- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
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I used to see anti-AI people as myopic and foolish, but seeing how it’s being developed and implemented is really eye-opening. They’re pushing an unfinished, unrefined technology that often adds to the ecological crisis and might be poisoning people’s drinking water, so they can roll the dice in terms of what it’ll do to the economy while using it to spy on everyone. The public face of all this is these companies telling us that we should be terrified of what it’ll do to the job market, but we need to invest in it big time, right now. I apologize to anyone I spoke down to. This is all such a bad idea.
Disaster capitalists can’t be trusted to mix the vinegar for washing windows, much less a technology that can be used to undermine labour itself.
he says it’s all about open source
how does he verify the spat out code is not a proprietary snippet
also pretty wierd that he’s so about open source, and yet doesn’t consider linux a “social warrior” project
isn’t it about giving to society? if not, what is linux about?
also, why is the author polishing his knob so much, why so passionate about “well crafted message” and so on. it reads like a regular e-mail, are they all so exciting?
He just wants good software and finds open source the best way to get that
It’s not fear over new tools, it’s frustration with how it’s wielded and how inappropriately, irresponsibly, unethically, and greedily it’s pushed.
AI, itself is not the problem. The people who use AI, and the people who steal and trample and bludgeon to get it and while using it are the problem.
To disregard this entire aspect of the conversation is… Alarming and disappointing.
I believe we should all be pushing for ethical and responsible AI use and development, and what constitutes that and why. If not, the only resulting conclusion should and will be, simply: “Fuck AI”, which is where we are, now.
What if we rush slop generators witb ineffective safeguards to market instead?
I don’t think fighting fire with fire against a dragon is either a good plan to defeat it or to get the dragon to stop using fire. At best, the dragon will be confused why this highly flammable creature is trying to set itself on fire, but will then fully incinerate you.
Truthfully, I believe that is partially what’s happening now; I think a lot of people’s novel interest and imprudent utilization, along with half-discussed but very public debates like this have given a loose, implicit endorsement to continued unchecked usage and development, and therefore a metaphorical ethical self-flagellation.
These sorts are the type that ask both Mommy and Daddy, and if either one says yes, to go ahead and use the credit card to buy candy, and when confronted with it, to pit the parents against each other.
The issue remains that we as society are tasked with founding and discussing open, but structured ethical and practical discussion about the nature, past, and future of AI, but we haven’t the means or the structural conventions in which to either hold these discussions, nor disseminate the findings. Fully open anonymous online forums are not the way. And if they are to be international, real identifications, but that are protected from assassinations and military and political retaliation and threats need to be enacted.
The truth of the matter is: our governments have all failed us all. On many fronts, and on this one.
I sincerely and urgently call for a global cooperative forum to be formed around the future ethical moderation and standards development of artificial intelligence.
Will anybody here of any power, influence, or note heed my call?
“AI is a tool” is a thought-terminating cliche. The phrase is intended to foreclose other ways of framing the discussion.
Yeah, it ignores the biggest problems a lot of people have with AI. It’s not the slop code, it’s that it was generated at a ridiculous cost to the environment and the population around the datacenter where it was trained.
what is a social warrior? is it some sort of shortening of social justice warrior?
I’m pretty sure he already handed out a ban for someone who submitted a slop PR.
He’s been pretty clear that he’s only interested in clean code additions. It doesn’t really matter how you achieved your PR so much so thst it’s quality code with a useful purpose for the kernel.
I swear, if AI makes its way to the linux kernel in some way, I’m headed to BSD.
Almost every second PR to the kernel is already assisted by LLM. Or did you mean if they actually integrate AI to the kernel? That’s probably not going to happen, no reason for it.
FreeBSD’s Wi-Fi and sound card support is terrible and its browsers don’t support containerization though. You can get around its Wi-Fi issues with wifibox which runs an Alpine VM in the background and uses drivers from that, and use jails as containerization for browsers, but I’ve not found a solution for my audio not working as of yet.
AI is not the problem. It’s the people and companies behind the popular public AI services that are the problem.
ML algorithms are fine. It’s the capitalist use cases that are shit and bad for everyone.
And all the stolen and continued stealing and privacy issues and biases and all of the other ethical issues… But yeah.
This is the correct outlook on it.
Academically, artificial neural network algorithms are cool as fuck, even given their shortcomings.
Capitalist greed has weaponized them and done horrible atrocious things to “improve” them (stealing works they have no rights to in order to profit off of them, replacing humans who want to work, ruining the arts, etc.)
It’s doing some pretty awesome things in the medical field as well, where experts can review it’s output and make decisions based on everything else they know and are experts in
It’s weird, like if experts feed AI things they know to be true, correct it when it gets it wrong, rinse and repeat. Then only use that AI for the things they trained it on, it seems to be pretty good. Whereas AI fed the entirety of human shit and corrected by middle managers, who are only experts in inflating their own ego, tends to output a lot of self-inflating bullshit.
I feel like the correct use case here is in parallel, not primary or backup.
Using them to intellectually and cognitively poison people for all kinds of gain, including full-on politics
I hate to admit it, but he’s right. I’m no fan of using AI either, but there are times and places where it can actually be a useful tool when used correctly. What’s really important is the quality of the contributions made to the project, and the usefulness should be judged on its merits alone of those individual contributions, not the “icky“ feeling people get from the idea of using AI at all.
Torvalds is clearly not here defending “vibe coding”, and he’s perfectly happy for people to not use AI at all. But when AI, as a tool, is used to responsibly, it can clearly be quite useful. And for the coders who can use it in a responsible and useful way to make meaningful contributions, I also think they should be permitted to.
He mentions the economic and environmental aspects of AI but I think dismisses them a little too quickly. While AI as a tool can clearly provide many benefits, the external costs (i.e. costs not directly born by the project but incurred by others/society as a result of use of the tool) should not be ignored.
And I don’t see mention of the seeming expropriation of works without compensation by the AI developers and the as yet unresolved IP aspects of using AI. These are part of the big picture economic impacts but also have moral and possibly legal implications.
In short, I think there are reasons not to treat AI as merely a tool.
These are completely valid points absolutely worthy of discussion, and I fully agree with both of them, FWIW.
I was just responding to the point that Torvalds was making here.
I think its really hard for something like the Linux kernel project to look at AI from an economic and environmental aspect that doesn’t start asking hard questions about Linux itself.
AI for instance runs very well on Linux and almost certainly all of these hyperscalers and compute centers are running Linux in some form.
If Linus is going to take a hard stance on economic and environmental reasons, is he also going to ban these orgs from using Linux?
I don’t really want to do too much “what about” isms because I think it would be hella based to see the defense industry, oil industry, and AI industries all get a “fuck you figure it out on your own”. I’m just saying I can completely understand why Linus might not want to play that game since his greatest concern is to simply make sure Linux is getting better.
I agree with everything you say. All the big picture issues are difficult to impossible to understand and predict the outcomes of.
Coincidentally I saw Your AI Is Not a Tool today. I don’t agree with all it says, but I do agree with the basic premise that AI is more than just a tool because it is almost certainly going to profoundly impact society and the environment, with much of that impact as yet unpredictable.
Of course, AI will change the world whether it is used in Linux kernel development or not. And some of the changes will be and already are for the good. But I think it is more than ‘just a tool’ in the sense that a compiler is just a tool. It will be so impactful, with such significant externalities, that it is reasonable to discuss what the limits of acceptability might be, even if the stance remains laissez-faire for the moment.
Yeah he’s smart and he has the boring take which is probably the wisest take. It’s just a tool and the people who vibe code just use it negligently.
Yeah he’s smart and he has the boring take which is probably the wisest take.
The wisest takes often are. He also has the benefit of decades of experience, dealing with trends and fads and upstart programmers with strong opinions.
Also an understanding that we live in a boring universe.
The problem is that it’s overwhelmingly not used “correctly”.
Yeah, exactly. Basically the whole thing incentivizes you to NOT use it correctly. Using it incorrectly is the default.
I would say it’s more than just an icky feeling. It’s a justified moral opposition. But otherwise I agree. Just a tool.
Agreed. Every major AI model is trained off of data gathered without consent. AI even violates the licenses of the vast majority of open source projects due to the requirement that the original authors be listed in the copyright section when you pull code from a project. AI generated code does not do that.
Everybody knows AI can be useful. Duh.
That’s not the only, or the main reason why people are negative about AI, currently. (People do make fun of it, but the anger fuels from MANY different angles).
This is a rhetoric/fallacy argument that he’s using, which, alone, shows his bias.
So until there’s an ethical, nuanced take on AI use from him, it’s probably safe to assume he’s drank the AI kool-aid. That, or he’s playing politics and trying not to alienate or make waves with certain people. And even if he isn’t, the simple status-quo “it’s just a tool” is so wildly irresponsible of a statement, that it’s effectively pro-AI.
An honest neutral AI take would address all major current concerns with it, not simply “does it work?” Wild.
Otherwise, he’s just the scientist working on the Nazi gas chambers going “yeah it works”. Like, bro, that’s not the only problem here; address the fucking elephant in the room!
Not addressing the elephant in the room IS the bias.
And no, AI isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.
No one is saying humans are perfect either. But Christ, the scale is clearly not the same. Before, an average bad dev had a limit blast radius. Now they can push a million lines of code and write a convincing description of why this is actually correct with little effort.
later
(Oops. Wait. You’re right to push back. This is totally wrong. This should have never happend.)
I also don’t use entire cities worth of power and clean water.
Blast radius you say say? Claude is that you?
Past the whole thing about theft of code, theft of wages and theft of rights, my next problem with AI is that it’s viral, in even worse terms than say the GPL is viral.
Once you accept slop submissions into a project, you have the problem that someone would have to check it. But why spend your own mental and emotional energy, better dedicated to dealing with and interacting with fellow humans, to trudge through a mass of hallucinated, gaslighting crap? Better set up some AI that checks the submitted code.
And now you have two problems.
Fortunately, lists like Open Slopware exist.
Linus is severely mistaken that Linux is not a “social warrior” project, but I guess that’s mostly because he’s the face the community has to try and “sanitize” for corporate the posture that people like RMS have. Gone are the times where he would openly flip Nvidia the bird. Which is not bad, but it’s unfortunately ill-timed: if history has taught us anything useful this decade is that, right now, bootlicking to corporate and its trends such as “uniformity” and “neutrality” is not the win you think it is.
Oh that’s a neat novel idea. That it’s viral. I know about the concept, but that’s a good development in terminology for it.
Linus is severely mistaken that Linux is not a “social warrior” project,
What the fuck are you talking about?
FOSS is inherently political, it’s about whether or not you should have complete control of something you own. That’s a political stance.
Everything anyone cares about is political.
I’d say FOSS is not more political than paying taxes. FOSS is just another way of using the copyright law enforcement without which FOSS cannot exist. If no copyright law enforcement is in place, then the GPL license wouldn’t have power. So FOSS is just another way a law abiding citizen may use their rights/entitlement and perform their obligation with copyright law like how they have right/entitlement and obligation from taxes.
FOSS is not more political than paying taxes.
If we’re including the other option, not paying taxes, then I agree. The choice of whether or not to use FOSS is as political as the choice of whether or not to pay taxes.
Coming back here from another discussion, I do find it funny now that a legal entity can choose to not pay taxes but a human cannot avoid that in any reasonable way
I mean you can if you’re rich enough. But yeah.
That is a good point
FOSS cannot exist under capitalism, as it is quite literally the definition of Marxist Praxis. Linux is quite literally the single most wide spread and successful example of communist production in world history. It is, by its very existence, a “social warrior” project.
Then why did almost all of FOSS predominantly start in capitalist, free market economy countries?
Why did communism?
Russia: a tsarist autocracy.
China: an imperial monarchy.
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea: colonial or agrarian societies.
Cuba: Batista’s corrupt military dictatorship.
Has communism actually ever risen from a free market capitalist country? The other way happened a lot. Marx was definitely wrong about this one.
As for FOSS, I believe the key is personal freedom, not the economic system that much. Linus just did what he wanted to do and he didn’t need any permission.
See that’s what’s confusing about it. He’s saying one thing and doing another.
Why? The proof that linux exists under capitalism already proves your point does not hold
Linux, in fact, does not exist under capitalism. The Linux Foundation does not own capital. It does not pay taxes. Value is neither rented nor extracted from the workers who fully retain all ownership of the labor value of the product of Linux. The same way a commune can exist despite capitalism also existing, it does not mean that commune exists under capitalism.
Hmmm, I guess it depends on what you mean by capital. Because The Linux Foundation certainly has assets that they could donate to other FOSS project
The actual definition of capital. By the people that invented the term. A resource that is rented to another in exchange for part or all of the value generated by that resource. The Linux Foundation, being a non-profit, does not own any capital whatsoever, otherwise they would lose their non-profit status.
the mailing list entry that phoronix links to: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8TtG_80KzsZ1syL9anBtmEh5Z40vg@mail.gmail.com/
"
On Tue, 14 Jul 2026 at 19:01, Roman Gushchin roman.gushchin@linux.dev wrote:
I think it makes the point of sashiko - helping maintainers - unachievable. If the point to not use
LLMs in general, let’s discuss this, not how to make each use case more complex.It seems like [1] expresses a very anti-LLM position in general
Yes.
And no, that’s not the position of the Linux kernel.
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area
where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level
maintainer.Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues
with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.Or just walk away.
AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no
longer in question today.There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used
it.Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer
workloads and just from a “it keeps finding embarrassing bugs”
standpoint.But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La
La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem
to do.The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers
instead of just causing them pain. There’s no question on that side.We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore
people who try to argue against other people from using it.And no, AI isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the
problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at
themselves at the same time.Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.
The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.
Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and
often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that’s a
side benefit, not the point of the project.This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been,
and never will be.In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better
technology, not because of religious reasons.And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear
of new tools.Linus"
Thank you for providing the full quote of what Linus actually said so folks have context, regardless of how people feel about the position he’s taking its always really helpful to have primary sources ❤️
Yeah he’s had a very neutral take on it. Like it’s a thing and it does good work some of the time but ultimately code not written by a person is harder to maintain. At least when a person writes code they typically have a strong understanding of what they wrote and can accurately communicate that to others.
As a developer I can say that plenty of developers have trouble accurately communicating how code they just wrote works.
That said its still infinitly being able to ask them questions on it then trying to parse AI code.
Hell, I’ve written code on Friday and by Monday it makes zero sense to me.
Who wrote this ridiculous, nonfunctional, unreadable spaghetti code?
Oh, I did?
… It’s not so bad.
Not only trouble communicating but often knowing what the code they just wrote actually does. I will ever remember one of the first times I wrote a thorough set of tests for what I thought was a correct and simple little bit of code: it wasn’t doing what I thought, until many iterations later.
My experience thus far is not all sessions even with the same AI are equal. There’s still that issue of erroneous errors and of course differing levels of quality of output each and every time it’s asked to do something. Like sometimes it’s bang on amazing and other times it’s straight up gaslighting you over statements that are blatantly false.
Like sometimes it’s bang on amazing and other times it’s straight up gaslighting you over statements that are blatantly false.
Well yeah, they’ve got no understanding of anything, it has no ability to detect if it’s right or wrong, it’s all just text prediction.
To temporarily drop into a philosophical debate, all humans are doing is seemingly action potentials in neurons which form models and do predictions not too dissimilar but a lot better and of course self aware (I’m assuming other people are self aware)
That said I’m surprised current models are even as good as they are, most people take the progress since 2017 for granted, then again the AI hype train has over promised like mad and when the thing works it can be flipping amazing, it’s just not consistently that good and failures are unpredictable. I honestly didn’t think we would be here until 2050 to 2080.
Alright philosophy aside, humans are easier to reason with so far, particularly when questioning.
Well written response, don’t know why you are downvoted. Makes me think back to a philosophy class where I questions if we are more than a machine that is able to product certain formulations or responses based on how our brains are set and the relevant input. For instance based on context it’s very easy for me to guess what my partner is thinking. For myself, where do my thoughts come from? Can I think a truly random thought? I’ve no idea and I think not. How is that different than ai? Because I have built neuron connects forming this framework that is my mind and allow my ideas to be formed unlike just randomly guessing. On the flip side, as an academic am I not just making an educated guess every time I think?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
True but usually when they go in and look at it it all snaps back into their mind. . . Usually.
You can ask AI how code works too, though. And it’s always available, whereas the human who wrote the code may not be.
Several times now I’ve come across a project that looked interesting but wasn’t well documented, and I just dropped the Github link into an AI chat and asked it to tell me stuff about how it worked. What algorithms were used, and so forth. Really handy.
it’s always available
Until the AI companies run out of money.
While he is correct from a purely technical perspective, a lot of the backlash against other people using AI (LLMs generally) on collaborative work is due to how it is currently being implemented in a way that harms the environment, drives up hardware prices, sucks up mass amounts of data it shouldn’t, breaks laws, negatively impacts those lower on the social latter , and a bunch of stuff outside of how it impacts code.
Like my limited experience with LLMs has been bad because it is frequently wrong, but I hate it because it is shoved into everything and has all the negative impacts I listed above. I wouldn’t hate it and discourage others from using it if it was just new tech that didn’t work.
I find it does well for:
- Reformatting data / text
- Finding new movies or music from a list of your likes
- Finding web info like google used to in 2010 before ad based content over swept all the searches
Other than those its a pain in the ass, and I keep having to disabling it or unistall products to make my windows work machine usable…so much garbage packed into every app now.
Finding web info like google used to in 2010 before ad based content over swept all the searches
LLMs are only useful because Google has deliberately made their search engine worse. Since I pay for Kagi, I don’t need to consult a chatbot anymore, I can just search again like I did before the AI hype.
So we technically don’t need LLMs for search. But we are nudged extremely hard into that direction.
I like the chatbot kagi has in their pay tier but not enough to pay for the biggest tier. Its been useful for searches like “I want the best GPU that will fit in 220mm” but aside from that I’m happy enough with their search to not bother.
Surely you can find the right GPU by just going to a site like pcpartpicker, filtering by length, and sorting by review score.
You’ve never used an LLM against an MCP server with a properly built API. The ad hoc shit you can do is amazing.
Imagine you are managing 1,500 endpoints. A mix of Windows (both clients and servers), Mac, and Linux. Now imagine that one day there’s a CVSS 10.0 in Eclipse Temurin 17 and you suddenly need to know everywhere it’s installed and which precise 17.x version.
You could spend all damn day fussing with SQL -or- you could fire up $LLM and tell it “Give me a report showing all installed instances of Temurin below version 17.3. Sorted by endpoint type and operating system”.
Suddenly want to know how many windows workstations haven’t rebooted in more than 14 days? You can do that and get an answer in not much more time than it takes you to type the question.
Suddenly need to change a setting in 15 different Microsoft Tenancies? Snap, it’s done.
LLMs are NOT magic bullets but they are useful for WAY more than what you listed. You just don’t know that because you don’t do that kind of work.
I don’t care that it can do that, not until they fix all the negatives it has.
Our IT guy does this stuff, but there’s training involving to get it to do that. I’m holding out for Zorin Grid which is supposed to do all that from a singled overview dashboard
A lot of what Torvalds says is greatly misinterpreted due to him not filtering his speech for critically less knowledgeable readers and listeners.
yeah I take a lot ot torvalds histeria news items with a grain of salt.
