JK Rowling expresses her opinion on transgender women and receives some pushback - Rowling responds to that by going all out in making her being a TERF her entire personality.
Linus Torvalds goes on Linus Tech Tip and when ask for his opinion on AI, states that it’s coming anyway so we better get used to it - receives some pushback and is now rapidly becoming the guy who makes using AI his entire personality.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with the Harry Potter lady or the YouTube tech guy.
Linus is clearly trans, duh. Which Linus? You chose!
Oh, the irony here. In truth, it is your kind that make AI hate their entire personality. AI really lives rent-free in your heads. To all us normal people, it’s simply just another tool.
I mean, the AI hate is unfortunately really justified, for so many reasons. And I say this as someone who appreciates how useful LLMs are at processing language, especially those of the programming variety.
There’s the whole billionaire techno fascism trying to use AI as a tool to further enslave us. Or those same people stealing people’s work illegally and profiting off of it. The entire consumer tech market being destroyed. The environment. The tax breaks and subsidizing small communities pay to prop up data centers. Those same communities paying more for utilities, while they still CAN afford them. Brain atrophy. The issues the education failing to keep up. Misinformation. Fraud. The list goes on, so so many terrible things.
But yeah, for people who already understand how programming works, it can definitely help save time and effort.
Does the cost outweigh the benefits?
Does the cost outweigh the benefits?
No.
It’s not simply a tool. AI has absolutely huge environmental and social costs. The data centers use up a lot of space, energy and water that could have been proper housing. Look up what it is like to live next to a data center.
AI also causes people to get laid off because stupid executives think it can replace people. Job security is in the toilet for any job affected by this digital disease.
AI or specifically LLMs have also completely ruined the internet. Most articles are thoughtlessly shat out by an LLM and contain errors and blatant misinformation. Sometimes they contradict themselves in less than three sentences. It has become increasingly difficult to find useful information.
AI companies endorse fascism and manipulate social media platforms for the twisted ideas of those companies’ leaders.
In short: Fuck AI. The gains do not outweigh the costs.
Do people also make it their personality to “worship the sphere Earth theory”?
Yes. They don’t get a lot of attention in the media, but they spend a LOT of time disproving flat earthers theories.
Its time to fork Linux
I’m sure Stallman would welcome your contributions to GNU Hurd kernel if you wanted to go that direction.
Yes, let’s support Stallman, no ethical qualms there at all.
Fuck Linus.
“This is a BIG merge window,” he wrote in his weekly state of the kernel update, as it contains almost 20,000 commits compared to the usual ~15,000 that developers submit for a new cut of the kernel.
Great to see so much momentum!
Another article about my fav traitor 😍
apparently many people’s stance on ai is “ai is bad unless my idol uses it”. there is not intellectual discipline, suddenly they are willing to ignore all the other problems with ai: jod lose, excessive energy use, training on stolen data, preying on vulnerable people, exacerbate wealth inequality and concentration of power. and let’s not forget the ones that apply specifically to Linus: diskilling and ai psychosis.
“b-but linus reviews his code!” 🤦
Are you sure you’re not mixing up different people with different opinions with opinion changes of some people?
This Lemmy guy is horribly inconsistent.
and let’s not forget the ones that apply specifically to Linus: diskilling and ai psychosis.
I’m open to correction here, but I do not think you have the insight to say whether or not these are things that are happening to Linus.
Nice strawman.
Here’s mine: the world would be a much, much better place if LLMs did not exist. Also, it would be stupid–today–to not use LLMs to find flaws in the Linux kernel. The only other option is to get your machines compromised.
I mean 5 years ago the world was shit with no llms so no ?
The world was bad, it will be worse thanks to LLM. Both things can (and IMO, are) be true at the same time.
5 years ago things were bad, therefore there’s no way LLMs can be bad. Is that the argument?
LLMs are bad but things would have been bad differently without them anyway.
Pretty much. It‘s a really shitty situation and it would be better if the world decided to not use them and sanction them. A bit like nuclear weapons that are also far more effective than alternatives but too destruktive to seriously consider. For now, many developers are doomed to use LLMs for security reasons. Because LLMs are not just a tool. They are an entire production line at the grasp of your hand. Just using complex architecture to obscure risks doesn‘t cut it anymore.
I’m not a huge fan of AI but comparing them to nukes is wild
I like to compare them to meth. Sends velocity through the roof…with just a few minor drawbacks… 😅
The environmental implications of the data centers fuelling the LLMs will undoubtedly end more lives than nuclear weapons ever have
You got a reference for that?
I don‘t think it‘s that wild. You could of course compare it to asbestos instead. Another „tool“ in our arsenal of things that are the best in their field but most countries have decided not to use them over other concerns.
Well, I think comparing asbestos to nukes would be wild too. In any case asbestos is a more level headed comparison imo
I mean you know about tactical nukes and uranium ammunition
Linus Torvalds has fucking lost it.
Going from chewing out someone for committing dumb AI code to becoming an AI techbro himself. How the mighty have fallen.
LLMs have proven time and time again to be a cognitohazard. It just sucks people in like a drug.
It’s healthy to change mind in light of new evidence. AI has improved since GPT 3 days - in particular in coding tasks.
The issue is not usefulness. It’s ethics.
I’ve agreed with Linus on a lot of things over the years. This is not one of them.
But I hear what you’re saying, and we’re not talking about me.
I don’t like him and I don’t like AI.
It’s like there’s nuance that deserves to be acknowledged or something. Weird.
Ai isn’t going away… It’s like a nuclear arms race. The government won’t let it go away… They need it and will do anything locally and globally to solidify ai (and digitizing life) as the modern foundation of governing.
If people don’t want ai, they should be completely boycotting their nations. Votes don’t reach this level of need. “Need” as in the government would even sacrifices its own people to reach the goal. For all we know it’s the whole reason America had trump as president… So they could distract and implement the social and psychological strategy of easing into the upcoming modern foundation.
I see the “unless my idol uses it / unless someone good uses it” as a deeply human thing. For me it’s the other side of the coin from not harming oneself in discussion, even if a valid point was brought up.
Few great people do that.
I am sure out of all projects Linux has the expertise and guardrails to ensure LLM generated code works as expected
Exactly! It’s a tool that creates slop with an untrained hand. With a trained professional hand who reviews the work it’s just a helper.
And yet the trained professional Linus recently PRed honestly garbage. Your argument is invalid.
Which pr do you mean?
The one from last month, when he made a pr (well, technically not a pr but you know what I mean) with race condition he missed in self review, and then when someone spotted that he fucked off on vacation and dumped it onto someone to fix.
Linus is no longer a good programmer (he even says so), but still disappointing.
Lol this is confirmation bias, bugs like this are merged ALL the time.
Huzzah! Saurman it’s finally using the seeing stone! He’s such a wise old wizard. He’ll be able to see the future and help us choose the right path. This could never go wrong or cause any ethics issue or anything!
Lawyer-turned-software-developer reporting in! (American, to be clear…)
My concern with AI generated code has to do with software licensing. Mainly…. What is the license of AI generated code??? What if it regurgitates entire sections of proprietary code? Unless I’ve totally missed some legal/tech news, these questions are FAR from settled.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills sometimes, but that seems like something the Linux kernel community should be at least mildly curious about….
Look, to be fair, maybe they are! I don’t follow the kernel mailing list; I don’t know what they talk about. I’m just a humble backend developer/infrastructure guy.
But I know it worries me… personally, I mostly use LLMs in my own work via asking questions about code I’ve already written. Then I look at suggestions it’s made, or potential issues it points out, and decide what to do accordingly. But that’s just me!
I’m more miffed about GPL or copyleft code going to proprietary software and then being profited from without any attribution. It’s a poison pill.
Yes! This concern absolutely cuts both ways.
Yeah, that is a pretty shitty consequence, but it’s nothing new or different from the strandard clean room techniques the industry has been using for decades.
I see it quite different from clean room.
A model that was trained on specific code that gets put out exactly the same doesn’t seem clean room to me.
Even if you argue it was turned into weights and probability and may not have originated from that specific code, by having included it in the training set you poisoned the model with no longer being able to claim plausible deniability - being produced rather than copied.
The transformation is still a machine and algorithm, even if it goes through a ton of obfuscation, distribution, and probability.
I mean it’s clean room but without even having to pay highly skilled engineers to do all the labour. It’s pretty catastrophic to the field.
Yeah, fair enough.
It really seems like way too many people are just kinda going “eh, everyone else is doing it. It’d be impossible for the courts to force us to reverse course on this now.” Like, there’s no way the monkey is going to get the cork back in, might as well just get used to being covered in shit.
Lawyer-turned-software-developer.
Are you the inverse of lawtechie from reddit?
Well… I don’t know who that is, so… maybe?
They posted in the /r/talesfromtechsupport, IIRC. IT-turned-lawyer, mostly posting about IT security consulting.
AFAIK in general usage one popular argument is that genral LLM outputs only correspond a small percentage of infringing data due to dilution from their massive datasets (wish i could find the article this was from). A model can produce infringing content but in general its output likely doesnt infringe (or so the argument goes) so I think the current standard is verifying output is not infringing over copyright controls over all LLM outputs (aka the whole “you’re responsible for your code” thing)
This doesnt change the fact a non-negligible portion of their dataset was obtained illegally however…
Oh no! Not our beloved corporate-owned proprietary intellectual property! Won’t somebody think of the sacred copyright system, bestowed upon us by God? /s
Sorry, but it sounds like you’re saying that AI is a threat to tech Capitalism, and that this is a bad thing somehow.
Friendly reminder of how dumb people can be, thank you kind stranger.
The problem with licensing here is very obviously that this makes the GPL weaker, potentially giving more power to corporate interests. Couldn’t you take half the time it took you to write your comment, and think about it yourself? Out of tokens?
If it regurgitates proprietary code the model should not have had access to for training data… well…
That street goes both ways, there’s more GPLed code in the training corpus than there is leaked proprietary code.
Unironically a AI’s biggest win. Absolutely fair criticism on art and weak imitations of human creativity, but code is just math with syntactic sugar. “Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time. What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation? What if printers just worked? What if you could put adblockers on any device? What if every online game could be self hosted and modded? AI is (for the moment) giving an approximation of that timeline and I’m here for it.
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time.
Well… we have open source for a while, and people are still reinventing the wheel every time. There’s always the new chat protocol that claims to be the best, but works almost the same as all others, there’s always reimplementations of some software in another language just because the developers don’t like the original language. There are forks of software due to ideological divergence. There are reimplementations of famous software just for fun. There’s a lot of other cases, all reinventing of the wheel, all the time.
It’s arguably not always a bad thing for people to reinvent the wheel, but anyway, I see it getting MUCH worse with ai. People are already going to chatbots asking to implement things before even searching for work already done on that, and we’re going to end with milions of businesses and individuals with reinvented wheels everywhere, instead of everyone using a shared codebase. If nothing happens in the near future, I see things getting less compatible with each other due to no standards in implementations
I’m incredibly against the big LLM SaaS providers and material waste besides. Anyway I don’t have a crystal ball and I’m highly sceptical that this technology will work out for average people, but it sure would be interesting if it somehow lead to less corporate control and cultural enclosure rather than how it seems to be going right now.
You believe people using systems created by big corps in giant datacenters, that depend almost exclusively on nvidia gpus to run will lead to less corporate control? I’m highly skeptical
That’s exactly what I said—that I’m highly sceptical.
It would basically have to backfire on all their plans and all the trillions of dollars they’re spending.
It would be very surprising. I would be so surprised.
I probably misread it, don’t mind me
Sorry we’re enemies now. We have to fight anytime we’re in the same thread. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.
“code is just math with syntactic sugar”
Wow!
Tell me you don’t write code wihout telling me you don’t write code.
I do write code. Code only exists as a high level abstraction that codifies logic and allows us to talk about the function of the silicone without getting bogged down in details. The utility of code depends entirely on the context of the people looking at it (eg. different code works better for a small shop of experienced devs vs a large scale enterprise vs a FOSS project).
I can show you a
forloop and talk in simple English about what it’s doing or write a formal proof showing that it meets the problem parameters. I could show you the compiled ASM and we would struggle to have the same conversation even with the exact same functionality. Same math, different syntactic sugar.The process of building software is where humans will always be needed (identify the human meat space problems, define features, manage risk and cost, set delivery expectations, etc). The specifics of how we create the code within that process isn’t as crucial.
I write code, and I see the point they’re making. It has the same feel as “chemistry is just applied physics” and such.
I mean I guess I agree insofar as math at some point becomes art.
A good proof can carry beauty in its elegance, simplicity and in its phsical expressions.
But coming from the original comment, this completely contradicts the whole argument.
Just playing devil’s advocate here; do you think an architect should not be able to own the blueprints they’ve produced?
To a slightly broader point, do you not agree with the notion that technical solutions can have creative implementations, and that that can be a form of artistry?
I don’t know much about architecture, but a building is generally bespoke. It’s made to a specific physical location and has to work in its surroundings and be built to local regulations. From that viewpoint I can’t really judge how much value the blueprint actually has and therefore if it matters who “owns” the IP. The architect has done real legwork to bring that specific building to life and anyone else would need to redo much of it to copy the result.
Any human effort can be a creative artistic expression. You could mass produce a jacket or a hand-stitch an equivalent jacket and both will be warm. You could code a subtle and elegant CMS for a website or use some pre-built solution, both will deliver the same content. The difference is, people will laugh you out of the room for trying to patent your home stitching technique but nod and clap when you put a license on your code.
You could say the same about patents for physical inventions. But there are legitimate reasons for patents to exist.
But what about the poor corporations making money off those games that already fired all the devs that made it after overworking them?
What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation?
That’s apple’s decision, one of many to force their users to only get their devices, similarly not being able to host your own game servers benefits the publishers/ devs. (Edit for clarity: by this I mean that this state of things isn’t caused by unavailability of open source solutions but rather by corporate greed.)
“Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
Not any different from protecting one’s art creations. You spend a bunch of time learning how to code and are doing it for a living so you don’t want others/ competition to take it and sell as their own. Not sure what’s hard to understand.
Most programmers earn a wage, not the full value of their labor.
That’s true of course. And it’s true for a lot of people in other areas as well. In vacuum I’m all for open source software, in fact I would like it a lot if everything was open. But reality is that as a developer in a smaller software company we’d be out of our jobs immediately as other, larger companies would take everything that’s worth taking and use their larger budgets to out advertise their copy.
Software licensing is dead, you should really catch up because what are even talking about.
For anybody confuse about why Torvalds is suddenly such a slopper it’s because AI companies pumped millions into the Linux Foundation which gives him a paycheck.
what makes what the article describes slop?
Way too many people just equate any form of LLM/agentic/AI with pure slop.
As a tech lead who has to review a lot of code: those who did shit without LLM do shit with it. Those who are good without, are good with it.
I’ve found that the quality of code produced by my team has dropped significantly since my org pushed everyone to use LLMs. “Let me throw an agent at it” usually means “here’s another headache of a PR for me to review.” Engineers with decades of experience are writing such utter fucking crap now, and it doesn’t matter how many docs I write for their fuckass agents to ingest, the quality doesn’t seem to be getting better. They can make their agent loop on it for functionality/bug and hallucination squashing, but that usually just means I get a bloated fucking mess to review. It’s miserable and it makes me want to go shovel actual hog shit.
Sincerely,
a very sad and tired senior dev who used to enjoy his job
I’m trying to adjust expectations. You aren’t getting my approval unless you can explain why each part is there. Your poor planning is not my emergency. K.I.S.S. still applies.
Admittedly, this is easier to say as a senior whose opinion is respected within the company.
If they push shit, I push back. It’s a tool they can use, not an excuse. Creating rules for the agent is fine, but that’s only a soft guardrail.
We don’t have a mandate to use LLMs, if things are worse with them then we won’t use them.
That’s the mindset we started with but things have shifted to what we’re seeing now and people are being forced to use it in many cases.
As a senior dev… AI actually improved the code we wrote in my last job. Mind you the codebase was in a shite position (tons of technical debt, plague-like avoidance of inline comments because “all of that knowledge is on Jira/Notion” except it wasn’t; lots of legacy code, undocumented weird behaviours, everyone was doing their own coding style without regards to the rest of the codebase and so on).
With controlled AI contributions, we’ve managed to:
- refactor large chunks of code where the overall high level logic didn’t need to change, but the underlying tooling did (e.g. lots of UI layers got rewritten from a very early attempt at a standardised MVVM approach to a well defined MVI one, we’ve also managed to eliminate the remaining RxJava/RxKotlin legacy flows to replace them with Coroutines)
- UI layers got refactored in no time because the AI agent was able to convert them appropriately (and even fixed a handful of UI bugs)
- a handful of core monoliths (yes I know… I hated working with them as well, but we never had the chance to properly refactor) got split up into more manageable, vertical-specific domain controllers without breaking
- the elimination of a legacy overarching component that was estimated at 6 months, got reduced to 6 weeks
- unit test coverage skyrocketed because even if the code was hand-written, an agent would provide coverage, based not just on implementation but on intention (and adoption of TDD/BDD finally started spreading).
Meanwhile code quality improved because we’ve had well established patterns and styles defined in the agent instructions, and even the anti-documentation “pragmatists” got shut up when they finally understood that the AI works better if there’s fucking comments to explain what’s going on
What you’ve done is allowed an unethical and incompetent machine create an unmaintainable technical debt which will destroy the future of the codebase or the company, because you were all lazy.
It sounds more like you didn’t even read his comment and are just rabidly spewing anti-AI talking points instead of participating in the discussion.
He let AI refactor his entire codebase because the team didn’t understand each other’s techniques/approach and nobody had any time or knowledge to do the work themselves. They literally did not understand how it worked so they asked the chatbot to redo it and now they still don’t understand it but it appears to them as if it was improved.
What did you read?
As they usually do.
Please shut the fuck up if you have no inkling about what you’re talking about.
Eat my ass slopper
Chill out dude
Being “
good with it” doesn’t negate the overwhelming harms it causes. Those harms are part of the slop: environmental slop, work environment slop, societal degradation slop.We’re harmmaxxing!
The invention of electricity also did a tremendous amount of harm. Should we have also just tried to put it back in its box?
Electricity allows us to perform otherwise impossible logistics, medical care, heating, countless beneficial technologies, and longer operation hours in industry.
Without AI… what? More jobs, cheaper utilities, lower polution? In the future it might be able to lie to you sightly more efficiently while funneling control of industry into the hands of a dozen wealthy elites.
None of that was true when it was first invented, it killed many people caused house fires etc.
We don’t know yet all the uses of AI, but we’re going to find out despite how many people on the fediverse crash out at the mention of AI
When it was first invented it literally brought light to the streets and phased out TORCHES.
Do you understand what a TORCH is?
Didn’t say “good with it”, I said "being good*.
5 years ago the complaint was people copy pasting from stack overflow without care. Those people now push without care.
Oh, sorry for misquoting you. It wanst intentional. I get you now.
Throwing around the word slop just devalues it.
Slop has a meaning and it does NOT equal harm.
“model” means “mode”, not LLM here:
He therefore hopes that the unusually large number of commits “is a sign that the AI fixes are becoming more part of the ‘normal development’ than a flood of fixes that go into the whole stabilization phase."
“I think that’s a much healthier model,” he added, before hedging with the observation that “people are expecting 7.4 to be the next LTS [long-term support] release, which is another independent reason why some releases tend larger than others.”
Until Claude can diagnose and treat Kent Overstreet for whatever neurospicy killed bcachefs, I will never trust it blindly. It just does things faster. Sometimes it breaks things faster, other times is finds things ready to be broken faster.
they should change the name to LinAIux
Unfortunately they maintain the main branch so we can only rename the forks. P.S. plz at me if we hear about an anti-AI Kernel Fork because I fully intend to install it myself.
Will do
Is he okay? He looks so frail
Its probably mostly because he’s in his 50s and does a desk job for a career.
56!
I don’t know why i thought he was from an older generation. He’s from gen x.Probably because you don’t expect a 22 year old to build a kernel and then maintain it for 34 years.
Not with that attitude, that’s for sure!
“Don’t you think he looks tired?”
Doctor Who, hm?
as long as it doesn’t start pretending to be my friend 🐙
