Linux

Our thoughts and prayers are with Linus and his family at this difficult and tragic time.

Don't compilers have some guarantee of behaviours? I.e even if you don't know exactly what instructions and order the compiler generates there is a guarantee that it is computationally/mathematically equivalent to the statements you wrote. Otherwise it would be a pretty terrible compiler. That's a pretty big jump to writing instructions you don't understand, since LLMs can't make the same guarantees about a prompt/request.

I don't know... tools made by companies who can't wait to get in bed with the Pentagon to kill brown people around the world would seem to be toxic af.

Comparing AI to traditional tools is a bad faith argument and it's a bummer to see Linus fall for it.

This is a seriously weak and narrow argument. First off, the parallel drawn with existing tools is shallow. When was the last time an editor or a compiler promised to replace employees? Which of those notably accelerates climate catastrophe? Which one of those is the biggest theft of labor in the history of humanity? Everything is political. Externalizing the social and environmental cost of the major LLMs is taking a clear stance in favour of the late stage capitalistic tech empires currently taking shape.

Lol, I could kind of understand (not really support) his use of AI. While I doubt it's something you can do for long without starting to make compromises, people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode and (more importantly) their willpower slowly runs out.

But this argument made me loose all my respect for him. It's so utterly stupid. I hate it when i have to check my assembly code line by line, because it's not guaranteed that the compiler will compile the same code I've written deterministically, and basically just randomizes what it outputs. Or when my editor does not save what I typed, and instead decides based on a random language statistics what to actually save, so I have to double-check my text word-by-word every time.

Oh, wait. No, because the tools are deterministic, and that doesn't happen. But of course, adding randomness into your workflow, where you have to focus and review everything line-by-line, is the same as using deterministic tools, lol.

Won't anyone think of the environment or small communities? AI is a nice-to-have, not an essential. We need to stop developing technology without thinking long term about the world we live in. We can't use the "oh we didn't know" excuse anymore.

Why does everyone who starts using AI always devolve into posting like this?