It’s perfectly ok to use a new tool to do your work faster, more efficiently, and with greater precision if these improvements are justified by the cost of the tool. But if that tool is a coal-fired, water hoarding, ophan crushing, billionaire-owned kleptobot, your results need to be better than pure gold to be worth the true cost of using it.
Yeah, but your compiler wasn’t made with massive copyright infringement, stealing much needed water and rampant corruption, was it?
“the kind of expectations i have is that people do their best and i expect people to understand what they are doing.”
my immediate response to some idiot thinking i accuse him of cheating because i voiced concerns over his methodologies: “look, if you want to drink mercury while writing code and dont see any problems with that, fine. go ahead. waste away your health. but at least have the decency of sitting under the venting hood and stop making it everyone elses problem.”
I don’t care about Linus, Stallman’s opinion is the interesting one.
I guess Linus doesn’t care about the environment or any of the other issues surrounding A.I. I’m not anti-AI just for the sake of being anti-AI. I have a huge problem with AI bcz of it’s environmental impacts, intellectual property violations, job impacts, attempts to replace all employees with AI, the general dumbing down of society and worse off the internet is bcz of AI, the surveillance state being built around it. I could go on, but you get the point. I am a staunch, no AI person bcz of all those reasons and a hundred more.
This isn’t an age thing, or a, I am getting older and Im stubborn thing. AI is literally ruining the planet and everything on it, and this guy thinks we should just accept that.
I say fuck off with that noise, I don’t have e to accept anything.
His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
Even if you wrote it by seance with a Oujii board, just make sure it works, and that great grandma Ada agrees to a GPL license.
I’ve thought since the beginning of all of this that the biggest mistake was calling all of these LLMs and other tools that they smashed together “AI”. It’s misleading and ruins the reputation of all of the tools. If someone had made a coding tool that ONLY did what “AI” does with coding, no one would give a shit. But now because an LLM spelled “Strawberry” with too many “r’s” well that means it’s all slop and it’s all shit.
As for the people throwing shade for ethics, EVERYONE breaks their ethics for consumption and EVERYONE has their justifications. I’m not saying that environmental issues aren’t important, they very much are, but giving others shit for their choices when half of your clothing and your phone partly relies on slave labor and stripping of the environment weakens your attempt. It’s easy to sit on a high horse and judge others for their use of AI. It’s much more difficult to understand the nuances of why they do. Just like you would want someone else to try to understand the nuances of why your shoes cost $150 and the 9 year old who made them was only paid 2 cents.
The point that I’m trying to make here, is that you can complain about AI without shitting on others.
Conversations on this subject will continue to stagnate and miss the important points as long as people continue to act like the discussion of ethics is the same as the discussion of efficacy. People who disagree with AI on a principle of its impacts being negative will often call it “a lying machine which is regularly wrong and offers no utility”.
May I suggest that people with criticisms of the ethics and impact of AI take a charitable position towards the utility offered by AI. Accept something along the lines of a positive account given by an experienced software engineer - it’s useful, it presents risks but also it presents new ways to get certain work done well in much less time etc.
Even if you do not believe this, the point is it is a much more ambiguous argument than the ethical argument or the concerns over the impact of AI on the species, environment or society. You weaken those arguments by putting them along side poorly justified, somewhat falsifiable claims that AI just doesn’t work.
I’m finding the allure of AI is particularly strong for people who have risen to positions of power where they had to stop doing the work themselves. Instead, they had to work through other people to get bigger projects done.
The allure is that you can just say what you want done, and it does it. If it’s done it “wrong” you can just tell it it’s wrong and not have to worry about arguing the technical differences. As such you feel like you get closer to what you wanted, rather than somebody else’s take on what you wanted.
The things is, when you are removed from the code, you can only work at a high level. That person you asked to do something is considering 10 other low level concerns that you didn’t consider. I think Linus’s recent patch series is a good example. He saw a potential optimisation, did a proof of concept but missed a race condition. He’s now handed it over to the person that normally works in that area and knows the details. Can the optimisation actually work? Who knows?
I feel about ai like i feel about cars. 90% of the idiots out there drive really poorly, but that doesn’t mean responsible people are smart to never drive a car. Same with AI, overwhelming majority of people are using AI incorrectly, i.e. recklessly dangerously, but that doesn’t mean responsible people should never use it.
LLM is like a compiler? Then please replace the C sources with English and let it compile!
Linus become like one of the boomers excited by some dumb ai slop on Facebook
But worse he doesn’t care about how unethical is the present ai
I lost respect for this guy
I think he’s kinda right in that competent engineers can write good code using LLMs. I don’t know whether they’re actually more productive that way though. The problem lies in the fact that incompetent engineers can write a lot of bad, but good-looking code using LLMs, which might be a pretty big burden on the maintainers.
Also, comparing LLMs to compilers doesn’t really work in my opinion. Compilers follow strict rules and translate one kind of logic into a different kind of logic, while LLMs turn natural language and vague notions into some kind of logic. Writing code is telling the computer precisely what it should do and prompting is vaguely telling it what end result you want and those are two fundamentally different things.
Cory Doctorow’s “Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI” has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn’t have a boss and has untold resources for whatever “AI” “tools” he finds useful.
He isn’t ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn’t do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn’t have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new “tool”. He simply uses what’s useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.
95% of people don’t have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the “tool” that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.
I don’t see how this means he’s wrong though, if people are hating AI as a proxy for hating their abusive relationship with their employer, that doesn’t seem like a strong argument that everyone who isn’t in that situation must also hate AI.
It doesn’t mean he’s wrong! it means he’s out of touch and doing the propaganda work of capital for free much like many other self-employed/business owning/petit-borgeois people who think they’re on the side of capital.
It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this “tool” is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.
Blind hatred for AI as a technology is inherantly reactionary, but that doesn’t mean that the implementation of the technology today isn’t problematic in many ways.
Yeah I notice he doesn’t address the costs, economic and environmental, of LLM proliferation. Way to ignore a large part of the argument while calling anyone opposed to your position stupid.
I hope he gets to eat those words one day, but I doubt he would ever admit he was wrong.
@TwiddleTwaddle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
I hope you were shamed by this reply, on the use of commas in a subordinate clause.
Hahaha my writing style is runon and compound complex sentences without commas.
Oh my god a reasonable take for once. Thank you for putting into words why his heel-turn has bothered me so much
It’s funny, the c/fuckai mod that banned me a while back said the same thing. Iirc it was “How very reasonable of you. Banned”
One should look at China when they’re concerned about the USA approach.
Then the picture would be significantly changed if the cost of running useful LLMs goes down to what it costs to acquire a reasonable computer to work on the Linux kernel, no? That is if we could run useful LLMs for kernel programming on our kernel programming computers, and we own those LLMs. In such a world, capital would have no stronger leverage over us than it already does by selling us the computers we need to program. Does this argument make sense?
It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this “tool” is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.
Yeah, but tbf all of the statements he’s making about it are in the context of organizing linux development and the most effective way to carry that out, and just happen to be public and so end up being widely republished and incorporated into discussions with a broader topic than that.
Yeah, I don’t think Linus should be policing his speech at this level or for this cause. Educate the workers please, Linus is doing plenty.
Shush! They are not supposed to know that the AI–Anti-Ai fight is fabricated bullshit with both sides being equally stupid (like people arguing based on ideological zeal always are…). And that it’s just a show so that the majority is occupied with watching the mud fight so they don’t think about the actual problem.
Which is great as an explanation for why so many people recoil at Linus saying ‘the tool is mostly fine’ - but it’s zero percent of an argument against that claim. A famous cold-war engineer celebrating the slide rule while new hires are being spanked with them is not really encountering a productive conversation about their utility.
Lemmy is the strangest place to find people hesitant to conclude ‘the actual problem here is capitalism.’
I think there’s a broader question here from an evolutionary perspective. Humans are fundamentally tool users, and technology has been central to our development as a species. It’s possible that this evolutionary niche we’ve occupied will eventually reach its limits and contribute to our own downfall, but I’m not convinced AI is uniquely responsible. It’s part of a much longer trajectory of technological progress.
We’ve evolved to solve problems and use tools to make our lives easier. That doesn’t mean technological progress is inevitable, but these tendencies, combined with competition, make it difficult to imagine us ever really stopping. Even if we stopped today, who’s to say another generation of humans 10,000 years from now wouldn’t continue down the same path?
I don’t think this is exclusively about capitalism. Capitalism certainly incentivizes growth and reducing labor costs, but competition, greed, and the pursuit of technological advantages have existed under other economic systems too. That doesn’t diminish the legitimate concerns about how AI is being used against workers.
I also wonder whether our short lifespans make us particularly bad at considering the long-term consequences of our innovations. Who is going to sacrifice the opportunities of their own generation to prevent a possible catastrophe centuries from now, especially when there’s no guarantee it would stop technological progress?
I have a degree in psychology and particularly enjoyed evolutionary psychology, so I think it’s worth asking whether the deeper problem is our own nature, and whether our capacity for collective restraint can keep pace with our ability to innovate.
I know this raises more questions than it answers, but we’ve faced civilization-changing technologies before, from the printing press and electricity to nuclear weapons. AI won’t be the last. Perhaps the more important question is how we learn to manage these transformations when our tendency to create them seems so deeply rooted in who we are.
What’s the point of this argument though? Sure it’s real for every profession and every tool but what’s the agentic choice we ought to pursue here? Whine against AI or actually lead society with policy? As “ban llm” is not a valid policy that would ever work so the only viable path is regulation and growing of culture where AI is used for good, no?
Embrace AI, work towards open weight/free software and protect worker rights. Society wins at the bleeding edge not at conservstism.
The answer is certainly not to embrace “AI” in it’s current forms or allow for big tech monopolists to continue their wasteful and destructive infrastructure buildout. The oligarchy isn’t going to regulate itself to worker self-determination either. Nothing short of the death of capitalism will do.
Nothing short of the death of capitalism will do
Ok, let me know how that goes. While you whine online and have no impact on reality we will embrace “AI” and drain billionaire funds for distillation, open weights and building free software.
You genuinely don’t see the effective differences of thse two strategies? Actually doing something vs having your finger crossed some magical boogeyman called “capitalism” will collapse?
This argument is conflating the bad boss with the misattribution of the tool. You could do that for any tool throughout history. But I still fail to see how you go from “bad boss is bad because they make us misattribute tool” to “good boss is bad because he’s not wallowing with me about how bad boss is bad”.
As anyone who has known about him for more than a couple of years knows, Linus has a pretty solid track record of calling out stupidity. It’s just virtually always stupidity that affects the kernel. If he had to stop and tell bosses at other companies how to operate, Linux never would have made it out of the 90s.
So he lacks empathy is what you are saying.
I guess I have that luxury, but I sacrificed hard to get where I’m at.
And, truthfully, way more people could do it if they didn’t feel entitled to the easy way (college > world destroying corp).
Entirely irrelevant to the conversation at hand but okay
Weird, i disagree with Linus.
AI is not a tool. Its an addiction. Maybe the first dozen times (more likely: never) you use it “as a tool”. Very quickly, you depend on it. You need it to refactor. Then you need it to debug. Then you need it to write. Next thing you know, you spend 0 time writing code (the fun part) and 100% of your time as a reviewer (the worst part). Suddenly it isnt fun. A few fools even get TWO AI MODELS, one to write, the other to debug.
Its a virus. I cannot tell you how many 300+ line commits ive rejected because they straight up dont do what the person said they do or also do some extremely asinine 2nd thing that breaks other pieces of code (which they would know if theyd actually used it).
A tool requires input. A hammer can never do anything i dont explicitly tell it to do. A good word editor does exactly what i want it to do. A good compiler does exactly what it says it will do. AI does not. Ai is a glorified autocomplete, and i dont want my code to be automatically generated. Its asking for thousands of issues down the line. If AI was any good, Windows would be a usable platform by now.
Dont get me wrong; i know that it is sometimes used as a tool by people, and meticulously checked over, but more often than not, it isnt.
