apparently many people’s stance on ai is “ai is bad unless my idol uses it”. there is not intellectual discipline, suddenly they are willing to ignore all the other problems with ai: jod lose, excessive energy use, training on stolen data, preying on vulnerable people, exacerbate wealth inequality and concentration of power. and let’s not forget the ones that apply specifically to Linus: diskilling and ai psychosis.
“b-but linus reviews his code!” 🤦
And conversely, many people seem to have a “the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus” stance.
Many people on Lemmy will start to crash out the moment you suggest AI is anything other than pure evil
It’s not the algorithms people oppose, it’s the way they are trained within a capitalist system (infringement of many copyrights without compensation), they way they are being marketed as a living mind that can basically befriend us and take a mental load off of us (they can’t and it’s problematic to humans who allow them to try), and they way they’re being used an excuse to buy up the wntire world’s capacity for computing so that rich tech oligarchs can force us all onto the cloud services for all computing in the future.
I think if at the very least they weren’t bulldozing people’a home and poisoning their drinking water in order to forever capture all technology and then rent it back to us we might have a more favorable view of the possibilities, but so far Big Tech has done almost nothing but try to find ways to make individuals and enterprise addicted to their Mechanical Turk in order to take advantage of us.
Please tell me about how you were poisoned.
That’s what I thought. You weren’t.
I haven’t been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it’s gradually getting a bit better here. There’s still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I’ve been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it’s just naturally getting more diverse.
As long as nobody is being like a personalized salesman of AI and getting it in everyone’s face, I think it’s okay. I still find AI as a useful tool. But I also don’t see AI as an everything-solve-all kind of tool. It has its limits and I’ve seen them by experience.
I mean it’s kind of undoubtedly a miraculous and game changing technology. Anyone who isn’t completely blown away by it doesn’t realize the implications imho
The problem about AI right now is multi-pronged.
But the main key problems are;
It’s costing people’s jobs. In a way, this is of no surprise because before AI, there were shitty bosses and CEOs. They were always there and they will always find any excuse, if any, to release you from your job. AI only merely accelerated it.
Data Centers/AI Plants take too much water. I like how people conveniently forget today, how much water companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle actually take while turning around, bottling said water, just to sell it back to you. And if anyone has watched How It’s Made, you can find arguments everywhere in that series, about how much resources are taken to make everything we use.
My point is, is a lot of arguments that people bring up against AI, there’s such a wedge of counter-arguments in them that negate the problem of AI itself. It’s just demonized because people are disappointed that AI isn’t magically fixing roads and potholes, I guess, I don’t know. Society doesn’t know what they truly want anymore out of anything, it’s just the feeling in the moment of the current ‘I want said thing’ dominates their mindsets.
But the actual problem with AI shocks no one - shitty CEOs.
I just consider the weight of their argument and ignore the votes. We have basically no defense against sock puppet alt accounts, some of which could be LLMs.
It is. Read the top comment. It is bad if you stop assessing it only in vacuum of its existence. It’s like in physics when you ignore all other forces to make simple calculations
Sometimes you’re not even allowed to even suggest that AI might be a thing that exists
I’ve agreed with Linus on a lot of things over the years. This is not one of them.
But I hear what you’re saying, and we’re not talking about me.
Linus Torvalds has fucking lost it.
Going from chewing out someone for committing dumb AI code to becoming an AI techbro himself. How the mighty have fallen.
LLMs have proven time and time again to be a cognitohazard. It just sucks people in like a drug.
It’s healthy to change mind in light of new evidence. AI has improved since GPT 3 days - in particular in coding tasks.
The issue is not usefulness. It’s ethics.
I think people assume the AI code goes first, but it’s not really like that.
I just busted out a half day of coding. Really impressive stuff for my standard and was just in flow with little optimisation breakthroughs popping in my head as I made it through. Output looks great, all working as expected, documented and commented my new things in case I forget them later or want to explain them to the team.
But later, I’ll probably run it through a model real quick and expect at least one change, usually around tidying things up or an opportunity to optimise a block here or there a bit more. Basically tighten up any loose screws or be pointed to big obvious things I somehow missed.
Really, I think that’s how most devs are making use of it. It can be frightening the shit LLMs come up with starting for scratch (that goes with anything), or even 60-70%. Doesn’t matter how good the prompts are, at the end of the day, it’s relying on Frankencode sourced from all over the place to apply solutions. It has no consistent and familiar, style, logic, or “accent” in its language. But if it’s got an established and detailed base, concept, and direction (such as a mostly completed chunk of code), frequently enough it’ll assist well with finding dumb shit.
It’s like a final phase thing, to get you beyond, “It seems work work well; good enough.” to “It’s definitely working well. This is done for now.”
I like to think that’s what’s going on here because anyone with even moderate developing knowledge/skill/experience totally sees just how bad LLMs are at coding.
I don’t like him and I don’t like AI.
It’s like there’s nuance that deserves to be acknowledged or something. Weird.
Nice strawman.
correct
Apart from the de skilling and psychosis thing. That’s up to you
I see the “unless my idol uses it / unless someone good uses it” as a deeply human thing. For me it’s the other side of the coin from not harming oneself in discussion, even if a valid point was brought up.
Few great people do that.
Ai isn’t going away… It’s like a nuclear arms race. The government won’t let it go away… They need it and will do anything locally and globally to solidify ai (and digitizing life) as the modern foundation of governing.
If people don’t want ai, they should be completely boycotting their nations. Votes don’t reach this level of need. “Need” as in the government would even sacrifices its own people to reach the goal. For all we know it’s the whole reason America had trump as president… So they could distract and implement the social and psychological strategy of easing into the upcoming modern foundation.
It’s not just “the government won’t let it go away.” Users won’t let it go away.
I find AI to be incredibly useful for running my coding agent, for example. I run it myself on a local machine. Every AI company on Earth could go bankrupt tomorrow and I’d keep on chugging away with it. Lots of other enthusiasts and smaller companies making use of it would do likewise.
Lawyer-turned-software-developer reporting in! (American, to be clear…)
My concern with AI generated code has to do with software licensing. Mainly…. What is the license of AI generated code??? What if it regurgitates entire sections of proprietary code? Unless I’ve totally missed some legal/tech news, these questions are FAR from settled.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills sometimes, but that seems like something the Linux kernel community should be at least mildly curious about….
Look, to be fair, maybe they are! I don’t follow the kernel mailing list; I don’t know what they talk about. I’m just a humble backend developer/infrastructure guy.
But I know it worries me… personally, I mostly use LLMs in my own work via asking questions about code I’ve already written. Then I look at suggestions it’s made, or potential issues it points out, and decide what to do accordingly. But that’s just me!
If it regurgitates proprietary code the model should not have had access to for training data… well…
That street goes both ways, there’s more GPLed code in the training corpus than there is leaked proprietary code.
Unironically a AI’s biggest win. Absolutely fair criticism on art and weak imitations of human creativity, but code is just math with syntactic sugar. “Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time. What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation? What if printers just worked? What if you could put adblockers on any device? What if every online game could be self hosted and modded? AI is (for the moment) giving an approximation of that timeline and I’m here for it.
But what about the poor corporations making money off those games that already fired all the devs that made it after overworking them?
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time.
Well… we have open source for a while, and people are still reinventing the wheel every time. There’s always the new chat protocol that claims to be the best, but works almost the same as all others, there’s always reimplementations of some software in another language just because the developers don’t like the original language. There are forks of software due to ideological divergence. There are reimplementations of famous software just for fun. There’s a lot of other cases, all reinventing of the wheel, all the time.
It’s arguably not always a bad thing for people to reinvent the wheel, but anyway, I see it getting MUCH worse with ai. People are already going to chatbots asking to implement things before even searching for work already done on that, and we’re going to end with milions of businesses and individuals with reinvented wheels everywhere, instead of everyone using a shared codebase. If nothing happens in the near future, I see things getting less compatible with each other due to no standards in implementations
Just playing devil’s advocate here; do you think an architect should not be able to own the blueprints they’ve produced?
To a slightly broader point, do you not agree with the notion that technical solutions can have creative implementations, and that that can be a form of artistry?
I don’t know much about architecture, but a building is generally bespoke. It’s made to a specific physical location and has to work in its surroundings and be built to local regulations. From that viewpoint I can’t really judge how much value the blueprint actually has and therefore if it matters who “owns” the IP. The architect has done real legwork to bring that specific building to life and anyone else would need to redo much of it to copy the result.
Any human effort can be a creative artistic expression. You could mass produce a jacket or a hand-stitch an equivalent jacket and both will be warm. You could code a subtle and elegant CMS for a website or use some pre-built solution, both will deliver the same content. The difference is, people will laugh you out of the room for trying to patent your home stitching technique but nod and clap when you put a license on your code.
You could say the same about patents for physical inventions. But there are legitimate reasons for patents to exist.
What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation?
That’s apple’s decision, one of many to force their users to only get their devices, similarly not being able to host your own game servers benefits the publishers/ devs. (Edit for clarity: by this I mean that this state of things isn’t caused by unavailability of open source solutions but rather by corporate greed.)
“Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
Not any different from protecting one’s art creations. You spend a bunch of time learning how to code and are doing it for a living so you don’t want others/ competition to take it and sell as their own. Not sure what’s hard to understand.
Most programmers earn a wage, not the full value of their labor.
That’s true of course. And it’s true for a lot of people in other areas as well. In vacuum I’m all for open source software, in fact I would like it a lot if everything was open. But reality is that as a developer in a smaller software company we’d be out of our jobs immediately as other, larger companies would take everything that’s worth taking and use their larger budgets to out advertise their copy.
It really seems like way too many people are just kinda going “eh, everyone else is doing it. It’d be impossible for the courts to force us to reverse course on this now.” Like, there’s no way the monkey is going to get the cork back in, might as well just get used to being covered in shit.
Lawyer-turned-software-developer.
Are you the inverse of lawtechie from reddit?
Well… I don’t know who that is, so… maybe?
They posted in the /r/talesfromtechsupport, IIRC. IT-turned-lawyer, mostly posting about IT security consulting.
Oh no! Not our beloved corporate-owned proprietary intellectual property! Won’t somebody think of the sacred copyright system, bestowed upon us by God? /s
Sorry, but it sounds like you’re saying that AI is a threat to tech Capitalism, and that this is a bad thing somehow.
Friendly reminder of how dumb people can be, thank you kind stranger.
The problem with licensing here is very obviously that this makes the GPL weaker, potentially giving more power to corporate interests. Couldn’t you take half the time it took you to write your comment, and think about it yourself? Out of tokens?
Software licensing is dead, you should really catch up because what are even talking about.
I am sure out of all projects Linux has the expertise and guardrails to ensure LLM generated code works as expected
Exactly! It’s a tool that creates slop with an untrained hand. With a trained professional hand who reviews the work it’s just a helper.
Huzzah! Saurman it’s finally using the seeing stone! He’s such a wise old wizard. He’ll be able to see the future and help us choose the right path. This could never go wrong or cause any ethics issue or anything!
And yet the trained professional Linus recently PRed honestly garbage. Your argument is invalid.
Until Claude can diagnose and treat Kent Overstreet for whatever neurospicy killed bcachefs, I will never trust it blindly. It just does things faster. Sometimes it breaks things faster, other times is finds things ready to be broken faster.
“This is a BIG merge window,” he wrote in his weekly state of the kernel update, as it contains almost 20,000 commits compared to the usual ~15,000 that developers submit for a new cut of the kernel.
Great to see so much momentum!
Is he okay? He looks so frail
Its probably mostly because he’s in his 50s and does a desk job for a career.
56!
I don’t know why i thought he was from an older generation. He’s from gen x.Probably because you don’t expect a 22 year old to build a kernel and then maintain it for 34 years.
Not with that attitude, that’s for sure!
I’d guess Ozempic, most of the folks my age that take it get frail looking for a while.
ActionRetro has the same look right now I guess they could be sick but…
“Don’t you think he looks tired?”
as long as it doesn’t start pretending to be my friend 🐙
they should change the name to LinAIux
Unfortunately they maintain the main branch so we can only rename the forks. P.S. plz at me if we hear about an anti-AI Kernel Fork because I fully intend to install it myself.
Will do
Another article about my fav traitor 😍
For anybody confuse about why Torvalds is suddenly such a slopper it’s because AI companies pumped millions into the Linux Foundation which gives him a paycheck.
Is that a fact or just a suspicion? Because I don’t see you providing any sources for that.
Don’t get me wrong I suspect so myself, but I wouldn’t make such a claim without backing it up.“SAN FRANCISCO – March 17, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced $12.5 million in total grants from Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and OpenAI to strengthen the security of the open source software ecosystem. The funding will be managed by Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), trusted security initiatives within the Linux Foundation, to develop long-term, sustainable security solutions that support open source communities worldwide.”
Immediately after this announcement Linus was suddenly a lot less critical of AI.
👍
