Troy Hunt has been a pillar in the cybersecurity community with his Have I Been Pwned project for many, many years, even walked back a purchase of it because he felt they would compromise the principles of the project. But now he has just gone all-in on AI. On a previous Weeky Update he published a “Robophobia Equality Policy” after receiving pushback to his openclaw usage. Since then he has posted more of his usage of AI, and in the latest he suggest that “people are getting into the program” because he seems to be receiving less pushback and because of Linus’ affirmations

  • dusk@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    No one would have ever called it ‘vibe coding’ if they wanted it to be taken seriously, and/or respected.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    Linus has a point, and I think people are missing it due to politics and/or biases.

    What he’s saying is, you can use AI to write code, but you still have to check behind it. For example, I have an iPhone, and the iPhone keyboard will change things you say after you’ve typed them. (This is why I prefer to type on my Mac, or if I’m on mobile, I prefer to use the Fediverse on my old Android, WiFi only, phone.) Some programming tools have features like this, like I know in Excel if I type “=S”, it’s gonna fill in “UM(” assuming I want to use the SUM function. No, you don’t just blindly trust the machine in either case, you absolutely have to make sure it’s doing what you want. I can’t think of another function in Excel that begins with S, but I’m sure they exist.

    And at some point while coding, you are handing things over to a computer without knowing what it’s doing. Like the compiler. And you still have to check behind that as well.

    So yes, “vibe coding” is introducing a second element you have to check behind, but checking is faster than writing.

    His point about “just write in Assembly” is also valid. Back in the day (I mean back in MY day, maybe not YOUR day), that was how you had to do it. Each new programming language that is friendlier to the user, that uses more human readable code, is actually less efficient in producing machine readable/actionable code. So yes, it would be more efficient to just write in Assembly, we went from having kilobytes of RAM to megabytes and now we have gigabytes. Some higher end systems actually do have 1TB or more of RAM. In these cases, the gains over Assembly wouldn’t be important. It’s like saying a new iPhone is twice as fast as a new Android flagship. So you’re gonna power down your Android phone, tell me to do the same and say “let’s race”. Okay, mine boots like half a second faster. You say “who cares”. We launch apps. We pick 10 apps, we’re gonna launch them, then go Home, then relaunch them in reverse order. (This is a common visual benchmark.) Yeah, mine’s gonna be a hair faster. It’s not gonna make you regret your purchase. It’s certainly not gonna make you go out and spend another grand on a whole ass other phone when yours is good enough. Likewise, no one’s coding in Assembly for those microsecond gains. And likewise, people are “vibe coding” because while it’s a tad less efficient, it does save them time in the end, and time is money. And the other guy’s doing it — that’s the thing. They’re all trying to keep up with one another, right? That’s why Linus is doing this to start with. He’s not a tech bro. He just doesn’t wanna get left behind.

    Then there’s me, and I imagine a lot of you here. I don’t like vibe coding because AI use is making RAM and GPUs and SSDs expensive. And game consoles. And prebuilt computers. Not to mention the ecological cost. It sucks all around. But I’m not in the biz. My ability to pay bills isn’t contingent on code. I’m not in a position where “vibe coding” (quotes because I don’t like the term, but admit it’s probably the best term) will help protect my job. I can afford to be a spectator. And I call “BOO” at vibe coding, and I’m in a fairly good position as a Mac user, as both Windows and Linux are vibe coded now… but it’s coming for us, too. If it hasn’t already. And then what? When all the major operating systems are vibe coded, where do you turn? What do you actually run to say you aren’t running any AI generated code?

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
      0·
      18 days ago

      you can use AI to write code, but you still have to check behind it.

      And this is, in large part, why AI is an unprofitable, useless product. So much of the promised productivity is crap, because if you have to validate and test anyway, it takes less time in the end to do the work yourself. If you’re building a tech product, you also need to understand how it works because you need to be able to service it properly, and frequent AI use dulls that ability too.

      Every single person who uses AI, by now, has seen it hallucinate bug out often enough that it’s demonstrably not something which produces trustworthy output.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldM
      0·
      18 days ago

      Linux is not vibe coded but for some reason claim it is but macOS isn’t. I see no basis for either assertion.

      • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        If Linus Torvalds’ post isn’t enough, I’m not sure what your criteria is for a basis, but I thought it was pretty clear.

        Microsoft has also said they are using Copilot to code Windows.

        There’s been no claim I’ve seen that macOS is. If the claim is they’re using Siri to do it, that’s a lie right there, “Apple Intelligence” will change a “to” to a “too” and then later flag it as a grammatical error. So which is it?

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.worldM
          0·
          17 days ago

          Yeah, the allowance of ai use whatsoever is not “vibecoding” and it’s a lie to pretend it is. His latest comment was that they had to put something in place to guard against ai aided PRs becoming too numerous. I know you’ve seen the backlash against the lie you’re spreading, you cannot miss it here. You’ve just chosen to believe what you want to.

          It’s not likely apple has banned ai, that’s just wishful thinking on your behalf. Your basis is “they didn’t admit to using it” which is laughable.

          If you continue to spread this misinformation here I will be forced to ban you

    • Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      handing things over to a computer without knowing what it’s doing

      So, it’s very easy to understand different levels of abstractions and how the lower level abstractions fit into higher level ones.

      Like the simplest adder circuit can be expressed in a series of nand gates, a nand gate can be implemented in various ways on the silicon. In the other direction, you have a group of circuits than can be driven by a clock to demarc discrete states, and the collective you have becomes memory, CPU, FPGA etc.

      The “software” is similar, truth tables, machine state etc whatever it is on to the highest level software.

      The act of vibe coding abdicates understanding the abstraction by the programmer, and if they take up that abdication they cease to be a programmer, or a professional in general.

      Edit fixed grammer but this looks worse

    • Thorry@feddit.org
      0·
      18 days ago

      Sure in principle you could check all the output the AI shits out to see if it’s right and then spend time correcting it either by hand or by prompting some more. And in doing so, one might be able to do more in a given amount of time, or less. Recent studies have shown it might have felt like programmers were able to do more, but in reality did less in the same time. But that might vary from person to person and the given tasks.

      However that skips over other issues:

      Reading and understanding code is so much harder than writing code. This has been known for decades. So instead of doing the easier task of writing the code yourself, you are left with reviewing and understanding the generated code. This add a lot of extra cognitive load, which can lead to fatigue quickly. This fatigue feeds into another issue, where it’s so much easier to just hit approve on everything and skip out on the really in depth stuff. People tend to slack and just glance at the code, which is a huge trap, because LLMs are very good at writing code that looks right, regardless of if it is right.

      Then there’s the issue where writing the code is a small part of the task usually. There’s also understanding the task and figuring out edge cases. It’s hard to do that all up-front and at least for me, while writing the code I think of edge cases or get a deeper understanding of the task. By flying through the writing part, the deeper understanding gets skipped as well.

      And the issue of bias, where it’s often a lot better to think about an open question instead of a multiple choice question. With vibe coding it’s very easy to be lead down a path by the LLM, where it suggests a path which seems logical, but might actually be wrong. Then breaking out of that path can be hard. This might be an actual wrong path, or it might just stifle creativity. A common complaint is all AI generated stuff “feels” very samey, which makes sense because LLMs are designed to see common patterns in a lot of the data. The more common a pattern is, the more likely the LLM is to suggest it.

      Another very common issue with LLMs is they tend to touch stuff they shouldn’t. This is because of how they work is by processing everything as a stream of text. So let’s say I want to expand a template with a new part, it has no choice but to read the entire template and then output the entire template as well. It’s supposed to just add the new part, but often it makes other changes as well. And this happens on a multiple-file base as well.

      One big issue I’ve noticed is the regression of skills for people who use AI for their work (coding or other). It’s so tempting to just press the big green EASY button on just about any task. But then when the AI isn’t able to do the task right, people are stumped and are no longer able to do the things they used to be able to do for decades before. Especially with coding, it isn’t like riding a bicycle where once you know how, you are able to do it forever. It’s a lot more like a muscle you need to keep excising and if you don’t it’s going to lose power and capabilities.

      And we’re not even touching other issues with LLMs in general, like concentration of power, vendor lock-in, obfuscated pricing, resource usage, (un)fair use of source data, hallucinations, manipulation, destruction of the internet etc.

      So for me the people who say: “It’s just a new tool, you wouldn’t go back to hand punching paper tape right!??!!?” are being very disingenuous about the actual issues. Sure it’s just a new tool, but one with real consequences to using it. As with every tool we need to weigh the pros and cons and just because it’s available, doesn’t mean we have to automatically use it. We still see people enjoying a command line or text-based interface, even though most people use graphical interfaces. And I personally code without any form of autocomplete, because I find it annoying and distracting. Just because tools exist, doesn’t mean we should all use them and it certainly doesn’t mean we should be blind to the downsides attached to certain tools.

    • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      usually you would click on the little shield to the left of the url bar and it would say something like “allow content from twitter”.

    • 00000@reddthat.com
      0·
      18 days ago

      It’s a Firefox feature. It blocks external calls to social media that might track you, then adds a summary below. I’m not sure how it works. I have the “AI kill switch” thing enabled and still get the summaries, so I assume it’s not using AI. At least not locally. My guess is some proxy server requests the content, summarizes it (probably with AI), then adds it to the page.

        • 00000@reddthat.com
          0·
          18 days ago

          Not sure if there’s any difference in Floorp. I think you need to have enhanced tracking set to strict or custom though. I have my ETP set to custom with the settings shown here, and the summary is shown automatically. (I don’t need to click anything, it’s just there when the page loads.)

  • jj4211@lemmy.world
    0·
    18 days ago

    a feeling that those weaponising the term have now accepted

    That’s an interesting approach, to declare that everyone who says it “doesn’t really mean it”

    Linus Torvalds

    Linus’ take was more nuanced, I’m not sure I agree, but at the same time he was talking up AI, he also expressed that he saw it as useful for onboarding, review, and throwaway efforts in fields you don’t get. Also he made the caveat that he doesn’t really code the kernel so much anymore, so he explicitly stated he had lost some perspective. Also that it wasn’t suitable for full-on “vibing” maintainable code. However AI bros have gone all in on feeling vindicated and feeling like Linus said the kernel should be vibe coded now.

    • Orygin@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      18 days ago

      However AI bros have gone all in on feeling vindicated and feeling like Linus said the kernel should be vibe coded now.

      What I saw was mainly AI haters that couldn’t form a well thought out take, saying that Linus has gone full slop and the kernel is now slop-first.
      The debate was killed before even starting because one side can’t express anything other than “slop”, and refuse to hear the full arguments presented.

      • Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        Nah there’s opinionated idiots on both sides, one is organically ignorant and the other is parroting corporate published ignorance

      • zwiebelkaramell@lemmy.world
        0·
        18 days ago

        Is there an argument to be made other than slop? All i have seen as far as arguments for is: “this other thing is slop, so why can’t I slop here?”, “what if it’s only a little bit of slop” or “what if I serve you slop anyway and you don’t notice”. I don’t care if you only put a thimbleful of dogshit in your soup, it’s still shit soup.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        0·
        18 days ago

        While it is a fair observation that critics also failed to recognize nuance in Torvald’s take, it is a bit wild to assert that it was ‘mainly AI haters’ that didn’t get the nuance in a post specifically about someone so pro-AI they declare that everyone agrees with their take, and even people who claim otherwise don’t mean it and secretly agree with him, and that Torvalds gave an unequivocal thumbs up to full on vibe coding.

      • LuceVendemiaire@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        17 days ago

        No, the anti-AI side gave plenty of well constructed arguments and rebutals about the societal effects, the limits of LLMs, the way it exploits artists, why agentic coding is unsustainable and bad, the blatant attempts at cutting income to people who are struggling like artists and designers, the complete and utter lack of care displayed by corporations and the sheer lack of respect displayed by everyone drinking the AI kool aid.

        The pro-AI response has endlessly been repeating “its just a tool and its inevitable and if you dont like it you’re a Luddite who’s never tried or researched AI” (Even as the people who draw “anti-AI” conclusions or point out the negatives and limits of this technology turn out to have done extensive research and experimentation on machine learning and LLMs and realized that this was a dead end that was going to reach mediocrity at best) and now this narrative that the anti-AI side is disrespectful and bigoted (fucking rich coming from proponents lf a technology that has been shown to be biased against minorities from the very beginning; image recognition STILL keeps mistaking black men for apes and gemini tends to assume trans women are predators, not to mention the utter insanity that is to pretend locking everything behind models that require strong, modern computers is somehow giving power to poor countries, also the fact that most of the people behind this push are besties with Thiel, you know, the guy that is the absolute worst of all these tendencies)

        We’re fucking sick of the endless disrespect and self-victimization that slop makers constantly peddle and the gall to call us the ones that are delusional and disrespectful. Anyone who has seen the arguments and debates and hasnt come out with an unbridled hatred for this piece of shit that has made life in this planet worse for everyone with no benefit for anyone that isnt a corpo fuck is worthless and can go fuck themselves

        • Orygin@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          17 days ago

          Thanks for taking the time to write a complete response. I’m not pro AI but I couldn’t help but see all the responses (including to my comment) that limit the thought process to AI=slop, which completely destroys any hope of civic discourse on the subject. There are many kneejerk reactions to anything AI and thought terminating cliché that makes discussing this topic highly toxic.

          I see that the topic is highly sensitive for many here, and it is best to leave this community fester on its own hatred.

  • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    Yeah, he’s been like this for a while, here’s a choice quote of his from back in April.

    Demanding to “speak to a human” solely because the bot is an AI may constitute robophobic exclusionary behaviour and will not be tolerated.

    • 🔍🦘🛎@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      I would love to live in a world where robophibia is a legitimate issue we need to overcome, but that’s not anytime soon.

      • MrOtingocni@lemmy.world
        0·
        18 days ago

        I’ve been waiting my whole life to stand in the living room drunkenly yelling “No daughter of mine is going to marry this… fucking roomba!”

        And she’d be all crying like 'That’s why I couldn’t you tell you I was robosexual, dad. You’re a hypocritical bigot! Mom would roll over in her grave if she knew what you and that Bimbo4000 subscription on your desktop were doing!"

        Then I’d punch a hole in the wall, which would be easy because all public housing would just be refrigerator cardboard boxes and yell “Why can’t you be normal like your transmasc ace furry brother??”

        Then she’d run out of the house crying and jump into her lover/Electric VTO transport that also plays in a band and burn thruster donuts in the front yard.

        But nooo, we get this stupid shit going on here.

    • h0tbeef@lemmy.zip
      0·
      18 days ago

      So his brain melted?

      He thinks the LLM has personhood? Or feelings?

      Fucking moron

    • VibeSurgeon@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      I feel like you intentionally left out some context there:

      This is so “peak 2026” - writing an equality policy to ensure people treat our AI bot with the same respect as they do their human counterparts. It’s intentionally a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it’s there for a purpose: we simply don’t have the capacity to deal with every request we get, and we need Bruce to be the coalface of support.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
    0·
    18 days ago

    LOL, no.

    Vibe coding is still 100% a derogatory term. Go use MS Teams for a day if you think vibe coding produces anything useful. There are new bugs every single day that we have to work around, as MS apparently vibe codes this shit AND no longer properly tests their work product before releasing it.

  • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
    0·
    18 days ago

    Quoting Linus Torvald’s response to generative AI anything but a reason why not to use it is insane. That man has clearly lost his mind and surely must be being paid off or blackmailed or something.

    I refuse to acknowledge anyone who uses generative AI as anything but a gear who is self-lobotomizing themselves in the long run.

  • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
    0·
    18 days ago

    Linus also said competent, which means it’s being tested before it’s committed, etc. This person is just fulfilling his bias. The AI cuck coders won’t be testing because they’re tired of testing AI’s fuck ups.

  • Pratai@piefed.caEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    They all will eventually. AI is going to own everything we have ever known. Get very used to it.