But all AI output is slop. It’s social spam. That’s what it’s for. It’s slop! Say “slop” every time

This writing is far, far too emotional to be considered anything but an opinion piece

I don't is hidden the AI code, but having a human to blame for the AI code if that code broke something.

sir this is a blog post

It’s so weirdly emotional that I’m sure I’m saving some folks the click

do people not see the url? the tagline? the smug clippy?

You do realize that all code for the kernel is code reviewed and tested by so many people right? The patches are probably some of the most human reviewed code on the planet....

This feels like the time when every armchair expert became experts on immunology...

By the looks of it this is the beginning of the end of linux, where we moving to nerds?

The article is literally about how they have so much AI slop that the code is no longer reviewed by people it’s reviewed by a Meta chatbot…

… If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately.

This is the vibe-code-two-step. "AI" is useful because it helps inexperienced users to code. But you also have to be an expert to use it properly.

Can you post the quote where it says that it's untested and it goes straight to master

I'm lost.

Well fuck off back to Windows then (I'm sure you can determine whether or not the code for that has been near an LLM... oh wait). Or fork it, if you can. If neither of those stop being so entitled about what tools someone uses to build the OS they give you for free!

The article is one angry person's rant and you are further going beyond what it actually says.

Lmao at this completely misguided comment.

Torvalds’s first publicly released chatbot code was in January this year, when he vibe-coded a project in Python because he didn’t know enough Python. The programming language kids learn in high school. The guy who runs the kernel couldn’t get his head around Python.

Linus would run circles around whoever wrote this article. Ever hear of "domain knowledge"? It's perfectly reasonable to expect an old school engineer well-versed in low level code like C to see high level scripting languages like python as fairly alien.

Ctrl-F "slop" - 32 matches

You know how we call AI output "slop" because it's low-effort and kinda generic? Yeah.

Also, looking through the authors articles, frankly, the list looks like low quality human slop.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/other.html

And I can't find any evidence they're actually involved with any development projects either. Literally ANY projects including stupid little pet ones every dev has

paper and talk

Same thing could be said about a fishing pole. Or car, or rifle, or a bicycle.

It helps inexperienced users to catch fish.... But with some knowledge and experience can get more out of it.

Not the same at all. You don't have to be a gunsmith to kill someone with a gun. You do have to be a knowledgeable engineer to produce anything that isn't slop with "AI".

A MUCH better analogy is construction. Do you want a bunch of teenagers and Main Character Syndrome dipshits who cannot even read blueprints nor understand regulations and building codes let alone know them, to build your house? Nono, it's OK! They have nail guns and modern lumber, they don't need to know all that!

Sure you can get a shed or even a small house out of that, but you're never going to get safe, modern, multistory construction like that...

I mean, having pet projects doesn't require being "involved" with one nor requires making anything public...

Yeah. Pretty much.

The actual policy is that it all gets reviewed by a human I think when I was looking into it.

The bots are likely most useful to reject obviously bad patches which have obvious bugs or don't follow guidelines. And identifying bad code is something which AI tends to be good at.

In our code at work, we use weakly typed languages which aren't strict and on those it tends to be even better. We catch things like table keys that are typed wrong, etc. On C, things like pointers it probably does a good job with identifying as wrong

If it passes AI code review it still gets checked by human for things that are wrong and needs fixing. But if it fails, it probably needs fixing regardless.

It's a tool, not a product.

I think you are the misguided one. Even Linus says devs should be able to understand what they generate. Him giving in and slopping something up is direct evidence of his supposed morals already slipping...

A good language server / ide will also complain about incorrect types. That specific example is a deterministic process, no llm is required for it at all.

beOS, ReactOS? I dunno.

"You don't like Trump? Well maybe you should go back to the middle ages. Or just go and make a new country, see if that's so easy, huh"

Since when is the argument of "other things are even worse so we shouldn't care about something becoming worse" a thing?

Nevermind, don't answer that, as usual the answer is "Since the rise of the 'AI' cult"

Except I can't see any references to this guy getting involved with any projects at all at a technical level.

If you check his articles, he's definitely targeting a specific crowd based on what I can see too.

Saying "there is an AI bot that identifies if code is obviously bad" doesn't really make an exciting story though...

We do use one. But, in practice, they can't catch a lot of things which AI will

At least in our case too based on what's available, it also can't check stuff like coding style well (but our development relies on that less).

Some might though

AI is useful when you can put it to a task and validate the result.

For many tasks that’s visually seeing a button you can click.

For other tasks you need to be an expert to get value from it and really understand.

If you provide tools and context, you get a lot better results. For most of my core uses I’ve built decent tooling, but I wouldn’t want to share or be responsible for maintaining that for everyone else.

I genuinely don’t think it’s useful for learning unless used like stack overflow, but it’s not designed or trained to do that, it’s trained to take the drivers seat regardless of instructions.

Linus is saying that using an LLM doesn't absolve you of taking responsibility for what you publish.

I am extremely anti-LLM for basically everything but even I can see this moral panic for what it is. Sadly not the first time David Gerard (the author of this blog) has fallen into it.

The people moaning about AI though rarely even contribute to anything. Slop is basically the same as "woke" and when I've asked people who go Lemmy post to Lemmy post to show the slop, the best they can do is just point to the agents.md file. It's never a real technical reason.

I can't find any evidence online the guy who wrote this article has contributed code to ANY project. And he seems to write human slop articles if you look at this history (EDIT: The guy who wrote the article is the crossposter. And, he's just blatantly banning anyone who disagrees without debate, and then after banning them, people attack them)

Even worse, the article is bullshit anyway, because all code on the kernel is reviewed by a human, and it goes through multiple levels. It doesn't filter straight through a bot to master

Also, things aren't getting worse. If you check the kernel 7.4 performance improvements, many are attributed to AI, including a recent optimisation (which was reviewed by human and cleaned up) to speed up kernel compiling down to approximately 10s apparently.

There's no such thing as 'just a tool', especially if that tool is accelerating climate change when we're already on the knife's edge of irreversible domino effects.

Redox or Haiku, if the Linux kernel is unable to be successfully forked.

Actually, I just discovered, the person who wrote this bullshit article is the first to submit it in the crosspost.

And he's banning people from the community who ask questions about it.. Or point out it's bad info lol, so, it seems obvious its more about attention than proper journalism

!dgerard@awful.systems

Why are you banning people who dispute your claims. Everyone should be downvoting the cross posted article with a passion. He's running a dictatorship (basically seems like another "madthumbs")

For anyone who wants to see how comprehensive the oversight is on Kernel development: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-patches.html

But yeah, patches don't go straight to Linus or straight to master, and, it certainly doesn't get approved automatically by an LLM or anything like that. If you're lucky after the initial reviews, they almost certainly go to other testing trees first (and generally multiple). Then you also have staging branches, etc.

Sounds like y'all are afraid, just like the HVAC guys and the mini splits.

Also sounds like that writer needs to learn to use a fork.

This dude has been pushing this schtick for a long time, seems to just be trying to pander to the anti AI crowd for clicks, never has anything meaningful to say.

For anyone curious how comprehensive the process is, the real info is in https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-patches.html

That is not what slop means. It's not ai slop if the developers understand the code and know exactly what they doing, audit everything.

You're less creative than AI

No it's been an argument since forever, not always a good one but that's not really the point. And the use of AI does not make things worse anyway you absolute nitwit, but your performative hate and wilful ignorance do - and they lead directly to shit like trump! YOU are the problem

You don't think climate change is a massive threat to our habitable biosphere?

Yep. That's clearly what I'm saying./s

Now I can see why you thought that article was a rebuttal though.

Your response to my comment mentioning that AI is contributioning to climate change was to suggest it was equivalent to HVAC workers being afraid of heatpumps, which is ridiculous.

If you think climate change is an impending global disaster, do you think building giant data centers that require extremely polluting on-site power generators is not a particularly bad idea, and should factor in heavily on how this technology is used or promoted?

It seems like most users and advocates of LLMs find the idea of limiting its use to just locally hosted models to avoid the majority of the negative externalities to be unthinkable.

Climate change is an issue, but this hardcore stance with no nuance isn't helping. The extreme strawman slippery slopes don't help, either.

You've got a capitalism problem, not an AI one

Data centers don't require any of those things. It absolutely can and should be regulated (or even existing laws enforced.) Irresponsible implementation is an issue, but if the only people with any familiarity with the technology don't care to do any of that? Do you think there is a world where this genie goes back into a bottle?

AI is indisputably helpful in many situations. Most people who I know that use AI generally use local models and that can cover 95% of what people want or need to do with it. (You might have a bit of a blindspot there). But there is a place for the big models as well.

Ice Carvers Decry Evils of Electrified Refrigeration.

The capitalism problem is also responsible for an inability to regulate AI, as the very people responsible for the regulations are lobbied to fuck by the AI corps to avoid that regulation.

That means the only power to fight back against them rests in the hands of individuals, who can refuse to use the corporate owned tools.

Most people I know are using corporate AI, and appeals to try local LLMs fall on deaf ears in my experience, with claims that they aren't powerful enough or that the hardware to run them is too cost prohibitive. If most of the people you know are running local models, I think that is an exception to the norm.

Would you support FLOSS projects officially restricting any AI contributions to those only made with locally hosted models? As I said, most times I've mentioned that idea in other threads, the pro-AI side was vehemently against it.

LLMs and other machine "learning" are tools.

Most of what people talk about when they talk about AI... are talking about products. ChatGPT is a product being sold. Claude is a product being sold. "AI" being shoved into other products also makes it a product being sold. etc.

They are not even mutually exclusive words...

Absolutely not. Such a community resource is exactly where we need to be employing it. And for building the tools we can use to cut those corps out, that's not a reasonable solution at all.

Human code review, and not such a rush to throw out new "features" would alleviate those issues.

I don't have any data to support it, but I suspect a lot of that use relates to their work and not personal projects. Though I'll admit the Facebook pics and meme generation junk is almost certainly mostly done on corporate systems. But this could be done with reasonable systems as well.

That capitalism problem is so much bigger than AI, but its the problem, not AI.

We would not be anywhere at all as a species if we rejected any advantage, but now with civilization we can do it responsibly. Even if the early days are the Wild West. I can support you or anyone who wants to avoid it, but I can't support a total rejection.

You're right, they're not mutually exclusive words, but I'm going to thoroughly disagree that people are talking about those specific companies when talking about AI as a technology, which we certainly are here.

You might not like the product that is Claude or whoever, but I don't like Irwin hammers, doesn't mean it's not an effective tool. And it doesn't stop the world from utilizing it. And it doesn't automatically make the job any less correct.

No one is out here trying to have the AI be their OS, they're using it to build things, so the house thing isnt any better. Keeping those teens off the jobsite is only going to stop that house, not the industry. You don't want to live in it, that's fine, but that doesn't mean it's not going to be exactly what someone else needs. And those kids did get some experience, even if its just the walls falling down around their ears. Next one will be better.

Would it be ideal if everything was inherently safer and more thoroughly understood by the masses? Yes. Is it a reality that is achievable?

lol defending teenagers willy nilly building a house and ignoring building codes...

OK

Your attitude is beyond pathetic. Your attitude would still have us working 10x6 days with no insurance anywhere to be seen. Your attitude reinforces all the shit you think "AI" can fix.