GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding
a month ago by General_Effort to c/technology
GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you're coming from or why you're so incredibly angry with us. It's not justified and does not make sense.
I am sure I will be down voted on Lemmy for this but using AI for development by a team who is already experienced in development of the product they are working on is not a moral failing.
My personal experience but the people who blindly bitch about AI are, quite frankly, idiots.
I use AI daily for work it's an extremely helpful tool as you stated. I still have concerns with it.
The difference is I understand human nature and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. We need governance and standards and it needs to be a utility just like hydro, water and The Internet. There also needs to be a global UBI yesterday.
What people are bitching about with AI amount to the lack of control we the people have over it.
I'm surprised you haven't been downvoted but I bet I will for calling a spade a spade in these people so rigidly opposed.
I don't think anyone is "blindly bitching". I think people have understandable concerns regarding its development, use, and proliferation.
The other idea that it needs to be a utility is straight from the wet dreams of every AI company. Realistically, the average person has little use for AI and it's much more likely to be a detriment to them than otherwise. I know someone who is an exec in a big company and they get AI through their work. They use it for inane things mostly, but recently they used it to generate a list of reasons that their kids *dont need to go to school. This is an educated person with a good job who can't figure out that AI has no idea what their kids need.
I don't think AI needs to be used by nearly the number of people currently using it, but my bigger concern is letting anyone, be it a private company or a government, have access to something people treat like a magic answer anything machine.
I disagree in part. Many people have replaced searching with AI.
Take a pic of something in chatGPT. "What is this?"
It's highly useful in everyday life.
The problem is that people my age were skilled before AI so it is literally just making things easier for us which is the point.
Kids on the other hand, it is taking away their opportunity to learn as my generation did and that's a huge problem.
Then we get back to the underlying problem. Governance and standards.
Should AI be allowed in school? Should companies be forced to continue entry level jobs that could be phased out by AI?
You could ask a million questions.
The problem with human nature is we are great at figuring out if we can do things we don't stop to think of we should do things.
i trust no business to use ai coding properly, they cut so many corners in crunch already that pure unfiltered slop will for sure end up committed
we already see this with microslop windows 11 updates
it is even worse that many coders think it makes them better at their jobs because given how many issues pop up with factual ai use elsewhere i am sure no one rational expects coding to be exempt from this problem, so the least knowledgeable will be the most impacted with false assurance or worse we have other agents validating agent generated code that never has human eyeballs on it
slop-centipede of shit code
the biggest coding bugs either fail silently or succeed incorrectly and ai usage makes both of these worse
Again based on real world experience I disagree. The problem is the people doing the AI coding and how they were before?
I have a strong coding background. I know what AI is coding for me. I give it strong guardrails. It does for me in minutes something that would take me hours. I will still review and QA what it does.
The problem is people who use it to built a monolith of code and I've seen my fair share of that AND documentation driven by AI. It's unneedingly obtuse and verbose and reeks of people who do not know what they're doing.
There is a huge difference in telling AI to "build me a website in Django" vs. "build me a function to do xyz when the parameters are abc and the return value needs to be lmn"
I mostly agree, but instead of better regulating AI governments and corporations have just been using it as an excuse to lay people off
personally don't care at all but the morality argument is not about the experience of the developers lol
The crux of that article is buying into Heidegger‘a definition of a tool, specifically, “thing that lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to.” If you disagree with that premise, the article doesn’t hold up.
Tools aren’t about letting you do something you would otherwise not have been able to do, they are simply a force multiplier for capability or efficiency. You still need knowledge and skills to do the thing.
I am not a carpenter. My knowledge and skills are near zero. This multiplied by any number is still damn near zero, and I have no idea about the culture, safety, or history of carpentry. I’m not stupid enough to jump right into using an lathe without a lot of research or someone to guide me, because I’m not a fucking moron.
People with programming knowledge and skills using AI will eventually figure out a workflow that works. Laypeople using AI to vibe code? They’re probably fucking morons. Sure, maybe even most of the time, it will be fine. But eventually, someone is going to be degloved.
That's something I see in my workplace even without AI, just with coding/scripting/automation.
It helps you do things faster. It doesn't ensure you're doing the right thing (unless you have someone skilled build in all the guardrails).
So many of my coworkers are at the "This chainsaw is amazing! I bet it would be great at driving nails!" level of scripting, and AI is only making them more reckless.
I was ready to roll my eyes at the title and move on, but i'm glad I spent the time to read this.
TLDR; i very much disagree with the premise, but the author brings up an interesting bit of philosophy that is helpful to the conversation.
When people say "it's just a tool", it is not to assert that the tool is neutral, only that the thing being referenced should be thought of and discussed in a similar fashion as we do when discussing other items in the same category. This is in opposition to the tendency to ascribe moral features or aesthetic to things that aren't inherent to their 'essence', but rather features external to the thing being discussed or features that are commonly shared by items in the set but not exclusive to it.
What comes to mind (possibly because of the great effort it took to read and understand it) is Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the 'assemblage'. Here's an excerpt from "A Thousand Plateaus (that happens to contain my favorite passage in possibly all of philosophy) that I think adds a contrast:
spoiler
[...] These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse "can do." They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can't get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother's bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame .. . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, "playing" horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans's nor the horse's, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what way would that ameliorate Hans's problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked?
The author here is correct to point out that tools are not neutral - and the connection to Heidegger's conception of the Gestell is very well received. I just wish they hadn't stopped at their conclusion and actually kept the analysis going. Taking their example of SUV's engendering 'asshole driving behavior' - it isn't just that the existence of SUV's bears a causal relationship to asshole drivers because of what that gestell produces, but that the existence of SUV's reshapes the relations of all the other assemblages in close proximity to it regardless of how it's used and by who. They even kind of preview this more balanced conclusion in their comparison of javascript and vue, stating that it's not a matter of one being better than the other, but simply that they have different purposes and enable different types of collaboration.
I think the entirety of the problem of this argument could be captured just in this part of the blog,
After all, all kinds of fascinating weapons systems are being used in defence of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and this is both good and necessary, but none of this makes the effects on leaders of having access to bombs and artillery, or on individual people of having access to firearms, not ceteris paribus deletrious.
All other things couldn't possibly remain 'equal'. The addition of those tools fundamentally changes the relations and constituent parts of all the assemblages around it, including concepts like "freedom" and "democracy". To take it one step further - if the signs and symbols that refer to those assemblages and relations - that have now necessarily changed by the new addition - do not also change with them, then they simply stop being practically useful to describe them.
Any tool is going to have a non-neutral affect on those who use them - that's mostly the point of the assertion.
Go live under a rock then because that applies to almost anything in life. Selective morality is fine but when it is to be a science denier you are just a fuckwit.
Don't forget the negative internalities (it makes it's users dumber and the codebase less maintainable).
But yes it is useful, and the knee jerk hate comes mostly as a reaction to the marketing lies told by the companies selling it.
Experienced developers benefit from it, my guess is because they've already formed their knowledge, habits, opinions, etc.
I don't think any company has shown productivity gains amongst experienced developers due to AI
Those are still external to the thing, not internal.
Nuances?! on MY Fediverse?! tbh im also mostly with Linus and also do not expect his PRs to drop in quality, because of it. He does sometimes say weird things regarding AI though, like that its a great way for upcoming developers to learn and I do not think that is really true, but again: Nuances. I myself keep AI usage minimum and in the constraints of a chat bot, not because its not useful but because I dont wanna get stupid :(
I’m with Linus Torvalds
you mean the guy who started losing his marbles like 5 years ago?
Luckily, the "negative externalities" are mostly made-up bullshit.
It's pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the economy. Focusing on AI to the exclusion of bigger issues is actively harmful.
It also didn't exist at all 5 years ago. Why are we as a society allowing new ecological damage? When will we stop? The billionaires want it to be never as long as it gives them money and power.
Layoffs are made-up?
Layoffs aren't the problem here...the problem is that society requires people generate their own worth through work, and suddenly a good chunk of that work is now significantly less valuable.
Requiring less work is a good thing. Humans should be striving to minimize work. That's what humanity is good at.
The problem comes in that while the "input" of AI is, essentially, the collection of all human knowledge...while the output is money for a small handful of people...people who themselves contributed next to nothing to that pile of human knowledge (and in fact are probably running a deficit to it).
That ain't right. We are all shareholders in the collection of all human knowledge. We should all be getting dividends from its work.
It should be noted that the input of all human knowledge is getting the door closed and locked behind it. Requiring you to buy tokens to access said information.
And if you refuse to provide more training data to their services that collect said data, like reddit, facebook, x, then you can't access essentially the entire internet. With google locking down captchas to only "verified" android phones. And every website requiring you to sign up with a ID card, and locking you out when you use a VPN.
So not only will your jobs will be taken away but your autonomy and access to what used to be free information. Or not even information sometimes your job or access to a services requires you to use these things. Even just getting into your apartment with a RFID reader on your apparments official app. You have to exist in their panopitcon just to even exist in many situations.
Oh and the best part the only thing worth money in the ai industry is all your user data and how it gets fed into palantirs networks. From every single comment you make on their services, and everytime you order a cheese burger in public, that all gets logged because you are a domestic terrorist for thinking maybe we should hold these people accountable.
reduction in labour requirements are good.
Oh look! Another "leftist" trying to shift blame away from tariff man.
I'm not American if that is what you're implying. Have a nice day.
Maybe I am just not understanding your direction based politics, but isn't it the right that put him in office? Isn't your comment backwards?
To be clear, I literally don't know, it's hard enough following my own country's politics lol
Reality altering disinformation as fact, using a machine that is essentially plagiarism incarnate? You are pushing a false narrative OP
I haven't dug into the code, but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating. There's a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to "use AI" on a project.
I've been a programmer for two thirds of my life up to this point. I don't see how the machine that generates code that must be assumed to be broken, and statements about said code that must be assumed to be wrong, until both have been manually verified, because the "hallucination" issue is inherent to the design of LLMs and cannot be solved, is supposed to make my life easier. Especially since a well known problem in computer science is that writing code is more fun than reading it.
If you're using AI for code generation, I hope you like reading code.
If you're using AI to learn your way around an existing codebase, I hope you're prepared to fact check everything it tells you.
If you're using AI for code review before merging a PR, fucking yikes. What made you think the sycophant machine that once told users a soggy cereal bar was a great business opportunity and cannot even transcribe McDonald's orders correctly was suitable for that purpose?
If you're telling yourself it's okay because there's a human in the loop, please read some studies about attention fatigue and consider that increasing the number of critical decisions a person must make per day, while giving them a suggested answer that's right 90% of the time and catastrophically wrong the remaining 10%, and the only way to tell the difference is to read in depth, might not have the desired effect. Especially if the human in question is then put under time pressure.
And all that is before I go on a five paragraph rant about the ethical transgressions of every major AI company.
It's pretty black and white for me.
I don’t see how the machine that generates code that must be assumed to be broken, and statements about said code that must be assumed to be wrong, until both have been manually verified, because the “hallucination” issue is inherent to the design of LLMs and cannot be solved, is supposed to make my life easier. Especially since a well known problem in computer science is that writing code is more fun than reading it.
quoted for emphasis. you have more patience than I do in telling sycophants why their take is idiotic.
The fact that it isn't perfect is the grey. And sure, it has a lot of problems but not only is it still useful anyways, but those problems are being ironed out. They probably won't disappear completely but the tech is already miles further than what we had 2 years ago.
To make you understand what I mean by black and white, you have a user that put "AI is evil" in big bold letters in the comments. The hate is almost cult like for part of the population, and imo, it's mostly because the media tells them to be mad.
Most of it depends on the task in any case. I don't work with massive code bases and it doesn't take long reading through a few scripts, running it and checking the output. The people I know that do work with huge code bases are using it as well, but I can't really talk for them either. They don't hate it tho.
The person who put "AI is evil" in big block letters is objectively correct. See homes getting claimed under eminent domain to build power lines for datacenters, electricity prices for consumers rising as service quality gets worse, and water usage to the tune of millions of gallons per datacenter per day. See companies buying rare books in bulk, cutting them apart so they can be scanned faster, and not publishing the scans, literally destroying culture so they can have one more scrap of training data guaranteed to be free of slop that their competitors don't have. See companies operating web scrapers that deliberately evade every block that website owners try to use to stop them from reading their sites, and then scraping so many different pages so frequently that it's indistinguishable from a DDoS attack, hosting bills skyrocket, servers crash, indie webmasters pay the price for corporate greed. See xAI operating natural gas turbines on the property of their datacenter for extra electricity in flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act, spewing toxic smoke into the air and generating powerful, inaudible infrasound vibrations that have been linked to everything from nausea to irritability to hearing loss to seizures. See Anthropic treating Minority Report as an instruction manual. See how ChatGPT use affects test scores. See AI psychosis. See chatbot-induced suicides. See deskilling. See how little AI companies care.
The fact that it isn’t perfect is the grey.
And the fact how it is used in practice, actually, in reality, is the very dark grey that some people call "black" for better clarity. The fact that you can use a large butchers knife for practical things does not mean that entering a primary school with one is the right thing. What are the actual intentions for grabbing that tool?
Supposedly wonderful “human artisanal code” has plenty of fuckery.
These are supply chain attacks and in the case of xz utils, the attacker had gone to extreme lenghts to hide the attack from a well-meaning, good-hearthed but overworked and burnt out solo maintainer.
To compare this to bugs that people unwittingly introduce in normal human-written code is not sincere.
I understand this but, you have to consider the ecological impact of it, the thousands or more people whose work was stealed to train AI, the constant shoving of AI into everything and the problems that have arise from it, the campain AI companies did and do telling people they are going to lose their jobs and constant fearmongering, the constant blatantly lying of "AGI achieved", the layoffs by senile CEOs, the debt that is causing because stupid people in power gonna be stupid, etc. There are plenty of reasons to hate AI and what it is doing to our world and people lives in general. Sure there are positives but the negatives clearly outweighs the positives.
On top of that, regardless of however you feel about AI, there are so many questions about copyright and ownership here, that as-of-yet remain untried and unanswered by the courts, that it's essentially impossible to know what the legal ramifications will turn out to be, when accepting "AI code" in your project. I definitely fear that it could turn out to be a sort of trojan horse against especially the GPL, and other copyleft licenses. I conaider it to be risky to use AI code, on that basis alone.
True, but how will you prove that code was written by AI and not yourself? Any people can generate code, modify some variables to incorporate in their code, and it won't be any different than copying it from stackoverflow. Unless the code is written in a "very specific AI way" it won't be possible to distinguish.
Oh, I don't think any court would rule that using LLM generated code automatically infringes on the copyright of everyone whose text was used to train it, independently of the degree of similarity between the generated output and the original text(s).
But LLMs have a habit of sometime, and not too infrequently either, reproducing parts of their training material verbatim, as their output. As long as it's only sufficiently small "snippets" of text or code, it's unlikely to raise significant copyright concerns - but the fact is that it's not actually that rare that an LLM will replicate larger sections of text from its training material, spanning across many lines. What's more, LLMs don't advise you of this, when their output is a replica of a significant part of an already-existing, copyrighted text. But you'll be infringing on somebody's copyright, whether you know it or not, irregardless of whether you aquired the text from an LLM or elsewise. That's a big liability to accept in a large project, that frequently uses LLM-generated code. It would be a minefield.
I'd hope that they will stick to non-retroactivity for new laws and rulings on AI, or else the world will have a giant mess on its hands. But I have the feeling that we're moving towards an eventual, enduring weakening of copyright law, which is totally fine by me. Copyright has done more harm than good to the world (imo).
Usually, if it's noticeable that AI was used on code, the code is flawed or, at least, has copyright concerns.
Agreed.
I strongly remember a CompSci professor ~2005 being disgusted with auto-generated Java GUI. And yes it was clunky and more memory intensive than it could have been, but also, I really don't care about how GridView is defined most of the time.
Bad code is bad code, touched by AI or not. For working code, a volunteer group spending resources to determine if it might have been touched by AI is at the very least an incredibly frustrating standard to try to meet. And very likely impossible to verify in any meaningful way.
There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.
I am not talking about the Linux kernel or the Rust project - they have stabdards way above average commercial projects - but generally "using ai" in practice means to use it for code generation. Then, programmers are expected to review the output but are not given extra time for it. This creates an extremely slippery slope leading to mostly unsupervised code creation. Also because reading and understanding buggy third party code means more effort than writing new code.
Then there is the idea to get rid of the bugs by "debugging", but debugging is frankly not a software engineering strategy, because you can always just recognize a fraction of the bugs that your process created in the first place. Debugging is also more expensive tha writing good code.
Then, what makes the process between product managers and software developers very often a bit friction-loaded is that good developers always want to have clear specifications what they are supposed to build.
LLM code generation largely replaces clear specifications with plausible assumptions. That appears to make the process fast, but the result is often wrong. At times obviously wrong, and at times subtly and catastrophically wrong.
Then, what makes the process between product managers and software developers very often a bit friction-loaded is that good developers always want to have clear specifications what they are supposed to build.
Excellent observation, which aligns with my observation that fans of "coding assistants" can't wrap their head around algorithms, not to mention a sound software architecture.
Eh, I now have witnessed two cases where I asked a software team lead of a project I was working for for a precise interface or API for a planned function and they looked at me as if I had talked about going on a giraffe ride with a bunch of alien Martian schoolkids.
(And subsystem interfaces is really a subject I was taught in 10th grade by a math professor who himself had been a student of Niklaus Wirth. Maybe if you stand on the shoulders of giants, you should not be pissing on them...)
It was already difficult to find people who know how to phrase good requirements and / or design an architecture before the slop machines got introduced. It will be so much worse for the next couple of decades, with idiots bullshitting their way past HR into a position.
but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating
you misspelled "extremely deserved"
Look at the comments here. Do you think the haters here care?
I am not a coder in any fashion but this is the make or break frontier for development, particularly FOSS and small scale projects.
AI is evil.
It is an ecological nightmare, socially and economically distructive, prompted on the theft of the knowledge and work of every creative endeavour any person as ever made and pointed at rendering pointless any future aspiration of individual creation someone may have.
The association has been made and it is not going away.
AI in concept is not evil and could be a good thing .
Unfortunately, its implementation has been at the hands of rapacious, avaricious, and narcissistic über-capitalists, which has inextricably linked AI with the evils you enumerated.
In a different timeline, AI was developed slowly, using heavily-vetted and legally obtained data, and rolled out in an intelligent and safe way.
We are better off leaving the appeal to alternate time lines for another conversation, preferably around science fiction or comics.
As it exists, as it was created, "AI" is evil. It consumes resources we can't afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities.
And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it.
This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, as you very well put it, not done that way.
AI is not evil. It doesn't have a consciousness. It doesn't make decisions.
What is evil, are billionaire capitalists having full control over the technology.
What is evil, is the concept of closed-source.
What is evil, is stealing all creative works without attribution or compensation.
What is evil, is seizing essentially all the silicon to build these datacenters, then soak up all the electricity out of the grid and all the water out of the ground.
The problem isn't the AI, itself. It's the means that's the problem...not the ends.
To summarize: something that is being created through highly destructive amd predatory means, by completely deranged people, is not evil.
I can't disagree more. And to quote myself, again, today:
As it exists, as it was created, "AI" is evil. It consumes resources we can't afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.
AI is a tool, like a hammer, and should be used as such. And like a tool should require training. The problem is people aren't using it as a tool and rather look at the hammer and say "go build me a house". That's where the issue is. Does a hammer know how to build a house on its own? no. does AI excel at end to end builds? no. but people are using it for said end to end builds.
Devs, vibe coders, god knows who else still to this day fail to understand that AI doesn't understand how to build things correctly. All the agents care about is getting to a solution as quickly as possible to retain a userbase. that's it. will what ever it builds scale? no. will it be full of exploits? very likely. will it be able to refactor whatever it wrote? no because it will believe YOU wrote it. so upgrades/improvements to whatever are virtually impossible.
THEN you combine all that with the fact that EVERY AI's training data, currently, is incredibly out of date. Tech moves too fast for it. So you have people building shit with libraries and what have you that are already out of date and they don't know that.
That's a great example actually, you just have to differentiate between a nuclear weapon and a nuclear power plant. You can split atoms to build a bomb or heat water, the concept of splitting an atom itself isn't evil.
I think with OP’s analogy, a nuclear weapon is no longer a tool, because the actual tool (nuclear technology) was crafted into something (weapon) that does a specific thing (destroy). But I guess OP should’ve used LLM and machine learning instead of AI.
Nuclear fission has been used in nuclear reactors for good, and was exceedingly efficient at that time, and has been a significant factor in the recent human history. Just as it's been with the "evil" use in nuclear weapons.
I'm not aware of any breakthrough that has not been used for both good and evil.
Good justification to why GOS is right to use AI to detect vulnerabilities. The only true way to protect yourself from an enemy that has nuke bombs is to have some yourself.
Ukraine gave up its stockpile in exchange of promises from both Russia and NATO that no harm would come to them, and would there be harm from one side, the other side would come and help them. They were betrayed by both sides.
AI is very efficient at finding vulnerabilities. Among a see of false positive, they find real ones. It's much more efficient and faster than human auditing code. So either it's GOS using it, finding them and patching them, or it's… someone else.
A tool built through nefarious means and consuming resources it should never had chanelled into it.
Then, taking from your words, if the information these machines are working is by default outdated, why insist in feeding it with more and more and expect different outcomes?
Makes no sense to begin with.
So by your logic, a child produced through “nefarious means” is also inherently evil.
It's a tool like a gun, specifically purpose built to usher in a technofeudalist surveillance state. Not useful for anything else as is.
Guns are incredibly useful, just like LLMs and diffusion.
For literally one thing only. That was the point of my comment. Unfortunately AI can't give you reading comprehension.
What? So I use my Intel B70 to help code a useful application. Maybe use a half kilowatt to do so. Play a game for an hour you'd use the same.
The current crop of AI companies are doing what you hate, not AI.
"Ai" isn't inherently evil. It's just a tool. An incredibly interesting and marvelous tool, in theory.
What we make of it and how we use it matters. Noone needs stupid chatbots. People should only be allowed to use them after graduating an exam of what they actually are and how they work. In the current state they're 90% bullshit and harmful.
But LLMs surely have great and reasonable applications. People often fear what they don't really understand. And LLMs really are a topic that often even "techies" don't get, so why should a layman.
Yes, they are environmental Desasters. But try to substract all the trillions of silly nonsensical queries millions of people hammer into chatbots, that once were simple search-engine - queries. And it's not THAT bad anymore.
I'm just going to quote myself, as I'm satisfied enough with the answer I wrote to another reply.
As it exists, as it was created, "AI" is evil. It consumes resources we can't afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.
You are confusing capitalism and ai. AI is just a tool. Capitalist will use any tool it can to hurt labor. This is currently born out by history recent and ancient. The luddites attacked the looms not because they were evil. But because the bourgeoisie were using them to exclude and attack labor.
That is a false equivalence.
The looms, the automated treshers, the tractor, whatever machine designed to a fullfil a task that displaced human labour wasn't designed with the objective to render humans useless. There were periods of transition when people hurt, needlessly, if I may say so, but new occupations emerged.
This is not the same.
For the first time, we are faced with a technology that feeds off human achievement to be built and next states it can dispense and completely replace what enabled it to be put together to start. While consuming resources we can not afford to waste and returning nothing of value.
"I'm just going to quote myself"
Yeah go on buddy, doesn't make you right though.
AI is an item (as "tool" seems to trigger you people), saying it is "evil" is just stupid and makes you sound like an evangelist lol.
Is it bad? That is something people can actually discuss, but you're not here for that it seems.
Just because it was a nicely worded statement, doesn't make it universal.
I use a local LLM for our smart home. It wastes a Lil bit of energy, which is still faaaar below my 1500W while gaming. Is gaming evil now? It helps dramatically in ways that were never possible before like "turn on all lights at 40% in the color purple and also turn on music. My fav playlist" followed by a "no, use a warm color and close all windows".
Not every LLM is a fucking chatbot that eats the planet to "create" a shitty cat-meme for Granny's Facebook.
Don't assume everyone uses silly chatbots. That is ONE application of LLMs, and it is indeed stupid and kills out environment for basically no benefit.
Well, tbh, if someone has an opinion that isn't swayable by facts, why should I take that person seriously? It's like talking with religious nutjobs. They already have all "answers".
The facts are clear, relatively simple, and accessible by everyone. And "evil" is generally considered bad. But LLMs are not just "that precise one thing" that could be declared evil. It's a concept. The application of it changes the good/evil attribution. Chatbot? Obviously bad. Helping to determine cancer in a Patient? Good. Etc.
If people don't WANT to argue because they already joined a "AI is the devil"-cult, so be it. Not my job to convince anyone of anything 😊
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS Here you go, argue with GrapheneOS - it's an open platform, go ahead and make a masto account and share your thoughts with them. Tell them what you think! The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
Yeaaaah like deleting their earlier posts to make themselves look better and claiming the "haters" are coming from K*wi Farms.
https://mas.to/@zzt/117246306723269935
Truly good rebuttals right here!
I'm not going to approach them in any fashion. I have already made my decision about their work/product and the GrapheneOS is not of my interest.
The project must have their reasons but I still insist on what I've stated regarding AI in general.
You're right, but don't encourage people to brigade GrapheneOS. That's a donation-funded project.
I am not a coder in any fashion
You should use ai to learn 😁
I recommend https://chat.mistral.ai/chat as they use renewable power to train their models and are european 👍
How do you know? Honestly, how can you claim a given author will relay to a meat grinder the effort of compilling a work they will sign and be responsible for?
One added curiosity from me: at what point has the colective surrender of independent thought and action been signed and by whom?
And a final question but feel free to skip this: do you rely completely on LLMs to complete your daily life tasks or are you still able of doing things by yourself?
If they're just using it to find and patch bugs/exploits? Fine by me.
Vibe coding? Get the fuck outta here.
This is the key point.
From my reading that is not the limit in how they are using AI. It seems like they are accepting LLM generated code as inputs.
This pretty much compromises the whole project as far as I am concerned.
Considering Graphene's entire reputation is staked on extremely precise definitions of security, this is a little concerning.
They're the "best" (read: most secure) mobile operating system. If the best degrades, I don't foresee some Graphene alternative stepping up very quickly (see also: cross-platform alternatives to Google-made Chromium and Google-funded Gecko)
is the linux kernel "the best"? because they are using AI tooling. Linus actually threatened to use LLM to maintain sparse if nobody stepped up..
is curl the best? because the creator of curl has also used/accepted LLM code...
if the creators of two of "the best" pieces of software ever made are accepting (NOT embracing or promoting... just accepting) LLM code.... maybe it's time for us to think about the possibility that this MIGHT be a useful tool instead of everyone just yelling "SLOP SLOP SLOP" everywhere.......
Someone commented on here the other day that they don't use anything that uses AI. I had to point out that they were on Lemmy, in a contemporary web browser, connecting to a Linux server running inside of a docker container. I'm still not sure if they understood my point, but I'm glad someone else on here is seeing the ripple effect.
People trusted Linux to be better than Microsoft Windows, and saw the effect of a company with tons of money and first-class AI access exponentially worsening their product.
It has been disappointing to see people like Linus Torvalds turn aggressive against people who do not agree with his ideology, and I find it distasteful for you to use reductive attacks against strawmen as well.
If it's thoroughly vetted, it might still be OK, but it's concerning...
Based on my understanding, the "core" team uses AI to detect vulnerabilities.
They also take codes from paid third party devs, and they say they don't mind how they wrote the code, but it must be clear and each contributor needs to be able to explain it.
They follow the same rules on code conventions including readability. So basically, it's less that they accept it than they don't care as long as it matches their quality expectations. If you can't tell, you can't ban...
If Vibe coding means people who don't know how to code creating code... yeah, that's kind of like giving people who don't know how to paint an airless gun and 5 gallon bucket and telling 'em to go for it on this building here...
Even people who can code tend get worse over time the more and more they rely on "AI" to avoid having to think too hard.
Studies have shown doctors who rely heavily on "AI" are similarly affected.
People who rely too heavily on anything get brain atrophy with net negative consequence.
Those same tools can be used for learning and exploration and strengthening skills - all a matter of how they're used.
People using calculators stop being able to calculate things and don't even get me started in these evil "abacus" things that strip people off their short term memory! People using cheap paper to write whatever they want will not only have worse calligraphy but also write about whatever comes to their mind! Etc. etc. history is full of this.
GrapheneOS is using AI models to find vulnerabilities before others do. The Bitcoin Red Team did the same and found an absolute ton.
I hate the AI bubble, but they're forced to use AI to defend against AI.
And by-golly are they pushing AI.
What, you mean this fantastic enthusiasm isn't entirely organic?
You shouldn't let billionaires control your life. They may not have your best interests at heart.
Using tech that billionaires push makes them richer and gives them control.
Tell me how does not using their crap give them control, exactly?
I'd argue that this news is over-blown. The project has more than a solid and honorable track record with insanely talented engineers behind it. AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions. If GOS team, who again would be at the top % in the field, feel that this can elevate the project, should we not give them the benefit of the doubt?
My thought it was over blown until I saw them claiming that anyone on Mastodon is "not a user" and them saying that any real users are on their Discord and not complaining.
Uh, OK - Discord was semi-excusable up until 2025, but at this point anyone using it to communicate with their users is certainly not considering how bad that channel is for user privacy. Im a Graphene User, I will not use Discord, and I am not going to continue to use an OS thats supporting the rapid expansion of datacenters through the use of AI.
I don't use Discord myself, but I think their decision to use Discord is defensible even if I find it distasteful. Their support chat isn't meant to be a private space. (People discussing crimes and whatnot on Discord are using poor judgement.)
I think what they are trying to say there is that there is a lot of negative commentary on the Fediverse coming from people who are not users, and that they are not really beholden to those commentators. And that's true. They don't really have a history of smooth PR as far as I can remember.
I also think whether their acceptance AI usage is an overblown issue or not is completely unrelated to that comment, so I'm not sure why it would change your opinion of it.
Matrix is the proper space for a privacy focused community. Discord as an application is privacy invasive and requires ID to be provided. This has nothing to do with a public community not being private. It's the wrong technology choice for what they claim to be focused on and there is no getting around that.
Discord does not require an ID unless the space you're trying to access is marked as adult only. This obviously does not apply to a tech support community. But like I said, yeah, it's not what I would choose. What's your point? Graphene OS is suspect because they don't choose your favored chat platform? And like i said, this has nothing to do with whether or not the acceptable use of AI assistance was overblown.
Exactly this. As much as I hate the current AI scenario across the board, the GOS team has shown, time and again, that they are stellar developers and coders, that they genuinely care about security, and that they are the best at countering anti-privacy on the technology front.
If any team can use AI responsibly to improve all this, it's the GOS team. And if it ends up failing on it's face, I expect them to move away from it if things go south. Now, if they don't because of 'AI addiction', then I will be looking at what my alternative options are. Until them, I'm 100% with them, as they have not given me any reason yet to doubt their judgement.
AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere.
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
You cannot put the evils back into Pandora's Box when it was already open.
Even if these companies sink, individuals can still use their own hardware for AI. Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
So where are all the 3D TVs? Where's the Nintendo Virtual Boy? Betamax? Google Wave? Google+? NFTs?
Oh not transformational enough?
Ok then how long did it take electric vehicles to come back after The fossil fuel industry killed them in like 1920?
Oh here's a good one: thalidomide. That one went away for good.
How about the hole in the ozone layer?
Sorry, AI is only a foregone conclusion because apparently everyone's had their consent beautifully manufactured to an extreme degree.
Sure you can. Because in this case Pandora’s box is something which exists solely through a sustained, inconceivable amount of money being continuously funneled into it without any guaranteed long term benefit to the people who do so. It’s a technology which isn’t sold as a product as it exists in its current form, but a theoretical future form.
If the bottom were to fall out from under it tomorrow, it couldn’t even continue to exist as it is now, it would disappear entirely as there would be no financial incentive to keep it running. Individuals could still run what we have now offline, but its value and usefulness would degrade rapidly as time went on, because it relies on mass-scale power consumption and data theft to remain up to date, much less improve.
Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
stop. calling. slop. ai. It's a shitty subcategory of it. Just like actual dog poo is a subcategory of organic chemical compounds.
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
It exclusively comes from either snake oil vendors or people who are less smart than they think they are. Where the former are typically part of the latter group.
At the very least, you'd have to convince both the US and China to stomp it out. And then there are other countries that would be willing to pick up the slack.
AI is not something self sustaining enough to necessarily require stomping out, at least that we know of at this point. Right now AI’s future relies on its operators continuing to convince people of a theoretical future scenario.
GOS is not part of a theoretical future.
It's not going anywhere because it's already been here for a very long time, you just didn't know about it
What people call "AI" is just Machine Learning.
Chatbots, OCR, Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, Computer Vision, Web Search, Spam filtering or Fraud detection, Personalized ADs, even your phone's camera processing algorithm.
It's all Machine Learning, but now under new and fancy "AI" name. And it's been here for decades.
The reason it blew up this much only now is because people realized that the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes. And so they started exploring it more, to the extent of causing valid ethical concerns.
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere. But it’s clear from the context here what we’re referring to when we say AI in this conversation.
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere.
As someone who despises the current slop hype with a passion, you're correct on this. But only when you exclude LLMs. Because they are garbage with a net negative for mankind. Machine learning as a field however has very useful applications. Typically such that complement human assessment of data, e.g. re-viewing radiology images to flag potentially anomalous images for a second doctor to look at - not in place of the first doctor.
the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes.
And that's bullshit. The slop machines have already peaked. More input will not improve the results.
That's the communication problem in these conversations. Whether it's a useful tool and whether it's an ethical tool are two different questions. People come in and attack the developers for generating slop, and they respond that they are experienced developers who can use the tool properly to increase the security of the code or whatever. And the conversation here is about that.
And then someone like you comes in talking about ethics, which is what we should be talking about, but we are talking past each other.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions.
I don’t need to be skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions.
You are both correct. But the former is about the engineering, the latter is about ethics. You do need to technically skilled to evaluate whether AI is a useful tool for Graphene. You don't need to in order to critique it on ethical grounds. These are completely different topics that have nothing to do with each other.
the only people getting a net use out of LLM garbage are sub-par programmers. and I say that partially as a self burn because I have consulted slop chatbots to get some keywords / usage examples for functions I didn't know yet. Even though I never used any drop-in code, and verified the usage of all that I "learned" from such conversations, the output was incredibly shitty and had to many holes in it that most people wouldn't even spot because "it just works". Using slop bots in coding / vibe-coding is offloading your incompetence as work onto future programmers.
no, we are not talking about two different things.
We are talking about one single thing.
the theft of human potential for profit, and the sacrifice of the world for the enrichment of the few due to exploiting that theft.
You are just trying to play word games and split the discussion to defend the indefensible.
Lol you are so argumentative that this is how you respond to someone agreeing with you? Forcibly putting me into the "opposing camp" against my will. All right then, live your delusion while we fight AI without you.
Calling for the murder of other people in a public forum is never wise. At best, you could (should) be permanently banned. At worst, police could show up at your house and lock you away forever (the world would be better place for it!).
So, username checks out...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
Aaaand just like that you disqualified yourself from having an opinion worth listening to on what "insanely talented engineers" are.
There really is a difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and I don't know enough about actually coding to look at their repos and tell you what's happening.
The issue is, there's also difference between how people cram "AI-assistance" into their previously well-refined workflows. Did see the odd person ending up with the same issues as straight-out vibe coding but without the speed, including the eventual (mild) AI psychosis and later switching to vibe coding after the chatbot convincing him.
Also I think it would be pretty trivial to generate an "understanding" of the code, yet AI boosters never bring up it as a concern.
A bit unrelated, but I wonder if I'm the only one left that is:
- Using small, open-weight models
- Asking it to only write small snippets that I can easily go through, check and understand.
- Copying pasting from good old web frontends instead of integrating it into my editor or whatever else people do with agents nowadays.
I feel like when we're talking about AI this sort of usage gets lumped into the same pile as agentic vibe coding and it's not helpful for discussion. Surely most people wouldn't find this problematic?
Probably.
My company is currently pushing "loop engineering" on us... They are in love with Claude and keeps referring to it as "him". Very proudly announce that "I set ut a loop, and he closed 40 PRs while I slept!" (without review, of course). Based on vibe written tickets as well, which contains many hallucinations.
The poor QA department (2 people) is now trying to figure out how to test all the slop.
Things like this radicalize people against all AI.
The poor QA department (2 people) is now trying to figure out how to test all the slop.
I'd hand in my resignation...
Best of luck!
I prefer it less for the writing part (unless big refactors that aren't actually complex) and more for analysis. If you got a couple million lines of code upstream that you depend on heavily (ERP modules) then it's nice to fire off a prompt and come back to "you got weird behavior x because upstream changed y, here's the exact file and lines and how it flows there"
No, there are plenty on the left doing exactly that. Plenty don't mention it because there's been so much AI pushback they don't want to be written off, others don't mention it because they know it doesn't really contribute to the conversation most times. It's unlikely that your use is reflective of most AI use in these large projects.
Realistically, even your use doesn't address some people's issues. People dislike that the training data was used without consent, that's not really addressed by open weight models. You checking and understanding the output is great, but a lot of people take issue with having offloaded that to the AI in the first place. Maybe your use doesn't have the same negative environmental impact as some of the other models, but I'm not sure it really matters. If we're using AI then inevitably some outputs will have larger environmental impact than others.
I am not saying your AI use is the problem with humanity or anything, but no, you're not alone. Most people just aren't talking about people like you and your specific situation doesn't actually fully address people's issues with AI regardless.
I have occasionally used anonymous browser sessions in the way you describe, and I still feel dirty for it and think it's problematic. It did not affect the quality of my code because I never did the 2nd bullet, I never asked for drop-in code or used any, but the ethical implications suck donkeyballs so I hate that I do this occasionally - I blame really bad documentation of some build environments.
I don't get the copy pasting. That's just a convenience thing. You can easily integrate local models into an IDE.
I don't like GOS devs, they are not focused on usablity, but on security (which is completely valid, but it's a shame that GOS is the most usable mobile OS), but holy based.
If you are disputing AI utility in coding: Recent Linux kernel versions fixed up to 3 times more CVEs in comparision to releases before AI. Also, much less of those CVEs are found in the newer versions, which means new kernel releases contain better code.
I think the gist here is making a distinction between AI coding and AI auditing.
To the best of my knowledge, AI coding is still significantly behind human coders in code quality and security. AI auditing, on the other hand, allows a lot of previously missed bugs to come to light, and actively helps in making code better.
I'd fork a lot of software if I had the time and skills, an OS is a bit too much for me. I'll happily donate to good projects that come around though, I'm just not feeding money to ones that are feeding that back to billionaires to build datacenters for fucking AI.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all. Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn't ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code. LLMs are SO on steroids (actually trained on SO topics). So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it's results blindly is silly and dangerous.
There's a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source. Also: if OSS community did not use AI it would hardly stop it from continuing it's growth in Enterprise. So there's not much of a winning strategy there either.
Which brings us to GrapheneOS decision and given above reasons I think it's a well-balanced decision.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all.
This tool is however not neutral but has a lot of steering and bias built in. Like an advisor who optimizes heavily for personal gain. For example, it constantly tells you that it knows it all and also that your ideas are the best thing since sliced bread. A lot of stuff around them is engineered to increase engagement and make you dependent on them. Precisely like social media which is full of "brain hacks" - no, this isn't hyperbole, this is the name that engineers at Facebook gave to their creations. As social media, commercial LLMs are "addictive by design".
Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn't ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code.
Stack Overflow is a really good example. I am programming over 40 years, since 35 years as hired programmer, since 25 years on PhD level and I used Stack Overflow a lot to find interesting new angles on issues with seemingly obvious answers. Like "what is the most portable, clearest way to efficiently serialize message data in a C struct, given that type punning is only defined for some compilers and can lead to undefined behaviour".
Stack overflow has typically various opinionated commented answers here, which gives you different angles and you can decide what is best in your case. This is crucial since a lot - one could say, almost all - of software engineering is about trade-offs.
ChatGPT is the know-all of stack overflow responders: It gives you a single smart-allecky answer and is purposefully built so it tries to take decisions out of your hands. It currently also makes a ton of suggestions of which some have a point, some might apply in other cases but not yours, and some are bullshit. If you let it run free you will easily get ten times more code than needed. And ten times more code means ten times more bugs - this is well-established.
So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it's results blindly is silly and dangerous.
The thing is that commercial LLMs in practice are engineered to short-circuit your judgment and decision-making.
There's a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source.
First: These companies will siphon off open source code anyway, be it legal or not. That is outside of the influence of single open source developers or projects. Maybe a matter of high courts and civil society lawsuits to decide. And these will have to fight an uphill battle against the current political climate around favouring large companies in general and that kind of exploitative AI in particular.
But what projects do have influence over is the quality of their code base and what ingresses into it.
Further, it is to expected that the quality of commercial code bases continues to degrade at a rapid pace and also that companies will depend even more on open source infrastructure and libraries - and FOSS developers training the LLMs they use on anything that is new. Because the average commercial project or github project just will turn to shit. Companies will soon wistfully remember old times where Sturgeon's law was a thing and when only 90% of all public code was shit, and not 99.999% . (Congratulations to that future five nines!).
There is an asymmetry between open source code and proprietary software: Open source code is protected by copyright law. Which GenAI vendor companies practically do ignore. Proprietary software is usually protected by copyright law, and also obfuscation by it being binary or behind server APIs. Currently, this works in favour of companies: They get to use GPL-proteced public code, but are not exposing their own, uh, creations. (And of course, LLM vendors will make the solemn pinky promise that they never ever will publish commercial code their customers are working on as LLM output (ask top-notch mathematicians how that worked out).)
But will this stay like this? Because another issue is that the same methods can be used to decompile binary code, and LLMs can also be trained on decompiled proprietary code. Which will, for example, make its many hidden security issues much more acute.
Agree 100% I was about to mention training the LLM on decompiled binaries, but you mentioned that too. I guarantee the Chinese models are already doing it.
Another thing is I think one can analyze binaries (decompiled or not) to extract control structures in machine code or byte code to control flow graphs. Using some classical pattern matching, that should not be too difficult because the number of ways compilers transform code like loops are limited. Allowing some degree of fuzziness, I'd often expect these to be very characteristic for the original source of a code piece. That source might often be FOSS code; often an old, vendored version not updated in years.
One could then use standard graph search/fuzzy matching algorithms and graph databases in order to find out which GPL’d open-source code e.g. some proprietary product has included. This would give away potentially vulnerable versions. And it would not necessarily need a lot of computing resources.
I'm just waiting for Microsoft and Windows to get blown wide open by this Pandora's box they've opened.
a lot of communities are aggressively clamping down on AI contributions. i think leaving the floodgates open really hasnt worked out. People touting "the kernel does it so get over it" gloss over the contributions being small and strict "your ai code reflects you and you own the consequences" policy.
additionally i dont buy the enterprise does it so get on board argument. the floss movement is literally built around pushing back on corporate norms. i dont know why anyone would take thay argument at face value.
for a lot of FLOSS communities, the ethics of the software is as important as the quality. which is why so many Debian community members felt betrayed by milquetoast ai policy adoption.
Graphene made a similar "look they're all doing it too" argument on Mastadon which I feel just really undermines their image as the alternative.
"we dont police our developers usage as long as the quality meets out high standards. all code is at the end of the day ownedand reviewed by the humans in our teams" or some other equally silly statement would still have had critics but at least they wouldn't sound like a grade schooler wining about how infair life is.
Is it just a tool really?
Using a hammer doesn't atrophy the muscle in your arms as you use it.
However using AI has already been shown to atrophy the brain.
You can achieve wealth and happiness way faster if you rob all other countries of their resources. But if it is feasible, must it still be done ?
Kind of the same thing with LLM. It’s not because you can that you should.
As you said, LLM is killing OS communities. It’s preventing people from working together, now they are all "I don’t need you, I can do it my way all alone", and you get 50 clones or similar softwares, which aren’t finely tuned since it’s all LLM.
As you didn’t say, LLM has a huge impact on the planet, it costs a lot of electricity, it uses clean water which it evaporates in data center, but we don’t care because guess what, we have it in our hands and it’s so much fun to use ! And well, we ourselves are not responsible for the planet’s state, it’s the big bad company that create LLM, I'm just using it because otherwise, the other will do so !
What’s next ? After coding our own little games and softwares alone and ultra-quickly I mean.
Who pays the bills ? Who will pay the next one, and where is humanity going ? Not sure I want to know.
AI Searchers are quitting their jobs being scared of what they enabled Companies are being hacked by LLM without control People are losing their jobs because of LLM (and I think those are not the ones using LLM in the OS Community, because oh, the irony it would be)
Society clearly isn’t ready for any of this, and saying "don’t care" doesn’t make it fine.
Edit : this is cleary not on or against you, I'm simply expressing my frustration on this subject with arguments and examples I hope should make people realize things x)
Yeah, just one small problem, muchacho. Whenever a language recieves a breaking change you gotta retrain the model again, and a lot of your references are useless now. There is no "improving" it's just a vicious cycle.
Your argument is that of peer pressure and not compelling.
"Join us or we'll just steal your code anyway"
Here's my rebuttal. Garbage in, garbage out. Most projects out there are trash. This tool doesn't help you build good code, it helps you throw together a pile of trash. An actually helpful LLM would be one trained on the damn language itself and coding best practices. Almost everyone has lost the plot here. You DON'T want a massive LLM, the small specialized ones are good enough. So you can use it as auto complete, like the tech was intended.
You've made a few of erroneous conjectures which are orthogonal to my argument. But I'll call out one: LLM is bad at code completion and it's use not have to be limited to (final) code writing. Thus my theses on "what" vs "how"
LLM is just fine for next text prediction, in the same way my phone keyboard can sometimes guess what I'm about to say. But the notion of building this huge mass is where I draw the line, it'll never be finished. Does overfitment mean nothing to anyone anymore?
your points support my statement though: how vs what is the real question here. LLM is fine performing repetitive mundane tasks that we find boring and uninteresting. Like refactoring small chunks of code out or "search and replace" when context matters more than matching string etc. Also, let's assume someone had enough bitcoin mining gear laying about to repurpose it into LLM training infra and trains his/her small model on stuff they care for, suddenly we lose all the other arguments and use of LLM becomes more acceptable. So blanket ban at this point is not going to achieve any of the goals, really. Consider that majority of developers were mandated to use LLMs for work, consequently their skill shape changed, for project to draw from that pool of developers you need to offer comparable tools.
Context matters too: Graphene has to deal with AOSP, which lost it's development transparency a while ago and Graphene developers likely have to contend with big (likely LLM-generated) code dumps within mainline AOSP with each new release, so to keep up with that onslaught they either need to expand developer base (and we just said that pool is shrinking) or leverage LLM to cut through that mess. Again "how" tool is used matters a great deal.
Give me a break. Put down the thesaurus. You are the reason LLMs are so.useful. because, as one searches for a solution to the update that borked one's servers, we find that 4 out of 5 forum threads on the topic devolve into jerks weaving unhelpful riddles, smelling their own farts and feeling superior.
Reading the comments, wow AI is polarizing. Neither side will budge.
I guess only time will tell, to see if all the AI code will actually come crashing down.
Non AI code has been crashing down for decades, controlled chaos, continuous improvement. We have lots of tools to put metrics on that, and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics. It's not 100% self sufficient code creation Nirvana, but it might be fairly compared to the Cotton Gin in terms of making the field workers more productive in the delivery of market ready code/cotton.
Non AI code has been crashing down for decades,
i.e. the code that made literally everything until a few years ago? That was crashing?
Yes
but it might be fairly compared to the Cotton Gin in terms of making the field workers more productive in the delivery of market ready code/cotton.
Last i heard was that developers FELT like it made them more productive but actually not so much.
Last i heard was that developers FELT
Several of those studies were published on early 2025 data, LLM agents have been rapidly improving since then. In early 2025 I would agree with the sentiment - it was kind of equivocal for overall productiveness. By early 2026 I'd say it was a much clearer advantage, both in doing the same kind of work faster, but more importantly: in doing better work at the same speed or even a little faster.
We have lots of tools to put metrics on that, and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics.
You mean more lines of code?
that was previous commenter's point. you missed it. LLM coding assistants are for people who can't think their way through an algorithm.
Are you trying to make a joke or a serious contribution
and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics.
Lol. You have zero understanding of efficient coding, don't you?
Well capitalism is based on unethical practices so what’s the point of striving to be ethical!!!
Is what I’m reading
I am reading the same. A variation of "everyone's doing it, why should I act ethical?" Fuck them.
If it was about real AI – not stochastic parrots – I would be all for it. What happened to those developments that started in the 70s where you have automatic formal proofs that a piece of code does what it is supposed to do? That is intelligent. Producing slop more voluminous and convoluted than humans could produce or understand is not intelligent software architecture just like fixing a hole in a roof by throwing what sticks at it is not intelligent building architecture. Both may do the job for some time. But what are the long-term costs and who is capable to clean up? In my opinion, what's most desired is tools that are bug free, do what they should without annoying the user, and are radically simplified in their architecture. (For example, I would be happy with a perfectly working product that does what NFS or Samba aspire and fail to do for decades.) Apparently, AI can't deliver that. To have the billionth app that is a browser wrapper and shows me exactly one website is much more important.
modern AI can be used to generate formal lean proofs:
It's called symbolic AI, or sometimes GOFAI for good old-fashioned AI. It's no longer considered AI by the wider public, it seems. I believe those techniques are still widely used, but they have reached their limit quite some time ago. Cyc was maybe the high water mark of that approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
What happened to those developments that started in the 70s where you have automatic formal proofs that a piece of code does what it is supposed to do?
The stochastic parrots we have today are pretty good at doing that kind of tedious, extensive, franky mind numbingly boring stuff. They're also fast enough that you can "afford" to take the time / effort required to do those kinds of proofs where they are warranted - it makes them "a good idea" in a lot more places than they used to be when they were so much more expensive to perform.
People still seem to think AI is a fad that will go away. I don't see this happening (for code) at all. Not ever
People don’t really understand this yet. There are LLMs that can do useful work running locally on 5 year old laptops (ok, only if it’s a Macbook Pro, but still). Qwen on consumer hardware isn’t close to Claude Code using cloud models, but it can do real work and this is the floor, the absolute minimum of AI we will have going forward. No matter what happens to the industry and the bubble, it will not go away. With any other outcome other than a total collapse of the bubble, AI will be more powerful than that.
Cool well I'll keep using Lineage until they become massive piles of steaming crap as well.
Fuck AI and all you silicon ball lickers.
A large number of people are using it as an opportunity to promote using operating systems which are the direct opposite of hardened and are much more heavily using AI models including for a lot of code generation.
LineageOS is certainly using it. CalyxOS, /e/ and iodéOS are based on it. CalyxOS is developed by LineageOS core developers.
Fan-fucking-tastic. Everything I love is ruined by slop users.
Since LLMs are essentially built from code, I have an easier time believing that coders can get a benefit, especially at the Individual level, within the frame of having a coding background and being able to audit, directly, the code that the machine spits out. But basically everything else happening with, and surrounding, these fucking things is atrocious.
I feel ya dude
It's not infighting (oh well, if you want to see that, check any other post from GOS when they talk about privacy and security of other Android distros…). They quite legitimately ask why GOS using AI to detect vulnerabilites has triggered such a shit-storm while every other distro accept LLM generated code and no one seems to care.
@BrickEater unfortunately LineageOS does allow AI contributions: https://github.com/...
if you are using a computer or phone, you are running AI-generated code. it is rather dire. the best you can do is limit your use of this fashtech in other areas.
FUCK. I can't have fucking shit in this goddamn world.
Why are you okay with that? I feel psychotic, like it disgusts me that this is just OK with people.
Well, I hardly use my PC and was just forced to get one for a job to do email bullshit, so in my day to day, yes. And Ive been exploring getting a basic ass flipphone and a atlas instead of relying on googles shit GPS system, I already use OSM instead but still.
You'll use it because we will leave you no other option
You slop garglers really are wonderful people.
Also, didn't Debian declare that AI generated code is not compliant with their policies?
Also also: organic foods, human-powered bicycles, acoustic music, manual transmissions, etc
An AI supporter would link The Verge instead of the source itself. 😒
You're right, they allowed AI generated code.
No they don't.
The thing about tools is they do what you expect. A fork picks up food. A hammer’s head doesn’t suddenly change shape or fly off. I don’t have to worry about my shoes suddenly falling apart.
AI cannot do these things, but encourages you to use them in such a way that you don’t have to oversee the output.
It is so much more work to rewrite something that has already been written poorly. It takes more time and effort than to just rewrite it from scratch. It’s not a tool as it cannot do its job. On top of that it’s just a glorified collage machine pulling code or whatever it wants from its database and smashing it together. The code is not novel or genuine.
All of that rework and it still destroys the environment and communities wherever their data centers are housed. Loud noise and now Americans don’t have the right to clean water. They’re pissing in your yard and telling you to drink it up.
Please have a spine. Or just some pride.
Sooner than later most things the average person does will sort of be vibe coded like compiling to an intermediate language. The idea of apps and walled gardens will not be as important. Instead of approved apps, it will be approved models and agents. Even the idea of an operating system is going to change. Linux is a great space for integrating the computing environment with AI coding. The full source is available to the model and any change you ask it to make can just be done for you. The idea of running a "Linux" or "Windows" could be limited to certain software and domains.
I think that certain things will be fairly resistant to forking, even by AI. Foundational software like the kernel, compilers, basic tools, databases, and so on will likely benefit more from being used as the standard/vanilla version rather than a modded version (especially a vibe-modded one).
But people and companies will experiment with this for sure and it wouldn't surprise me if some of the less software-competent hardware companies start making their Linux forks or drivers with LLMs, at least for a couple of years in the near future.
I also think that this will shift lots of companies further away from GPL toward MIT/BSD, because they'll want a fully moddable source but they won't want to share what they're vibecoding.
@bekkaboo@girlcock.club Linux itself is heavily using AI models.
For security analysis and uncovering bugs.
I guess many people don't know how much programming has changed over the last year. GrapheneOS is doing a good job telling it like it is.
Your take here is so dumb. Many on Lemmy are software engineers (myself included).
We know exactly how "AI" companies have tried to change programming and know how dumb and misguided it is because we understand quality code.
Sure bro. All dumb takes by GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and even Linux.
You understand quality code, unlike Linus Torvalds.
GrapheneOS and Linus have always had a god complex and took the stance their way is the only way. I have never respected them as the arbiters of the correct path others have. (I know LineageOS exists but not much else so can't speak to them).
I respect them putting in the effort. I respect them trying. I've contributed where I can because the overall goal of data privacy and digital freedom is one I agree with. But to hold them on a pedestal as always right is, yes, still a dumb take. I've never seen anything that made them the end all be all people seem to hold them up as. Solid voices who's opinion should hold more than average? Sure. But that's it.
Yes, Linus is smart and has had good takes and can produce code used by most every computer in one way or another. That doesn't make him infallible.
Its not about putting linus on a pedestal... its about these anti-AI purists declaring everyone who uses AI a nazi and all code is slop. Big tough guys saying they wont use software with even a single line of generated code.
Go ahead, fork the linux kernel then... these people will never be able to follow through with their purism, unless they go full templeOS mode
I dislike AI overall, but what i'm starting to dislike almost as much are these anti-AI purists who are holier than everyone
Unfortunately, having a god complex is not sufficient to make one a good coder.
One look at their agents.md says otherwise
There is really no point arguing about such details. AI haters don't care how exactly you use AI. If you want the best, most secure software possible, you need to let the developers find whatever way there. Imposing arbitrary restrictions won't work.
Its so annoying that all code has been perfect and bug free until these silly LLM people came and made buggy code
I'll grant that bosses and managers have a valid role for keeping the work on track. But someone who tries that without being qualified themself will cause major problems.
Remind me to stay away from that Nazi bar.
Defenders of genAI might as well hoist their vintage early 1940s German flags while they're ahead! Though I suppose an Italian or Japanese flag from the same time period would also work as well.
elon musk owns a company that has a few models, but if someone wants to try using the already flaky argument of "nazi bar" with something as detached as "one of them likes/funds it so everyone that uses it is a nazi" it tells you how little they think "nazi" means
Well, I conflate Nazism witg fascism and same goes with genAI. It's already a link in mg head, ao I'm trying to stay as far away from things using genAI coding as well. Keeps me from having to remove the label of "person" from myself.
What about Mistral AI? Stable Diffusion? They Nazis too?
And 'genAI' - not sure what thats suposed to mean but AI use is growing fastest with the boomers and all ages are using it.
Spouting nonsense about things you clearly know little about makes you sound as backward as the MAGA morons.
- By genAI I mean generative AI, like mistral and stable diffusion.
- So yeah, I would include them the same way I would include things like craiyon or perplexity.
- As a creative, the fact that almost every genAI model in existance relies on training on copyrighted works¹ is more than enough for me to hate it. There's a reason why even the RIAA is in a lawsuit against suno, that seemingly hasn't been settled yet. Despite them being the devil, I would still support them before supporting genAI.
- I do not care what anyone else thinks about it. I have made it a life goal of mine to see to it that a future where genAI ( and the creatures who willingly use it ) are minimized as much as possible in society at just about any cost.
- Do I sound deranged for all this? Yes. Do I care? No.
Edit:
I am also not hearing any of the genAI companies calling out things like how grok was allowed the feature set of undressing literally anyone without consent. Most I heard was backlash from everyone else. Similar thing to that one "person" on r•ddit trying to recruit people to try and strip away the effectiveness of tools such as Glaze and Nightshade off images illegally scrapped ( or at least should have been more than illegal ) from a site made for real artists ( those who do not use genAI for their work at any point ). Haven't seen any backlash from any of those creatures or any of the companies responsible for creating those creatures.
Consent in the realm of genAI is as real as in the realm of rapists and I will defend that view until I die.
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I'm with Linus Torvalds and GrapheneOS on this. AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.
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