- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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And then yesterday he said something along the lines of “we need to make it harder to contribute to the Linux kernel.” Which I believe he means to say “oh god there’s so much being submitted all of a sudden and it’s all slop.”
"Well, well, well if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. "
- Linus Probably
The people who are keeping up with this controversy and end up with this conclusion are wildely illiterate, or, extremely biased and making up fictions.
stop trying to force a reality that fits your narrative
i came to this forum thinking i’d find interesting stuff and it’s mostly just people getting angry at reality
Oh no, you are one of those “if you don’t adapt you will be left behind” people, aren’t you?
AI is the new reality aparently.
or imagine a reality where AI just exists alongside other things. Stop catastrophizing
Ignoring the hype is not catastrophizing.
alright, i’m disengaging from this echo box… everyone should go outside and sit in nature for a while
Feel free to do so next to a data center. Feel (hear, breathe) some externalized costs for a while.
i’d be curious if you eat chicken from the supermarket? Have you ever lived next to a chicken factory, breathed and listened to that one? Do you drink Coca Cola? Sorry to break it to you, but we’re all complicit in things that are destroying nature and humanity and just because you’ve desensitized yourself to the other ones don’t mean they’re not happening. You can rage all you want at each one, but it’s not going to be constructive. At some point we just have to come to terms with reality that we’re also responsible for this reality and I don’t agree with AI’s effects on nature either, but I think if we’re smart we can leverage its capabilities in the window of opportunity available with the people who are most capable (good developers) to create pathways leading toward better things. Or just go yell and rage some more, as you wish.
low dimensional thinking
Yea I’m sure when Google came out “Real Programmers” were angry at all these people just looking up solutions to their coding issues, and using Stack Overflow instead of studying the API or books.
Only to be replaced by people that embraced the new technology.
Only to be replaced by people that embraced the new technology.
I think you have to make a distinction here:
It makes a huge difference whether you know what you’re doing and can work more efficiently thanks to the new technology… or whether you have no idea and think the new technology is a magic wand that can solve everything (which you only think because you have no clue about the subject and therefore believe that whatever the new technology produces is good or desirable).
To stick with your example: Someone who couldn’t code before didn’t suddenly learn how to do it on their own just because of StackOverflow; it just made things easier for people who already had some knowledge but were simply lacking the specific know-how.
In this case, I’d cautiously assume that Torvald can judge what makes sense (within his area of expertise) and what doesn’t.
I think that is still true today with AI just to a lesser degree.
After google many people could copy templates, change a few things and boom they “Built a Website”
It’s pretty obvious when someone who has no clue, just used AI to slop out code or something. And it’s often riddled with bugs and issues.
Where as someone with say 10+ Years experience in coding, can use AI to do their job a lot faster and better, and denying that is delusional and you will fall behind - !RemindMe 5 years
Eg. I can just throw my error logs and repo at a local hosted AI, and it will find the bug significantly faster than I would have.
Presies.
Having an AI help you code is like getting your six-year-old to help you put a shelf on the wall. Undirected, they’re just going to make a huge mess for you to clean up later. Given specific tasks within their abilities, they can actually make it both go faster and be an altogether more pleasant experience.
With direction and an operator who knows its limits, AI can be used to semi-automate many boring tasks. One of the things I’ve got set up in some of my open source projects is an LLM that takes bug reports and turns them into regression tests. I don’t always end up committing the AI-generated test (sometimes it’s very slow and I can better pinpoint the behaviour and target a test at that), but it helps because I don’t have to do that scaffolding myself, and I can just immediately jump into a debugger.
Fall behind what
Every single one of you is behind the best coders in the world. Guess you should just give up and take on crochet or pickleball
You’re behind, why botherThere are thousands of professional football teams that are behind the UEFA top 10, why do they even bother?
Yes, exactly. That’s what i said.
I’m sure I’m also behind the best cyclists in the world, and having a basket on my bike might make it slower, but it’s way more enjoyable and functional for me that way.
And it better serves my purpose, sure I’m not going to win any races, but I never wanted that in the first place.
Except that a basket isn’t analogous of AI, a smoky two-stroke engine that pollutes the air with unburned fuel and oil mix is. And your reliance on the engine will atrophy your legs lol
You’re on the slow-roll group ride saying you need an engine to keep up and we’re looking at you with disgust because you’re so loud and we can’t breathe.
My analogy is fine, you waisted it, but Lol Funny enough, I love 2 strokes.
I’d rather rip it on my KTM down a single track any day of the week rather than suffering slowly on a road bike.
Both are a workout, only one is really a full body workout, way more fun and comes with adrenaline.
until he fell into the slop vat and came out sloppified
im old enough to know this is exactly what happened
Why is it bad if people get angry at things that are happening in the world? Would you rather we get angry at fiction?
it’s fine, i’m just commenting that it’s getting tiring and I don’t see people doing something constructive with that anger on a forum where my perception is there are a lot of intelligent people who have power from technical understanding that carries a lot of power. I have a need to see progress and structure through collective wisdom as I think that is lacking.
Hey, I’d only be killing people objectively bad for humanity. Trump and his allies, Putin, my ex-wife, Saudi Arabia’s crown Prince, Netanyahu, that guy who cut me off in traffic last month, Rupert Murdoch, the Ellison family…
Ah, yes, “when used responsibly.” Like how we use drugs, alcohol, guns, cars, money, power, and everything else responsibly? Humans can’t be trusted with things that do more harm than good when used irresponsibly.
AI is the car of modern times. It’s convenient, ruinous for the environment, and a danger to anyone in proximity of one. Hell, we even wasted tons of land on highways kinda like what we’re doing with datacenters. But boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
Not so long ago, face to face interaction was the only way business was transacted, people were employed and paid.
In today’s world, if we could get past the baseless RTO mandates and let the 60% or whatever it is of modern workers work from home or wherever is convenient for them to work, get the commuters off the roads, restructure the food distribution systems to eliminate that need for cars, we really could make a significant improvement in the environmental impact of cars and trucks.
In the world of AI, I suspect a huge chunk of current AI usage, energy burned in data centers, etc. is “wasteful” - investigational, experimental, learning usage. If we can get past that kind of usage and eventually use it for what it’s good for and leave it alone for counterproductive wastes of time, it should also be a clear net-benefit for “getting stuff done” not only faster, but more correctly and valuably. Which software is more valuable: one coded by humans over the course of a year, with a half dozen undiscovered security vulnerabilities, or one coded by those same humans over the course of a month with those vulnerabilities exposed and fixed?
If you’re concerned about the environment, those humans commuting to work for an extra 11 months add up to far more environmental impact than the AI they used to accelerate their work. Good luck getting their employer to give them 10 months off with pay for delivering the same valuable product faster and better.
“Knives cause lots of stabbings, so let’s ban knives”
Nice try to equating a knife to fucking drugs. AI is even worse than drugs, is like the digital version of nuclear weaponry: it shouldn’t even exist.
I swear, some people still think Prohibition was a great idea.
I mean, it is how ice cream became so popular… https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ice-cream-prohibition-era-craze
However, the end of Prohibition was a much better idea than the start of it.
It was.
If the goal was to reduce the amount the average American drank alcohol year over year (and that was the goal) it was an overwhelming success; not only during prohibition but thereafter as well.
Banning stuff and then enforcing the ban works really well and we have tons of evidence of it working; not just in the US but literally world-wide.
You seem to have missed the 1001 negative side effects of Prohibition, that eclipsed the tiny ideological victory of reducing drinking.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/unintended-consequences
Additionally, there is no consensus on whether Prohibition was even successful at that, owing to a lack of hard data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
This is quite aside from the fact that today we’ve figured out that criminalising drugs and users is the wrong approach and does a lot more harm than good. But we STILL have people like you.
Then just let AI use AI. I’ll collect my Nobel prize now thx.
You might want to rethink that position: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai
Sorry, I don’t really feel like reading anything from Anthropic atm (I might later, it sounds interesting), but my actual, non-sarcastic position on the matter is fuck LLMs; they should not be doing any sort of policymaking.
Long story short: AI using AI can find ways to run itself on TV set top boxes and similar common IoT devices, as part of a bot-net. It can also find ways to self-propogate such bot-nets across many surprisingly low powered and widely distributed devices in our world.
There’s an example used in regulatory circles: electricity would never be permitted in homes under today’s regulatory standards - we only accept it and its hazards because it is so incredibly common and useful in daily life and we’ve been accepting it since before we cared so deeply about safety.
So, have today’s goalposts moved so much that “AI” no longer passes modern society’s definitions of acceptable? I feel like such a technology would have been cheerfully embraced in the 1960s.
The fucking point that Linus misses is, using AI by itself is intrinsically the more irresponsible thing to do. Change my mind.
You are claiming it’s irresponsible, why do you say so?
AI is just a technology, how you use it makes it bad or not.
Nuclear is the cleanest safest energy we have, but you can also make bombs with it.
I’ve read this article before. Found it very reductionist. For example, it says that weapons might be good for Ukraine, but they’re bad in general. You can’t just “in general” something like weapons or AI. They have thousands of different contexts and use cases. Sure, a weapon can make somebody homocidal in one context, but it might make somebody a militia in another context. AI can be a slop generator for a vibe coder, and a bug detection tool for Linus Torvalds.
I’m not a fan of how modern politics and social justice is so reductionist nowadays. “One aspect of X is bad, so we must reject X altogether”. Can we add even a little nuance to our discussions? This mindset is brainrot.
intrinsically the more irresponsible
That doesn’t claim it’s intrinsically irresponsible. You can use AI responsibly
A tool is thus any kind of thing that lets you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to.
Immediately goes on to using a fork as an example. Wtf are you doing eating with a fork that you couldn’t be doing with your bare fingers?
Argument is stupid, and falls apart at the first hint of critical thinking.
Wtf are you doing eating with a fork that you couldn’t be doing with your bare fingers?
Preach. There was a lot of fuss made when I was in school about “humans are the only animals who use tools” - of course by then all kinds of animals had been documented clearly using tools, but they were still teaching the kiddos (self included) that “humans are special.”
I have been making and using software tools for 45 years, a tool is something you use to make a job easier, faster, cleaner, safer, a tool might make the impossible possible, but that’s far from a requirement for “tool-ness.”
The “no such thing as a bad tool” argument falls apart if you start thinking about it for longer than a few seconds. If you have a hammer made out of styrofoam, that’s a bad hammer.
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attack it with ethics!
How do? Does this apply even if it’s a locally run LLM? Even if it’s done using green energy like Mistral? Even if all of the AI written code is carefully reviewed by professionals?
Is it a problem of making it too easy for people? If so, what is the correct amount of easiness for people? Shall we start taking clothing down to the river to scrub instead of using washing machines too?
I’ve been thinkin:
We went from STEM to STEAM. But I think we really need SHTEAM. (The H is for Humanities.)
Philosophy, psychology, history, basically anything that would get nerds to think about the social consequences of the stuff they like to tinker with.
Warning! very unpopular opinion
Title
I hate STEAM, preferred when it was just STEM.
very unpopular opinion
True! I think your opinion sucks lemming! 😎 /s
But seriously, while I do think STEAM sounds a little dumb compared to STEM (and I’m young enough where I saw the name changing happening in real time and despite being at the age where it’s easy to impress on kids, I never really cared for the name), I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to teach STEM kids and professionals more about the non-tech side of hard sciences and subjects.
SHTEAM sounds and looks stupid as shit, but we should absolutely take steps to properly educated up-and-coming STEM majors that they need to understand how their work and inventions affect humanity, along with actually having an appreciation for the work that they will do. Not teaching these things is how we create idiots that are proudly declaring “Mecha hitler” and “AI will kill us all, and that’s good!”
People complain about electives and gen ed classes in college like, “why do I, a science major, have to take an ethics class?” and then go on to become Sam Altman. As a STEM major, I fucking hate those people. I understand you want to get your money’s worth in college, but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory. I have learned so much about people and become more knowledgeable about humans and empathy through arts and ethics classes, and have gained an appreciation for them. It also affects how you do tech in general too. So often do I hear about coders, security analysts, data scientists, etc who make music, art, literature etc, and feel like it affects and improves how they work.
but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory.
Fuck it, one of each. Programmers had the opportunity to show they could handle not getting a humanities education with their diploma and they blew it.
So SHTEM?
That looks like it’s the name for an STD
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again : eventually you just fucking end up with “be a complete person; here’s the entire dewey decimal system.”
STEM is meant to deal with logic based thinking and the problems unique to that industry, like for instance, a huge gender gap. Shoving arts and humanities in doesn’t fix the issue. Cross disciple collaboration is great, expanding your horizons and putting ethics into practices is great, but that’s not what STEM is.
There are already plans for these things in practice (hippocratic oath, iron[1] ring[2] ), which need to become more widespread. We don’t have to have STEAM toys and SHMEAT courses.
There’s many good reasons why even Bachelor of Science degrees have such a load of core courses across the academic spectrum.
Yes. That stuff is necessary. I am agreeing with that, while maintaining that “STEM specific initiatives” need to be STEM specific. I’m talking about conferences and toys, not courses.
I don’t understand what’s he talking about. I was forced to use AI by my employer and instantly lost all the joy in programming.
I agree, but the question is, how to use responsibly. I like to use it as an assistant that can look things up. Googling has the tendency to bring up outdated information, a good AI model is able to cross-reference what it finds with documentation and release notes. I never let the AI write anything for me though.
This is exactly how I use it too. Google and other search engines have gone to complete shit in order to cater to LLMs. So that’s how I use the LLM. You are my search bitch, Gemini. No, you’re not allowed to actually create anything.
Anti-social hermit discovers that his job is more fun if he has someone to talk to.
You have to kind of feel sorry for him.
Honestly, if I can use an AI agent that is not coming from an evil corporation that’s destroying the environment, I would use it to help me solve problems like figuring out why I have a build error, why I’m getting certain error messages, why a piece of code isn’t working as I expected, find potential bugs, etc.
It can be a great tool to help you grow, like having a tutor explain where and why you made a mistake so you can learn from it.
NOT if you ask it to do the job for you and generate your code.
That’s the neat part, you can.
If I had to pick one, it’d be Olmo 3 from Ai2: Non-profit. Ai2 is a research institute, not a company that needs to sell you a subscription or harvest your prompts. Fully open, not just “open weights” Ai2 publishes the training data, the training code, every checkpoint and the logs. Anyone can check exactly what went in, and in principle rebuild it from scratch. You don’t have to take their word for anything.
Runs locally. The 7B version runs on an ordinary gaming laptop or a recent MacBook. Your code never leaves your machine, there’s no data centre involved when you use it, and the energy cost is your laptop being on. Apache 2.0 licence. No usage restrictions and no strings attached.
Good enough for the tutor use case. Explaining errors, walking through why code misbehaves, and pointing out likely bugs are all well within what it can do.
To be fair about it: the training data is largely scraped from the web, like nearly every model. The difference is that Olmo is honest and auditable about it.
If strict consent matters most to you, StarCoder2 is cleaner (only permissively licensed code, with an opt-out)
Devstral is very good
I used a local model today to write a long form regex for me today. it would have taken me 30 minutes. instead it took 3 seconds and worked out of the box.
I think this is a perfect example of what LLMs should be used for.
Ok. But did you understand the regex? That’s what people are missing out on. The learning aspect.
absolutely. I know regex, better than most devs I know personally.
I also don’t use it all the time. I happened to have it up and just said, “hey fucker, give me the pcre regex to find all instances of these keywords in a string like this”
reviewed it, threw what I had into my code, ran my tests and everything was golden.
a great way to find joy in programming
I already had that, thanks Linus. Did you not?
Linus Torvalds is correct.
Often enough to give his statements serious consideration.
Suddenly Lemmy is going to explain to me why AI is the best thing ever.
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It’s a thing, good for some things, not so great for others.
It’s a new thing, people are just starting to figure out what it’s really good for. It’s also improving rather dramatically over the past year, hard to say if that’s the start of an exponential curve, or if we’re hitting an s-curve rolloff already…
If it continues to grow its energy / environmental impact at the current growth rate, that’s a bad thing, but it’s not “in a bad place” yet… if you’re outraged about the last 2 years of AI environmental impact, you should have already been apopleptic over the past 15 years of Bitcoin’s environmental impacts.
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