Watching Torvalds actions tearing this place apart is hilarious
Almost anyone can cut and paste a face on a different body using a classic photo editor.
It still takes a profesional to do it in a way that delivers a quality result.
Linus Torvalds is a professional, the linux terminal is his baby, if we can trust anyone on this, its him.
The amateurs using ai to produce slop that resembles what we perceive as quality, is sometimes hard to tell but 25 years ago people though half life 1 looked insanely realistic and that graphics could not possibly look any more real. Over time our brains will adapt and we will be able to tell slop from real work in a heartbeat. I bet most people here can already tell if a mail was written by an llm and not audited by a human with ease.
but isn’t using AI inherently unethical?
My subjective opinion is that yeah it is unethical, but not more then so many other things we normalised.
Systematicly slaughtering animals for meat for example.
I am not a vegitarian by any means. You cannot fight on all fronts at once and have to pick your own battles in context of your own lifes challenges.
Cars poison the air and kill many people, i dont drive a car for that reason because thats a fight i can fight. I have sensativities with food, so i am not cutting out meat. (I aim to do so some day)
I moved to linux some years ago by getting help from an llm which requires datacenters build by malicious companies. I don’t have a google or meta account and my cloud and media is hosted locally on recycled hardware. Where for others those services require datacenters build by malicious companies.
Life is various shades of grey.
Linus explained in that Git tag message that he “did what I preach” and used modern LLM tools to make sense of patches that were hard for him to follow.
It’s already too late. He’s gone down the rabbit hole.
I’m worried about cognitive surrender. There’s evidence of people losing skills they once had because they stopped doing it themselves and just get AI to do it for them.
“Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Erodes Your Ability to Persist at Hard Things”: https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/using-ai-just-10-minutes-erodes-your-ability-persist-hard-things
They should run the test with calculators, because they’ll see the same effect. Turns out that giving people a tool to make things trivial, and then taking that tool away, halfway through the goddamn exam, is a lot more frustrating than just asking them to do some algebra on paper.
‘Bicycling for just ten miles makes walking back seem like a pain in the ass.’
going to just copy and paste my reply to your other comment: AI is not a tool it is a replacement, there’s no skill in using AI
Only in the sense using a calculator makes you worse at long division. You’re still doing math.
Every pearl-clutching article like ‘doctors got worse at spotting cancer when we gave them a tool and then took it away’ is only measuring before and after. None of them seem interested in asking: how much more cancer did they find, with the tool?
AI is not a tool it is a replacement, there’s no skill in using AI
Weird how software engineers are better at ‘being replaced’ than novices. They seem to get better results by knowing what it’s supposed to be doing.
What a funny coincidence.
yeah I agree with this statement. it’s not that LLM are necessarily bad it’s making people reliant and lazy which leads to complacency.
it’s making people reliant and lazy which leads to complacency.
Pretty much the whole point of every invention in the industrial revolution.
If he’s still auditing and understanding the code. Something that he’s done as a project manager for decades at this point. I don’t see how it will. If the code is generated by a person or a machine. The auditing isn’t much different.
Ironically, I find the LLMs to be better at auditing code than generating it in the first place. Like the humans they trained under, LLMs make mistakes and miss important things in both endeavors, but: when an LLM finds a real problem, that’s a win no matter how you look at it.
Definitely. I just hope that sooner rather than later it’s possible for them all to move over to local open source models. Supporting wasteful content thieves is not sustainable.
That and that all the GPU manufacturers Etc have their sound blaster moment. These days a lot of socs have quite powerful Graphics accelerators on them. At some point, someone’s going to release a bit of silicon equivalent to the AC 97. May not have been able to compete with sound blaster on the ridiculously high end of the market. But was good enough for 99% of tasks. So that most people don’t even remember sound blaster anymore. Even though they still technically exist.
I searched what sound blaster is, but I don’t really understand it. Are they a company that made audio cards in the ancient times? I think I remember some people said that having audio cards was not standard.
Their website seems to have weird hardware targeted at gamers.
Maybe they sell audio interfaces? But I’m confused why gamers of all people would be the target group. I got an audio interface for my guitar myself and some MIDI things.
Back in the DOS days and early windows days. They were one of the gold standards for PC audio. Even if you didn’t own a sound blaster card, you likely owned a clone that emulated one. They were the bees knees so to speak when it came to PC gaming.
But by the late 90s the company had spread itself so thin on branding and other things. Sound blaster CDROM drives? Yep. Sound blaster video cards? Yep. Etc Etc Etc. They tried to parlay being a lucky defacto standard into something else. Wanted to be a premium brand. Prices go up, quality goes down. Kinda like Nvidia now. Fake frames, AI slop, shitting on traditional customers.
Turn of the century and a standard set in 97 finally started rolling out on consumer motherboards. No longer when you bought your computer if you wanted it to make anything more than basic beeps boops and buzzes. Did you have to go out and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get an ad in card. It was on board. On the motherboard.
The newest computer I own is an early ryzen from the previous Dark Times. Not to be confused with these dark times. So I don’t have first-hand experience. But it is my understanding that Intel integrated Graphics isn’t quite the joke is that it used to be. Just a bastard stepchild that Intel can’t decide if they really want to support of not. And some AMD chips have an APU on it which is similar. But still chokes under anything very intense. It’s getting close. But just not quite. Give us a truly standardized setup with the basic power of a mid 2010s graphics accelerator and vulkan api, most people would be in business.
Honestly I’m hoping something along this line happens and becomes common with risc-v systems. Like Mali with arm.
I have been using “onboard graphics” professionally in our products, including products which do 3D rendering, since 2014.
I think GPUs have a little longer life than sound blaster cards still in them, massive arrays of relatively simple CPUs have more purposes than just graphics rendering.
I can vouch for that: As a programmer, I can generally see both programming AI and general LLM use if it was copy-pasted. I know a guy who isn’t a programmer who’ve used Claude Code to make an app, and things are working, but it’s sooo clear even to a junior SE that it’s vibe-coded. There’s a clear lack of consistency, architecture, maintainability, and general human readability.
However, if the code/text was reviewed and edited by a capable human programmer, it’s incredibly difficult to single out what is a product of AI and not.Actual programmers who understand and can write code themselves who use AI simply as a tool, NOT a shortcut, will produce indistinguishable code. Linus is an incredibly smart and capable guy, and for specific uses, I’m confident in him using this tool responsibly.
(The ethics of AI use is a different topic however…)
How do you see the longevity of it. You obviously learnt how to code before ai. What about those learning now that are learning only having access to ai. Id anticipate the quality over time will deteriorate
I think we’ll unfortunately see a degradation over time of capable programmers, as it’s with most other things: Humans learn poorly from seeing things being done for them, rather than doing it themselves. AI can be a good resource for iteration and a sort of rubber duck, and even for explaining things (with external confirmation). But as it currently stands, people find it much more attractive to just let AI do the work for them. That’s the most prominent work culture after all, based on capitalistic values: Economic growth above all.
I see it in schools as well, unfortunately: Students find it much more appealing to get good grades than to actually learn. Not everyone, of course, but still way too many.
And I do understand many of the students: The bar for junior programmers has now increased, as a lot of employers simply think “why hire a human that is on the same level as AI?”.
This message explains the difference between being a centaur or a reverse centaur. Pluralistic explains it in more depth.
Meh, its less exciting whenever Claude Code is involved; I am wondering how many undetected bugs will sneak into the kernel. If he was going to use an LLM, he could at least use something local and not connected to one of the many nasty big corps that are ruining shit.
I am wondering how many undetected bugs will sneak into the kernel.
Less with LLMs than without. https://projectdiscovery.io/blog/the-vulnerability-curve-bent-with-the-ai-curve https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/aixcc-results
Yeah, but you are still relying on models that are going to go up in smoke when the bubble fucking crashes. As people are rightfully hesitant to pay the real price for these things, these things are controlled by mega-corps which is ultimately a bad thing because a centralized authority sets the terms of engagement with their services. They are the ones actively scraping open source projects so much that it acts as a DDoS attack, hovering up personal data of other people as if it were candy. Not to mention the other effects it is having on jobs, AI systems being central to massive data breaches, etc. A few positives don’t outweigh the massive negatives that come with the technology.
If the models all go up in smoke, we still have the code (and its bugs) - so let’s get as many bugs out as possible as soon as possible and not accept a bunch of garbage code - as has always been the case, it’s just happening faster now.
Trainers (all over the world) are behaving badly, because they can get away with it. I’m not sure where that ends up, but it doesn’t change the generated code or the discovered vulnerabilities or the fixes.
The personal data has been abused for decades already, but again - now it’s easier for more actors to abuse your personal data and mine. Maybe, someday, we’ll get serious about enforcing privacy policies and not just have completely toothless theater about it.
I’d definitely like someone to champion an open-weights model under 32 GB. But part of that desire is - I’m not sure they’re there, yet. Local models are only a few months behind, but hoo boy, the last few months have been big.
Coding models could be tiny, but distilled versions keep preserving pop-culture knowledge and world history, when reasoning through C++ requires essentially none of that. It needs the tokenization to recognize why a comment begins “Jesus Christ.” It’s fine for “treat the hash like Lot’s wife” to go completely over its head. Keep the weights that know a regex for e-mails, not the capitol of Florida. If it speaks a dead language I want it to be Algol.
You wouldn’t want him using a local model unless he was running some fancy rig that could run a high end frontier model. He might not have such a thing laying around. Using the best out there for something like this is how you help avoid bugs.
He gets paid more than enough to afford high end hardware.
He definitely can afford it yes, but its still a big ask to want someone to spend 15-25k or whatever it would be (shits getting more expensive by the day) to use a tool that he can just do pay per use. The code is open source so its not like he’d be using a local llm to keep it private.
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AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9960X
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GIGABYTE TRX50 AERO D Motherboard
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Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 2TB SSD
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Noctua NH-U14S TR5-SP6 Cooler
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Intel Arc B580 GPU
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Fractal Design Torrent E-ATX Case
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Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 1600W 80+
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Titanium PSU
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ASUS ProArt Display PA32QCV 31.5" 6K
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HDR Monitor
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Honestly, his mind and the community is probably one of the best things out there at the moment. They live the Linux Kernel, while that thing he used does not think or understand anything. Eh, it would be better if they moved with care instead, as that is a good way to avoid bugs too. I don’t have a lot of faith in gassed up LLMs.
He’s doing it though. So that’s kind or moot. Fable is out there finding bugs in these things, so seems like if he is going to do it, using the thing that’s already making it more secure by finding multiple exploits is the right choice of what to use.
“Improvement” huh
?
I too love
filling my code with things that silently reduce my understandingimproving my code usingstochastic prediction models trained on tainted data filled with hidden injection prompt attacksAIwhat’s the worst that could happen? /s
I’d love to see a pre-AI fork of the Linux kernel.
Be the change you seek in the world.
Okay, that was always an option.
I think some of the BSDs have no AI clauses.
I ran it all through Slopscore and consulted open-slopware, and here are the results:
- ⬛ Linux has at least 2,274 slop commits, to date.
- 🟧 FreeBSD has at least 53 slop commits, including some from Anthropic themselves.
- 🟨 OpenBSD and NetBSD have a couple of slop commits, but nothing colossal. NetBSD also requires any AI-generated code to be signed off by the core maintainers.
- 🟨 DragonFly BSD has at least three slop commits.
- 🟥 MidnightBSD has at least 292 slop commits.
- ⬛ NextBSD is entirely vibecoded.
- 🟩 MirBSD has an anti-AI policy, but only supports i386 and SPARC, and is currently unusable anyway.
- 🟩 HyperbolaBSD has an anti-AI policy, but hasn’t been released yet (they’re still a Linux-libre distro).
- 🟩 CoffeeBSD is a slop-free fork of FreeBSD, but has had no commits since it was forked.
You can do it always
I can see people genuinely switching to NetBSD because of this.
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