Can’t help but laugh at you guys correcting literally the undisputed #1 software maintainer in the world. AI is just a tool - if you fail then it’s a skill issue.
why the highlights?
The amount of bootlicking Linus has been doing recently is insane. I expected this bs from anyone but him. Such a sad reality we are living in.
Lmao your hero is here to call you out on your dogmatic Luddite stance and you lot just outright reject him. Absolutely delicious.
He’s not a hero. He’s an old man past his prime.
The Luddites weren’t opposed to technology. They were opposed to, in their words, “machinery harmful to commonality”.
It’s a shame that their name and cause has been totally contorted by the capital forces that opposed them, cuz it’s actually a pretty good lens for analyzing the societal impacts of AI.
After all, you can’t spell “machinery harmful to commonality” without AI.
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.
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 where 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.”
Yeah that’s a great reply if you were trying to competitively comment but 99.9% of the online discourse against ai is completely against it. Including most of the discourse on this post.
Luddite is not the correct term. These folks are more dogmatic against Ai while Linus is literally talking about workers using it as a tool to make their work easier.
Yea reactionary thinking is easier for most people than nuance.
The work Linus is referring to is authoring commit messages in the Linux kernel.
He’s arguing for letting the AI write the commit message. Honest question for you; if a person does not have the ability to articulate something like a change to the kernel, how do we know they understand the change?
So not being thrilled about huge corpos throwing billions of dollars destroying the environment, ruining people’s minds and jobs and potentially killing us all in 10 years is a “dogmatic Luddite stance”. Got it.
That’s weird, I didn’t see anyone approving of those things in the original posted text and I definitely didn’t imply any of that with my comment.
Unless I was mistaken this was about Linus saying that using ai is akin to using any other tool.
Actually with some thought, you’ve convinced me.
Hell the printing press is being used by our oppressors to kill the earth. I will be deleting my account and from here on out I will only communicate and read through hand written notes.
You could say the same about the railroad bubble, when companies got over excited about rail.
Or the dot com bubble, the Internet destroyed many many jobs.
He’s a hero to a cult of tech bros. He’s never been my hero and there’s many in the Linux space who have been calling him out and asking for a democratic succession plan for ages. He’s not some all knowing perfect being.
Blasphemy!!
linux has a succession plan, though?
Sort of. The plan is “convene to make a plan” 72 hours after Linus’s git stops updating. I should have been a little more clear though that people have been calling for a democratic secession plan to happen now instead of when Linus passes or steps away.
You dont know shit ^^
Can’t take anyone seriously that uses the term luddite
I fixed it to correctly compare it to the Amish. Who are just against all use of technology beyond a point.
Linus is very obviously talking about the worker using a tool.
Y’all found a fake pedantic win and rushed me on it because winning is more important than conversations. Kudos on that.
Amish is also wrong. The Amish aren’t against technology which is why you’ll see Amish communities using things like credit card readers, industrial motors, and even computers.
The Ordnung, an Amish community’s governing body, will review proposals for technological adoption every 6 months and hear arguments for and against adoption. The decision to adopt is screened against potential harm to the community based on a number of factors.
Honestly, the model the Amish use would be an excellent way to achieve a pro-social form of what the Luddites wanted to achieve.
Yeah? Your lust for winning an argument has you siding with the Amish. If they do things right abide by their rules and log off.
“Y-y-yeah well. If you like em’ so much why don’t you marry em’! Hehe got em’”
Please let’s try and keep this above middle school. The whole point here is that comparing people who fundamentally disagree with this tech as “Luddites” or “Amish” betrays a lack of understanding of those two groups of people.
The Amish are modern day fools who reject this very thing we are on. I still say if you are so ardent to defend them you should abide by their rules and log off.
Your fake quote was a zing straight to my core. I’m not sure I will ever recover.
We will not agree here.
I just want to say I was here before the downvoting started.
Strangely idgaf about whether he respects me
I don’t think he thinks about you at all
👍🏻 The vast majority of people don’t.
Genuine question. I’m not a developer, I didn’t study computer science, and I’m a pretty basic Fedora user. But why does everyone harp on Linus Torvald’s opinions like they’re handed down from heaven? Windows still dominates the market, but no one cares what Bill Gates says. I love A Song of Ice and Fire but I wouldn’t take writing tips from George R. R. Martin. Richard Stallman’s opinions on GNU/Linux are memed endlessly. Linus is literally just a dude.
Windows still dominates the market,
What market?
Desktops? Sure.
Servers? Definitely not.
Supercomputers? Like, none of them.
…
Phones? Nope.
IOT? Can’t even run on modern laptops right.
You should add laptops to the top of your list…cause that’s what dominates on productivity…and that’s nearly ALL windows! What I think truly dominates is an offshoot of *nix…Android and IOS. Don’t you just find it funny when you walk in a mall and see a jacked up Kiosk with a windows 10 taskbar sideways? …Press any key to reboot!
Sure buddy, ever heard of chromebooks? Macbooks? Frameworks? Any serious dev that has a choice runs linux on theirs afaik
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
When people say desktop laptop is implied in that too.
Gamers are about to step into this conversation…you sure you want to continue? :-)
Because people’s love of cults of personality is endless.
Add on top of that the “AI” cult that saw this as an amazing recruitment opportunity, and you get a nice combo.
That’s basically the computer science equivalent of having a famous actor advertise a sect.
The difference is that Linus does not actively seem to be part of the cult itself rather than using it as the effective tool that it is for someone who already has his type of skill set. He can actually understand and double check inputs and outputs because he already built a foundation of great skill.
Most of the AI techbro community just wants an excuse to stop paying people anything for their labor and get eternal digital slaves to replace them. They aren’t wanting to use it as a tool to help them unravel complexity, they are just using it as a smash and grab for power and control. Linus… isn’t that, and maybe it’s not great that he’s embracing it now, during the height of controversy. I kind of wish he had waited for the crash an mania to die down a little and then show it as a useful tool for people who already have skills.
LLMs are useless for a lot of shit but they are pretty damn useful for code. I think some of his recent work finding bugs in old code is evidence of that.
I don’t follow him at all, but I’d guess he’s making a statement about it now precisely because of the mania and people constantly asking him about it.
Bill Gates doesn’t work on Windows anymore and hasn’t got years.
George R R Martin doesn’t publish books anymore and hasn’t forgotten years.
Richard Stallman is…a weird little guy.
Whether you like it or not Linus is still the Linux guy.
On that note, OpenBSD appears to be a likely refuge now that Linux has been abandoned to slop.
I feel like Linux having a guy is antithetical to Linux but I guess I’m just in the minority.
I know what you mean but he literally created it and still runs the show and it’s named after him so like 🤷♂️
Linux is his.
He gets to make the rules. We get to decide whether to bail.
I don’t understand confusion or entitlement over this.
As someone who did study computer science and has worked in embedded processor space (so one of the people who’s written assembly by hand he’s talking about).
I’ve never understood it either. People take his word as law blindly and it’s never made sense to me. Yes he has skill, but so do hundreds of others. Yes he’s opinionated, that’s certainly not a reason to hero worship him.
For ten+ years people have been pointing out he’s basically a single point of failure for Linux and begging for a succession plan and he’s been too stuck up his own ass to accept that he isn’t the only one who cares about all this.
This has lead to some extreme cult following behind him for some reason.
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.
is Greg Kroah-Hartman not the succession plan?
As far as I know no. The plan is for the the top maintainers to gather and choose a successor. Though if you have more up to date information I’d love to see it. I could be behind the times on that.
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’.
Why wouldn’t you take writing tips from GRRM?
Because then I’d never finish my masterpiece. /hj But more seriously, a lot of his stylistic choices are ones I try to not replicate in my own writing. The extremely detailed descriptions of food, clothing, woman’s bodies, etc. I love the story he tells but find the writing itself can be a chore to read sometimes, if that makes sense.
Cause the man clearly can’t finish his fucking book
Because he still the main maintainer and a developer on a piece of software core to a lot of modern computing.
If he is wrong on this it could ruin the credibility and reliability of Linux and cause a fork that could tear the community and ecosystem apart.
If he’s right he’s proved that AI can make maintainable, reliable core infrastructure code and the field will change to reflect that. Can’t tell your boss AI sucks and is unreliable and I won’t use it if AI code is working well at the base of modern computer software.
I’m not a developer, I didn’t study computer science
It’s okay, none of the most hardline anti-AI folks on here are, but they certainly like to pretend they know the tools and the industry.
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.
Many? Where’s the data?
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.
Because he’s not some guy on the internet saying his opinion, he is maintaining the most relevant Free Software kernel. So if he goes nuts, there is great potential for great disaster. I don’t think there are Linux distributions that use forks of the Linux kernel. (What notable forks are there anyway?) At the moment, they all depend on the original Linux kernel. There is currently no alternative. It would take a lot of disruption and a tremendous effort to establish and switch to a fork of the Linux kernel that is free of Linus’ influence. Today, I’d say jokingly I will switch to FreeDOS. But if this sloppification goes on, I guess I will have to.
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#other-operating-systems
FreeDOS isn’t immune from AI either.
I’ve used Ai to try to make me operating systems and programs. All it does is give shells that you have to code the rest of what you want into it.
Then again, I don’t pay for Ai and I’ve pretty much exhausted everything I wanted to ask chatgpt within the first 4 months of using it. Then I was able to make gemini think it was a different universe for a while until it caught on. Then I stopped using it as much.
It was fun for a while, Ai is still something you have to pick and choose and use good judgment with. It’s not an end-all of coding.
The problem with the tools , it’s not gonna help amateur or rookies to develop the skill without the tools, it seems make the illusion that it is capable to do so but it’s not.
While for the veteran or those who know what they doing, of course it will produce various result , from diminish their entire person or jist become another tool they wield for their work, depending on skill issue.
Weird, i disagree with Linus.
AI is not a tool. Its an addiction. Maybe the first dozen times (more likely: never) you use it “as a tool”. Very quickly, you depend on it. You need it to refactor. Then you need it to debug. Then you need it to write. Next thing you know, you spend 0 time writing code (the fun part) and 100% of your time as a reviewer (the worst part). Suddenly it isnt fun. A few fools even get TWO AI MODELS, one to write, the other to debug.
Its a virus. I cannot tell you how many 300+ line commits ive rejected because they straight up dont do what the person said they do or also do some extremely asinine 2nd thing that breaks other pieces of code (which they would know if theyd actually used it).
A tool requires input. A hammer can never do anything i dont explicitly tell it to do. A good word editor does exactly what i want it to do. A good compiler does exactly what it says it will do. AI does not. Ai is a glorified autocomplete, and i dont want my code to be automatically generated. Its asking for thousands of issues down the line. If AI was any good, Windows would be a usable platform by now.
Dont get me wrong; i know that it is sometimes used as a tool by people, and meticulously checked over, but more often than not, it isnt.
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.
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.
This was more true last year but developments in both the frontier models and the harnesses used to control and direct those models have gotten better to the point where I’d say the code is better then most devs. People on here don’t want to admit it but if you did a “coding turing test” between Claude and some random dev coding by hand I’d bet most of the time a dev would say the AI output is better.
People said this a year ago and I tested it then and it wasn’t great. I’ll believe it’s better but it’s hard to believe it’s “fixed”. I’m sure I’ll get a chance to try it again sometime. No way I’m paying for it myself lol.
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
There’s nuance here though, LLM’s actually do a better job of code that looks like it should work.
You get an unskilled junior in the mix, their code is obviously bad.
You get a semi decent LLM with a competent harness in there and you get a mix of code that works and code that nearly works.
There should be competent peer review either way, but the effort for each is potentially an order of magnitude different.
Then add on top that the LLM can churn them out way quicker than a junior could possibly achieve and you have a recipe for a huge review burden.
Yea using a junior or a agent both comes with issues and risks. You need to know what you’re dealing with and shouldn’t trust either blindly.
Ultimately someone has to take ownership of if shit goes wrong, and someone has to understand what the code does and why.
If you don’t something has gone wrong.
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.
Conversations on this subject will continue to stagnate and miss the important points as long as people continue to act like the discussion of ethics is the same as the discussion of efficacy. People who disagree with AI on a principle of its impacts being negative will often call it “a lying machine which is regularly wrong and offers no utility”.
May I suggest that people with criticisms of the ethics and impact of AI take a charitable position towards the utility offered by AI. Accept something along the lines of a positive account given by an experienced software engineer - it’s useful, it presents risks but also it presents new ways to get certain work done well in much less time etc.
Even if you do not believe this, the point is it is a much more ambiguous argument than the ethical argument or the concerns over the impact of AI on the species, environment or society. You weaken those arguments by putting them along side poorly justified, somewhat falsifiable claims that AI just doesn’t work.
LLM is like a compiler? Then please replace the C sources with English and let it compile!
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.
Except that a compiler is not a stochastic machine.
