replace whether the product is capable of it or not.

No you. My statistic still stands, if you would like to provide a different one please do. Maybe it will be 2%.

Your second paragraph is shifting the blame away from capitalism and towards AI. Economic bubbles and mass layoffs are features of capitalism, this is a pattern that has been repeating since capitalism was born. If not AI it would be something else.

His line seems to be 'don't submit shit code.'

Even if you wrote it by seance with a Oujii board, just make sure it works, and that great grandma Ada agrees to a GPL license.

Because the “tool” is poisoning our water supply, burning our crops and delivering a plague unto our houses, only half-jokingly?

Pivoting to other complaints entirely is not a sincere argument. You made a claim - someone countered it - you don't get to pick another argument and maintain the same conclusion. That's pretense.

Linus friggin' Torvalds just did.

Early compilers sucked, and still beat using raw assembly.

How does this calculus work if AI finds a bug introduced by humans?

Nothing short of the death of capitalism will do

Ok, let me know how that goes. While you whine online and have no impact on reality we will embrace "AI" and drain billionaire funds for distillation, open weights and building free software.

You genuinely don't see the effective differences of thse two strategies? Actually doing something vs having your finger crossed some magical boogeyman called "capitalism" will collapse?

You could set temperature to zero and it'd work less.

As with path-tracing, physics simulations, and even sorting algorithms, sometimes an element of randomness is demonstrably more useful than rigid if-then branching. Sometimes it just avoids hard-to-judge decisions between marginally different choices. Sometimes it converges toward a simply correct answer. Sometimes it's chaotic - and many outcomes are equally valid.

Honestly a lot of computing history goes 'Okay now it should always do--' followed by not that.

It took us a long while to tame the transistor. It took even longer to figure out why those solutions worked.

Is that what Linus is talking about in the OP? I was sure this was about code-generation. If he's talking about images and recording the metadata then I agree with you.

Which is great as an explanation for why so many people recoil at Linus saying 'the tool is mostly fine' - but it's zero percent of an argument against that claim. A famous cold-war engineer celebrating the slide rule while new hires are being spanked with them is not really encountering a productive conversation about their utility.

Lemmy is the strangest place to find people hesitant to conclude 'the actual problem here is capitalism.'

The standard form is "I hate AI as much as the next person, but--" followed by whatever you were going to say anyway. It seems to appease the identarians.

Maintainability became the go-to jibe this year. What a high-level requirement to complain about. Like sure, generated code can demonstrably work, and read sensibly with comments and tests, and interoperate with other programs... but in ten years you'll be sorry! As if local models two years from now won't make these behemoths look primitive. The bubble could pop tomorrow and it'd only increase pressure toward smaller and faster experiments by people with one-comma budgets.

A recent Computerphile video amounted to nervous laughter about chain-of-thought vanishing as a worthwhile glimpse of the model's state. (On the shaky assumption it ever was.) At the end they mention prompts where the model gets to output one word as an immediate answer. Last year the kinds of problems they could solve "between words" was comparable to what a person could think through in thirty seconds. On current frontier models it's more like half an hour.

That’s a straw man argument at best. You act as if I can control where I live (though I’ve work for multiple reperation charities to help with this exact issue because I know I live on stolen land and I want to give it back).

Knowingly using stolen property to “create” something is not the same as living on stolen land that was stolen two plus centuries ago.

And honestly I find it a little pathetic that that’s the comparison you tried to go for.

You’re disgusting

That's not what the study fucking says and the people who wrote it say so.

How did you make it through the Ukraine bombings you weirdo Russian bot

He's not Benevolent Dictator For Life, because the project is sprawling enough that he simply can't be. He's also ensconced deep in the technical low-level side of things, making decisions most users would hardly understand. People are much more likely to take issue with the guidance of self-appointed head guys for specific distros. God knows I ditched Ubuntu because of Mark Shuttleworth's front-end bullshit.

as a pro-AI, anti-cloud nerd? All of these problems disappear when we address the real problem of Capitalism.

there are abandoned tech certs for building datacenters that produce 110% of their own electricity. these are distinct from the data mines these useless nerds want to build.

without capital, the surveillance state dies.

intellectual property is a capitalist myth invented to hold us back and induce rents, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.

oh no, you fired me from a job I'd rather not have to do and I still get to survive because we slew capitalism? ahhh, how will I cope with the blow to my identity?

Also llms are built on plagiarism. If you use llms, you are a plagiarist.

Edit: ah, you already mentioned it. Oh well.

Talk about misleading. The differences are timestamps and metadata, and some compilers have flags to let you zero out timestamps and force it to produce a bit-for-bit identical file every time.

When Babbage first proposed the Difference Engine, one aristocratic onlooker asked, "But but how will it find the right answer, when someone enters the question wrong?"

Calculators will confidently tell you the square root of seventeen if that's what you type in, even if that's not the hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides of length twelve and five. You can slap the keys to your heart's content and almost certainly get the answer to some problem.

Critics need to consider - if you genuinely could not use an LLM wrong, there would be nothing to talk about. They'd just work.

essentially disruption will always keep happening, its how its handled thats the important part.

I do agree. We can look at countries with different economic and political systems to see which ones handle them best. Countries with socialist economic systems are able to use AI for the benefit of workers. While companies with capitalist economic systems use AI at the expense of workers.

'You can't say it's just like a hammer because hammers also affect your brain in the ways we condemn LLMs for.'

Ah I get your point now. Yes, ultimately both policies would rely on honor.

I'd argue plagiarism is different, though. If a codebase stipulates 'don't plagiarize,' that's... common morality. Not many contributors are going to argue 'well, I want to plagiarize.' They wouldn't advertise it in any project they contribute to.

Dictating what tooling to use is different. That's going to fall under 'personal choice' for more contributors. And they may feel compelled to hide tool use for that particular project, when they would otherwise show its use publicly in others.

In other words, forbidding tools like, projects runnings be telling contributors to forgo something they're used to using public. That's going to trigger more lack-of-disclosure and rule-breaking from devs that otherwise wouldn't do that.

You're not wrong with a lot of the substance there, but big tech doesnt own the corpus of AI, and it most certainly will still be around even if you were to dump all of big tech (which I am very much for...!)

I'm not into utilitarianism, just trying to be pragmatic here and not jump on the strong emotional reaction train... Unfortunately, LLMs are really useful tooling ...and they simply are not going to go anywhere, so I like to direct efforts to responsible governance, not mob mentality campism.

Shit no go bakie in horsie, lets put the onus and responsibility on the individual and produce better guidelines.

AS I said to the other dude, I'm not going to keep coming up with examples because you'll just keep moving the goal posts. There are tons of examples of something of value, natural or man made, being stolen and later treated as a common good.

Just do some research.

Go look at their post history, then block them anyway :) Your Lemmy experience gets substantially better after you block a couple dozen trolls.

AI in school is an interesting issue, we can't discount the fact that there are benefits to using AI in school as well. It needs to be up to countries to regulate usage and educate children on it's use. Socialist countries seem to be doing a pretty good job at this.

The US’s dumbfuck government almost started a war with China

"sources say" hmm I wonder what those sources are, I'm sure the CNN would never extrapolate information out of nowhere to spread sinophobia and call for AI regulation (which is exactly what AI companies want at the moment.)

Calling something just a tool is whitewashing who’s making it and promoting it and what it’s used for. Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

I'm not sure how calling AI a tool is whitewashing. Of course tools don't exist outside of their material conditions, however, AI has many benefits, it's just that capitalist economies will always use tools for the detriment of workers. Socialist countries have economies that are orientated to benefit the working class. They recognise the problems that arise from AI and work to fix them while using its benefits as much as possible to liberate workers rather than burden them.

Maybe one day, I would like a scarf.

Ethics of using AI are different than the efficacy of using AI. Both are included in Impact of using AI, but some people need to tease the two apart.

If Linux kernel isnt using AI, the hackers certainly will. Moreover there are ethically trained models as well.

(Doing a whatabout ism, couldn't find a good analogy) Wrt environmental impact, I don't see an outrage against eating red meat, over fishing, fast fashion to be as prominent despite their well studied negative impact. Part of it is because they are culturally tied or impossible to escape. AI has become like that for most coding tasks specially around security.

At that point I might not really care if the function name or a variable name is different

At least clean it up so it's maintainable, introducing tech debt is a long term impact

I mean we all know that driving combustion engine cars is an absolutely terrible idea and incredibly inefficient from both a physics and a societal viewpoint. Yet, even most people that accept that fact don't go around breaking up contact with their families or boycotting any business that uses ICE cars.

Sometimes we can be loud about the terrible impacts of a technology and demand stricter regulation while also leveraging the benefits ourselves. Maybe we can do a little bit ourselves. Like not owning a car or at least an EV. Or by being considerate about token use and using smaller or even local models for the lighter tasks.

The seed is generated by an random sampling algorithm that works on the epoch. Yes if you keep the seed fixed, the outcome will be the same but the seed is not the same, and you don't have any control on it anyways when you're using an api.