This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
AI code bans may be impossible to enforce in the first place
I hate this attitude that if a rule or standard can't be enforced perfectly, we shouldn't strive for it. We can't (reasonably) run an OS free of proprietary software, does that mean the free software movement should just give up?
"People are going to murder anyway, so why even make murder illegal?"
You are correct, you should make rules even understanding that they will be broken by some.
I think one way is to make people realize that there is a concept in copyright called Threshold of Originality, meaning that because machine generated output in itself is not creative work, it's not copyrightable. You can do literally anything with it, the licenses attached don't matter. The GPL is not enforceable and no proprietary EULA is enforceable.
I hate this attitude that if a rule or standard can’t be enforced perfectly, we shouldn’t strive for it.
"Murder bans may be impossible to enforce in the first place"
In his commit message:
[And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.
I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.
I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.
But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.
This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "round_up()" to a "round_down()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]
Didn't he state quite early on that LLMs were a good tool to spot bugs? Found this from 3 years ago: https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/
Hackers use LLMs to spot odd exploits so it makes sense developers use them too. The usage of LLMs in development likely won‘t make Linux better or safer overall, because bugs and exploits wouldn‘t have been found by either side without it in the first place. It‘s like pandora‘s box where Linus is kind of forced to use it. If that makes sense.
He might consider himself forced to use it to find bugs. He wouldn't be forced to use it to write the fix.
(Now you might say he wasn't or isn't, but even if that were true for the kernel at large this doesn't seem to be: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/10/linus-torvalds-says-ai-has-made-huge-linux-kernel-updates-the-new-normal/5285268 And this seems like mostly to be on Linus, for not stepping in here.)
Whatever's the outcome, the anthropomorphization in that message stinks 🤮
Trying to avoid anthropomorphising something with which you interact via natural language is incredibly laborious, and achieves nothing.
Using AI is not the same as vibe coding.
Asking AI to write a piece of code and then read it, understand and use, is a very reasonable use case.
Yeah, and Torvalds using generative AI to write code is not the same as Bobby LinkedIn telling us he's coding his third app this week.
I’m glad Linus is pragmatic about this, ethical questions aside LLM’s are a highly valuable tool in software development and they are likely to continue to improve. Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are. Open weight LLM’s have also come a long way and are already good enough for daily use.
ethical questions aside
And his here is the problem. Oh yeah lets just waive off the biggest critisicm on and issue of AI.
Hitler was a pretty neat guy, ethnic cleansing aside.
And before you say this, no, i am not comparing you to hitler, I'm only using an over the top example to hopefully make my point more clear.
Yeah, ethical, environmental, legal and fuck the consumer memory questions aside.
Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are.
How do you measure that?
I am asking because I tried all the AI coding tools (copilot, cursor, claude code, etc.), even the paid versions, to find the utopia that doubles my productivity where lots of people are talking about. But everytime I find they take more time to generate code than me typing it, they rarely get things right the first time, they produce way more code than needed (which is much more to reason about) and all in all it takes longer to achieve something using "AI" instead of doing it on my own.
The worst results are the ones that seem to be correct, but can only be found incorrect on closer inspection. For instances, a part of my job is to write data collection applications for sensors; those sensors come with a datasheet (usually 100 to 200 pages) that explain how to "talk" to the sensor. Sounds perfect for an LLM - throw the datasheet in, get a small C application out. But either I get something that does not even compile, or something that seems to collect data, but configures the sensor completely wrong. Debugging that takes more time than just working through the datasheet myself and program it myself.
I remember people being angry at IDEs for making programming too easy and belittling code colourization as for children.
There will always be a crowd that wants everything to stay the way they know it.
unpopular opinion, especially on the fediverse, but: AI is not inherently bad.
it is a tool, that can do everything to a pretty low standard but rather fast. so it is up to the learnt human to use the thing at the right time. i use the company ai at regularly at work, but treat it as an apprentice: every line of code has to be checked, because it will fail hilariously. but it does type faster than me, so simple and boring jobs can be done by it.
i don't see the appeal of avoiding generated code at all cost. it is not different from human code in that it can fail horribly. the important thing is oversight. is there someone with the knowledge and keen eye to ensure no BS is merged. Linus, in my opinion, spent a lifetime building that reputation.
I keep seeing headlines like this, and of course conveniently leaving out how Torvalds chewed people out for vibe coding.
Torvalds didn't vibe code away the Linux bug. He actually knows what he's doing.
AI is like a power tool. If you give a contractor a nail gun instead of a hammer he can build a house faster. If you give someone who has no idea how to build a house a nail gun they'll just fail at building a house faster than if you only gave them a hammer and they'll probably hurt themselves.
Problem being that the majority of software engineers really don't know how to build software well.
And are using AI as a tool to just accelerate their lack of engineering.
This will also be quite the test for the Lemmy slopwarriors
Oh, please... is it still a text generator, or is it already a religion?
There's a difference between using a tool as a knowledgeable professional, and using a tool as a novice or a member of the general public: the professional can likely tell when the answer an AI gives is wrong.
AI is a tool that can be useful sometimes.
LLMs suck at writing code, but they are absolutely amazing at reading code and finding bugs. I am firmly against the usage of LLMs to write anything, but they have a place as a diagnostics tool when verified by a human.
Seems like an AI apologists article. Sounds a bit like "bans are hard so why even bother."
No, the alternatives exist and people can choose them where able: https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index Sure, not all things are available AI free, e.g. there's no Linux kernel (NetBSD doesn't run on as much hardware), but that doesn't mean there's no point in choosing no AI software where possible, if you care about it.
The enforceability part seems the most apologist to me. You never could really know if some contributor wasn't copying leaked Windows XP code into your FOSS project. If you trust contributors that little, don't let them contribute.
Finally got where I stand: why uncomfortable? It's just being hard to impose a sensible approach to it:
If the model is adequately FOSS, i.e. open weights, and can run on a single consumer GPU (or NPU), and the "author" (quotations because I'm personally undecided if one can claim code generated by an aforementioned model is theirs) understands it, then I really don't see what the problem is...
Personally I have nothing against SLMs/LLMs as a technology, to me my grievances against ChatGPT or Claude are mostly about their environmental impacts and selling us back our own art, also keeping knowledge behind a for-profit black-box - if those aren't appropriate for a specific model, then I say using that model is fair, and good for productivity.
I'd take a model whose training data is open source and legitimately obtained. The only ones I know about are Apertus and OLMo, and they aren't really competitive.
People are forgetting the AI hype train is reliant on the fact that businesses and individuals can't host the AI themselves, which is rapidly changing.
All that insane power that OpenAI and Anthropic have harnessed is suddenly completely useless when you can just spin up a competing model at home, with HF hosting a crap ton of finetuned models like uncensored/abliterated to do whatever you want with it.
Even Deepseek released their full size models if you happen to have 400Gb (or 1.5Tb) of VRAM lying around.
When the bubble (hopefully) pops, AI will just continue to be a tool that devs use where applicable, and likely not on a massive data center cloud as it migrates into consumer electronics.
I personally don't care about the tech. I care about the economy around the tech.
People who are vehemently against any form of AI will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth.
Its a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it's valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going "Lalala!" when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that it has none, you will be left behind.
You will be like office employees from the 80's and 90's who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It's your choice if you use it or not. It's also every company's choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt.
If you haven't learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use AI now, or find a different career. It's not going away, no matter how much you may bitch and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group.
I don't say this to be snarky or smug. I hate AI myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I'd have to be to refuse to use it. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but it's also the truth.
Agreed, although simply using LLMs to do your thinking for you is only going to decrease your value in the workplace and make you more replaceable. The goal needs to be learning how to use AI to expand your thinking, counteract your biases, improve the quality of your work, and accelerate your learning.
This falls apart the second you look at it when you see that it doesn't take much learning to use that tool for most applications.
At the same time, people overly reliant on that tool take a big hit in developing and strengthening their own skilks and thinking capabilities.
Combine the two things if you still can.
People who are vehemently against any form of blockchain technology will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth. Blockchain is a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it's valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going "Lalala!" when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that blockchain has none, **you will be left behind**. You will be like office employees from the 80's and 90's who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It's your choice if you use blockchain or not. It's also every company's choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt. If you haven't learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use blockchain now, or find a different career. It's not going away, no matter how much you may *removed* and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group. I don't say this to be snarky or smug. I hate blockchain myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I'd have to be to refuse to use it. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but it's also the truth.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what "skills" are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you're trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that's a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using "AI" in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about "Project ABC" into a new Outlook folder called, "Project ABC" or asking a chatbot to, "draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site."
It's not the next industrial revolution, it's not the beginning of the Singularity, it's not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people's critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
I would trust Linus Torvalds to use AI to do this because the AI is literally trying to copy him when it writes that code. In that context, he is the training data.
What AI haters don't get is that the people fanning the flames of AI(LLM's) hate are the same people who want you to buy their subscriptions, because they know the only place the real damage occurs is in OpenSource communities.
AI use for Open Source projects is arguably the one use case that benefits everyone, plus it's a sweet irony against corps and their locked-down proprietary software. Denouncer will loudly hawk that LLMs will make it trivial to circumvent the GPL, but they fail to mention that the pendulum swings both ways; with LLMs, it's now easier than ever to reverse engineer proprietary systems and programs, recently there was a similar discourse on lemmy due to the mario kart wii decompilation.
They want loud people to sow division into OpenSource communities so that true opensource LLMs solutions are shunned and never reach maturity, corporate meanwhile is unaffected.
