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Linus Torvalds used AI to fix a Linux bug, and now LLM critics on Linux face an uncomfortable choice
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.
Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEO's who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.
I'm wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).
I do not think LLM's can be "just a tool" as many claim.
99% of LLM's (the ones virtually everyone use) are trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLM's have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.
Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html
i dont get it; not paying for a subscription should actually discourage them from building new data centres because they're turning a net loss by you doing that. it's also, very freakin clear, that AI in its current state is not profitable.
Virtually the entire industry is not profitable, but that current reality does not affect the massive investment money they continue to receive, as they are pitching the concept to investors that many of the free users will eventually become paying users, and that their overall userbase will continue to expand, with projections of huge profits a decade from now.
For investors, the lack of profits now is not a blaring alarm bell, because Amazon also operated without a profit for many years by undercutting their competition until the competition failed, then Amazon was able to be a monopoly and jack up their prices.
A similar thing is happening with AI companies, where the prices they are currently charging is putting them at a net loss, but each one is hoping to out survive the other so that some day they can be a semi or total monopoly, and jack the prices up on a userbase that has become totally dependent on them to do their jobs.