Won’t anyone think of the environment or small communities? AI is a nice-to-have, not an essential. We need to stop developing technology without thinking long term about the world we live in. We can’t use the “oh we didn’t know” excuse anymore.
Global solar generation has increased by 50% in the last 2 years, meanwhile a token is something like 900 times less energy consuming than it was a year ago?
Something comes first, almost free energy and deeply embedded ai usage or total environmental collapse, capitalism deems that we will find out which in due course.
The only intelligent people that I trust are those that use drugs and drink until they drop!
If you deny to consume those things than you ate dumb!
What? It’s obvious that it can lead you to a downwards spiral, into alcoholism, a life of mental problems and struggles? Create a toxic environment around you, make your family worry and suffer because of those actions? Makes the world a even worse place? Oh well that’s on you being weak, you should’ve been smart and know how to use the things well.
It’s weird that you only trust people who take drugs to exess and harm.
I too only trust people who take drugs, but not those who harm themselves and those around them with excess. Caffeine, prescription drugs, recreational drugs too if they don’t do as you suggest, those are fine.
I don’t really trust anyone who would turn down a vaccine or antibiotic. Those people are even worse than the heavy drug users. They take neurotic beliefs to the point of harm even worse than the “destroy the family with drug use” people.
This might get me banned here but I mostly agree with him
AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong
But used right, it can be a huge benefit. We know how deeply checked and tested all code is (who doesn’t remember the continuous Linus rants?) so why does it matter if submitted code covers a bug that was discovered through AI, or even written by AI? As long as the code checkers know and understand what happens, I dont see the problem with the code having been written by a tool
Obligatory AI doesn’t exist, its LLM’s, and LLM’s are tools, and tools are fine as long as you use them well.
If companies suddenly started making two meter long chainsaws and people started running around with these chainsaws cutting little girls in half, then yeah, people would rightly question if we shouldn’t ban those tools too.
Force AI companies to be responsible for how their products are used and wait to see how fast things would get better.
And for developers: as long as every commit is reviewed and checked by humans, to me its just another tool being used to make Linux better
For those arguing the water of energy and the theft of intellectual property, it’s the same point: governments need to put rules in place to control the stupid growth of data centers, AI companies must be held yo account for the data they’ve stolen, absolutely. However, that doesn’t mean that LLM’s are tools without any use
This might get me banned here but I mostly agree with him
I have seen a turn in the tide in the past few months. Whereas online forums discussing LLM tools for coding used to be near 100% brigade against them with mostly bluff and bluster and no real basis for the arguments, attitudes have been softening. I actually read one rather long thread with 90%+ support for the tools - not blind enthusiasm with no evidence, but clear statements from users about what is working well for them and what still needs improvement. All in all, work with the new tools seems to be going better “in the trenches” than work without used to.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if you wrote the code, an LLM wrote the code, your cat tapped it out, or aliens communicated it by blinking their home sun… you check it, it works to your satisfaction, you submit it for review and merge for use by others. In all those scenarios, it’s “your code” - the LLM, your cat, aliens, none of them are going to stand up and defend the quality of the product. If you don’t really understand why what your cat wrote works, you probably shouldn’t sumbit it. Especially the alien code should be carefully examined before running, but at the end analysis it’s the code that matters, not its provenance.
I don’t think the arguments against it had no basis. It’s clear that those tools have become really useful, but a huge chunk of those arguments are ethical about the environmental and economic impact.
What I’m seeing is that those arguments are beign faded out, along with those that talked about it as if LLMs didn’t work as expected.
They are clearly useful now, and it can’t be said that they aren’t anymore, but those example that Linus gave minify the other problems and it makes it seems that anyone that does not abide by AI is a fool and an elitist, which I don’t think that’s the case.
I think that this position makes how you wrote your matter for some people.
a huge chunk of those arguments are ethical about the environmental and economic impact.
I have never seen an economic or environmental argument that puts objective numbers in context, how much more energy, water, etc. is AI using or projected to use? It’s all handwaving as if every single ChatGPT query is burning down a Macaw’s home tree in the rain forest and polluting a small town’s water supply, single handedly raising the average ocean temperature 5C.
makes it seems that anyone that does not abide by AI is a fool and an elitist
Back in the late 80s, there was a large contingent of the workforce who felt they were “too old to learn the computer.” Linus, and I, were getting our starts around then and we were the young upstarts using this “solitare playing machine” to do “a few little tricks, not sure if there’s actual value to justify the cost.” Through the 90s there was a good 20% or more of the workforce that probably would have been more effective in their jobs if they would have “skilled up” on “that computer stuff,” but they didn’t and we all got through.
Adopting AI is going to be easier than learning how to use Win95 when you’re coming from dictation, letter openers and interoffice memos delivered on paper, but I won’t be surprised or disappointed if a significant chunk of the workforce stays away from AI for a whole variety of reasons, and that’s fine. I also highly encourage those using AI to ensure that it’s actually improving their product, not just making something passable faster.
makes how you wrote your matter for some people.
Pedigree and provenance, whose child wrote this paper, who they studied under, where they grew up, all of that matters, a lot, to a lot of people, in a lot of fields. In computer code, particularly in computer code like the Linux kernel, it shouldn’t.
AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong
Because the public discussion devolved into some insane fight between people ideologically against any AI (funnily often the argument “it’s stealing other people’s work” is coming from people that are fundamentally against copyrights in every other case) and some not less crazy people believing that AI is their new lord and savior (and a lot of them are paid or the followers to said paid influencers you just changed one idol (tech billionaires) to another one as instructed…).
It’s basically a mud fight between those believing that hammers are inherently evil and need to be destroyed and those that think everything in this world is a nail. Nothing in-between.
AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong
Maybe if the tool is so finicky that it’s practically impossible to get right, it’s a bad tool? For sure millions of programmers are just prompting it wrong… Can’t be that it’s just not as great a tool as the AI overlords claim
As long as the code checkers know and understand what happens, I dont see the problem with the code having been written by a tool
Until the code checkers resort to LLMs because the agentic coders submit so much code for review. I will just let AI run over this one time, what could go wrong? I’ll tell AI to generate test cases beforehand to make sure it gets the implementation right. Bad tests never lead to problems right?
Or maybe, just maybe people eating up a constant stream of propaganda produced by those whose whole financial future is tied to AI being the universal solution to every problem (and some they have to create in the first place) are indeed a problem.
Just because 24/7 advertising tells you to hammer in screws doesn’t mean it’s the smart thing to do. And neither does it show how useless a hammer is as a tool.
It’s so funny when they try to argue that the conditions around it are somehow different and make it unethical. Like yeah, I’m against fascism and climate change, but all our previous tooling was also built on unethical grounds, this isn’t any different. You like trains? The railroads were built by slave labor, extracting the fuel displaces indigenous people and hurts the environment, and folks like Carnegie used their train-powered wealth for their own personal benefit to the detriment of the public. Does that mean taking a train is unethical?
Things were bad before AI, so let’s make them worse.
Why does everyone who starts using AI always devolve into posting like this?
Maybe because when they actually try them out they’re discovering that AI coding agents are pretty good?
Probably because they get pissed off by the illogical anti-AI crazies.
it’s crack for burnt out programmers who don’t enjoy the process of creating software anymore. You get to have results without putting in any work of your own. In corpo-world where everything is a metric, outputting massive amounts of code quickly and effortlessly is a great thing. For the others who actually enjoy making something it’s a useless tool.
It’s really weird when people with a kink try to push that kink on everyone else and they act like everyone else is wrong for building their entire persona around the kink. We get it, you really love hand crafting your code, line by line character by character, but I don’t need that to enjoy coding. I like producing useful things and then working on ways to make them even more useful. I have hand crafted enough widgets and thingamabobs that I don’t need to personally fondle another one into existence. I don’t need to be an expert at yet another language that will be obsolete well before I retire. When I was a young lad I could get off a really good wank to the bra section of the Woolworths catalog, but not so much anymore. That doesn’t mean I am burnt out or that I don’t like a good wank anymore, but frankly I would prefer someone with a pretty face and soft hands to yank on my dick for me. Have you never worked with or trained junior programmers before? I guarantee you that the nonsense a junior can produce is much worse than the crazed hallucinations of some AI.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, like the destruction of the dev experience pipeline… but shitting on people who manage to find ways to use AI is not really helping your crusade.
I generally try to avoid using AI for my hobby projects, but I think there is still a niche for it in working out issues that take a disproportionate amount of time to track down manually relative to the scale of the fix. Things like a subtle typo somewhere or missing some hyperspecific nuance of whatever stack I’m working with. In those particular cases I would say it actually enhances my own creative ability insofar as I don’t need to spend hours of effort banging my head against a wall until I eventually figure out what went wrong, and I can put that time and mental energy into the stuff that’s actually interesting to me.
But yes, in general I do agree it’s kind of useless otherwise for creative endeavors or passion projects. It’s great for helping with code being written solely for a paycheck, but for personal projects it largely defeats the purpose of working on them in the first place. I think the trouble is that in general AI does make a lot of things easier and I have a lot of anxiety about getting into the habit of overusing it in that way, so I try to keep it as a sort of last resort.
That’s pretty accurate, but only the good case. Burnt out programmers still have some kind of system understanding and some kind of leftover appreciation for good software architecture, they’ve just been battered down by years of the stupidest requirements, deadlines and incompetent management. Even with AI they usually keep a hand on the wheel and aren’t particularly set on always using it for everything. Maybe they’ll even start advocating for AI because they can’t imagine anyone using it in a different way than they do.
The bad case is all the people who never cared about anything to begin with and aren’t any more emotionally attached to writing code than they are to filling out an excel sheet. That’s the kind of people that will absolutely derail an entire project by vibecoding it into the ground and then arguing for every single thing Claude changed. “You have to be able to understand/code this yourself” does stop them dead and they will piss and shit themselves because they can’t do anything and aren’t used to feeling stupid.Tbh I mostly like no-AI policies because it’s funny to see those meltdowns 🤷
We’re all being hypnotized by aliens who have replaced our political leaders and oligarchs, and now they’re using LLM chat hypnosis to take over the next tiers of society. /s
Lol, I could kind of understand (not really support) his use of AI. While I doubt it’s something you can do for long without starting to make compromises, people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode and (more importantly) their willpower slowly runs out.
But this argument made me loose all my respect for him. It’s so utterly stupid. I hate it when i have to check my assembly code line by line, because it’s not guaranteed that the compiler will compile the same code I’ve written deterministically, and basically just randomizes what it outputs. Or when my editor does not save what I typed, and instead decides based on a random language statistics what to actually save, so I have to double-check my text word-by-word every time.
Oh, wait. No, because the tools are deterministic, and that doesn’t happen. But of course, adding randomness into your workflow, where you have to focus and review everything line-by-line, is the same as using deterministic tools, lol.
His point is that an LLM is just another tool for increasing productivity, the same as a compiler or IDE. The quality of the code is the only metric that should be judged.
Reviewing AI code is harder than reviewing human code. I’ll judge humans on what they do, and LLMs on what they are.
people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode
Damn, dude, I had mad 6502 assembly skillz in 1985, I could even write it out by hand - pencil on paper, and those slowly eroded through use of compilers for higher level languages until my last assembly experience in 1996, today… I’d be learning everyhing specific to assembly code from scratch. I guess I’m just useless now.
the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.
Gotta agree there. We had two clear camps of programmers before LLM agents came along, and the camp I least enjoyed reviewing the code of before (and now) of is the camp that resisted adoption of new interesting tools the most loudly.
I think there is no equivalency between compilers and other tools, and LLMs. As the comment states, they are just the statistical prediction of what would come next. Compilers may sometimes give unexpected outcomes, but they are working to a defined set of rules and there is potential to see how they actually came to that outcome and address it.
Added to this is the prevalence of people thinking that LLMs can allow them to do anything, whether or not they understand it, it’s even sold like that. In my own organisation I have an operations manager thinking he can make pages for our Intranet - where does it store the data? How is access controlled? So many basic questions that an actual programmer would know to think of. Sure you can just keep asking people if they can fly a plane and maybe one will do well enough that they get you all the way there, till it comes to landing and it’s too late - maybe better to just ask a pilot to do it.
Our software engineers use it really well, they can read what it’s outputting to understand if it’s wrong, they know how to prompt it to avoid issues, they use it for snippets and fixes and that it won’t just write a whole program. However, it’s benefit to us (and the world) is nowhere near worth the monetary and environmental cost. The investors pouring in money are hoping they can be the company that people become reliant on, so they can survive the bubble and their ultimate goal of replacing real people.
Added to this is the prevalence of people thinking that LLMs can allow them to do anything, whether or not they understand it
1971, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory depicted a computer which could (but was refusing to for comedic effect) predict the location of the remaining golden tickets. There were, and probably still are, a shocking number of people who believe that was a realistic scene.
I have an operations manager thinking he can make pages for our Intranet - where does it store the data? How is access controlled? So many basic questions that an actual programmer would know to think of.
Option 1: hold his hand and educate him on what he lacks
Option 2: let him flounder and make fun of his mistakes (the making fun part should be done anonymously if you value your job)
Option 3: he’s bright enough to ask the important questions to you or the LLM and get reasonable answers
Option 3 has a very realistic chance of working, if 1) you have documentation for how you do these things today - even informal documentation, anything the LLM can read and extract the relevant patterns from, 2) the LLM must have access to that documentation, and 3) your manager needs the patience and perseverence to work the discovery process until it’s viable and sustainable.
Odds are, your operations manager is going to fall short on the patience and perseverence dimensions and offload the boring parts to you, after all why did he become a manager in the first place?
maybe better to just ask a pilot to do it.
Yeah, except you can’t make nightly backups of the plane’s passenger manifest. If you’re not making nightly backups, you’re already in catchup territory LLM or no.
it’s benefit to us (and the world) is nowhere near worth the monetary and environmental cost.
I suggest doing a little research into what exactly the monetary and environmental cost of YOUR usage is. People engaged in low-value usages (too many to even begin to imagine, Rule 34 needs expansion to start to cover them) are burning a lot of un-necessary tokens.
What I have read, consistently from various sources, is that my $20/month Claude code subscription burns $11 to 12 in electricity to serve my responses. My house burns over $13 in electricity per day in the summer, mostly for the air conditioning.
“Deterministic” compilers and reproducible builds are actually fairly difficult problems. (Yes I know technically the compiler is deterministic, but AI is also technically deterministic since you can set the seed).
It’s not just about being deterministic. A compiler crucially follows clearly defined formal rules on what is a correct output given some input, which the programmer can fully rely on.
which the programmer can fully rely on.
Most of the time, today. Mid 90s I was constantly checking compiler output for bugs, and finding them. Early 90s the compiler bugs were finding me, particularly in Borland Turbo C++. I turned off the linker optimizer in 1992 and couldn’t turn it back on until 2008 without getting difficult to identify bugs.
There is a clear line between deterministic code and what comes out of an LLM. One of the bigger problems there is that LLMs have a rather large “context window” they operate from, and human operators don’t readily “grok” how the content of that context window enhances and degrades the desirability of the outputs you get.
I almost exclusively use LLMs to generate, review and test deterministic code, then use that code for “the real tasks” with zero LLM involvement. The output of LLMs is still unpredictable, but once they’ve “said” something valuable, recognizing and using that value is a deterministic activity.
You can add deterministic testing to AI output though?
Wouldn’t it be just… writing code yourself? It’s just instead of writing what you want directly you are writing tests for it.
But you really should be writing those tests regardless of whether or not you or an LLM ends up writing the actual code. That helps ensure that the code actually does what you think it does, and prevents bugs or unintended changes in behavior from sneaking in later when something changes
Well, depends. My thousand-line pet project does not need any tests, it needs to be feature complete and never touched again.
Bigger projects are usually ones where multiple people are contributing and having code that practically nobody wrote there is a huge problem on it’s own in my opinion, even if it passes a number of tests. Good tests themselves are usually harder to write than the code they are testing, I am not sure if delegating the actual fun part of development to an LLM and doing “chores” manually is a good idea.
instead of writing what you want directly you are writing tests for it.
LLMs write pretty good requirements, specifications, code, and automated tests from chat sessions. You do need to keep an eye on what it’s writing to make sure it’s not hallucinating, but hallucinations have been reducing in practice rather dramatically across the last 12-18 months of model development. They still happen, you will always need to guard against them, but usually a quick read of what is written followed by a quick test of the product will find the worst offenders. In the end, you need to check the final product to be sure it does EXACTLY what you want, just like you always did. And, it’s still a good idea (and as possible as ever) to keep the product modularized and also check every module to ensure it works as you want. How small you make those modules has always been a matter of preference / dictated by levels of concern, etc.
If you are generating tests with an LLM, it’s not deterministic.
Also, have you actually read anything an LLM wrote that’s longer than a hundered words? It’s usually immediately obvious. In the open source world things I keep seeing are exchanges like this one. And Niri is a fairly good case with it’s maintainer actually reading the PRs and catching all the bullshit that an LLM spits out. Very often nowadays people will also do reviews with an LLM and this sort of stuff will just accumulate in the codebase with nobody to reject it.
But even if it was as useful as big tech paints it to be, I’ll always be against using it based purely on morals. There is an enormous number of issues in that regard, most importatnly LLMs literally kill people both directly and indirectly. Condoning the adoption of this technology is either being ignorant or misanthropic.
If you are generating tests with an LLM, it’s not deterministic.
Once the tests are generated, they have become deterministic - unit test code is checked in alongside the repository, CI (continuous integration) systems can prevent the code from merging to main branch until all CI tests pass. No LLM is involved in the test execution process, and if all LLMs stop functioning tomorrow, the tests still work just like they did before.
read anything an LLM wrote that’s longer than a hundered words? It’s usually immediately obvious
About 250,000 lines of code so far, and no… I don’t read it all - my personal music player isn’t that important, I just care that it works. Other more important projects I have read every single line. Even in the music player I have read a few hundred lines and skimmed a couple of thousand. Yes, the style is obvious. It’s what you might call “too complete” attempting to cover lots of edge cases that a human would usually neglect, though as human code is maintained over the long haul, it tends to mature in that direction. And just because it’s very complete doesn’t mean it’s perfectly correct, and that’s a major point of conflict with me and LLM code, I’m constantly asking it to simplify because the complexity is easy to hide mistakes in. You know what happens when you ask it to simplify? It simplifies.
people will also do reviews with an LLM and this sort of stuff will just accumulate in the codebase with nobody to reject it.
That’s a management / maturity problem. As new as all this stuff is, it’s virtually inevitable there will be an adjustment process. Our company runs on processes and procedures, they average 50 pages each and there are thousands of them. I am given almost 100 of them to “train on” on a near annual basis - whenever they get revised. No way in hell can I do an accurate review of 5000 pages of intertwined procedures, not code, natural language work instructions. LLMs can. LLMs are. Simple questions to an LLM like: “review this procedure, is it internally self consistent” will find issues, real issues - usually minor - but undeniable when you read the review, the problem it describes is absolutely present in the document, page 14 says “X” and page 23 says “not X” and the context is basically identical - so which are we really supposed to do: “X” or “not X”? Well, that depends. Depends on what? Additional context and detail that the already too long 50 page procedure doesn’t address. We just did an internal audit which turned up thousands of these mostly little issues. Addressing them is going to be… interesting. We’ve been in business over 70 years, we know we’re not going to tackle it all in a single year, there will probably be a plan to work down the worst of the issues, then a second round for additional polish, of course corrective actions to ensure that we at least don’t make things worse along these metrics with future changes… I bet by 2035 we’ll have 90%+ of today’s real observations fully addressed.
LLMs literally kill people both directly and indirectly
As does nearly every activity of life, both in human society and the natural world.
Why the are you getting more text than you can physically review at your job? That sounds like a recipe for poor reviews. How are you sure LLMs are not missing anything if nobody actually has the time to read through all the text? Why does the text that gets to a developer contain logical mistakes in the first place? Back at my last job we had people assigned to collecting feature requests, talk them through with whoever wanted the feature implemented and produce proper specifications that developers would implement without wasting time on specifications containing garbage.
As does nearly every activity of life, both in human society and the natural world.
Yea, all people who drank water died. Not a very good argument. Most things don’t have a mental disorder named after them. If I leave a webpage with a calculator running unattended it won’t magically persuade a random visitor into commiting suicide. Webpages with LLM-powered chatbots are doing just that. You may choose to neglect it, but to me it sounds like adding lead to your gasoline. Yea, your car runs better. Are you sure it’s worth it, though?
Why the are you getting more text than you can physically review at your job?
Regulatory required documented training, old conservative company.
How are you sure LLMs are not missing anything if nobody actually has the time to read through all the text?
You’re not. Neither do the humans tasked with the job do a 100% thorough review. Side by side, the LLM catches more flaws than the humans do.
produce proper specifications that developers would implement without wasting time on specifications containing garbage.
Sounds nice. We’ve got ~500 employees at our “site” (which is now distributed across 3+ states with remote workers), of those, about 8 do software development, so developers end up doing virtually all of the translation of customer “needs” to specifications / requirements. We also have a marketing department that changes their mind about twice as fast as the product development / delivery cycle.
If I leave a webpage with a calculator running unattended it won’t magically persuade a random visitor into commiting suicide.
That’s a touchy subject. A friend of ours recently had her son die of drowing in his bathtub, he was epileptic, had a seizure and fell in the tub. There was no suicide note, it was ruled an accident. He used ChatGPT to write his own obituary, as well as a book explaining his life from his perspective - each seizure was “taking away a little of who he was,” and the seizures were getting more frequent, none of the treatments or medications slowed them. It’s pretty clear, to me, that he was going to commit suicide and/or die soon with or without ChatGPT. After he passed, his mother had a ton of grief / guilt about not being closer with him in his life, but then… he actively pushed her away, even violently. It’s doubtful he would have written or expressed what he did as completely without ChatGPT assistance - how much was him, how much was LLM hallucination? Does it really matter? He wrote the book, and he put it where she would find it.
The next time you go driving, count the oncoming cars. When you get to 100, realize this: statistically, one - maybe two - of the drivers of those oncoming 100 cars will, eventually, end their life by suicide. And those are just the deaths officially classified as suicide. Engagement with ChatGPT undoubtedly works both ways, some cases accelerating the process or even causing them to take their lives when they wouldn’t have, and other cases slowing or stopping the pursuit of suicide altogether. It’s going to be hard to say if Chatbots or other world events drive the statistical changes starting a couple of years ago. The data isn’t clear yet, but the concerns have certainly been raised, and I would assume the supportiveness of Chatbots should improve as a result in the future.
Indeed, my code has never been more rich in unit tests now that coding assistants make them so easy to add. If the coding assistant subsequently does something weird that changes program behaviour it knows immediately.
Indeed, my code has never been more rich in unit tests now that coding assistants make them so easy to add
Me as well. A year ago there was significant trouble with those unit tests not adding much value but that has improved a lot over the past several model updates. The unit tests aren’t 100% as good as they could or even should be (neither are human generated unit tests that take 10x as long to add) - but in terms of time invested vs value derived, they’re excellent value for effort.
If the coding assistant subsequently does something weird that changes program behaviour it knows immediately.
About 90% of the time for me now, in Opus 5.5.
What do the tests do?
They check to make sure that the code continues producing the expected results. For example if I had some code that added up numbers, I might have a unit test that calls that function with the parameters “2” and “2” and checks to make sure the result is “4”. If something changes that makes it start returning something else then a flag is immediately raised.
Are these tests written by AI? Have you reviewed the tests? Do they cover all code paths and all the possible inputs and outputs? Do the tests have requirements cited (traceability)?
Unit tests have been around for a long time. They tended to be under-utilized in the past because they’re such a maintenance headache - changes / improvements in the production code that used to be a simple 5 minute thing can easily balloon to an hour or more of headache in necessary adjustments to perfectly good unit tests for “the old way” that happened to be impacted by the change.
Unit tests are a good way of keeping under-experienced programmers from accidentally breaking old things as they work on new things. They are VERY appropriate tools for LLM agent assisted development.
Absolutely not. In a world where hallucinating machines are writing code, humans should be writing the tests at a bare minimum.
AI writing code to pass tests written by AI will get people killed.
This is a seriously weak and narrow argument. First off, the parallel drawn with existing tools is shallow. When was the last time an editor or a compiler promised to replace employees? Which of those notably accelerates climate catastrophe? Which one of those is the biggest theft of labor in the history of humanity? Everything is political. Externalizing the social and environmental cost of the major LLMs is taking a clear stance in favour of the late stage capitalistic tech empires currently taking shape.
I thought it was devastating to lose Steve Yegge to AI psychosis. But damn. This is… unspeakably bad. Like if the guy in charge of the CDC decided Tylenol caused autism or like if the guy who controls the U.S. military decided it was a good idea to bomb Iran.
It just goes to show that ‘everything is only as strong as its weakest link’
If everyone you thought was smart are disagreeing with you, perhaps take another look at your position on the matter? Might be a reason beyond spontaneous mass “psychosis.”
or consider not putting people on pedestals.
If everyone you thought was smart are disagreeing with you…
Plenty of people I thought were smart before the AI bubble started think of AI as I do today.
Big “100 physicists have signed a letter saying you’re wrong, Mr. Einstein” energy.
This also assumes that TootSweet is Einstein in this scenario, rather than just some guy on the Fediverse. If he’s got cred on par with Steve Yegge or Linus Torvalds the comparison might hold some weight, but I’m dubious about that.
No. Not that one.
There’s a story that a reporter said to Einstein “100 physicists have signed a letter saying your theory of relativity is wrong” to which Einstein replies “if they were right, it would only take one.”
Apocryphal or not, the point remains that truth is not a democracy. If a million people say AI is great, it doesn’t make it so — even if one of those people is the primary maintainer of the the Linux kernel.
And billions of people eat at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t make a hamburger better than a steak. Or any more ethical.
So… If AI were actually as bad as so many people are saying, it would actually only take one?
If people are saying that AI kills people and there was evidence that it did, then I would believe it.
This is still assuming that TootSweet is equivalent to Einstein here.
And is Linux equivalent to McDonald’s in this scenario? The analogy is becoming rather unclear.
No, it doesn’t assume TootSweet is Einstein.
It’s pretty sad that you seem to think that popular opinions are correct.
Plenty of popular opinions are wrong. And unpopular opinions are right.
The popular opinion is that AI is great at coding. But there isn’t much evidence that it is. There’s lots of evidence that it produces a lot of lines of code. Scant little evidence that it’s good code.
Hence the analogy to hamburger versus steak. They’re both beef, so technically the same. But hamburger is adulterated and watered-down. Steak is the real deal. So AI code is to real enginnering.
I pointed out that several smart people were disagreeing with TootSweet. You responded:
Big “100 physicists have signed a letter saying you’re wrong, Mr. Einstein” energy.
Who else would “Einstein” be in this analogy?
Linus says he only cares about quality and refuses to make a hardline rule explicitly banning LLMs in all contexts
This is… unspeakably bad
Man, genuinely… how do people not understand why nobody takes the Anti movement seriously?
How do you not understand that code quality alone is not a good measure for viability?
Take ZFS, for example. It is inarguably a good filesystem, and its code is… well, it’s not bad, so let’s quantify it as good, or good enough. But it’s still poison for the Linux codebase, because of its conflicting license.
Or take sweatshop labor, or slavery. Would you accept “good” code written under duress?
“AI is just a tool.” No. Machine learning algorithms are a tool. LLMs are an ecosystem, composed of agents, models, infrastructure, continuous labor to maintain the models updated, and more. And like in biological ecosystems, the worst performing factor determines the maximum health score, which for LLMs is “unethical as fuck.”
Linus may be smart about OSes and seems competent about project management, but I wouldn’t trust him to give me medical advice, and his opinion on AI is also wrong.
He’s drunk the AI Kool-Aid.
That’s a good thing, it was Flavor Aid that was laced with poison in Jonestown.
Well, it was nice while it lasted.
*slaps an orange flag over the tux sticker on my laptop*
2027 will be the year of the NetBSD desktop, guys!
I’m switching to haiku.
I plan to put Haiku on my old ThinkPad; but the lack of even a lock screen in the OS sadly makes it unsuitable for my main machine.
I know it’s early, but so far y’all just throwin’ rocks. No intelligent criticism whatsoever of the content you just read (you did read it, right?) - nothing but low-effort jeers. Linus is saying he expects high quality work and doesn’t accept a shotgun zero-tolerance mindset against how it’s produced. What, in concrete terms, is actually wrong with that?
you did read it, right?
Why would people read it? There is giant mud fight happening between idiots believing AI is the devil and idiots believing AI is their new lord and savior. And like most morons only interested in that kind of team sport they already picked their side to cheer for. No actual arguments or thinking required.
And you’re here standing in between the two sides, casting mud in both directions and thinking you’re not getting any mud on yourself in the process?
Some things deserve zero tolerance IMO
As I have gone through life, I have decided that just about the only thing that deserves zero tolerance is zero tolerance itself.
Some things do, but work technique isn’t one of them.
What about a tool that killed someone every time you used it? Or every ten times you used it? There’s a line somewhere, right?
I already agreed some things deserve zero tolerance, so obviously there’s a line. If AI killed someone or gave the user shooting pains every ten times it was used then I would call it a failed attempt to make a tool. But the relevance of this escapes me.
My argument is that the environmental costs of AI, not to mention the knock-on effects of the societal change it incurs, lead to people dying.
You are conflating environmental costs of AI with willful destruction to make money.
AI data centers don’t need to use giant amounts of water. They do because assholes can get away with saying “fuck the people and environment” by paying off other assholes in governing positions to not regulate them.
AI data center’s electricity usage is not a problem either. We will see a massive increase in demand anyway as electrification is actually a big step in decarbonisation. What is a problem are again assholes in the fossil fuel industry that lobby the already mentioned corrupt assholes in government to fight renewable energy and its infrastructure that is clean and available in abundance.
If you believe that AI is a cause for the problem and not just a pretense and that they would not have found (actually manufacture, just like they manufactured this insane “Ai will solve everything”-bubble) another reason (or dozens) to burn the planet for their profit anyway, you really lost the plot.
So, bring the numbers. Where’s this environmental catastrophe resulting from the use of chatbots?
My $20 per month Claude Code subscription uses about $11 worth of electricity to generate my replies - our damn air conditioner is using near $11 per day to keep the house cool in the summer these days.
Evidence would make that an argument. Without it what you have is a hypothesis. I have a hypothesis that people die from the knock-on effects of social media, but here we are doing it without demonizing ourselves.
Fair enough. I’m not going to follow up with all that just for this comment thread. At least we can agree that some things are bad enough to justify not using.
Exactly, the only thing that matters is results.
No. The ethics of how something is produced are material.
The ends don’t justify the means.
For me the most criticism against AI is rather criticism against Big Tech. AI itself however doesn’t have to inherently come from Big Tech so banning it wouldn’t really be reasonable for something like the Linux Kernel.
Of course! But also, AI shouldn’t be used to simply generate code. It should assist human developers into solving problems like figuring out why your code won’t build, or why certain errors occur or detect bugs.
Why? Because if everyone starts using AI to generate code, you lose experienced developers who will understand what’s happening in the first place. You lose the expertise. And that’s a big problem.
Yeah, and as I understand it that’s what Linus wants people to do. So banning AI would not allow this to happen when working on kernel code.
It doesn’t inherently have to come from big tech, but currently there’s nowhere else to get it, soooo…
Maybe we ban it now and then revisit all this after small open source local models are actually useful for anything?
Not true. I’ve been coding for months now using only local models running on my own hardware. It’s perfectly adequate with the right harness.
Ok well that’s actually awesome!! But is that what these people are using in big important projects like the Linux kernel, or are they using Claude? I’m guessing it’s the latter, right?
Local models are capable of assisting coding in even enormous, complex pieces of software. That’s where having the right harness really shines - it provides the model with the tools it needs to focus in on just the bits of code it’s currently working on. Sort of like how a regular human programmer can do a much better job working on a large project with Visual Assist or equivalent in their IDE. I’ve also installed some tools like Context7 that provides the LLM with API documentation (no more hallucinated APIs) or Firecrawl (it can just go search whatever it needs like a regular person). It’s not so great at large-scale architecture questions, but that’s not what 90% of coding usually involves.
If you want a step up from what can run on just commodity desktops, some of the bigger models are also open-weight and a company or studio with a programming department could run one of those on their own hardware in the server room. GLM 5.3 is right up there next to Claude in the benchmarks, for example, and doesn’t take a data center to run.
Or you could go halfsies on the “big tech” thing and have an API subscription for a big model that your coding harness uses for doing the large-scale architecture planning and then hands off to small local models for implementing the plans the big model wrote. That’s a very common pattern too.
The key point is that there’s a lot of options here, it’s not “pay Anthropic or nothing.”
wow… his ego is pretty big and bursting. Good thing that he evacuated his brain power to LLMs.
AI will come for Linus too someday.
LLMs aren’t new or interesting.
