Cory Doctorow’s “Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI” has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn’t have a boss and has untold resources for whatever “AI” “tools” he finds useful.
He isn’t ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn’t do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn’t have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new “tool”. He simply uses what’s useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.
95% of people don’t have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the “tool” that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.
I don’t see how this means he’s wrong though, if people are hating AI as a proxy for hating their abusive relationship with their employer, that doesn’t seem like a strong argument that everyone who isn’t in that situation must also hate AI.
It doesn’t mean he’s wrong! it means he’s out of touch and doing the propaganda work of capital for free much like many other self-employed/business owning/petit-borgeois people who think they’re on the side of capital.
It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this “tool” is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.
Blind hatred for AI as a technology is inherantly reactionary, but that doesn’t mean that the implementation of the technology today isn’t problematic in many ways.
Oh my god a reasonable take for once. Thank you for putting into words why his heel-turn has bothered me so much
Yeah I notice he doesn’t address the costs, economic and environmental, of LLM proliferation. Way to ignore a large part of the argument while calling anyone opposed to your position stupid.
I hope he gets to eat those words one day, but I doubt he would ever admit he was wrong.
I guess I have that luxury, but I sacrificed hard to get where I’m at.
And, truthfully, way more people could do it if they didn’t feel entitled to the easy way (college > world destroying corp).
Entirely irrelevant to the conversation at hand but okay
new and interesting tools
Looks Under The Generative AI Hood
Sees Snakeoil Salesman Selling Labotomies As The Future
AI is just a tool, the user of a tool should be competent enough to use it properly
The other practical side of this is enforceability.
Lets say Linux banned all use of VSCode in contributions, this second. And any Microsoft tools. No exceptions. And it makes sense, because there is an evil blatantly anti-linux entity behind it… What are people gonna do?
Keep using it anyway, and just not disclose it.
This is why linux doesn’t tell people what tools they can and can’t use. Practically, they can’t police what tools people use, just what they contribute. Just like (to a reasonable degree) they don’t try to police people who contributes to the kernel, but instead judge them by their contributions. Other contributors don’t have to like those tools or contributors, but that is how a project like this must operate.
Maybe the rule should be that if you use AI, just make sure Linus can’t tell you did.
the thing is - no other tool (currently yall_cant_read) in our industry, and others, out there involves as much active destruction in both the working class and environment in its use.
that’s it. that’s the bit.
for those not understanding: the word “in” above implies in current use not that i am comparing AI’s effects with the invention of knitting machines or electricity.
No it’s just the newest tool that does that.
Are your clothes machine knitted? Do you know you’re destroying the jobs of people who hand knitted clothes? And let’s not forget the art form of hand knitting that is now being insulted by people who buy machine knitted clothes without a care. And let’s not forget about the environmental impact of knitting machines that require electricity while hand knitting doesn’t!
The same could be said about so many things.
There isn’t really a fundumental difference thar I can see between AI and other tools, at least that I can see.
the newst tool happens to be the one doing the most destruction, so… yes.
also: i do knit, lol. just a coincidence in example.
I don’t think AI is the most destructive at all. AI is responsible for around 1% of carbon emissions (do your own research if you want a proper source). There are so many things, such as cars that emit way more than this.
As for job loss there are so many things that have eliminated so many more jobs. Tractors, knitting machines, production lines, automation in factories etc. No one says we should stop using tractors so we can have more jobs for farmers.
also: i do knit, lol. just a coincidence in example.
That’s funny, I’ve got a half knitted scarf somewhere but I’ve never gotten into it properly.
get back to the scarf! i have a blanket im working on too lol.
but yeah. i think from our sw/eng industry, ai is at the least the one with the steepest destructive “curve”, i suppose.
ty for your reply.
Now do it for the planned capacity of every AI data center currently planned or under construction or waiting for compute manufacturing by the big tech monopolists, and the trillions of dollars of labor that they’re telling the world they’ll replace whether the product is capable of it or not.
The bot doesn’t have to be able to do your job to displace your labor. It only has to convince your boss that it can. Right now the big tech monopolists are actively convincing the entire world’s bosses that they can replace your labor. This doesn’t have to be true to be a labor issue, and it certainly doesn’t have to be true to be a devastating economic bubble.
Could have said the same about the invention of electricity
The invention of the light bulb.
That has been SO much worse than the negatives we’ve seen with AI. If anyone is interested, that is a horrible story socially, industrially, environmentally, etc. Definitely worth reading about.
yes. indeed. two things can be true at once.
The cotton gin. The ink press. The player piano. Vhs. Photoshop. Audio in film.
You’re so wrong it’s laughable.
Explain to me how Photoshop is comparably destructive as AI is lol. Also the cotton gin replaces slave labour primarily. Idk if that’s what you want to put up as an example here.
none of those are examples of things in our current era doing as much damage as ai lol. can you not comprehend the comment i made?
here is the email this screenshot is an excerpt of; the specific “X” (the thing which the message Linus is replying to here suggested perhaps AI should not be used for) was the writing of commit messages.
That does change things a bit
When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.
Vague criticisms, fallacious reasoning, highly emotive language, little response to attempts at discussion (though some might engage in disingenuous discussions of shifting goalposts here and there to discourage particularly vocal engagees from future participation). So I’d say that Linus is just the latest convenient scapegoat in an Anti-AI ‘trend’ that will have little impact on the rate of AI adoption in the long run.
Sucks that I waited until now to try to form a measured opinion on AI because now all the discussions on the internet are hot garbage.
Measured perspectives are hard to come by. A Marxist Perspective On AI
I got banned from the Fuck AI community for saying Linus isn’t stupid. Not that he’s right on AI, just that he’s not stupid.
Indeed, the atmosphere is toxic.
We’re on a site where people happily discuss their arr stack or transpiring the PS5 system, but bemoan AI is killing artists and coding.
There are real ethical issues, job impacts, environmental issues, property rights issues (real and intellectual), privacy, a stack of cards economy etc.
But there is also utility, and frankly the genie is out of the bottle. For better or worse.
Catching kernel bugs in Linux with AI should be seen as a good because they’re not being exploited offensively by private actors. AI review that catches the most annoying 80% of errors or issues saves human time, while not contributing slop to the kernel.
There is a lot to discuss if you show up in good faith.
Also, Linus is an asshole. Why would anyone be surprised he reacted like an asshole? His point on his expectations is actually clear and sensible to me. He probably could have said just that, but he’s an asshole, and acting how you would expect after a bunch of people are yelling at him.
Just don’t engage with any community that starts with “fuck” if you have any kind of nuance for the subject matter.
It’s not a great time. If you don’t get banned, you’ll get dogpiled with angry and idiotic comments anyway, by people who have decided their own facts already.
Nuance is a hard concept to get in most Lemmy comment threads. It’s obvious it’s just a tool that uses an insane amount of resources that can do some good in certain applications. The problem stems from it being abused for evil and stupid things.
Can AI be used to help flag cancerous growths in x rays and help save lives? Absolutely! Can it also be used to track every human being on the planet for surveillance purposes while its proponents build massive biome-destroying data centers to act as the infrastructure? It sure can!
All that said, I still don’t feel confident about rolling in AI code to open source projects when bots aren’t accountable to their contributions. They should require a huge amount of oversight which I doubt is happening at the moment.
Agreed.
On AI contributed code I’m always confused, if I put MY name on it and push it I am stating it meets my standards. If I allow a Claude contributed commit into my code, I am stating Claude passed my standards.
If someone is contributing and it’s not up to standards, why is it getting merged? If it’s a maintainer and they’re merging crap with review or standards then you couldn’t have actually trusted them pre-LLMs.
Ever since the first iteration of GitHub Copilot it was always your responsibility to make sure contributions to your project were correct. The beauty of open source is that when a project jumps off a cliff you can fork it or make your own.
Partially what is good about Linus is historically Linux has said no to crap, and the Linux team expend considerable effort to remove crap they realized was crap too late.
From my layperson understanding, the true program is not the lines of code, it’s the model that lives in the programmer’s brain. The code is just an extension of that.
If it needs debugging, it is the mental model that helps. If you need to add a feature, same thing. If a few years go by and no one remembers how the code works, rebuilding that mental model is the first step in making progress.
I suspect that it used to be that if someone contributed good code to the kernel project, it meant that they had a sufficient mental model. But with AI, it can seem like they do.
Maybe if you’re Linus your understanding of the kernel is so strong it would take years to atrophy, if at all. I don’t know. But developers in general?
Too many times in my work life, people have told me one thing, but it turns out that AI invented that and they didn’t really know what they were talking about. On things that I’m an expert in, I can catch it. But if I’m not an expert, I don’t realize the mistake until a consequence occurs.
Allowing AI is basically making it so the maintainers have to be complete experts in everything they accept. Maybe that was already the case, but that is my layperson understanding of it.
I want to expand on your first thought and just say that in my experience the internet as a whole is not a great place for nuanced takes, and I’ve noticed that becoming mirrored in reality over the last decade. Perhaps its been happening for longer.
There’s so much going on, and so many actors trying to influence the masses. I don’t blame anyone for having different conclusions to my own, there’s an almost untrackable amount of sources to draw information (and disinformation) from. I just hope we can get to a point together where we can (again?) discuss nuance without ceding to emotion.
I got banned from saying not all that is called ai is bad by giving video game npcs from the last decades as an example.
I thought it was just llms that they where against but nope. I imagine Alan Turing spinning in his grave.
We have our share of radicals
I would like to reiterate that posting on main as an admin is obnoxious since we can’t block you.
Consider using an alt to post unless performing official instance actions.
Button is right there man
the button is there, but clicking it does not do anything, can’t do it via the profile or searchbar either
What are you using? Web or some app?
I would like to reiterate that posting on main as an admin is obnoxious since we can’t block you.
If you can’t block me, that’s an issue with your Lemmy client, because the default web client isn’t stopping you.
blocked.
It’s a pretty reductive take, that treats tools as politically and behaviorally inert. The work on understanding how cultural artifacts use us just as much as (or maybe more than) we use them goes back several centuries.
But Linus is just an engineer, after all. There’s no reason to treat him as some high-minded philosopher (and he’d probably be the first to tell you that). And for as long as the history of thought into the politics of artifacts may be, the history of engineers focusing only on solving the problem in front of them and not thinking about “where the rockets come down” is about as long.
I have mixed opinions on his stance towards AI.
I confess, I’m guilty. I’ve used AI to diagnose random issues with my little personal blog (please don’t hate me, I’m just a man without a degree). That said, I understood the simple code well enough to see what I was getting wrong and comprehend the AI generated suggestion, so it wasn’t all that different than looking things up on a wiki and implementing it. The primary difference, for me, was that I had already spent two weeks digging deeper and deeper for my answers, only finding outdated or incorrect information, and Claude delivered the correct answer in about 10 seconds.
In my opinion, the reason it was a good idea to implement the AI generated code was that I understood it. There was a human brain looking at that result and going “aha! I see what I was missing!” If I hadn’t understood what I was looking at, it could have been doing anything, and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable implementing it. If I hadn’t at least tried to the old fashioned way first, I wouldn’t have used it. But after weeks of hitting dead ends and with the knowledge that there was an extremely powerful tool that could give me my answer in seconds, it began to feel foolish to continue punishing myself with wasted time.
In Linus’ case, I think it is safe to say he understands enough about Linux to interpret the AI suggestions and be a safeguard against slop. I’m not too concerned about his contributions to the kernel if he’s using AI to think outside the box or diagnose a complicated problem.
But! There is a major risk factor when people start implementing code that they don’t understand, or when it is a crutch for their total lack of comprehension. Vibe coding and using a diagnostic tool are different things. I hope Linus gives some real thought to the realistic limits that need to be in place for people who aren’t knowledgeable enough to filter AI suggested code through their own brains, because it wouldn’t take long to destroy a reliable system like Linux if they incorporate AI generated code with no experienced human in the drivers seat.
Apologies to those who just fundamentally hate AI and think I’m a fool for using it, I just wanted to share my experience as an unschooled computer nerd who finally gave in and tried it out a couple of times.
Educated computer nerd here. AI has fundamentally changed how you do CS in industry, it’s completely unavoidable at this point and not using it in some capacity is doing yourself a massive disservice. It’s able to catch edge cases we’d never have caught otherwise. The important part is indeed understanding what it’s doing and keeping contributions organized/concise.
That doesn’t make it any less scary from an ethics and model oversight perspective, but from the perspective of the project it is fundamentally just another tool. Linus appears to feel this way too. Frankly I’d be more concerned if there weren’t people using AI on Linux, especially to validate kernel level security.
Strangely idgaf about whether he respects me
I don’t think he thinks about you at all
👍🏻 The vast majority of people don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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 for years.
Richard Stallman is…a weird little guy.
Whether you like it or not Linus is still the Linux guy.
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 🤷♂️
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!
When people say desktop laptop is implied in that too.
Gamers are about to step into this conversation…you sure you want to continue? :-)
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
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’.
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.
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.
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.
https://nitter.miningtcup.me/twtayaan/status/2109668665951941101
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.
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.
Fully agree with Linux.
Ai is a tool. Learn how to properly use it or not use it like you prefer, it’s a goddamn tool.
If you are a bad coder you will still be a bad coder using AI. If you are a good coder, you will be a faster good coder with AI.
It’s a fucking tool.
Except Torvalds is now a bad coder with AI.
AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline. Looks like we have a great example in Torvalds, outside of the research papers already released.
AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline
source?
One example.
One example.
Got something that has more than 18 participants split into 3 groups for a total sample size of 6 people per control group? Not to mention its focus on AI assisted essay writing, measuring cognitive debt (not decline), using EEG to infer performance of higher cognitive function, etc.
These research papers talking about AI leading to cognitive decline seem so asinine when certain people’s productivity has just skyrocketed under AI.
Sure the hand coding capabilities decline, but that’s replaced by thinking around the actually product or architecture.
A huge sect of new Linux users and Selfhosters are talking about how much AI has enabled them yet we’re still bringing up papers on cognitive decline that were written on models from 3-4 years ago when Claude Code didn’t even exist.
literally me, i started using ai to help me self host shit. i now know how to use docker and podman essentially even without AI. i’ve been wanting to do that for years but never had anyone to help me and it felt too overwhelming to me. similarly i now have some dotfiles set and in general i have a better system. specially for a lot of shit i know how to do but it’s fucking boring to do.
I could care less of what you think is asinine.
