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Torvalds is doing an illicit substitution of Claude, Gemini, Copilot et al. for the vague term AI, which also includes local models, open-weight models and things that aren’t LLM (machine translations, for example), thus ignoring the ethical issues associated with the operation of commercial AI/LLM services.
Most tokens sold come from China today and open weight models, and
most(EDIT) 42% of energy produced in China is from clean sources like nuclear or renewables. Don’t blame AI for ethics or lack thereof in neoliberal capitalism and a lack of planning or regulations. China also has the most and smartest regulations on AI so far.• Specific Sources (Recent 12-month baseline via Low Carbon Power): • Coal: ~54% of electricity consumption • Hydropower: ~14% • Solar: ~12% (split evenly between utility-scale and behind-the-meter) • Wind: ~11% • Natural Gas: ~3% • Nuclear: ~4% • Biofuels / Biomass: ~2%
That would be China today.
Thanks for correcting. But overall the trend rapidly goes upwards year by year for china.
The more general argument would be that you can’t blame an individual for systemic ills, which has been done to death for climate change and tried to turn it into personal responsibility. We do not live in true democracies but capitalist societies. And we can’t be expected to “opt out of the system”. If something could be implemented in a way that is ethical but isn’t because the ruling plutocrats make more profit that way, this is not the individuals fault. This demonization of people for using AI is unethical and a strategic blunder in a fight for liberation and ultimately only serves to shield specifically neoliberal capitalism from critique.
a great way to find joy in programming
I already had that, thanks Linus. Did you not?
Linus Torvalds is correct.
Often enough to give his statements serious consideration.
I don’t understand what’s he talking about. I was forced to use AI by my employer and instantly lost all the joy in programming.
Have it do the tedious work
Have it create a better testing environment
Have it do bunch of edge case things or automate ui testing.
Use it as a tool. You can still be the brains.
I’m doing all that, but it’s not the same. I’m no longer writing code and it was my favorite part of the job. I guess I was lucky to have a job I enjoyed, now I join the 87% of people who hate their job.
That’s your managers fault then not ai itself if you can’t use it how you want to
What happens if you write the code and your LLM agents write the unit tests, maintain the CI scripts, keep the requirements and specifications and comments in sync with what the code actually does, reviews your code and points out potential problems?
LLMs are actually the best “employees” I’ve ever had, they don’t get their feelings hurt, they usually do what they’re told after a few reinforcement instructions. They’re forgetful, but willingly write and refer to comprehensive notes.
The thing to realize is: you have always been the brains. It’s just a tool. If you try to let it be the brains, you’ll just get the miserable end of the deal and it will be doing an inadequate job as “the brains,” making your end of the relationship even more miserable.
That’s how I felt when I found MDMA, and it allowed me to find joy in parties and being around people. If used responsibly, of course.
I’m getting exactly the same feeling with AI now. It is instant dopamine fun, but I can see it being addicting in exactly the same way. Of course I tell myself I’ll use it responsibly, for work, and keep my skills sharp by making sure to do some of my own projects, and be responsible in properly reviewing and checking my code.
Just as I told myself that I’ll keep a healthy pause of two months between mdma use, and have a rogorous vitamine and supplements plans based on the most recommended harm reduction research.
Sure, I did manage to do that for the first half a year or so, you can guess how it is now.
It’s pretty unsettling how exactly the same it feels, the way you slowly start giving up on things you’ve sworn to do, and how you slowly start to be unable to do/enjoy the thing (be it parties or coding) without it.
Suddenly Lemmy is going to explain to me why AI is the best thing ever.
It’s a thing, good for some things, not so great for others.
It’s a new thing, people are just starting to figure out what it’s really good for. It’s also improving rather dramatically over the past year, hard to say if that’s the start of an exponential curve, or if we’re hitting an s-curve rolloff already…
If it continues to grow its energy / environmental impact at the current growth rate, that’s a bad thing, but it’s not “in a bad place” yet… if you’re outraged about the last 2 years of AI environmental impact, you should have already been apopleptic over the past 15 years of Bitcoin’s environmental impacts.
Nah im still firmly anti AI regardless of what daddy says. Still based, but hypnotized by the tokens.
So what happens when AI can recode on demand… Rather than programming a game, a gaming AI just generates the game as you play it.
Rather than writing a program, it just codes and runs the code at the same time… so that what you need is there when you request it to be.
Code chunks being put together and pulled apart as required. What then?
Rather than writing a program, it just codes and runs the code at the same time
Yeah, so there’s been a lot of improvement very quickly over the last year in LLM agent’s coding abilities.
If they continue to improve at an exponential improvement rate like they have been… maybe 5-10 years from now you might see such a “code and run” as you make the descriptions LLM performance, for simpler things.
I’m curious, with “unlimited access” to the inference engine hardware capabilities, just how much faster the LLM agents can run when they’re not in timeshare over the internet mode?
so what happens when i start barfing up gold coins and never can’t afford food again, what then?
There’ll be no gold coins, or individual programs anymore. Programming will be extinct.
bad bot
Fuck off dickhead.
Hey, I’d only be killing people objectively bad for humanity. Trump and his allies, Putin, my ex-wife, Saudi Arabia’s crown Prince, Netanyahu, that guy who cut me off in traffic last month, Rupert Murdoch, the Ellison family…
And then yesterday he said something along the lines of “we need to make it harder to contribute to the Linux kernel.” Which I believe he means to say “oh god there’s so much being submitted all of a sudden and it’s all slop.”
"Well, well, well if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. "
- Linus Probably
Ah, yes, “when used responsibly.” Like how we use drugs, alcohol, guns, cars, money, power, and everything else responsibly? Humans can’t be trusted with things that do more harm than good when used irresponsibly.
Some humans cannot own knives responsibility. It doesn’t mean I have to cut the pineapple with a spoon.
Correct - knives do more good than harm, even when some people use them irresponsibly. My point is that AI doesn’t; even when some people could arguably say that they use it responsibly and do good work, those that use it for slop, to perpetuate disinformation, and to further degrade our ability to think critically outweigh those people.
AI is the car of modern times. It’s convenient, ruinous for the environment, and a danger to anyone in proximity of one. Hell, we even wasted tons of land on highways kinda like what we’re doing with datacenters. But boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
Not so long ago, face to face interaction was the only way business was transacted, people were employed and paid.
In today’s world, if we could get past the baseless RTO mandates and let the 60% or whatever it is of modern workers work from home or wherever is convenient for them to work, get the commuters off the roads, restructure the food distribution systems to eliminate that need for cars, we really could make a significant improvement in the environmental impact of cars and trucks.
In the world of AI, I suspect a huge chunk of current AI usage, energy burned in data centers, etc. is “wasteful” - investigational, experimental, learning usage. If we can get past that kind of usage and eventually use it for what it’s good for and leave it alone for counterproductive wastes of time, it should also be a clear net-benefit for “getting stuff done” not only faster, but more correctly and valuably. Which software is more valuable: one coded by humans over the course of a year, with a half dozen undiscovered security vulnerabilities, or one coded by those same humans over the course of a month with those vulnerabilities exposed and fixed?
If you’re concerned about the environment, those humans commuting to work for an extra 11 months add up to far more environmental impact than the AI they used to accelerate their work. Good luck getting their employer to give them 10 months off with pay for delivering the same valuable product faster and better.
There is one key difference though, drivers and car manufacturers are sometimes held accountable for their actions
sometimes held accountable for their actions
Very weak theater.
Then just let AI use AI. I’ll collect my Nobel prize now thx.
You might want to rethink that position: https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai
Sorry, I don’t really feel like reading anything from Anthropic atm (I might later, it sounds interesting), but my actual, non-sarcastic position on the matter is fuck LLMs; they should not be doing any sort of policymaking.
Long story short: AI using AI can find ways to run itself on TV set top boxes and similar common IoT devices, as part of a bot-net. It can also find ways to self-propogate such bot-nets across many surprisingly low powered and widely distributed devices in our world.
“Knives cause lots of stabbings, so let’s ban knives”
“Guns cause a lot of shootings, so let’s ban guns”
~ any reasonable country on the planet
All those things, including knives, are heavily regulated, yes.
I’m sorry, who or what exactly regulates knives? Knife manufacture? Knife ownership? Even knife sales… If you’re referring to ballistic knives or switchblades, sure - those are like guns, but the 99.999% of knives in the world? The ones anybody with a piece of metal can hammer out and sharpen for themselves?
In plenty of countries carrying knives in public is not allowed. You can own one for use in your home or work but don’t brandish it out in the open.
The reason few people know this is because it’s rarely ever needed, and the people violating that law are generally the people you want arrested anyway (e.g. because they’re trying to stab someone).
I see nothing special about knives in that respect, though I have no doubt there are laws.
Making credible threats of killing or seriously injuring people, with whatever tools, would seem to be a good basis for arrest.
Nice try to equating a knife to fucking drugs. AI is even worse than drugs, is like the digital version of nuclear weaponry: it shouldn’t even exist.
I swear, some people still think Prohibition was a great idea.
I mean, it is how ice cream became so popular… https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ice-cream-prohibition-era-craze
However, the end of Prohibition was a much better idea than the start of it.
It was.
If the goal was to reduce the amount the average American drank alcohol year over year (and that was the goal) it was an overwhelming success; not only during prohibition but thereafter as well.
Banning stuff and then enforcing the ban works really well and we have tons of evidence of it working; not just in the US but literally world-wide.
You seem to have missed the 1001 negative side effects of Prohibition, that eclipsed the tiny ideological victory of reducing drinking.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/unintended-consequences
Additionally, there is no consensus on whether Prohibition was even successful at that, owing to a lack of hard data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
This is quite aside from the fact that today we’ve figured out that criminalising drugs and users is the wrong approach and does a lot more harm than good. But we STILL have people like you.
There’s an example used in regulatory circles: electricity would never be permitted in homes under today’s regulatory standards - we only accept it and its hazards because it is so incredibly common and useful in daily life and we’ve been accepting it since before we cared so deeply about safety.
So, have today’s goalposts moved so much that “AI” no longer passes modern society’s definitions of acceptable? I feel like such a technology would have been cheerfully embraced in the 1960s.
…Verily?
Honestly, if I can use an AI agent that is not coming from an evil corporation that’s destroying the environment, I would use it to help me solve problems like figuring out why I have a build error, why I’m getting certain error messages, why a piece of code isn’t working as I expected, find potential bugs, etc.
It can be a great tool to help you grow, like having a tutor explain where and why you made a mistake so you can learn from it.
NOT if you ask it to do the job for you and generate your code.
I used a local model today to write a long form regex for me today. it would have taken me 30 minutes. instead it took 3 seconds and worked out of the box.
I think this is a perfect example of what LLMs should be used for.
Ok. But did you understand the regex? That’s what people are missing out on. The learning aspect.
absolutely. I know regex, better than most devs I know personally.
I also don’t use it all the time. I happened to have it up and just said, “hey fucker, give me the pcre regex to find all instances of these keywords in a string like this”
reviewed it, threw what I had into my code, ran my tests and everything was golden.
That’s the neat part, you can.
If I had to pick one, it’d be Olmo 3 from Ai2: Non-profit. Ai2 is a research institute, not a company that needs to sell you a subscription or harvest your prompts. Fully open, not just “open weights” Ai2 publishes the training data, the training code, every checkpoint and the logs. Anyone can check exactly what went in, and in principle rebuild it from scratch. You don’t have to take their word for anything.
Runs locally. The 7B version runs on an ordinary gaming laptop or a recent MacBook. Your code never leaves your machine, there’s no data centre involved when you use it, and the energy cost is your laptop being on. Apache 2.0 licence. No usage restrictions and no strings attached.
Good enough for the tutor use case. Explaining errors, walking through why code misbehaves, and pointing out likely bugs are all well within what it can do.
To be fair about it: the training data is largely scraped from the web, like nearly every model. The difference is that Olmo is honest and auditable about it.
If strict consent matters most to you, StarCoder2 is cleaner (only permissively licensed code, with an opt-out)
Devstral is very good
stop trying to force a reality that fits your narrative
lol how many tokens did you burn today
Its been an hour, the chatbot hasn’t given them the perfect retort yet.
Perfect retort to name-calling? FM69’s comment is not exactly a rhetorical masterpiece.
I find this comment a kind of masterpiece, because there was both no actual name calling, and you refuse to type FartMaster’s actual name.
believe it or not i have the ability to still use my mind even when there are tools at my disposal! And I was at the local veggie market talking to people during that hour, so sadly again your narrative is wrong 😞 your response, however, pretty low effort… might need to throw a captcha at you
You won’t trick me into solving basic logic problems that you and your bot cannot!
let’s see, i woke up and did jiu jitsu. I went to the local vegetable market with my dog, bought some breakfast and got some coffee and practiced my Spanish with the vendor. I spoke with a nice lady about art residencies and her desire to live an alternative lifestyle even though shes 75. I had a conversation about iterative prisoner’s dilemma game theory. Then I came home and now I’m replying to your low dimensional attempt at an insult, while spending some tokens to fix a form validation bug across a web app 💙
Ew, a web sloper even.
how sad that’s what you decided to highlight…
How sad that you engage in sloppery.
this transports me back to high school level communication, thanks for the nostalgia 😄 🙏
I’ve been thinkin:
We went from STEM to STEAM. But I think we really need SHTEAM. (The H is for Humanities.)
Philosophy, psychology, history, basically anything that would get nerds to think about the social consequences of the stuff they like to tinker with.
Warning! very unpopular opinion
Title
I hate STEAM, preferred when it was just STEM.
very unpopular opinion
True! I think your opinion sucks lemming! 😎 /s
But seriously, while I do think STEAM sounds a little dumb compared to STEM (and I’m young enough where I saw the name changing happening in real time and despite being at the age where it’s easy to impress on kids, I never really cared for the name), I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to teach STEM kids and professionals more about the non-tech side of hard sciences and subjects.
SHTEAM sounds and looks stupid as shit, but we should absolutely take steps to properly educated up-and-coming STEM majors that they need to understand how their work and inventions affect humanity, along with actually having an appreciation for the work that they will do. Not teaching these things is how we create idiots that are proudly declaring “Mecha hitler” and “AI will kill us all, and that’s good!”
People complain about electives and gen ed classes in college like, “why do I, a science major, have to take an ethics class?” and then go on to become Sam Altman. As a STEM major, I fucking hate those people. I understand you want to get your money’s worth in college, but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory. I have learned so much about people and become more knowledgeable about humans and empathy through arts and ethics classes, and have gained an appreciation for them. It also affects how you do tech in general too. So often do I hear about coders, security analysts, data scientists, etc who make music, art, literature etc, and feel like it affects and improves how they work.
but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory.
Fuck it, one of each. Programmers had the opportunity to show they could handle not getting a humanities education with their diploma and they blew it.
So SHTEM?
That looks like it’s the name for an STD
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again : eventually you just fucking end up with “be a complete person; here’s the entire dewey decimal system.”
STEM is meant to deal with logic based thinking and the problems unique to that industry, like for instance, a huge gender gap. Shoving arts and humanities in doesn’t fix the issue. Cross disciple collaboration is great, expanding your horizons and putting ethics into practices is great, but that’s not what STEM is.
There are already plans for these things in practice (hippocratic oath, iron[1] ring[2] ), which need to become more widespread. We don’t have to have STEAM toys and SHMEAT courses.
There’s many good reasons why even Bachelor of Science degrees have such a load of core courses across the academic spectrum.
Yes. That stuff is necessary. I am agreeing with that, while maintaining that “STEM specific initiatives” need to be STEM specific. I’m talking about conferences and toys, not courses.
The fucking point that Linus misses is, using AI by itself is intrinsically the more irresponsible thing to do. Change my mind.
How do? Does this apply even if it’s a locally run LLM? Even if it’s done using green energy like Mistral? Even if all of the AI written code is carefully reviewed by professionals?
Is it a problem of making it too easy for people? If so, what is the correct amount of easiness for people? Shall we start taking clothing down to the river to scrub instead of using washing machines too?
attack it with ethics!
You are claiming it’s irresponsible, why do you say so?
AI is just a technology, how you use it makes it bad or not.
Nuclear is the cleanest safest energy we have, but you can also make bombs with it.
The “no such thing as a bad tool” argument falls apart if you start thinking about it for longer than a few seconds. If you have a hammer made out of styrofoam, that’s a bad hammer.
I’ve read this article before. Found it very reductionist. For example, it says that weapons might be good for Ukraine, but they’re bad in general. You can’t just “in general” something like weapons or AI. They have thousands of different contexts and use cases. Sure, a weapon can make somebody homocidal in one context, but it might make somebody a militia in another context. AI can be a slop generator for a vibe coder, and a bug detection tool for Linus Torvalds.
I’m not a fan of how modern politics and social justice is so reductionist nowadays. “One aspect of X is bad, so we must reject X altogether”. Can we add even a little nuance to our discussions? This mindset is brainrot.
A tool is thus any kind of thing that lets you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to.
Immediately goes on to using a fork as an example. Wtf are you doing eating with a fork that you couldn’t be doing with your bare fingers?
Argument is stupid, and falls apart at the first hint of critical thinking.
Wtf are you doing eating with a fork that you couldn’t be doing with your bare fingers?
Preach. There was a lot of fuss made when I was in school about “humans are the only animals who use tools” - of course by then all kinds of animals had been documented clearly using tools, but they were still teaching the kiddos (self included) that “humans are special.”
I have been making and using software tools for 45 years, a tool is something you use to make a job easier, faster, cleaner, safer, a tool might make the impossible possible, but that’s far from a requirement for “tool-ness.”
In other words, you found an article whose headline seems to make your point for you - which you probably didn’t even read or you might have an actual answer. I did read it, and found the reasoning spurious, like jumping through a series of philosophical hoops to prove all taxes are illegal or that birds don’t exist. The author’s example of a Chinese dish with an unusually large amount of chopped peppers being more easily eaten with chopsticks than with a fork, could just as well have been a bowl of broth that’s much easier to eat with a spoon than with chopsticks. All it demonstrates is that any tool can have appropriate and inappropriate use cases. They’re still just tools.
I read it
I read it
Did AI translate it for you first?
intrinsically the more irresponsible
That doesn’t claim it’s intrinsically irresponsible. You can use AI responsibly
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