His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
Even if you wrote it by seance with a Oujii board, just make sure it works, and that great grandma Ada agrees to a GPL license.
I guess Linus doesn’t care about the environment or any of the other issues surrounding A.I. I’m not anti-AI just for the sake of being anti-AI. I have a huge problem with AI bcz of it’s environmental impacts, intellectual property violations, job impacts, attempts to replace all employees with AI, the general dumbing down of society and worse off the internet is bcz of AI, the surveillance state being built around it. I could go on, but you get the point. I am a staunch, no AI person bcz of all those reasons and a hundred more.
This isn’t an age thing, or a, I am getting older and Im stubborn thing. AI is literally ruining the planet and everything on it, and this guy thinks we should just accept that.
I say fuck off with that noise, I don’t have e to accept anything.
Intellectual property is an imperialist tool for exploitation and oppression. I see you are a fanatic zealot defending it. And you think we should just accept that?
BTW most tokens today are sold in China and mostly and increasingly produced with nuclear or renewable energy. China is also the country with the most, fastest and most sensible regulations on AI. You’re blaming the ills of neoliberal capitalism on AI.
Therefor you are shielding capitalism from critique, and are preventing any sensible regulation on AI and any changes to the system that actually leads to our downfall. You people clearly have given up belief in democracy or revolution and just accept that this helpless and brainless zealotry is the only thing you can do now. Preach hate against your common man instead of the oppressors that make the decisions about how AI is used. So if you want to talk ethics, sniff your own butt first.
Is that really all you got from that? AI is stealing people’s art, their video games, music, etc. I’m not talking about large companies. I’m talking about Joe down the street who’s spent the last 4 years making a game, just to have an AI try to rip a slop version of his game 2 days after he released it.
I don’t give a shit about Microsoft, or any other corporation for that matter, and the fact that you came in here with this aggressive long ass rant reply to me without even so much as asking a clarifying question says more about you than it does me.
Seriously? Joe down the street? Lol. That’s a myth. Poor joe down the street that this despicable Linus is trampling on! He was going to make a living with his indie game! Oh the humanity! Hahaha
It’s not a myth. It’s a huge issue people having been dealing with in the Indie dev space, which you would know if you were a game developer. Anyway, I’m done here. You’re either a bot, or an extremely unpleasant person, and I don’t have the mental energy to engage with either today.
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Yeah, former…fuck off. Stop replying to me or I will block you.
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.
I dislike LLMs/GenAI mostly due to ethical reasons (I’m aware the code quality from LLMs has increased over time), but I’ve already accepted the fact it’s gonna be used a lot. In most cases, I can avoid software using it in favor of alternatives, but that’s not always possible, such as Linux itself. I’m not gonna risk staying on outdated kernels, and I don’t have the time and knowledge to maintain a fork of a whole kernel.
As for my own code, I refuse to let AI touch it because I like thinking about how to code something, and I get really happy when it works.
This mindset is the entire problem. “Oh we don’t need to worry about ethics or morals, just efficiency” is exactly the issue with every pro-AI argument and every pro-capatalism argument. Its the issue with our governments, with investing, with corporations.
I say fuck anyone who argues ethics is not important when talking about efficacy. Fuck that mindset and fuck AI.
I think the point is that it actually hurts an ethics-based anti-AI argument to also claim that it has no utility, because the no-utility argument is weak and therefore makes the rest of the stance (i.e., the ethics-based argument) look weak by association.
Exactly, if you say that AI is ethically bad and doesn’t work, to someone who uses it and clearly sees it works well for them, it just invalidates your argument.
If you just stick to the ethics your argument can’t be dismissed in that way.
Yes! Another problem is, not everyone is using AI in the sense that people think of.
AI is a large field, it studies many different methodologies and aspects of automation, prediction, generation and observation, yet today most people outside the field use it for LLMs and image generation, which throws the baby out with the bath water.
In addition to that, there are publicly available LLMs, some have datasets obtained entirely from consenting parties and public domain works. You don’t have to pay billionaire technocratic fascist a single dime to use such marvelous tools computer scientists worked decades to bring forth.
A machine can never create art, it can never take responsibility and should never be allowed to make decisions, it’s a tool.
LLM is like a compiler? Then please replace the C sources with English and let it compile!
He doesn’t get it… Have the big corpo-shilling libertarians rotted his brain?
Like, imagine if using “AI” consisted of whatever big corpo SaaS you subscribe to sending your prompt off to someone to work on then send the result back to you. Isn’t that an idiotic dependency to have? And why the fuck even go through the middleman? Oh they have the “best workers?” Fuck that. Nvidia makes the best cards, but you don’t see me buying from them.
Do people like Linus not realise how silly it is to offload your work to some middleman service that just steals work from people who do not consent to sharing their labour? Who are desperately throwing insane, GDP-level boatloads of cash at it this unknown technology in the hopes that they’ll somehow get people hooked on their particular chatbot?
The intentions of these companies are not good. Their entire valuation is not based on being a “force multiplier” or whatever bullshit, but on being able to threaten or fire workers if they don’t slot themselves into the newest enunciation of hype-based capital.
Anything you do to willingly boost or massage these corporate services is enabling actually vile companies to continue puffing air into their stupid pointless bubble until it bursts and the next generation has to eat tuna helper sans tuna just to be able to afford to live.
Does Linus support steaming artwork and a fascist surveillance state? Because using and supporting and entrenching the technology use is exactly that.
The other way of helping with that, is give Apple, Adobe and Windows a huge advantage, so people can’t easily move to free / open software.
It’s a lot more difficult to be controlled by a monopoly when the OS is free, and anyone can roll their own
At the moment, money is basically going straight to closed source US companies for all desktop computers. They control everything. Remember when Tim Cook gave Trump a gift publicly the other day? We KNOW Microsoft and Apple DEFINITELY aren’t on our side… They’re not even subtle about it anymore (weirdly though, it feels like Microsoft is more on our side these days than Apple)
Piracy is good, and AI is piracy 😏
I’m finding the allure of AI is particularly strong for people who have risen to positions of power where they had to stop doing the work themselves. Instead, they had to work through other people to get bigger projects done.
The allure is that you can just say what you want done, and it does it. If it’s done it “wrong” you can just tell it it’s wrong and not have to worry about arguing the technical differences. As such you feel like you get closer to what you wanted, rather than somebody else’s take on what you wanted.
The things is, when you are removed from the code, you can only work at a high level. That person you asked to do something is considering 10 other low level concerns that you didn’t consider. I think Linus’s recent patch series is a good example. He saw a potential optimisation, did a proof of concept but missed a race condition. He’s now handed it over to the person that normally works in that area and knows the details. Can the optimisation actually work? Who knows?
I find myself asking the same 3 questions when considering whether or not to use an AI tool.
Is it a straightforward task where I can save significant time with a tool?
Can I verify the results?
If the tool AI makes a mistake, or if I am not thorough enough in verification, is the risk of failure low?
I’m a firm believer is using the right tool for the right job. Most of the AI’s people are using are not designed for the things they are using them for, and I don’t see many practical uses for generative LLMs. I will acknowledge that there are purpose built AIs to be used as a tool, but even then most of them tend to do a below average job. We’re also seeing a lot of algorithmic driven models being labeled as AI, similar to calling something a “smart” device.
I mean, it would be better if you could write it in assembler.
The crashes would be inexplicable and intractable, but they’d be so damn efficient.
Proof: Rollercoaster tycoon
Is this the Linus Tech Tips guy? Isn’t he like a known asshole these days or something? Or am I thinking of another Linus?
this is Linus Torvalds, the guy who originally wrote Linux and is still in charge of kernel development
I feel about ai like i feel about cars. 90% of the idiots out there drive really poorly, but that doesn’t mean responsible people are smart to never drive a car. Same with AI, overwhelming majority of people are using AI incorrectly, i.e. recklessly dangerously, but that doesn’t mean responsible people should never use it.
The problem with “LLM requires skill to use correctly.” is that LLM’s are not being sold as a skill but rather the end of skill.
marketing departments have always lied
That is true but does not pertain to what I wrote.
To be more precise, LLMs’ present valuation in the market is not based on their being a skill so much as the end of skill.
Not really true.
LLM valuation in the market is aimed at several things, making unskilled people appear skilled is the smallest of them.
The most valuable position in the market right now is as a substitute of search enginesm
The second most valuable position in the market is as a tool to speed up work for already skilled people.
And I would argue that the third most valuable position in the market is a bot tool to substitute human iteration.
Unskilled people doing slop might be the most visible face of AI as it’s very annoying but it’s a minority of it’s market, just a very loud minority.
The most valuable position in the market right now is as a substitute of search enginesm
The second most valuable position in the market is as a tool to speed up work for already skilled people.
I perceive them as having equal value. In each case the technology is forced on users in a top-down way and results in worse outcomes.
I don’t expect you’ll agree; that’s not the same as what I wrote being “Not really true.”
Pretty good analogy because health damage from cars don’t just come from accidents, which are terrible and tragically visible, but from pollution which is a lot less visible yet kills even more.
That specifically might not on its own, but there are also a lot of other factors that definitely mean responsible people don’t drive. Even local LLMs map neatly onto EVs - they’re not as polluting day to day, but still require plenty of environmental damage to be built.
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.
I think he’s kinda right in that competent engineers can write good code using LLMs. I don’t know whether they’re actually more productive that way though. The problem lies in the fact that incompetent engineers can write a lot of bad, but good-looking code using LLMs, which might be a pretty big burden on the maintainers.
Also, comparing LLMs to compilers doesn’t really work in my opinion. Compilers follow strict rules and translate one kind of logic into a different kind of logic, while LLMs turn natural language and vague notions into some kind of logic. Writing code is telling the computer precisely what it should do and prompting is vaguely telling it what end result you want and those are two fundamentally different things.
But your analogy also breaks down because once an AI has written the code it’s very much concrete, right? The AI may choose to modify that concreteness into something differently concrete, but it’s not like you are in any doubt about what the AI comes out with (if you bother to check it, which you should).
I use to write asset systems during the AAA gaming part of my career and the elusive “[my] perfect file format” always eluded me.
Over the years I spent many a showers and long drives thinking about what the “perfect file format” needs and what kind of architecture would support this. I started formulating these into long text files and over time things crystallised into “yes this would work”.
I never had the time to write the code fully. A couple of false starts, coupled with “I should do this in rust even though I’ve been in C++ my whole life” meant it lingered and lingered.
The architecture felt right though.
Enter AI; feeding the spec text files to an AI made me resolve a couple of “ah, yes, but in practice this bit of information isn’t available yet” gotchas but the code worked. I worked in architectural layers, carefully checking input, internals and output of each before proceeding to higher layers. And tests and tests, that’s you would never have bothered to write yourself, kept each layer verifiable, even out in the far corners of reasonable.
It worked and it was real affirmation to see 20 years of pontification made real.
But then I started profiling it. And hot damn, an LLM knows nothing about cache, file systems nor does it think about ways memory allocators and virtual memory systems work.
There was 200-300% speed ups to gain from hand tuning it and iterating with a proper profiler.
And all of this happened at code level, with real concrete code.
So yeah, an AI can be a wonderful tool. And the code it produces and iterates on is concrete. It’s not like the AI starts from scratch every time you have a thought. So the very, very first pass is not deterministic. But the thing you deliver forwards very much is.
I agree with you here (and also cool project/idea). What I’m trying to get at with my analogy is that, if you understand a programme’s source code, you understand and are able to predict its behaviour in a meaningful way (although of course you lose some amount of knowledge of what the processor exactly does with which registers etc). When you only know the prompt used to generate a programme, you can’t do that. That’s why you have to manually check the code an LLM writes, but not the assembly generated by a compiler.
Linus accepting AI now says more about how far the technology has come than anything else. AI today is not the same as AI a year ago.
This is the thing I’m trying to advocate people to understand. It’s not that they were wrong about AI a year ago - AI has changed in radical ways people couldn’t confidently predict within just a year.
The AI coding agents a year ago DID create slop that would dillute your code base. The AI coding agents today generally don’t.
It’s becoming increasingly less valuable to combat your LLM and scrutinize it’s output. You can provide more market value by assuming it’s 95% correct, doing some manual verification, and architecting it in a way that leads to low integration complexity. The OOP principles are still relevant - abstract, encapsulate, etc.
I swear I’m not an AI bro despite the above comment being somewhat pro-AI. I’m just trying to be pragmatic about the state of our field.
I couldn’t agree more. There is a long list of valid reasons to hate on AI and the industry but AI = slop barely makes it onto the list anymore.
He used to be cool, but then he started following some corporate hype trends that make me suspicious, I think he is nearing retirement and doesn’t want to fight corpos anymore.
The moment he accepted Rust officially on the kernel was the time I knew he got a bit too old to care anymore… This is just a continuation.
Also is so curious to see the venn diagram of people supporting Rust and AI being mostly a circle. My theory is that Rust takes every piece of joy out of programming and thus the idea of never programming again becomes so attractive if you are surrounded by Rust.
I personally like Rust fine, it’s not my favorite or my strongest language but we’ve suffered stuff like Java for decades.
I don’t know how you came up with your rust <-> ai theory, that hasn’t been my experience at all.
