I’m kind of gobsmacked by this. I’ve heard younger developers compare LLM with compiler and chalked it up to ignorance, but I don’t get what this is.
Can I write code in assembly? Yes. Of course. It’s true that I never do it, but if there was a rule that you needed to write some assembly now and then to certify as a kernel developer I don’t see how it would be any kind of impediment.
Comparing more directly: if you hand me a compiled binary and the source code and ask “why is the bit at address 0xXXXXXXXXX a 0?” I can, with 100% certainty, answer that. Probably in less than a day of effort. If I ask "why did the LLM output “for” as the XXXXth word of its utterance, can Linus say why?
And “can you write a good commit message without an editor?” Uhhh? At least when I was in school, this was something people did for fun/messing around. I still do
cat > somefilewhen I need to put some quick text together. In fact, Claude will sometimes write a Git commit by cat-ing into a file–which it’s doing because there’s so many online examples of this. Fucking weird things for Linus to pick. Makes me think his brain’s rotted.There was another article posted on Lemmy somewhere where recently other kernel developers had to clean up after Torvalds as of recent.
So yeah. I’d say his brain has rotted.
I like Linus, but comparing an LLM to a compiler is fucking stupid.
Why?
You can predict with certainty what a compilers output would be. Linus is conflating the fact that most people don’t understand how a compiler converts higher level programming language into machine code with the reality that no one can actually predict and audit what an LLM puts out.
He is saying that you have to understand your contribution, so whatever the LLM spits out, you need to thoroughly review and double-check that it makes sense. So, in particular, he’s not trying to rate these tools, he’s merely saying make sure the contribution is objectively good, then he doesn’t care how you got there.
Predicting what a compiler outputs is quiet hard, especially if you enable optimization flags or get near any undefined behavior. But I think you’re right to say that a compiler is more predictable than any LLM. I don’t get the point why you should be unable to audit the output of an LLM? If its used as a tool like described the user should have the knowlage to audit any output
I was just pointing out Linus was conflating the two to make his point. I don’t agree with this, but everything else he said was fine.
100%, or we’d commit prompts instead of code lol
all the undefined behaviors would like to disagree with you there champ
Can you elaborate?
I think if I had taken an icecream scoop to my forebrain I would have experienced more intellectual development than reading the contributions of the sloppers.
You all need to read about enclosure and learn to make arguments without analogy.
I would love to read about enclosure, can you give me a phrase I can actually search for?
I think he is refering to the enclosure movement, a proto-capitalist strategy to privatize public land. Karl Marx talks about it a lot as a way for capitalism to take root in a society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
They are suggesting that ai is a way for private interests to control foss.
She and yes I am.
The enclosure of the Commons largely carried out under absolutist monarchs.
LLMs are a naked attempt to enclose the vast intellectual and cultural commons online, not just FOSS. Clammy Sammy nakedly talks about a future “where you buy intelligence from us on a meter”, sites where people taught each other have been mined for knowledge and then destroyed, cultures of sharing destroyed, private blogs closed under a tide of bot hammering.
Where must you go for all this now? They are literally buying and destroying books. It’s madness.
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 don’t see how this means he’s wrong though, if people are hating AI as a proxy for hating their abusive relationship with their employer, that doesn’t seem like a strong argument that everyone who isn’t in that situation must also hate AI.
It doesn’t mean he’s wrong! it means he’s out of touch and doing the propaganda work of capital for free much like many other self-employed/business owning/petit-borgeois people who think they’re on the side of capital.
It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this “tool” is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.
Blind hatred for AI as a technology is inherantly reactionary, but that doesn’t mean that the implementation of the technology today isn’t problematic in many ways.
Yeah I notice he doesn’t address the costs, economic and environmental, of LLM proliferation. Way to ignore a large part of the argument while calling anyone opposed to your position stupid.
I hope he gets to eat those words one day, but I doubt he would ever admit he was wrong.
@TwiddleTwaddle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
I hope you were shamed by this reply, on the use of commas in a subordinate clause.
Hahaha my writing style is runon and compound complex sentences without commas.
Oh my god a reasonable take for once. Thank you for putting into words why his heel-turn has bothered me so much
It’s funny, the c/fuckai mod that banned me a while back said the same thing. Iirc it was “How very reasonable of you. Banned”
It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this “tool” is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.
Yeah, but tbf all of the statements he’s making about it are in the context of organizing linux development and the most effective way to carry that out, and just happen to be public and so end up being widely republished and incorporated into discussions with a broader topic than that.
Yeah, I don’t think Linus should be policing his speech at this level or for this cause. Educate the workers please, Linus is doing plenty.
Shush! They are not supposed to know that the AI–Anti-Ai fight is fabricated bullshit with both sides being equally stupid (like people arguing based on ideological zeal always are…). And that it’s just a show so that the majority is occupied with watching the mud fight so they don’t think about the actual problem.
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).
Entirely irrelevant to the conversation at hand but okay
I don’t have a personal or professional workflow that would benefit from AI. I have not been impressed with any generated art or writing (knowingly, so far). I pretty much only know it for the enshittification of search results. It might be great at coding, I’ll never know because in my first 49 years of life I’ve only needed to code enough to get a D+ in my Pascal class. It might get great at generating art but I haven’t had to generate art since my sophomore year of high school. I hear it’s good at scanning lab test results which is great for future me when I need a lab test result but doesn’t come up for me in the day-to-day. There are plenty of other useful things I’m sure it can do for other people but the stuff they say it can do for me right now is nothing I’m interested in having done for me.
It’s not great at coding. I’m on about my fifth “rewrite large system that’s a pile of AI slop” job this year, trust me.
Shitty devs will write shitty code using AI
Good devs will write good code faster with AI
I have for sure seen far worse hand written code than AI would produce
It works great as a fancy search engine. Google results have been atrocious for quite some time, and DDG isn’t that much better. When you’re looking for something hard to find, you may have to check dozens of results or try several searches. LLMs can do this and process the results much faster than you can, and can even give you the sources. Which you do need to check, because sometimes they still spout garbage.
Most other uses are crap unless it’s used by an expert in the subject matter. But search can be useful for anyone. Note: this is not the AI results at the top of the search results; those are still crap. I’m talking about telling the LLM to do a thorough search with a lot more relevant context than the search usually has.
They still.kind of suck gibe you an answer and you say but blah. And itnfoes oh yes in version x.x they changed. I mean if unwanted old outdated in found use Google. Since looking for technical studfnis hard cause so much is out of date.
Did they make you take Pascal in school, or did you choose it and then not like it?
That’s pretty cool if it was required (or some form of programming), it is something I think everyone should at least try and be shown how it works.
Umm Spartan, what is your profession?
new and interesting tools
Looks Under The Generative AI Hood
Sees Snakeoil Salesman Selling Labotomies As The Future
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.
Every once in a while I’ll ask the DDG AI a question, and then try to confirm ot with narrower searches. I think that’s the extent of my use of LLMs.
And I feel guilty for it, wondering how much water and power it’s taking and if the compute is poisoning the air of its human neighbors and keeping them up at night with a 70 dB hum.
There might be something to be said about using models locally, and using them as part of a human-guided process.
Note: I’ve stopped calling it AI in favor of LLM, partly due to the whole SI controversy in the US and partly in the hope that AI is still a larger category of learning systems that might lead to AGI, if we don’t destroy ourselves first. Also the Jev model looks like an interesting development that indicates the ultimate tools might be other than a later model from OpenAI or Anthropic.
Note Also: I programmed in the 1990s and broke my brain trying to teach a computer to competently play a complex strategy game. I got pretty far before all my variable names leaked out of my head. These days, I write simple AHK scripts but that’s about it. So I’m way out of my league when it comes to sound 2020s era coding methods.
I’ll probably get flamed om Lemmy for saying this, but the water usage of AI is negligible and far dumber things use far more water but get zero mention.
People want to be upset at AI so they are looking for reasons
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.
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.
GenAI lets teenagers nudify their classmates, creating child porn. Twitter even let you do it directly on the site earlier this year.
Students are using it to do their homework for them and learning nothing; at least with CliffsNotes you got the gist of what you were supposed to be reading. We shouldn’t want a dumber society.
GenAI also makes it substantially easier to post propaganda and spam. Bots on the internet were already common but now trying to find genuine art or conversations is like pulling up steel from ships that sank before 1945 because everything since then has been irradiated.
The US’s dumbfuck government almost started a war with China earlier this year thanks to someone using GenAI. And yeah everyone knows they’re a bunch of fucking idiots but that doesn’t change the fact that it wouldn’t have happened if LLMs didn’t exist.
Calling something just a tool is whitewashing who’s making it and promoting it and what it’s used for. Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used
I think the real problem is that sometimes things like this come around that are disruptive to the workforce, faster than the workforce can handle the influx of new unemployment.
It will in theory sort itself out, but at the moment, were in a transition period.
That doesn’t mean its bad, but it can mean that our governments aren’t responding in ways that support the worker in the transition which is their fault, not the technologies fault.
Edit: essentially disruption will always keep happening, its how its handled thats the important part.
the newst tool happens to be the one doing the most destruction, so… yes.
also: i do knit, lol. just a coincidence in example.
Flying is almost surely more destructive, and pretty common part of how we work these days.
I don’t think AI is the most destructive at all. AI is responsible for around 1% of carbon emissions (do your own research if you want a proper source). There are so many things, such as cars that emit way more than this.
As for job loss there are so many things that have eliminated so many more jobs. Tractors, knitting machines, production lines, automation in factories etc. No one says we should stop using tractors so we can have more jobs for farmers.
also: i do knit, lol. just a coincidence in example.
That’s funny, I’ve got a half knitted scarf somewhere but I’ve never gotten into it properly.
Now do it for the planned capacity of every AI data center currently planned or under construction or waiting for compute manufacturing by the big tech monopolists, and the trillions of dollars of labor that they’re telling the world they’ll replace whether the product is capable of it or not.
The bot doesn’t have to be able to do your job to displace your labor. It only has to convince your boss that it can. Right now the big tech monopolists are actively convincing the entire world’s bosses that they can replace your labor. This doesn’t have to be true to be a labor issue, and it certainly doesn’t have to be true to be a devastating economic bubble.
I don’t believe they’ll finish. If you do believe they’ll finish and succeed in ripping communities off as planned, then I think you’re also predicting that this stuff really works and soon.
get back to the scarf! i have a blanket im working on too lol.
but yeah. i think from our sw/eng industry, ai is at the least the one with the steepest destructive “curve”, i suppose.
ty for your reply.
Could have said the same about the invention of electricity
I was gonna say nice strawman and then I saw the instance and yea this dumb statement checks out 🙄
The invention of the light bulb.
That has been SO much worse than the negatives we’ve seen with AI. If anyone is interested, that is a horrible story socially, industrially, environmentally, etc. Definitely worth reading about.
yes. indeed. two things can be true at once.
The cotton gin. The ink press. The player piano. Vhs. Photoshop. Audio in film.
You’re so wrong it’s laughable.
Explain to me how Photoshop is comparably destructive as AI is lol. Also the cotton gin replaces slave labour primarily. Idk if that’s what you want to put up as an example here.
none of those are examples of things in our current era doing as much damage as ai lol. can you not comprehend the comment i made?
When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.
I got banned from the Fuck AI community for saying Linus isn’t stupid. Not that he’s right on AI, just that he’s not stupid.
Indeed, the atmosphere is toxic.
We’re on a site where people happily discuss their arr stack or transpiring the PS5 system, but bemoan AI is killing artists and coding.
There are real ethical issues, job impacts, environmental issues, property rights issues (real and intellectual), privacy, a stack of cards economy etc.
But there is also utility, and frankly the genie is out of the bottle. For better or worse.
Catching kernel bugs in Linux with AI should be seen as a good because they’re not being exploited offensively by private actors. AI review that catches the most annoying 80% of errors or issues saves human time, while not contributing slop to the kernel.
There is a lot to discuss if you show up in good faith.
Also, Linus is an asshole. Why would anyone be surprised he reacted like an asshole? His point on his expectations is actually clear and sensible to me. He probably could have said just that, but he’s an asshole, and acting how you would expect after a bunch of people are yelling at him.
Just don’t engage with any community that starts with “fuck” if you have any kind of nuance for the subject matter.
It’s not a great time. If you don’t get banned, you’ll get dogpiled with angry and idiotic comments anyway, by people that have decided their own facts already.
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.
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.
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.
From my layperson understanding, the true program is not the lines of code, it’s the model that lives in the programmer’s brain. The code is just an extension of that.
If it needs debugging, it is the mental model that helps. If you need to add a feature, same thing. If a few years go by and no one remembers how the code works, rebuilding that mental model is the first step in making progress.
I suspect that it used to be that if someone contributed good code to the kernel project, it meant that they had a sufficient mental model. But with AI, it can seem like they do.
Maybe if you’re Linus your understanding of the kernel is so strong it would take years to atrophy, if at all. I don’t know. But developers in general?
Too many times in my work life, people have told me one thing, but it turns out that AI invented that and they didn’t really know what they were talking about. On things that I’m an expert in, I can catch it. But if I’m not an expert, I don’t realize the mistake until a consequence occurs.
Allowing AI is basically making it so the maintainers have to be complete experts in everything they accept. Maybe that was already the case, but that is my layperson understanding of it.
This is correct. And yes, we expect everyone that contributes to have this understanding. If you don’t have it, welcome to ask. Misunderstandings that happen despite your effort will be caught by the steward.
All the fuckX communities are toxic for the same reason.
No nuance. No complexity. Binary.
The world is not black & white it’s shades of grey.
I got banned from saying not all that is called ai is bad by giving video game npcs from the last decades as an example.
I thought it was just llms that they where against but nope. I imagine Alan Turing spinning in his grave.
Vague criticisms, fallacious reasoning, highly emotive language, little response to attempts at discussion (though some might engage in disingenuous discussions of shifting goalposts here and there to discourage particularly vocal engagees from future participation). So I’d say that Linus is just the latest convenient scapegoat in an Anti-AI ‘trend’ that will have little impact on the rate of AI adoption in the long run.
Sucks that I waited until now to try to form a measured opinion on AI because now all the discussions on the internet are hot garbage.
Measured perspectives are hard to come by. A Marxist Perspective On AI
There’s nothing Marxist in that article. Only fallacies from rich white man ranting about people pushing back against fascism.
People say AI to mean LLM first because main stream western, fascist, media pushed the term by inviting exclusively non-expert and CEOs to talk about the subject. People are pushing back against a product that is mean to make workers dull and replace them by stealing their works even by capitalist standards.
The article tried to paint the discussion as anti-llm would be anti technology, which is not Marxist in any way and not relevant. Weirdly enough fascist guy like the one on this article don’t talk about cryptocurrency as something we ahouy chill for. Isn’t it a tool too?
Current LLM chill is the opposite of dialectical materialism: what is the concrete analysis here? LLM outputed nothing of value for years despite the hundred of billions invested. Worst it actually participate to global warming, bourgeoisie attempt to mass control, getting rid of workers and inflating computer costs. So the real consequences for people are losses only.
And for what? To get to have unskilled rich white people who can afford the awfully hight price of LLM to boats about “I made this” while it is actually made from steal and empoverish people and enriching tech lord’s.
So no, thanks, and trying to paint fallacies to Marxism isn’t going to help either.
Bad news, @yogthos@lemmy.ml, you’re not a Marxist, and your analysis is the opposite of dialectical materialism.
I’ll never recover from this. 🤣
was that supposed to be an argument against my explanation?
Obviously it wasn’t, or I would have made an argument.
Yes please do not make any argument and post memes with some interesting comments
When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube c omments.
Really helps.
Discussions on the internet are hot garbage in part because thanks to LLMs you can’t know what’s real anymore. Of course there were bots before, but any random idiot can pay OpenAI for a subscription now and spam anywhere they want.
We have our share of radicals
I would like to reiterate that posting on main as an admin is obnoxious since we can’t block you.
Consider using an alt to post unless performing official instance actions.
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.
Button is right there man
the button is there, but clicking it does not do anything, can’t do it via the profile or searchbar either
What are you using? Web or some app?
just the basic lemmy.ml website.
i personally don’t care about posting opinions on an admin account, but they seem to be right. suspect it’s to do with living on the same instance.
blocked.
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.
That does change things a bit
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.
I have mixed opinions on his stance towards AI.
I confess, I’m guilty. I’ve used AI to diagnose random issues with my little personal blog (please don’t hate me, I’m just a man without a degree). That said, I understood the simple code well enough to see what I was getting wrong and comprehend the AI generated suggestion, so it wasn’t all that different than looking things up on a wiki and implementing it. The primary difference, for me, was that I had already spent two weeks digging deeper and deeper for my answers, only finding outdated or incorrect information, and Claude delivered the correct answer in about 10 seconds.
In my opinion, the reason it was a good idea to implement the AI generated code was that I understood it. There was a human brain looking at that result and going “aha! I see what I was missing!” If I hadn’t understood what I was looking at, it could have been doing anything, and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable implementing it. If I hadn’t at least tried to the old fashioned way first, I wouldn’t have used it. But after weeks of hitting dead ends and with the knowledge that there was an extremely powerful tool that could give me my answer in seconds, it began to feel foolish to continue punishing myself with wasted time.
In Linus’ case, I think it is safe to say he understands enough about Linux to interpret the AI suggestions and be a safeguard against slop. I’m not too concerned about his contributions to the kernel if he’s using AI to think outside the box or diagnose a complicated problem.
But! There is a major risk factor when people start implementing code that they don’t understand, or when it is a crutch for their total lack of comprehension. Vibe coding and using a diagnostic tool are different things. I hope Linus gives some real thought to the realistic limits that need to be in place for people who aren’t knowledgeable enough to filter AI suggested code through their own brains, because it wouldn’t take long to destroy a reliable system like Linux if they incorporate AI generated code with no experienced human in the drivers seat.
Apologies to those who just fundamentally hate AI and think I’m a fool for using it, I just wanted to share my experience as an unschooled computer nerd who finally gave in and tried it out a couple of times.
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.
I mean, I use it because I’m forced to, but I don’t feel much in productivity gains (not using agents though). Sometimes it’s very, very handy, but most of the time it’s like talking to the stupidest rubber ducky, and the frustration it gives me is not worth that imo. Others might make a different calculation, but ultimately if search engines didn’t enshitify themselves into obsoletion, and LLMs didn’t produce the worst, most verbose, and sometimes objectively wrong documentation, I’d not see an upside at all. But here we are.
Strangely idgaf about whether he respects me
I don’t think he thinks about you at all
👍🏻 The vast majority of people don’t.
Maybe the rule should be that if you use AI, just make sure Linus can’t tell you did.
