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We have R U OK? day here and the idea is to check in on people you know to de-stigmatise mental health issues.
I don’t understand what’s he talking about. I was forced to use AI by my employer and instantly lost all the joy in programming.
Have it do the tedious work
Have it create a better testing environment
Have it do bunch of edge case things or automate ui testing.
Use it as a tool. You can still be the brains.
I’m doing all that, but it’s not the same. I’m no longer writing code and it was my favorite part of the job. I guess I was lucky to have a job I enjoyed, now I join the 87% of people who hate their job.
stop trying to force a reality that fits your narrative
lol how many tokens did you burn today
And then yesterday he said something along the lines of “we need to make it harder to contribute to the Linux kernel.” Which I believe he means to say “oh god there’s so much being submitted all of a sudden and it’s all slop.”
"Well, well, well if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions. "
- Linus Probably
The people who are keeping up with this controversy and end up with this conclusion are wildely illiterate, or, extremely biased and making up fictions.
Suddenly Lemmy is going to explain to me why AI is the best thing ever.
It’s a thing, good for some things, not so great for others.
It’s a new thing, people are just starting to figure out what it’s really good for. It’s also improving rather dramatically over the past year, hard to say if that’s the start of an exponential curve, or if we’re hitting an s-curve rolloff already…
If it continues to grow its energy / environmental impact at the current growth rate, that’s a bad thing, but it’s not “in a bad place” yet… if you’re outraged about the last 2 years of AI environmental impact, you should have already been apopleptic over the past 15 years of Bitcoin’s environmental impacts.
Nah im still firmly anti AI regardless of what daddy says. Still based, but hypnotized by the tokens.
Torvalds is doing an illicit substitution of Claude, Gemini, Copilot et al. for the vague term AI, which also includes local models, open-weight models and things that aren’t LLM (machine translations, for example), thus ignoring the ethical issues associated with the operation of commercial AI/LLM services.
Most tokens sold come from China today and open weight models, and
most(EDIT) 42% of energy produced in China is from clean sources like nuclear or renewables. Don’t blame AI for ethics or lack thereof in neoliberal capitalism and a lack of planning or regulations. China also has the most and smartest regulations on AI so far.Does Linux Torvalds use those Chinese and open weight models? Iirc he was using Claude
The point is that fuckai aims to outright villanize people who use AI, although in a proper democratic society we would have massively invested in nuclear and renewables.
The principles would be “If a material good or service can be produced ethically but is only not produced ethically due to profit maximizing which the individual has no power over, then the individual is not ethically responsible for using or boycotting it”.
Or said simpler, the whole fuckai demagoguery is misdirecting anger that should go towards capitalism and especially neoliberal capitalism against people just trying to exist in the fucking system.
• Specific Sources (Recent 12-month baseline via Low Carbon Power): • Coal: ~54% of electricity consumption • Hydropower: ~14% • Solar: ~12% (split evenly between utility-scale and behind-the-meter) • Wind: ~11% • Natural Gas: ~3% • Nuclear: ~4% • Biofuels / Biomass: ~2%
That would be China today.
Thanks for correcting. But overall the trend rapidly goes upwards year by year for china.
The more general argument would be that you can’t blame an individual for systemic ills, which has been done to death for climate change and tried to turn it into personal responsibility. We do not live in true democracies but capitalist societies. And we can’t be expected to “opt out of the system”. If something could be implemented in a way that is ethical but isn’t because the ruling plutocrats make more profit that way, this is not the individuals fault. This demonization of people for using AI is unethical and a strategic blunder in a fight for liberation and ultimately only serves to shield specifically neoliberal capitalism from critique.
a great way to find joy in programming
I already had that, thanks Linus. Did you not?
That’s how I felt when I found MDMA, and it allowed me to find joy in parties and being around people. If used responsibly, of course.
I’m getting exactly the same feeling with AI now. It is instant dopamine fun, but I can see it being addicting in exactly the same way. Of course I tell myself I’ll use it responsibly, for work, and keep my skills sharp by making sure to do some of my own projects, and be responsible in properly reviewing and checking my code.
Just as I told myself that I’ll keep a healthy pause of two months between mdma use, and have a rogorous vitamine and supplements plans based on the most recommended harm reduction research.
Sure, I did manage to do that for the first half a year or so, you can guess how it is now.
It’s pretty unsettling how exactly the same it feels, the way you slowly start giving up on things you’ve sworn to do, and how you slowly start to be unable to do/enjoy the thing (be it parties or coding) without it.
Honestly, if I can use an AI agent that is not coming from an evil corporation that’s destroying the environment, I would use it to help me solve problems like figuring out why I have a build error, why I’m getting certain error messages, why a piece of code isn’t working as I expected, find potential bugs, etc.
It can be a great tool to help you grow, like having a tutor explain where and why you made a mistake so you can learn from it.
NOT if you ask it to do the job for you and generate your code.
I used a local model today to write a long form regex for me today. it would have taken me 30 minutes. instead it took 3 seconds and worked out of the box.
I think this is a perfect example of what LLMs should be used for.
Ok. But did you understand the regex? That’s what people are missing out on. The learning aspect.
The fucking point that Linus misses is, using AI by itself is intrinsically the more irresponsible thing to do. Change my mind.
You are claiming it’s irresponsible, why do you say so?
AI is just a technology, how you use it makes it bad or not.
Nuclear is the cleanest safest energy we have, but you can also make bombs with it.
The “no such thing as a bad tool” argument falls apart if you start thinking about it for longer than a few seconds. If you have a hammer made out of styrofoam, that’s a bad hammer.
In other words, you found an article whose headline seems to make your point for you - which you probably didn’t even read or you might have an actual answer. I did read it, and found the reasoning spurious, like jumping through a series of philosophical hoops to prove all taxes are illegal or that birds don’t exist. The author’s example of a Chinese dish with an unusually large amount of chopped peppers being more easily eaten with chopsticks than with a fork, could just as well have been a bowl of broth that’s much easier to eat with a spoon than with chopsticks. All it demonstrates is that any tool can have appropriate and inappropriate use cases. They’re still just tools.
I read it
So how do they gatekeep the vibecoders out then? FOSS need to change and develop new quality control systems. Stop complaining about vibecode, just review it before you use it. Why can’t you do it?
Stop complaining about vibecode, just review it
Hahaha. Not a developer, huh?
There is no way I could possibly review my coworkers’ 1000s of lines of code he posts daily. I just blindly approve it because fuggggit we don’t care about quality only velocity.
This is different from before because before he would normally post 2 or 3 small code changes per week. Also, he would have tested it himself so starting off it would already be in a good state. Also, since he tested himself, we could talk about the change since he still had the context.
Now it’s just ship, ship, ship. We literally can’t “review it” like we did before. That world is gone.
rationing:
Limit lines of code or diff size. Limit scope. Limit PR per user per month. No bots, obviously. New users don’t get to send anything, they can comment and vote, at best. And bring in negative ratings for contributors: low quality, suspicious code, bad PRs.
This is another way of saying deceleration, a word that accelerationists hate.
Because the pace of code production has officially overwhelmed the human capacity to review it. As it was discussed recently. Linus answer was to use more AI, with the implementation of code review tools that gobble up code and spew out summaries.
For the time being, humans reading the summaries count as human reviewed. But at some point in time this system will crack. The current zeitgeist is to restrict who can contribute. Which leads to the obvious follow up question of who decides based on what, and how to decide who deserves to contribute.
You just witnessed the first steps into the philosophical and political erosion of the open source movement. Not just on the kernel but it is also affecting almost all popular FOSS projects.
But of course, that doesnt matter because Linux is not and has never been political. /s
