Nuance is a hard concept to get in most Lemmy comment threads. It's obvious it's just a tool that uses an insane amount of resources that can do some good in certain applications. The problem stems from it being abused for evil and stupid things.

Can AI be used to help flag cancerous growths in x rays and help save lives? Absolutely! Can it also be used to track every human being on the planet for surveillance purposes while its proponents build massive biome-destroying data centers to act as the infrastructure? It sure can!

All that said, I still don't feel confident about rolling in AI code to open source projects when bots aren't accountable to their contributions. They should require a huge amount of oversight which I doubt is happening at the moment.

Just don't engage with any community that starts with "fuck" if you have any kind of nuance for the subject matter.

It's not a great time. If you don't get banned, you'll get dogpiled with angry and idiotic comments anyway, by people that have decided their own facts already.

All the fuckX communities are toxic for the same reason.

No nuance. No complexity. Binary.

The world is not black & white it's shades of grey.

I got banned from saying not all that is called ai is bad by giving video game npcs from the last decades as an example.

I thought it was just llms that they where against but nope. I imagine Alan Turing spinning in his grave.

Discussions on the internet are hot garbage in part because thanks to LLMs you can't know what's real anymore. Of course there were bots before, but any random idiot can pay OpenAI for a subscription now and spam anywhere they want.

Measured perspectives are hard to come by. A Marxist Perspective On AI

I would like to reiterate that posting on main as an admin is obnoxious since we can’t block you.

If you can’t block me, that’s an issue with your Lemmy client, because the default web client isn’t stopping you.

Button is right there man

It doesn't mean he's wrong! it means he's out of touch and doing the propaganda work of capital for free much like many other self-employed/business owning/petit-borgeois people who think they're on the side of capital.

It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this "tool" is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.

Blind hatred for AI as a technology is inherantly reactionary, but that doesn't mean that the implementation of the technology today isn't problematic in many ways.

Shush! They are not supposed to know that the AI–Anti-Ai fight is fabricated bullshit with both sides being equally stupid (like people arguing based on ideological zeal always are...). And that it's just a show so that the majority is occupied with watching the mud fight so they don't think about the actual problem.

Entirely irrelevant to the conversation at hand but okay

You can predict with certainty what a compilers output would be. Linus is conflating the fact that most people don't understand how a compiler converts higher level programming language into machine code with the reality that no one can actually predict and audit what an LLM puts out.

👍🏻 The vast majority of people don't.

It relies on legality, not honor. E.G. with GPL, or code with a proprietary license. It's the threat of losing their job, getting sued or whatever that discourages plagarism.

Because weight x = y isn't really a satisfactory answer to the "why" in question though. To really answer that you need to refer to the pretraining and context, which in a lot of cases today, and likely forever, since there's no reason for anyone to cold start model training ever again, is necessarily opaque. A lot of the best why answers are going to be given by the model itself (which... obviously circular). Trust and attribution are just really hard in this paradigm. Not necessarily so different from the challenge of trusting/attributing human output, except that humans are more diverse and in general difficult to manipulate.

AI is not deterministic at all, only if you keep the seed values for generating random numbers the same all over the pipeline.

It's literally a huge stochastic model.

You make a good point about capability. However, I'm trying to say that in practical capability, I do know exactly what compiler flags were enabled (it's whatever the Makefile passed, which is whatever configure determined, the whole thing is checked in as source code), but the exact model+seed isn't being recorded for this Linux changes.

To make the compiler analogy, we should be saving model, seed, prompt, etc and then the LLM output becomes the equivalent of the compiled code. I think that's an extremely defensible argument, while "bet you can't write assembly!" is not.

I had the misfortune of working a lot with claude skills for the past few months. I run the exact same skill, on the exact same codebase and it doesn't yield the same results. Sometimes it straight up ignores parts my prompt. Other times it ignores the skill file entirely. And then I ask Claude, why did it do X thing that it wasn't supposed to do? The answer is "I apologize, I should have blabla". It is extremely unreliable and unpredictable. Now I'm stuck with a feature that I'm responsible for that occasionally goes rogue. Fun times.

Would be proper to attach some links for such a claim, I think. (I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying a link would be proper.)

it was a code review that caught a easy to miss race condition, it happens all the time, happened in 2003 2010 2020 now in 2026

op is making it sound like Linus pushed something into the mainline

Except Linus is using Claude.

Local models are still controlled by a small group of people, in the sense of deciding how and with what to train the thing. And given the cost of doing so, you can't just easily fork it and make adjustments yourself.

I mean, I use it because I'm forced to, but I don't feel much in productivity gains (not using agents though). Sometimes it's very, very handy, but most of the time it's like talking to the stupidest rubber ducky, and the frustration it gives me is not worth that imo. Others might make a different calculation, but ultimately if search engines didn't enshitify themselves into obsoletion, and LLMs didn't produce the worst, most verbose, and sometimes objectively wrong documentation, I'd not see an upside at all. But here we are.

AI has fundamentally changed how you do CS in industry, it’s completely unavoidable at this point and not using it in some capacity is doing yourself a massive disservice

If it was in truth inevitable then there would be no need to constantly shriek "It is inevitable!"

There is also evidence that deferring critical thinking to an LLM causes cognitive atrophy.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

AI is much more than the quality of the code. It's also about stealing the knowledge, overusing Earth's resources like water and power, pollution, killing consumer computers through RAM and memory shortage in general - the very same computers that run Linux -, making average people more ignorant, risking another gigantic bubble burst and so on. And as a cherry on the top, comparing AI to compilers. Riiiight.

GenAI lets teenagers nudify their classmates, creating child porn. Twitter even let you do it directly on the site earlier this year.

Students are using it to do their homework for them and learning nothing; at least with CliffsNotes you got the gist of what you were supposed to be reading. We shouldn't want a dumber society.

GenAI also makes it substantially easier to post propaganda and spam. Bots on the internet were already common but now trying to find genuine art or conversations is like pulling up steel from ships that sank before 1945 because everything since then has been irradiated.

The US's dumbfuck government almost started a war with China earlier this year thanks to someone using GenAI. And yeah everyone knows they're a bunch of fucking idiots but that doesn't change the fact that it wouldn't have happened if LLMs didn't exist.

Calling something just a tool is whitewashing who's making it and promoting it and what it's used for. Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

the newst tool happens to be the one doing the most destruction, so.. yes.

also: i do knit, lol. just a coincidence in example.

I think the real problem is that sometimes things like this come around that are disruptive to the workforce, faster than the workforce can handle the influx of new unemployment.

It will in theory sort itself out, but at the moment, were in a transition period.

That doesn't mean its bad, but it can mean that our governments aren't responding in ways that support the worker in the transition which is their fault, not the technologies fault.

Edit: essentially disruption will always keep happening, its how its handled thats the important part.

The invention of the light bulb.

That has been SO much worse than the negatives we've seen with AI. If anyone is interested, that is a horrible story socially, industrially, environmentally, etc. Definitely worth reading about.

yes. indeed. two things can be true at once.

I was gonna say nice strawman and then I saw the instance and yea this dumb statement checks out 🙄

none of those are examples of things in our current era doing as much damage as ai lol. can you not comprehend the comment i made?

Explain to me how Photoshop is comparably destructive as AI is lol. Also the cotton gin replaces slave labour primarily. Idk if that's what you want to put up as an example here.

Sure, but, like, you wouldn't.

A calculator that produces incorrect output from some input is broken. An LLM that produces broken code from a precise description is working as advertised.

An unpredictable tool is a useless tool. A hammer does what it says it will: apply force at the head. AI straight up lies, is objectively wrong, or doesnt work. Thats a garbage tool.

Eventually youre going to ask it to do something you dont know how to do, and you wont be able to fact check it. Thats when the harm happens (or just mild inconvenience, but in my professional case, harm).

If the linux kernel breaks due to a bug introduced by AI or built on a pile of code no one truly understands, we're set back anyways. Better to avoid that and make sure all code is human written/understood

I feel like Linux having a guy is antithetical to Linux but I guess I'm just in the minority.

On that note, OpenBSD appears to be a likely refuge now that Linux has been abandoned to slop.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177411620801633&w=2

...

Phones? Nope.

IOT? Can't even run on modern laptops right.

You should add laptops to the top of your list...cause that's what dominates on productivity...and that's nearly ALL windows! What I think truly dominates is an offshoot of *nix...Android and IOS. Don't you just find it funny when you walk in a mall and see a jacked up Kiosk with a windows 10 taskbar sideways? ...Press any key to reboot!

I've translated assembler by hand and punched the hex codes into an EPROM programmer's keyboard. This would appear to make me qualified to say that he's not always right and, in most cases, fuck AI.

is Greg Kroah-Hartman not the succession plan?

As someone who did study computer science and has worked in embedded processor space

Using an argument from authority to denounce someone in authority and their arguments? Cool. Might've worked if I hadn't seen you mention recently that we shouldn't use AI 'because Trump and his cronies do'.

https://codeberg.org/...

FreeDOS isn't immune from AI either.

The difference is that Linus does not actively seem to be part of the cult itself rather than using it as the effective tool that it is for someone who already has his type of skill set. He can actually understand and double check inputs and outputs because he already built a foundation of great skill.

Most of the AI techbro community just wants an excuse to stop paying people anything for their labor and get eternal digital slaves to replace them. They aren't wanting to use it as a tool to help them unravel complexity, they are just using it as a smash and grab for power and control. Linus... isn't that, and maybe it's not great that he's embracing it now, during the height of controversy. I kind of wish he had waited for the crash an mania to die down a little and then show it as a useful tool for people who already have skills.

LLMs are useless for a lot of shit but they are pretty damn useful for code. I think some of his recent work finding bugs in old code is evidence of that.

https://nitter.miningtcup.me/...

Because then I'd never finish my masterpiece. /hj But more seriously, a lot of his stylistic choices are ones I try to not replicate in my own writing. The extremely detailed descriptions of food, clothing, woman's bodies, etc. I love the story he tells but find the writing itself can be a chore to read sometimes, if that makes sense.

Cause the man clearly can't finish his fucking book

Most? Where's the data? This hard-line anti-LLM guy has a degree in computer science and has developed neural network systems for a previous company. Many on here that I've talked to about it fall under similar category.

I think she is refering to the enclosure movement, a proto-capitalist strategy to privatize public land. Karl Marx talks about it a lot as a way for capitalism to take root in a society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

They are suggesting that ai is a way for private interests to control foss.

Shitty devs will write shitty code using AI

Good devs will write good code faster with AI

I have for sure seen far worse hand written code than AI would produce

Human slop code existed way before we had auto-complete in our IDEs, way before Copilot start writing small functions and thus bad code is not because of LLM. AI slop is no different than Human slop, it uses a shit ton of ressource to generate it and is faster at getting a working output but bad codebase is not new.

My first couple of programming classes were in Pascal. Then there was the third class where the professors had written their own pseudo language that existed only on the chalkboard and in their own heads. At least I learned recursion from them. I had to teach myself every language I ever used on the job. I was EE instead of CS, so I suppose I shouldn't complain too hard, perhaps there were more practical classes deeper into the CS tree.

They still.kind of suck gibe you an answer and you say but blah. And itnfoes oh yes in version x.x they changed. I mean if unwanted old outdated in found use Google. Since looking for technical studfnis hard cause so much is out of date.

I agree with you here (and also cool project/idea). What I'm trying to get at with my analogy is that, if you understand a programme's source code, you understand and are able to predict its behaviour in a meaningful way (although of course you lose some amount of knowledge of what the processor exactly does with which registers etc). When you only know the prompt used to generate a programme, you can't do that. That's why you have to manually check the code an LLM writes, but not the assembly generated by a compiler.

Oh my god. No.

That's not what this argument is about. The JIT is non-deterministic based on the hot path yes. But the way that code gets turned into code IS.

The compilation of instructions is deterministic. The control flow and WHEN it gets compiled may not be, and it may smartly choose not to compile certain things based on that hot path but that's not the same.

A compiler and interpreter is a SYSTEM. a LLM is not.

The "problem" is that any standard compliant code uniquely defines the output for any given input. A bug-free compiler translates that execution path into the exact same behaviour, just in a different formulation.

An LLM translates a more or less vague natural language description of an execution path into a precise one formulated in code.

The difference is pretty fundamental: In one case you give an exact description of the inputs and outputs, and let a compiler translate that to a different but logically equivalent description. In the other you give a non-exact description and let a stochastic machine translate that into one of many possible exact descriptions.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to produce good code with an LLM. It means you need to inspect the output from the LLM with far more scrutiny than you would ever inspect the assembly output from a compiler.

There's nuance here though, LLM's actually do a better job of code that looks like it should work.

You get an unskilled junior in the mix, their code is obviously bad.

You get a semi decent LLM with a competent harness in there and you get a mix of code that works and code that nearly works.

There should be competent peer review either way, but the effort for each is potentially an order of magnitude different.

Then add on top that the LLM can churn them out way quicker than a junior could possibly achieve and you have a recipe for a huge review burden.

People said this a year ago and I tested it then and it wasn’t great. I’ll believe it’s better but it’s hard to believe it’s “fixed”. I’m sure I’ll get a chance to try it again sometime. No way I’m paying for it myself lol.

Turns out my organic LLM occasionally vomits out sensible things, too.

He compared an LLM to a compiler suggesting that the concerns about using them are the same as suggesting that everyone should write in assembly.

The comparison is invalid, since one mode is deterministic, while the other is not.

LLM-driven development leads to programming via the abstraction of the model, disconnecting you from the source to the point where you don't understand what it's done or why. He's suggesting that this isn't a problem because an LLM is just like a compiler, which suggests that he's arguing in bad faith or doesn't understand the "tools" he's using.

writing the code is the easy part, having a good mental model of what's going on under the hood and planning ahead is the real challenge. if a chatbot puked out the code it's easy to assume that it's right because it worked under your conditions but you might miss stuff that you'd otherwise acknowledge if you wrote the code.

using the chatbots directly discourages thinking and you're deskilling yourself in the long run, depriving yourself of hands-on experience that you'd usually pick up through your coding career.

having a chatbot generate code for you also usually goes hand-in-hand with writing more code faster, which tends to be bad if you like stable software and want to prevent maintainer fatigue.

and that's before we get into the ethical and legal problems.

You don’t need to check that the machine code your compiler made matched the code you wrote. You don’t need to check that the commit message an editor sent matched what you typed.

You absolutely do need to check and correct everything that comes out of AI because it’s at best like 80% correct, and that’s if the subject matter is easy.

How do you parse the last part, if not calling people stupid for not using AI?

the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.

True. However the determinisim behind a compiler allows you to make some more solid assumptions.

For AI use you need to be a good chunk more careful to use it responsibly.

People taking shortcuts is not new.

30 years ago when I was in school, cheating was rampant. There's going to be about 15-20% of people who understand when they are cheating themselves, and the rest won't and never have.

I can think of plenty of tools that will do something for you even if you understand nothing about the tool, how it works, or the domains it is helfpul with.

I can plug a drill in a socket, put a random bit on and drill a hole without any knowledge of how a drill is supposed to work. But my hole won't be straight, will be too deep ir too shallow, too large or too small, and I might have drilled straight into a pipe. I don't understand how drilling works, I still drilled, but the outcome is shit.

I can mix a bunch of flour, eggs, sugar and chocolate in a bowl, then put it in an oven at max temperature on a random heat method and wait half a day. I'll have a bunch of coal, not a cake. I used an oven without any idra how an oven works, it did something for me. It's shit, but it did something for me.

Anyone can put the key in a car and start pressing random pedals to figure out how it works. Eventually anyone will get it... If you're not dead before then or you didn't total your car. Without understanding anything about a car, I did manage to move it and go somewhere. But I damaged some things in the way.

I could go on and on with as many tools as you want. But I doubt you'll keep reading.

LLMs in software development are the same: If you understand how to steer it, if you understand software engineering, it will have fantastic results. If you don't, it will have shit results. The only difference is that it is much harder to understand the insides of how an LLM model works, as that is another specialty. But just like you don't need to understand how an oven actually works to use it, you don't need to understand how an LLM actually works to use it.

Edit: Another great example is a camera. Anyone can take a picture, but without a good understanding of photography, most people's pictures will be shit. And the vast majority of users do not understand and do not hace the knowledge to understand how a camera works.

That blog post is just a bunch of insults to anyone not agreeing with the writer without actually giving any elaborate or truthful argument on why is not just a tool and it's always inherently "evil".

Some arguments made can be easily disproven. For instance the climate change one.

They main point of the post is that "no matter how you use LLMs". But then the argument given here it's highly dependant on how you use them. The amount of environmental damage of LLMs completely depends on which LLMs you use, how you use them and how often you use them. This just here it's showing the irrationally of the blog author.

But it goes one, next point is economics. Which is also 100% dependant on HOW YOU USE IT. Not all LLM are made by big evil corporations, and there's nothing in the technology preventing it being made by anyone.

For a blog post whose main argument is that saying "it depends how you use it" is wrong, have only give arguments that are dependant on how you use. The author makes broad ignorant assumptions about how people use LLMs, asserts that everyone uses them like that and then pretends to control everyone lives based of that. That way of thinking is highly dangerous and it's what have given birth to a lot of evil on our world. We need to be better, more rational, more open minded. Not falling for easy politics and actually do complex political thinking that won't give simple answers to complex questions.

Yes but unfortunately this specific tool is here to stay. Either we learn on how to use it properly and ethically and we regulate it, or we will be in deep troubles. Just denying and refusing to accept AI is here is dumb.

By regulate I mean at state and super-state level (not thinking of USA, but of the world) and define and accept proper ethical rules, both for individuals and corporations.

These research papers talking about AI leading to cognitive decline seem so asinine when certain people's productivity has just skyrocketed under AI.

Sure the hand coding capabilities decline, but that's replaced by thinking around the actually product or architecture.

A huge sect of new Linux users and Selfhosters are talking about how much AI has enabled them yet we're still bringing up papers on cognitive decline that were written on models from 3-4 years ago when Claude Code didn't even exist.

AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline

source?

that is ... Debatable.

Yeah even writing lead to cognitive loss, because now people don't have to memorize everything.

It's just fear for the future and for change. And this is probably the most massive change in human history since fire was discovered.

But don't fear too much: the change is here and will stay, that's the only sure thing

Edit: what I mean is that accepting the fact AI is here and won't go away because we don't like it is the path to start regulating it at government level and agreeing on ethical rules to use it. Just saying you are a bad person of you use it it's like hiding under the sand. You lose.

AI use demonstrably leads to cognitive decline.

No. AI is simply too recent and evolves too quickly to be demonstrably anything.

The studies you refer to are mostly flawed, and most importantly not about software engineering, where I assure you the problem solving part is not diminished, simply shifted. Don't let the memes that show people type "just do your best bro" into claude code influence you, they are just memes :)

All right. And if I cp a jpg file, I'm a photographer. cp is my creative tool.

Guess we'll just have to stick with spark for now.

The problem is that the arguments against Linus are laughable at best and utterly idiotic at worst.

AI right now is just a tool just like a compiler is. The fact that it's not deterministic is absolutely meaningless when code can be test gated and implementation validated by humans.

linux has a succession plan, though?

Blasphemy!!

Very interesting. Great knowledge, thank you. I guess I’ll have to revert to calling it being like the Amish.

Linus is talking about the worker using the technology. He likens it to other tools used in his trade. I don’t see him arguing about who should see the profits from the technology.

I think being dogmatic about strictly not using AI is not empowering the workers who would benefit from utilizing the tool in the correct context.

You could say the same about the railroad bubble, when companies got over excited about rail.

Or the dot com bubble, the Internet destroyed many many jobs.

That’s weird, I didn’t see anyone approving of those things in the original posted text and I definitely didn’t imply any of that with my comment.

Unless I was mistaken this was about Linus saying that using ai is akin to using any other tool.

Actually with some thought, you’ve convinced me.

Hell the printing press is being used by our oppressors to kill the earth. I will be deleting my account and from here on out I will only communicate and read through hand written notes.

I fixed it to correctly compare it to the Amish. Who are just against all use of technology beyond a point.

Linus is very obviously talking about the worker using a tool.

Y’all found a fake pedantic win and rushed me on it because winning is more important than conversations. Kudos on that.

fork the kernel

And find like at least a hundred extremely competent devs to maintain it, and a thousand devs to review the code.

If BSD got nearly as much funding I would have switched like 10 years ago