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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.
The comparison between AI and compilers is kind of stupid though. When you program in a given language, you’re writing out the entire logic and behavior of your program. Not to mention that the compiler is a deterministic machine, it will always behave in a certain manner and produce predictable results. On the other hand, using AI you just write a sentence and it can create a whole bunch of code that will not always be the same even if you always use the same model. Not to mention all od the detrimental effects AI has, cognitively speaking, when you start to rely on it.
His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
And he’s been 100% consistent with that since the start.
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.
as a pro-AI, anti-cloud nerd? All of these problems disappear when we address the real problem of Capitalism.
there are abandoned tech certs for building datacenters that produce 110% of their own electricity. these are distinct from the data mines these useless nerds want to build.
without capital, the surveillance state dies.
intellectual property is a capitalist myth invented to hold us back and induce rents, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
oh no, you fired me from a job I’d rather not have to do and I still get to survive because we slew capitalism? ahhh, how will I cope with the blow to my identity?
Ethics of using AI are different than the efficacy of using AI. Both are included in Impact of using AI, but some people need to tease the two apart.
If Linux kernel isnt using AI, the hackers certainly will. Moreover there are ethically trained models as well.
(Doing a whatabout ism, couldn’t find a good analogy) Wrt environmental impact, I don’t see an outrage against eating red meat, over fishing, fast fashion to be as prominent despite their well studied negative impact. Part of it is because they are culturally tied or impossible to escape. AI has become like that for most coding tasks specially around security.
I mean we all know that driving combustion engine cars is an absolutely terrible idea and incredibly inefficient from both a physics and a societal viewpoint. Yet, even most people that accept that fact don’t go around breaking up contact with their families or boycotting any business that uses ICE cars.
Sometimes we can be loud about the terrible impacts of a technology and demand stricter regulation while also leveraging the benefits ourselves. Maybe we can do a little bit ourselves. Like not owning a car or at least an EV. Or by being considerate about token use and using smaller or even local models for the lighter tasks.
Also llms are built on plagiarism. If you use llms, you are a plagiarist.
Edit: ah, you already mentioned it. Oh well.
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.
A sob story about the poor widdle smol bean petit bourgeois, making a proprietary closed source game to rent seek off of.
Why should I care about this class enemy?
You class traitors never care about actual working class people.
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.
bot
Scratch a copyright advocate, and a dehumanizer bleeds.
deleted by creator
Yeah, former…fuck off. Stop replying to me or I will block you.
Go look at their post history, then block them anyway :) Your Lemmy experience gets substantially better after you block a couple dozen trolls.
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!
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.
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 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.
I like the car analogy. I never had a car, and the last time I called to use one, I had had eye surgery and needed to get home.
There are many aspects of the analogy that match quite well:
- some types of motor vehicles like ambulances and trucks are clearly useful but most uses are not
- cars have a massive negative environmental impact (220 grams of CO2 per every kilometer, not to speak of toxic air pollution, photochemical smog, and particulate matter that appears to cause dementia)
- especially in cities, car feel much faster than they effectively are
- cars destroy cities and walkable communities, to such a degree that European cities like Paris come to new life after restricting cars
- cars are extremely convenient, such that they become an addiction quickly, and after a while you don’t even believe you can’t walk two miles on your feet. You even lose your sense of walking distances.
- cars massively increase the daily distance you travel, because of Marchetti’s constant (humans have a time budget of one hour travel a day), which changes your whole daily routines, leads to more distant work places, urban sprawl in housing, and after a while you are really physically dependent on them
- using cars is bad for your own health because it leads to lack of exercise, which leads to multiple common and deadly diseases
- cars do actually cost a lot of money which is sucked up by a corrupt industry and even more corrupt fossil fuel producers
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.”
I partially agree. If forced by stupid management results would clearly be worse.
Also people using LLM as search engines have a lot to do with internet entshitification. Surfing the web have become so obnoxious that asking an LLM the answer to something is easier.
This have two obvious conclusions from my point of view. First is that the best scenario would be a not entshitified internet. Second is that when LLMs, specially the big ones owned by big companies, get their dose of entshitification, users will be back on square one of not having a good way of extracting information out of this massive sea of information that we have built and which should be much easier to navigate.
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.
I mean, it would be better if you could write it in assembler.
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.
These things are certainly made addictive by design, like TikTok, YouTube, and modern social media.
And even if the Internet itself is useful, these addictive-by-design stuff is so harmful that it is likely that the net effect is negative.
Is Google Maps also an addiction? I’m entirely certain it’s reduced or even eliminated peoples ability to navigate to places by memory, eye or even the stars.
Fucking Socrates was against writing, because people would become lazy and not remember stuff and not discuss stuff and not listen, because they could just read it.
It is a fucking tool, because every person gets to decide how it’s used. You see lazy idiots use AI without knowledge or skill, and then assume the problem is AI, instead of the people. These people copy pasted Stack Overflow before, they didn’t change.
Why remove a tool from everyone, just because some idiots exist?
Because the “tool” is poisoning our water supply, burning our crops and delivering a plague unto our houses, only half-jokingly?
Also if “only” 99% of people use the autocomplete bot for nefarious/harmful uses, i fully believe the 1% should be deprived of the technology for the betterment of society. Id rather wait an extra 10 years for (insert pro ai talking point here) than let it continue to fuck every aspect of society including health, the economy, and entertainment.
I think that percentage could get as high as 33% “good actors” and 66% ignorant usage and still be valid.
All ai users are bastards, or something (obviously excluding high level STEM research, but even that is kinda sketchy; see mathematics atm)
Because the “tool” is poisoning our water supply, burning our crops and delivering a plague unto our houses, only half-jokingly?
Pivoting to other complaints entirely is not a sincere argument. You made a claim - someone countered it - you don’t get to pick another argument and maintain the same conclusion. That’s pretense.
AI is not a tool. Its an addiction
I totally agree. I’m watching people lose their drive to create and it’s so sad. They’re getting high off the satisfaction of “creating” without the work.
…and then they lose access to their wündertool and they can’t do anything.
agreed, a tool that you have to actively fight to do something well is a garbage tool. it’s like trying to cut some chicken meat with a knife that’s magnetically drawn to living beings. You can make some nice diced chicken with it, but it is way more likely that you’ll slip up and cut off your finger than with an actual knife.
regardless of the original intention, the purpose of generative “AI” is to become a manager that’s out of touch with the actual creation process, so at best no one will know how something works, at worst no one will be able to fix it if it breaks.
The same argument can be made about calculators.
A calculator isn’t a sycophant text extruder offered by megacorps via predatory tactics and doesn’t require half a little of water to operate last time I checked
A calculator that produces incorrect output from some input is broken. An LLM that produces broken code from a precise description is working as advertised.
You could say the same about a compiler
Sure, but, like, you wouldn’t.
Linus friggin’ Torvalds just did.
I have it create things for me that I would otherwise never have. I wanted an app for dream tracking. They were either pay walled, didn’t have the features I wanted, or both. Ai created what I wanted in a weekend. That’s just one example. I’ve created many single use apps as well.
If I’m at a takeaway store I take a photo of the board and it makes me an interactive menu that totals the price of what everyone wants and let’s us browse without trying to see the board and get in people’s way.
I don’t expect anyone else to use these. I don’t expect anyone else to want to use them. Though they’re welcome to. But if I can have a thing create exactly what I want and use it why not?
“but what if it has a bug and you lose a year of journals”. Well it created me manual timestamped backups as well as automatic timestamped backups to oauth Dropbox in a dedicated folder without the app having access to the rest of my Dropbox. It could crash everything and I would have every single thing safe in 2 places up to the most recent entry. And they’re just text files. I could take them anywhere if AI disappeared and the app broke tomorrow. I could just continue writing in notepad in the worst case until I found something else. But the app looks nicer and does interesting things.
The alternative to this isn’t me learning to code and spending months creating them. The alternative is them never existing.
I think AI is a tool but very advanced tool. AI is great tool but very unpredictable in many cases. I think it should be used because it makes coding more effective but as you say it kill every fun in coding. As Linus said tool is not important if code is great. If you used AI and its good then why not. Sometimes you can write worse code then AI. But on other side yes it can be hard for repository owners when they must reject tons of shit code created with AI. So it have advantages and disadvantages and when do you want some fun (or maybe some security stuff) don’t use it.
An unpredictable tool is a useless tool. A hammer does what it says it will: apply force at the head. AI straight up lies, is objectively wrong, or doesnt work. Thats a garbage tool.
Eventually youre going to ask it to do something you dont know how to do, and you wont be able to fact check it. Thats when the harm happens (or just mild inconvenience, but in my professional case, harm).
If the linux kernel breaks due to a bug introduced by AI or built on a pile of code no one truly understands, we’re set back anyways. Better to avoid that and make sure all code is human written/understood
Early compilers sucked, and still beat using raw assembly.
How does this calculus work if AI finds a bug introduced by humans?
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.
I’m no expert but a compiler does not equal and LLM built on stolen data
Neither does the use of an LLM mean you do not understand thoroughly what you submit. He doesn’t give a crap how the code was created, as long as you, the human (I hope), understand what you are submitting and can take accountability for it. You are still responsible for whatever crap comes out of an LLM, the same way that you are responsible for what comes out of the compiler. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use compilers or LLMs.
Why not be transparent though?
Do they require disclosure of what font the developer used for coding the patch? No one thinks it matters, but no reason not the be transparent, right?
The reason not to require disclosure is because in their opinion it doesn’t matter any more than the font matters. If the person reviewing the code can’t tell it’s AI, and the code stands on its own, then it stands on its own. If they can tell then it doesn’t meet code standards anyway.
A perspective that I don’t disagree with is that “disclosure” can be a shield for the developer to hide behind. “Anything weird wasn’t me being dumb, just the AI being wonky”, and that’s writing an excuse for subpar code. You submitted it, it’s your code, and if you can’t justify some dumb bit in it then you deserve the shame without the help of a face saving “it was the AI”.
Furthermore - I suspect he doesn’t even care if you understand it. He cares if it works reliably. If you accomplish the task of solving hard problems by taking shrooms and dancing naked on your keyboard, I don’t see why he would care.
It doesn’t work reliably, though. It had a race condition he missed due to LLM-induced brainrot.
Morality of using resources that someone else stole is ‘muddy’ to say the least but the majority of modern society would not function if we didn’t look the other way.
For example, I hope you’re not living anywhere in NA or most of Africa or many areas in Europe or some areas in Asia. Because if you are, you’re probably standing on stolen resources.
That’s a straw man argument at best. You act as if I can control where I live (though I’ve work for multiple reperation charities to help with this exact issue because I know I live on stolen land and I want to give it back).
Knowingly using stolen property to “create” something is not the same as living on stolen land that was stolen two plus centuries ago.
And honestly I find it a little pathetic that that’s the comparison you tried to go for.
AS I said to the other dude, I’m not going to keep coming up with examples because you’ll just keep moving the goal posts. There are tons of examples of something of value, natural or man made, being stolen and later treated as a common good.
Just do some research.
Can’t shame someone for being born in a certain place.
This is just one example. I’m not going to keeping punting just for you to move the goal posts.
It’s a mix of conquered, purchased and stolen land
Conquered is a funny way of saying stolen.
Coerced purchasing, or purchasing from someone else who stole, or purchasing under intentionally false understanding, is still stealing.
killing the previous owner has been a long established way of getting land for thousands of years
Yes that’s one of the mechanisms to steal the land
theft requires a victim, the dead do a bad job of filling that role
You’re disgusting
So I assume you agree that if someone murdered you, you would prefer they go free and live a happy life.
After all what would they be punished for. There is no victim.
Piracy is good, and AI is piracy 😏
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.
