Fuck.

Let’s hope for a slop-free fork or the old man changing his mind on this bullshit.

The former seems unlikely to happen (or at least for the long term).

Edit: other relevant post

or maybe just time to grow up

"Grow up, join the sect. If not you'll be left out when we all become AI-augmented and fly to Mars"

This is the kind of arguments people made against the free-software movement in the first place. That it's somehow more mature to not care about consequences of what we do and how we do it

I think it's exactly the other way around

join the sect says the person who's against a glorified calculator?

My calculator has 100% accuracy, always, it's never wrong. If AI were like that it'd be great.

And calculators can't be tweaked to subtly change messaging to push a narrative, or a product, or whatever.

Calculators didn't steal the work of all humanity to try to put them out of a job.

Calculators don't really get used for scams by cloning people's voices.

Could go on and on how calculators and LLMs are different.

Thank you for taking your valuable time away from huffing gas to share your invaluable insights.

wait till you find out how floating point works 🤣

The difference is that free-software movement is about rolling up your sleeves and actually making alternatives as opposed to throwing a tantrum like spoiled children which is what you all are. You lot are just a modern day iteration of Luddites who were raging against the technology as opposed to social relations that resulted in the technology being used in abusive ways. And lacking basic understanding of the problem you are doomed to fail the same way as your predecessors.

Somehow doubt that a bunch of whingers are going to fork Linux successfully, but I'll wait to be proven wrong.

The comparison to the luddites is interesting as you're tacitly saying "no you guys are right but your fucked anyway".

There is no good end with this technology. None. It will be used to abuse the working class, it will alienate workers from their labor, and it will bring an enormous amount of harm to vast numbers of people. This technology gives nothing in return for this loss except the ability to consume faster.

These discussions never focus on the fact that this tool optimizes the, already, most efficient part of the human supply chain, ideation and design. This tool does not make any of the other bottlenecks that slow human progress faster, those being implementation, adoption, and translation of solutions to different environments. The human race had the tools to solve world hunger shortly after the invention of nitrogenated fertilizer; yet here we are. The human race created a source of nearly infinite clean energy with negative temperature-coefficient fission reactors; yet here we are.

But you're ultimately right. The luddites lost, we'll lose, and we're fucked.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. The Luddites were highly skilled workers, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to substitute for their own skill. So, they set to work to burn the factories down thinking that if they could destroy the machines, the problem would be solved. But technological advances could not be stopped by mere vandalism. The Luddites ultimately failed in their efforts because they failed to grasp the material forces driving the march of history. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The evils of the Industrial Revolution grew out of the possession of the means of production which grants the power to determine how technology is used. The same is true today, and it is why similar attempts to boycott AI are doomed to fail. Those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.

It is not the inherent qualities of machinery that should be condemned here, but rather the class relations within which it happens to be applied. This is precisely what Marx articulated showing that technology does not exist as an isolated phenomenon, but is dominated by the social structure of the society in which it happens to occur. To control the means of production collectively is to make technology serve human needs rather than merely increase the profits of the rich. That is the very lesson that the Luddites missed, and that a great many critics of AI are missing today as well.

The rational strategy for those who have come to the conclusion that corporate AI cannot be trusted, which is itself very much a correct one, should be to focus their energy on ways to develop this technology outside the stranglehold of corporations. We already have a powerful example in the form of open source software. And with the release of Chinese model weights, there is a solid foundation to build upon.

The more open models are used, the less demand there will be for the proprietary ones. These models are the tools that people can run on their own machines, and under their own control. Developing and using open alternatives to paid APIs cuts directly into the profits of the corporations renting out LLMs. A mere boycott will not alter the balance of economic forces or change the status quo. If you want to resist, do it constructively by encouraging the use and development of this technology in the open.

They were not "against technology", that was the propaganda of the ruling class which still gets repeated today. The Luddites were put down by militarily and violently killed. They didn't fail because they weren't publicly supported (they were wildly popular) or weren't against the social relations (they very much were)

Building frontier AI models cost billions of dollars in capital. Any solution involves raising that kind of money, the forces of the money will be put right back against you. It's also just as likely to be banned if it's seen as a big enough threat.

The Luddites were skilled artisans, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to destroy their guilds. So, they set to work to smash the machines thinking that if they could destroy the technology, their artisanal guilds would be saved. And they were predictably crushed by state violence. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The same is true today, and those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.

Also, you're simply confusing the fact that the US is in a bubble with what it takes to develop new technology. Listening to you, one would think Linux could have never been developed because Microsoft put billions into Windows.

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report

Also, highly unlikely they would get banned, because there's a huge amount of capital in the US now being invested in companies using open models already. But even if the burger reich banned them why should I give a fuck, I don't live in that shithole.

Compute is the bottleneck for AI, not labor. Linux was able to develop more because of the labor being done by huge number of people for free and from those employed by other companies working on it. If AI keeps accelerating on the same trajectory, there is little reason to hope for it to get better as the models get larger and training costs get higher

The Luddites were not just smashing machines, they had a list of demands they were trying to build pressure for. They were also trying to get the rights for unions, strikes, abolishing child labor, minimum wages and the things like that which shifted powers back into the favor of workers. They had tried petitioning governments for that for a while before they started smashing things

If the US bans open-weight models, you don't think a large number of countries would be heavily pressured by industry to do the same?

While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger's human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.

We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.

This is fun :)

What part of distributed systems are you still struggling with here? Also, models are getting incredibly more efficient every few months. Qwen 3.8 that runs on a laptop today is comparable to Opus 4.6 from around half a year ago which needed a whole data centre.

People working on local models don't need to compete with whatever the big corps are doing, they just need to make tools that are good enough to use on your machine. Just the same way Linux didn't have to do everything Windows did to become usable.

And yeah, Luddites had lists of demands just you do, how's that work out for them?

And if the US somehow did ban open models, I'm sure the vassals would as well, but again who gives a fuck? The whole west is like 13% of the global population. And it's imploding economically and politically in real time. Who cares what goes on in this genocidal cesspool?

Based on your other comments across several threads which do not indicate good faith, I am not continuing this thread here

But the incentive structure is only present in the corporate versions of these tools. I'm advocating for building these tools in the open, and we don't have to mirror what corps are doing. I disagree that these tools are anti-worker at their core, they're just another form of automation. And we have a concrete example of what happens when this technology is introduced in a rational fashion with China.

Every form of automation will be used to alienate and atomize workers under capitalism, but it's obviously worse if these tools are also controlled by corporations which will decide who uses these tools and how they use them. While we continue to live under a capitalist regime, open source approach at least helps mitigate the worst ills. On top of that, it directly cuts into the business model of these companies.

Open models are what actually scares them and they state is plainly. We only have to listen to what these companies are saying themselves. They don't care about boycotts, or some online activism, but they are lobbying to ban open models, and that tells you everything you need to know.

Ah yes, when you're unable to come up with any actual counter point just say that the detailed explanation of why you're wrong is not in good faith. Bye troll.

my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core

But do we even want to be workers? I don’t. I have to be worker.

We shouldn’t be fighting parts of a broken or rather unfair system, but the system. I don’t want to fight for my place at the bottom of a pit.

I don't mind people using AI tools to code for them. As long as they understand the code when they submit it and can fix it, if there are errors/faults in it before or after it has been merged.

Y'know how you're not supposed to just yell "somebody do something" in an emergency situation? If I ever hear someone yell such a thing, I'm going to be the "somebody".

I am going to fork Linux.

That's a sensible stance and I don't disagree in principle, the problem is that I feel there are too few people that fall into that camp and a fair amount of them have had their brains absolutely cooked and believe they do, while they absolutely do not.

Of course I don't have any real data to back those assumptions up, it's not the kind of thing you're going to get solid data on, mostly just observations. I'd like to think the Linux kernel devs are a cut above, but given the state of things my faith is in the gutter.

I think the US banning open-weight/open-source models could be a real concern. Anthropic is certainly pushing for it with their weird self-propagating local open-weight worm in smart TVs narrative that makes little sense. But I don't think other countries would follow suit, because it wouldn't be in their interest, given that they are not currently in control of the frontier models and open models giving them an edge.

Remember SETI@home? If compute is the bottleneck, why shouldn't people all over the world get together to train their own models? Cyber security would be a concern, of course. Such a cluster could be misused. And the underlying question of copyright remains. But if lots of people were able to get together to create open-source software, lots of people can get together to train better, transparent models. The EU also offers free training clusters if you apply, if I'm not mistaken. I also read about an open-source LLM somewhere. Not only open-weight, open-source. Can't recall right now. Mistral 4 Large and Kolibri 1 are interesting open-weight models. Lots to come.

I also think that making the technology your own is the best way to tackle the big American corps and their proprietary models.

Linuslop Rustokenvalds

Same with statistics and probability. But they still have a point.

Arguing for the use of LLM on lemmy? Bold move. Don’t forget that 90% of the people are unemployed, jealous commies, attacking everybody who has even the slightest positive thought about LLM’s

If people are hurt enough, they will push towards it.

While I totally disagree with both, there are distributions without systemd and there are NEW projects that keep X11 alive and shun Wayland.

Something like this could happen with the Kernel. I’m not the one doing it because while I dislike Linus’ pro-slop stance I don’t really care enough for actively working on something like that..

But if available I’d install it instead of the slop Kernel.

So your stance is "trust without verification".

This will be fun when it inevitably blows up in all of our faces.

AI literally atrophies your brain.

Linus Torvalds ego has betrayed him, no one is perfect.

I don’t mind people using AI tools to code for them. As long as they understand the code when they submit it and can fix it, if there are errors/faults in it

So your stance is “trust without verification”.

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion

And calculators can’t be tweaked to subtly change messaging to push a narrative, or a product, or whatever.

the internet does the same! so TV! they can do the same with books! i think we should burn them, what do you think?

Calculators didn’t steal the work of all humanity to try to put them out of a job.

ai didn't do that either, it was capitalists. and as far as i know its a good thing that they "steal jobs" having less jobs means you can play more. except under capitalism. oh, so it seems you're complaining about capitalism here, ok, let's move on.

Calculators don’t really get used for scams by cloning people’s voices.

ok, away with e-mail, i got an e-mail that was clearly a scam a couple of weeks ago.

Could go on and on how calculators and LLMs are different.

yes, you could. the issue is that you're not complaining about AI, you're complaining about tangential stuff to ai, most of which are not AI directly or are temporary shit that can be modified. sure, water issue. that changes. processing power. that can be more efficient and it will be. so fucking please complain about AI.

So your stance is “trust without verification”.

No. The reviewer is going to ask the submitter questions about the code and the submitter needs to be able to answer them in a way the reviewer is comfortable seeing it merged.

This was only keeping honest people honest.

If the code is obvious crap, it doesn't matter if AI was involved. If the code is perfectly obviously fine, it doesn't (directly) matter if AI was involved.

In the grey area in between, if someone doesn't say AI was involved it might mean AI was used undisclosed to vibe code the result from beginning to end. If someone said AI was involved, it might mean AI was used solely to speed up testing to track down the cause of the bug. In the former case, you'll get nothing useful out of the submitter; in the latter case the submitter can engage usefully in pushback on their proposed flawed fix. In neither case did the AI disclosure (or lack thereof) actually help.

And that's more or less where this news comes from - the tool usage disclosure turned out to not be useful, partly due to the vagueness of the method of disclosure (a tag in the commit message), partly due to people not reliably following the requirement, so they decided to stop requiring it.

I'm not going to start using AI voluntarily any time soon, but I'm also not going to start panicking that the kernel is suddenly completely turned into vibe coded AI slop like so many crazy people seem to have been doing lately.

honestly the code should be stood behind by the developer. then it won’t matter.
and by stood behind, i mean responsible for the outcome as if they wrote it, able to explain exactly what the code does, how it does it. and have been reviewed before deployment. often times that takes longer then just coding it yourself

you can’t use ai as a scape goat when the code does not work.

Exactly, that's the only rational way to look at it. The person submitting the code is responsible for it. Period. How they went about producing it is their own business, but they are the one who takes ownership of the result.

have fun

Which is that they don't understand how statistics and probability work. The LLM generalizes patterns that get imprinted on the neural network during training, and then these patterns are expressed in the given context during inference. The stochastic aspect of the system is what allows the LLM to adopt generalized training to the specific problem being solved. So, the outputs LLMs produced are clearly not random in a sense of playing bingo because randomness is not the dominant property of the system.

Holy fucking shit... rational conversations when talking about AI tool usage on Lemmy? WTF?!

it is rare 🤣

No, I just see no reason to counting talking to someone who keeps renaming valid criticism as "whining". There is no mind to be changed here. This is just conservative rhetoric while pretending to talk like a "leftist"

The particular policy you are defending by the way goes against all your argument about wanting open models. The policy to not even have to say what model you use, and yet you defend it just the same. There is no cohesive argument here

Yet, here you are continuing to talk without saying anything of substance. I also love how in your mind, actually doing something practical about the problem of corps owning AI tools is conservative. Amazing mental gymnastics there champ.

And I don't know what policy you think that I'm defending that goes against my arguments. But I guess we'll never know since you won't actually mention what it is.

Thanks; I shall ^^

That's why I got into compsci and programming. It's fun :3

Exactly. While I do have issues with the ethical and environmental aspects of AI, I do believe that many of the criticisms are disingenuous. Some made me wonder if the one criticizing never worked in a real dev project and just parroting

Bad developer have been copy pasting from stack overflow, writing slop, not following documentation/standards for years. This will never go away.

AI can do amazing good stuff, keeping the exit criterias checked, act as a second opinion, verifying upstreams and helping building a good prototype. making harnesses, hell even find a forgotten RAII pointer or concurrency.

But it can also lead to making gibberish that no one understands, mess up with productivity factor (if someone do code fast, why dont you??) and many other issue.

I think its all about approaching how we can gatekeep the bad code, instead of trying to pin how it was made.

The issue with LLM's is that they cut as much muscle as they do fat. Work can take a lot of forms and surplus-value extracting labor and pro-social communal labor are often indistinguishable aside from the motivating force.

There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that work, that is to say "providing some useful function to others based on one's skills", has a large number of pro-social benefits. LLM's abstract an ENORMOUS amount of viable sources of "work" and therefor remove the incentive for people to rely on one another vice the tool.

Currently this is limited to repetitive white-collar work, software engineering, and being a mathematician but it would be foolish to think it stops there.

Humans are social animals and we have no model for what happens when there is no material reason to reach out to or rely on another human other than novelty. Genuinely, it would be better to restrict the use of LLM's to a select set of applications, weighing the costs and benefits of doing so, than it would be to carte blanche allow them everywhere.

Even in a communist utopia, this would be dangerous. The number one historical cause of violent revolution has been a glut of educated people who are unemployed or underemployed. This has been studied to death and one of the major findings is that it wasn't about the money, it was about status and identity. LLM's have the potential to create a population of incredibly educated and incredibly bored people.

It's suicide.

I agree with you that an open-source ecosystem around LLM's is better than a closed corporate one but my argument is that having such an ecosystem eliminates the lesser of the risks surrounding LLMs.

My contention here is that an open-source environment prevents control of the technology by a small handful of companies but it does not change the relationship between the worker and the LLM, which is the bigger problem.

LLM's abstract reasoning, there is no higher function that a human can fall back to, they are there for purely substitutive with no replacement or complements. Because of this even a single-proprietorship faces intense labor alienation as a result of using the tool.

To be clear; the genie is out of the bottle. We have no way to go back, and that is horrifying. We are all actively watching entire fields die overnight and it's not likely to stop any time soon. Every day I mourn another dead craft and I will likely continue doing so until most knowledge work is replaced.

But the elephant in the room here is that the way LLMs are used is just a symptom of the underlying problem. And that's where the focus needs to be ultimately. However, until that problem can be solved, surrendering these new tools to capitalists would be absurd. There is already a power imbalance, and it would only get worse if we reject technology which the ruling class embraces.