Human written code these days feels equivalent to a unique and soulful artisan made item whereas AI code is like a soulless and defected factory made imitation. I’d much, much, much, rather support artisans over factory made slop and even before AI, artisan work has been well known to be significantly higher quality than factory made stuff. For something as foundational and important as a kernel, I really think AI has no place in it.
Even artisans use tools.
OP didn’t say they didn’t
I didn’t say that she didn’t say that they didn’t.
You have too many negatives there.
Should be “I didn’t say she did say they didn’t.”
Though… You also didn’t say that she didn’t say that they didn’t (that was the other commenter) so I guess you’re still accurate.
I didn’t.
This “argument” really shines the light on just how dumb pro AI people are.
This ‘ad hominem’ really shines the light on just how toxic anti-AI people are.
Did you have to ask ChatGPT how you felt about my comment then to create a response?
Are you naturally an asshole or do you just enjoy fighting strawmen on the Internet?
That’s why you like AI. You can say anything and have it stroke your ego. Real people challenge you and I bet that feels icky.
No, it is you that likes AI. I can’t believe you support datacenters being built in endangered habitats, you’re such an bad person to be carrying water for AI. How does Sam Altman’s butthole taste?
Oh, did I just make up shit about you and insult you using this fabricated information? What an ignorant thing to do on the Internet. Don’t you agree, AI lover?
Artisans own their tools, that’s what makes them artisans (rather than wage workers). I believe after the bubble pops there will be legitimate uses for the tech, and we’ll be able to run a pretty good iteration in our own hardware, but as it is now I’m uncomfortable with my employer having the power to decide whether I have the tools they want me to use for the job, whereas with code that’s less of a concern.
There’s already pretty decent open weight models that you can run on your own hardware. They won’t be as fast as the models running in a datacenter but they will get the job done while not adding more money to the garbage fire that is ‘The AI Industry’.
I don’t think that the future of AI is as a massive subscription service industry, that is just rampant capitalism on full display (with all of the damage that it causes).
I was thinking more that lots of people don’t have the hardware required to begin with, and it’s really hard to purchase now (especially in poorer countries like mine), hopefully memory prices will come down at some point after the bubble bursts so we can afford shit
All I care about is whether it works and is secure. Bonus points for cheaper and faster development. If artisan code gets us there, sure. If AI code gets us there, great. I trust Linus to know what works and what doesn’t.
I care about the environment. 🤷♂️
I suppose the big issue for me is that I’m also an artist and I view code similarly, especially when I combine code with my graphics. I understand though that with a large project you are going to have some amount of people using AI even if you try to filter them out, so I can partially understand his stance. However I really disagree with him when he says it’s a useful tool, given how AI causes brain rot, productivity losses, and environmental destruction.
As for productivity losses and environmental destruction, that’s sort of what I was referring to when I said “bonus points for cheaper and faster development”. The environmental destruction refers to energy usage. Productivity can be thought of as time usage. If AI can be cheaper than humans in both time and energy, then that’s a win.
There’s a related discussion about how the context here is mainly about finding vulnerabilies with AI. And that is one where AI does seem to be faster and cheaper than using humans. Since AI is now finding kernel vulnerabilities that have been lurking there for 15+ years.
Maybe code generation will get there too.
As an artist you might also be worried about how AI is trained on copyrighted data. But I personally don’t really care about copyright
While I am very anti-genAI, I’m much more okay with analytical AI as long as it’s not blindly trusted. Technically they don’t need an LLM as they could use something smaller and optimized just to find vulnerabilities. I still take issue with ethical and environmental concerns but I think there are solutions to them. We just need to slow down, take the time to do things right, and ditch the whole “move fast and break things” mindset commonly seen in tech, but I doubt that will ever happen.
What’s your argument against generative AI but not analytical AI? From what I’ve seen the arguments for/against one also work for the other
My viewpoint is that genAI will always cause cognitive decline no matter what however I haven’t come across any studies yet about analytical AI also brain rotting people. If it’s trained on data with consent from it’s owners’ and they find a solution to the environmental problems, I’d be fine with it as long as it’s used for good purposes.
This post about AI detecting cancer makes me believe it might be genuinely useful, although of course it can be used for despicable, evil purposes as well.
Also, humans really like making/designing things. I don’t see the point in automating activities that many people love doing. Every time I come across an ad advertising image gen or whatever it just feels so out of touch with humanity.
In the past all you had was human-made so this distinction wasn’t even a thing.
I’m just very bitter that people will probably be made to use AI. Coding, as it was done before the advent of LLMs, was fun to me. Being a prompt engineer isn’t. I hope and pray AI isn’t here to stay, but if it is, what I thought would be a career full of doing something I enjoy, is just going to be a boring slog. (I currently took a different job outside of tech over this—I graduated with a CS degree as LLM usage was exploding and getting forced on everyone.) Years wasted prepping for a career I’ll never do, but at least nobody can force me to use LLMs in hobby projects.
But even if I do not code for work, I dread every non-manual job turning into one where I am expected to use generative AI and criticized and quickly fired if I don’t. I liked so many aspects of almost any type of work, but I really do not like generative AI, trusting this black box based off of statistical patterns instead of a model of the real world, and if it enters every type of non-manual labor I’ll have a shit sandwich to eat at any job I do unless I, delicate little woman who was raised to think I’d be able to have a white collar office job and would never have to earn money with muscles and the literal sweat of my brow, decide to start doing hard manual labor.
And then even if I wiggle out of it somehow as a white collar worker or find I take well to manual labor, I cannot guarantee my doctor didn’t just ChatGPT my symptoms, the bridge I drive over wasn’t glued together with nondeterministic predictions from generative AI instead of actual simulations based on fact…
Extremely unhappy to start life with “you’re good at do many things, you’ll do great!” only to get the rug pulled right when I start applying with “none of this matters when AI can do it much faster” so quick with little adjustment time. And with “I know I’ll enjoy working, most seem interesting, and I have diverse skills in case something happens to one industry, how lucky am I” to dreading when it starts to become the daily AI-prompting slog and I have the “daily grind” “ugh when does it end” everyone else does, or when I’m just totally cut out entirely unless I am willing to work my body instead of my brain. And so I have a vested interest in AI not becoming normalized or endorsed or approved by people lots of others listen to like Linus Torvalds. Because it is happening, all I have is sadness and anxiety for when work starts being prompt engineering.
Lmao I’m in the same boat as you. I’m a recent-ish CS grad with no job and vibe coding (or cuck coding as I like to call it) sucks the joy out of every part of CS to the point where I’ve considered going back to college to get a different degree.
Also, I’ve actually worked a manual labor job before and am fully aware of how shit they are. Very underpaid and unappreciated work imo.
I personally think both pro LLM and anti LLM are wrong. One group think they are gods. The other think they are demons. LLMs can be useful for programming to some extent. But they will create a disaster if you don’t know what are you doing. I have recently published a post about the matter on me blog. I think the best part is:
I strongly believe that LLMs are useful for programming to some extent. Imagine you have a shop and you get a robot to do the moves for you. So you instead focus on the main business concerns.
So if you want to make some changes to the code which don’t require intelligence, that is they are just mechanical tasks, LLMs are good. If you want the LLMs to understand semantics of your code, you have chosen the wrong tool. Maybe in future we’ll have new AI software and tools which also understand semantics to some extent. But I highly doubt a transformer will be able to do it. They just predict the next likely token.
There is something I haven’t yet added to the post. So I am writing it here. Our computers are Universal Turing Machines. There are some fundamental limits to what a turing machine can’t do. Those are called undecidable problems. For instance a turing machine can never check if two pieces of code are semantically equivalent[1]. But that’s what human programmers can do. That’s why I emphasize on tasks which require no intelligence.
[1] That’s about the general case. Sure there are exceptions. But as we say “exception is not the rule”.
This right here. It’s a tool.
But that’s what human programmers can do
I don’t think humans can solve the undecidable problems. If I understand them correctly, they’re like a law of nature; extends into mathematics, logic, and any formal system (e.g. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem).
LLMs can program, to some extent. But (not having read your linked post) you only focus on its capabilities, not its implications beyond “can it do the task?”.
Most of the “undecidable” are only undecidable for a subset of the problem instances, while a vast number of instances can be even trivially decidable. For example in the undecidable halting problem, both you and a computer can trivially deduce that
while(true)will not halt. In the same way a computer can deduce that many instances of two pieces of code are semantically equivalent.I’d like to see an instance of the problem where a human could decide it and the computer could not.
Hey. The number of problems which can are decidable are infinite as are those which are not. But as soon as there is a backward jump in your code, a Turing machine most likely won’t be able to decide if it’ll halt or not. The
while(true)is an exception. In the real world we have a great number of programs whose loops cannot be decided by a Turing machine. But the programmer who has written the code knows when the loop will terminate.If we see the machine code, if there is a conditional backward jump(unlike
while(true)which is unconditional), in the general case it’s undecidable.Backwards jumps are equally decidable for turing machines as for humans. Compiler and static code linters can trace through very complicated code and know that it will or will not halt, and optimize or warn based on the result.
I believe there’s nothing special about human computation abilities. Anything that is decidable by a human will be also decidable by a computer.
Please prove me wrong by showing a counter example.
I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Nor I’ve got the time for this. It’s up to you to do your research. I have done mine and shared the results. You can take it or leave it.
I admit I may be wrong so I asked you to show me an example, since you talk with such certainty.
In fact this is an open question so nobody knows, even though most of the researchers believe human computation is equal as far as I know.
LLMs are just tools, the problem is managers who all think they’re god machines and it causes hell on earth
Once again, Linus steps in and delivers a reasonable take that cuts through the whole argument. It’s hard to imagine what Linux culture will be like without him.
But it’s not reasonable, and doesn’t “cut through the whole argument”. I expand here
All it takes is one person using an LLM tainted with proprietary code which then just gives them that code line for line to undo decades of courtroom defense.
Ist that a common thing that LLMs using proprietary code for coding tasks?
Because I don’t think so.
They use everything for everything, that’s the big issue. Also gpl code. Anything they can trawl through they use. And replicate, in part or in full.
They take code snippets and copy and paste them? Or do they create own code based on what they’ve learned by trawling?
LLMs don’t “create”. Under the hood, they’re tokenizing the queries, looking for “clouds” of tokens that are similar to the query, then returning a sequence of tokens (with some random noise thrown in) that match what their training data says the answer should be.
In short: all LLM code is an amalgamation of their training data by definition. If there’s nothing similar in there, it’s literally not possible for it to be part of any response.
You’re exactly right. I should have used „generate“ instead of „create“.The point is I don’t think LLMs normally use copyrighted code in a way that would hurt open source projects.
Under the hood, they’re tokenizing the queries, looking for “clouds” of tokens that are similar to the query, then returning a sequence of tokens (with some random noise thrown in) that match what their training data says the answer should be.
Lol, so how do humans code in comparison?
Human programmers at least can tell you where they got a snippet they copied, whether it was in the docs, stack overflow or elsewhere, and you can try to keep attribution if you care about compliance. Not only that, but most of our skills are related to designing stuff and recognizing which pattern to use, the specific implementation isn’t necessary the same unless we go look for whatever we saw in the past, as our memories don’t just record everything and repeat it word by word. And after picking up a new language or framework I only need to look around when using a third party library or some API I’m less familiar with, or when something breaks.
Not only that, but AI output can’t be licensed/copyrighted. The GPL license no longer covers the kernel in legal terms.
The GPL license no longer covers the kernel in legal terms.
The uncopyrightability of AI-written code only applies to the actual strings of code generated by an AI, not to the entire project.
A person could ignore the GPL if they only copied the AI-written portions. But, how could they know for sure which lines were AI generated and which were not? A wrong choice would leave them civilly liable for copyright violation and all they stand to gain would be tiny portions of the Linux kernel code which are worthless by themselves.
There’s no reason to steal the AI generated portions and risk a lawsuit, when you can just generate your own code.
Whoever combines LLM generated code with GPL licensed code is required to license the result under the GPL. Can they do that if the LLM code isn’t copyrightable?
AI is a tool, just like other tools we use.
This argument has, to me, always reeked of naivety. Heroin is a tool, but it has clear ethical implications, and we make attempts as a society to manage those. So is nuclear, and a particularly relevant one, since many leading AI figures have officially and explicitly stated AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons. There are countless other examples of “tools” that require moral judgement (all of them, really).
I think Linus is being naive, and given his position of power, irresponsible.
And no, AI isn’t perfect.
I could write an essay about how much of an understatement, to the point of being wrong, this is. Many, far more capable than me, already have.
This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.
No, of course it’s not, but he seems to be treating it like ethics and context are for children.
It makes me worried for the Linux project. Not that he’s willing to use AI, but that this is how he sees it. This is a learning experience for me.
I’m reminded of this quote that, to be honest I don’t really understand, but feels relevant
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind…The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.
– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.
This is a nice one.
And I see it happening right in front of my eyes at work. ‘How it is used’ will defer by the individual and specially for new tools, there will always be a generation of suffering.
Project Management, Jira/scrum etc had one (I’d say, still ongoing for most workplaces, that haven’t figured out the correct match). This one will too; probably more of it.Friendly reminder that many drugs like heroin and morphin can be life savers if used correctly. Either directly or by changing some of its chemicals. For instance, when people have heavy surgeries, morphin is a life saver to evade the insane pain. Needless to say that many of such these or a production of them are used as meds for mental illnesses.
Pharmaceutical use was primarily what I meant by “a tool”
