I've translated assembler by hand and punched the hex codes into an EPROM programmer's keyboard. This would appear to make me qualified to say that he's not always right and, in most cases, fuck AI.

How do you parse the last part, if not calling people stupid for not using AI?

the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.

Does he... think LLMs are deterministic?

What is stupid is referring to AI as if it was just one tool when actually it's a bunch of tools, some of which are easier to use sensibly amd some it's near impossible to. Fancy auto complete like it's being compared to sure, fully automated do what the fuck you want agents, yeah sooner or later that is going to go wrong and no one is going to know where or why.

They might be fun and interesting, that doesn't make it a great idea to go all in in my opinion, certainly not for anything you would consider important.

He really thinks the tools you use do not shape and limit your results and yourself. I'd take a book carefully crafted in LaTeX anytime over slop pasted from Copilot into Word. What he's not even seeing is that AI is, above all, a source of input. No other tool, not the best LaTeX editor, takes care of my writing. AI is totally different. It is the author of Linus' code, it is his ghostwriter. He did not write it. He should not claim authorship. If he's not the author, he can't legally release it as Free software under a GNU license.

These research papers talking about AI leading to cognitive decline seem so asinine when certain people's productivity has just skyrocketed under AI.

Sure the hand coding capabilities decline, but that's replaced by thinking around the actually product or architecture.

A huge sect of new Linux users and Selfhosters are talking about how much AI has enabled them yet we're still bringing up papers on cognitive decline that were written on models from 3-4 years ago when Claude Code didn't even exist.

I would like to reiterate that posting on main as an admin is obnoxious since we can’t block you.

If you can’t block me, that’s an issue with your Lemmy client, because the default web client isn’t stopping you.

My understanding is that AI/LLMs can generate code that works, but often that code is more bloated/convoluted than code written by a decent coder, making it less efficient and more difficult to maintain. I can see that being acceptable for many in situations where hardware/performance/maintainability aren’t a concern like a one-off app or proof of concept. But for something as low level as a kernel I would think that performance and maintainability are the most important things since slowdown in that part of the system ripples up to affect everything a user does anywhere in the operating system.

I understand that a skilled coder can take AI output and clean it up into something at least approaching the quality of their own unassisted code, and I’ve been led to believe that Linus is able to do that for himself. But I fear that other/future maintainers of Linux won’t match that caliber, and it will start to feel that AI bloat. I think I’ve also read of Linus complaining about a torrent of low-quality, AI-based submissions and so I also fear that this will lead to him restricting who can participate in the work, overcompensate, and end up in a situation where Linux becomes less open and more closed.

Do you... think it matters? Tool generates code, you look at it, check it and correct it. You send it to a maintainer by giving your name and email, you are now expected to help maintain this code if it gets merged, it has your name on it.

Explain to me why writing the code by hand or with a "deterministic" alternative why would change the quality of what you do or are expected to do in future.

It’s a pretty reductive take, that treats tools as politically and behaviorally inert. The work on understanding how cultural artifacts use us just as much as (or maybe more than) we use them goes back several centuries.

But Linus is just an engineer, after all. There’s no reason to treat him as some high-minded philosopher (and he’d probably be the first to tell you that). And for as long as the history of thought into the politics of artifacts may be, the history of engineers focusing only on solving the problem in front of them and not thinking about “where the rockets come down” is about as long.

Sure buddy, ever heard of chromebooks? Macbooks? Frameworks? Any serious dev that has a choice runs linux on theirs afaik

There is no such thing as just a tool.

I could care less of what you think is asinine.

We have our share of radicals

👍🏻
The vast majority of people don't.

Button is right there man

blocked.

Nuance is a hard concept to get in most Lemmy comment threads. It's obvious it's just a tool that uses an insane amount of resources that can do some good in certain applications. The problem stems from it being abused for evil and stupid things.

Can AI be used to help flag cancerous growths in x rays and help save lives? Absolutely! Can it also be used to track every human being on the planet for surveillance purposes while its proponents build massive biome-destroying data centers to act as the infrastructure? It sure can!

All that said, I still don't feel confident about rolling in AI code to open source projects when bots aren't accountable to their contributions. They should require a huge amount of oversight which I doubt is happening at the moment.

literally me, i started using ai to help me self host shit. i now know how to use docker and podman essentially even without AI. i've been wanting to do that for years but never had anyone to help me and it felt too overwhelming to me. similarly i now have some dotfiles set and in general i have a better system. specially for a lot of shit i know how to do but it's fucking boring to do.

Most? Where's the data? This hard-line anti-LLM guy has a degree in computer science and has developed neural network systems for a previous company. Many on here that I've talked to about it fall under similar category.

So here's how I see it: There is a big difference between "AI generated" code and "AI assisted" code. Or just anything.

To put it in terms most people can more understand let's say you were writing a book. If you have an LLM generate the book its gonna suck and be slop. But if you write the rough draft, then paste it into an LLM and say, "Look through this and find typos and other mistakes and point them out to me". Then you go and check the things it finds and fix them yourself, that is fine. It's just a really good spellcheck at that point. Even if you say "suggest a fix" it's fine. For coding you could even tell it like "Take this line of code and suggest 5 different ways to do the same thing that might work better" then test them all out and see which one you like best.

I have personally used an LLM to help clean up my dotfiles for example. I don't want to read through all that shit and find the old junk I need to remove or change. So I just throw them at an LLM and have it point things out to me. Or say you know you have a file but don't know the exact filename. Go into the folder its in and dump the output of ls into an LLM. Tell it what file you need vaguely. Have it read them and give you the correct filename. Then check it yourself.

The problem comes from people who just generate stuff and don't do the work of double checking it themselves.

AI is much more than the quality of the code. It's also about stealing the knowledge, overusing Earth's resources like water and power, pollution, killing consumer computers through RAM and memory shortage in general - the very same computers that run Linux -, making average people more ignorant, risking another gigantic bubble burst and so on.
And as a cherry on the top, comparing AI to compilers. Riiiight.

Agreed.

On AI contributed code I’m always confused, if I put MY name on it and push it I am stating it meets my standards. If I allow a Claude contributed commit into my code, I am stating Claude passed my standards.

If someone is contributing and it’s not up to standards, why is it getting merged? If it’s a maintainer and they’re merging crap with review or standards then you couldn’t have actually trusted them pre-LLMs.

Ever since the first iteration of GitHub Copilot it was always your responsibility to make sure contributions to your project were correct. The beauty of open source is that when a project jumps off a cliff you can fork it or make your own.

Partially what is good about Linus is historically Linux has said no to crap, and the Linux team expend considerable effort to remove crap they realized was crap too late.

One thing people forget is that many human coders absolutely suck at what they do and or don't care.

80% of the code I've seen at clients is shit, some of it is hilariously bad, like absolute dog shit.

I've had a meeting where I had to explain the codebase to a new joiner, we were crying laughing at how bad the code was.

This particular fortune 500 company never cared to fix it, they just wanted more features.

So yes AI can be shit, but god I trust it more than some of the shit I've seen humans write.

Shit devs will make shit code with or without AI.
Good devs will make good code, just faster with AI

Many? Where's the data?

Man I've seen others try to twist those words the same way even though it's on the same level as one of those elementary reasoning problems you'd find on a basic IQ test (Jack caught an std after interacting with koalas - a) all koalas transmit stds, b) some koalas transmit stds, c) pandas are free from stds, d) Jack should spend more than $5 on his hookers).

So unless you actually are stupid and this is why you're choosing to (defensively) misinterpret his words by picking the equivalent of c) here, it's clearly wilful misrepresentation of a very reasonable statement - "Of the people I admire, most don't shy away from cutting edge sutff"

writing the code is the easy part, having a good mental model of what's going on under the hood and planning ahead is the real challenge. if a chatbot puked out the code it's easy to assume that it's right because it worked under your conditions but you might miss stuff that you'd otherwise acknowledge if you wrote the code.

using the chatbots directly discourages thinking and you're deskilling yourself in the long run, depriving yourself of hands-on experience that you'd usually pick up through your coding career.

having a chatbot generate code for you also usually goes hand-in-hand with writing more code faster, which tends to be bad if you like stable software and want to prevent maintainer fatigue.

and that's before we get into the ethical and legal problems.

AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline

source?

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#other-operating-systems

FreeDOS isn't immune from AI either.

Very interesting. Great knowledge, thank you. I guess I’ll have to revert to calling it being like the Amish.

Linus is talking about the worker using the technology. He likens it to other tools used in his trade. I don’t see him arguing about who should see the profits from the technology.

I think being dogmatic about strictly not using AI is not empowering the workers who would benefit from utilizing the tool in the correct context.

Proving yet again AI bros have lost the ability to think.
"many I've talked to" <- that literally is the data. I'm the data. It doesn't matter what the number is.

As opposed to your comment

none of the most hardline anti-AI folks on here are

Literally me existing already disproves your comment.

I have strong suspicions you don't actually exist.

He compared an LLM to a compiler suggesting that the concerns about using them are the same as suggesting that everyone should write in assembly.

The comparison is invalid, since one mode is deterministic, while the other is not.

LLM-driven development leads to programming via the abstraction of the model, disconnecting you from the source to the point where you don't understand what it's done or why. He's suggesting that this isn't a problem because an LLM is just like a compiler, which suggests that he's arguing in bad faith or doesn't understand the "tools" he's using.

Educated computer nerd here. AI has fundamentally changed how you do CS in industry, it's completely unavoidable at this point and not using it in some capacity is doing yourself a massive disservice. It's able to catch edge cases we'd never have caught otherwise. The important part is indeed understanding what it's doing and keeping contributions organized/concise.

That doesn't make it any less scary from an ethics and model oversight perspective, but from the perspective of the project it is fundamentally just another tool. Linus appears to feel this way too. Frankly I'd be more concerned if there weren't people using AI on Linux, especially to validate kernel level security.

here is the email this screenshot is an excerpt of; the specific "X" (the thing which the message Linus is replying to here suggested perhaps AI should not be used for) was the writing of commit messages.

As someone who did study computer science and has worked in embedded processor space

Using an argument from authority to denounce someone in authority and their arguments? Cool. Might've worked if I hadn't seen you mention recently that we shouldn't use AI 'because Trump and his cronies do'.

Have you actually looked into the real environmental impact of AI is compared to, say, eating meat, driving a car, or taking a yearly plane flight? It's a rounding error. Have you looked into the numbers? Compared the environmental impact of your AI use to the environmental impact of taking a yearly vacation on a plane?

The RAM shortage is real, but very temporary. Check the news today! Chip stocks like Sk Hynix are way down because people are worried about over-production. The fact that a new technology caused a temporary shortage in a resource just isn't even a coherent argument against the technology. There's discussion to be had here about whether we should as a civilization reserve some resources for other industries. That's a discussion we could have. But the idea that AI caused a temporary shortage in RAM, so that makes it bad is... like, really ridiculous? You must see that that doesn't even make sense as an argument?

These are not arguments that hold up to scrutiny. You should consider whether you accepted these arguments because you looked into the details and they actually make sense, or if you accepted them because they're telling you what you want to believe.

The other practical side of this is enforceability.

Lets say Linux banned all use of VSCode in contributions, this second. And any Microsoft tools. No exceptions. And it makes sense, because there is an evil blatantly anti-linux entity behind it... What are people gonna do?

Keep using it anyway, and just not disclose it.

This is why linux doesn't tell people what tools they can and can't use. Practically, they can't police what tools people use, just what they contribute. Just like (to a reasonable degree) they don't try to police people who contributes to the kernel, but instead judge them by their contributions. Other contributors don't have to like those tools or contributors, but that is how a project like this must operate.

I want to expand on your first thought and just say that in my experience the internet as a whole is not a great place for nuanced takes, and I've noticed that becoming mirrored in reality over the last decade. Perhaps its been happening for longer.

There's so much going on, and so many actors trying to influence the masses. I don't blame anyone for having different conclusions to my own, there's an almost untrackable amount of sources to draw information (and disinformation) from. I just hope we can get to a point together where we can (again?) discuss nuance without ceding to emotion.

the thing is - no other tool (currently ^yall_cant_read^) in our industry, and others, out there involves as much active destruction in both the working class and environment in its use.

that’s it. that’s the bit.

for those not understanding: the word “in” above implies in current use not that i am comparing AI’s effects with the invention of knitting machines or electricity.

Could have said the same about the invention of electricity

But Ed Zitron makes me feel fuzzy and warm when he name calls everyone and therefore he must be right

Turns out my organic LLM occasionally vomits out sensible things, too.

Luddite is correct. It just isn't the insult you thought it was. I'll add to the above commenter by saying that the Luddites were textile workers, which was the most highly skilled labor force in the world up to that point. They had I think a 6 year apprenticeship to learn to work with their very complex machines. The Luddites were the software engineers of their time.

They didn't want to do away with the machines, they wanted the workers to be in charge of what machines were used, when, where, and how. They were specifically concerned with the markedly lower quality of the fabric being produced with the new machines. In the burgeoning industrial capitalist economy, this could be considered an early example of enshitification. The Luddites were a labor movement concerned with the bosses ruining their craft with cost cutting measures, and they got branded as strict anti-technology primitivists so hard that it's still the common cultural understanding today.

There are of course no modern parallels for this and anyone skeptical of AI's usage today is definitely a primitivist that wants the AI genie put back in the bottle. /s

To quote Cory Doctorow "What's important isn't what a machine does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to."

Can't take anyone seriously that uses the term luddite

Asahi is cool but not ready for primetime dev work. Performance is ok, hardware support is spotty, battery life is appreciably worse. Any dev with a macbook is running MacOS 9.9/10 times

No it's just the newest tool that does that.

Are your clothes machine knitted? Do you know you're destroying the jobs of people who hand knitted clothes? And let's not forget the art form of hand knitting that is now being insulted by people who buy machine knitted clothes without a care. And let's not forget about the environmental impact of knitting machines that require electricity while hand knitting doesn't!

The same could be said about so many things.

There isn't really a fundumental difference thar I can see between AI and other tools, at least that I can see.

Cory Doctorow's "Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI" has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn't have a boss and has untold resources for whatever "AI" "tools" he finds useful.

He isn't ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn't do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn't have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new "tool". He simply uses what's useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.

95% of people don't have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the "tool" that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.

I guess I have that luxury, but I sacrificed hard to get where I’m at.

And, truthfully, way more people could do it if they didn’t feel entitled to the easy way (college > world destroying corp).