This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Well it's not that this shit CAN'T be useful, it's that it's being pushed at people heavily in ways that aren't.
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.
Ayup, i've literally thrown massive logs into an llm and "find the errors" to track down a complex issue. They're very good paper sorters
I suppose Microslop aren't actually professionals anymore.
I can live with that
I can stand AI as long as the code is reviewed line-by-line by a human. The only problem I have aside from that is that I wonder if code generated by an AI can validly be placed under an open source licence instead of being public domain. Didn't a court rule that you couldn't copyright generated code?
Good point. Not sure what they're gonna do about that.
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.
Yeah he has said many times the submitter of the code is the one responsible for knowing how it works. That's not the only issue with LLMs though. Stolen intellectual property and the larger environmental impact that the data centers required to run them is having are just a couple more.
I have a feeling that in order to achieve using deep learning (because let's face it; it's not AI) as a programming assistant, AI companies didn't need to do half the shit they've done.
The resources being outright burnt on their endeavours haven't served any useful purpose. You don't need data centres covering the globe and to destroy thousands of rare books to assist with code, or find cancer in a scan.
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 agree. Most actual technical professionals agree. AI has long existed in some form before tech bros in silicon valley turned it into a SaaS. It's just the fediverse is filled with a bunch of anarchists obsessed with Loli anime, and to them chaos and a return to medieval age is their best chance of living out their child loving fantasies.
I have access to essentially unlimited local compute at my work. Some of my coworkers use it to run LLMs, some use the pre-enshittified corporate models, and I gave all that a shot—like really went for it, but ultimately would rather just work at my own pace.
In my workplace the people who use them come off as kind of frantic to my eye. Like they're always making these overly engineered greenfield things no one asked for, which gets them a shout out at quarterly and then no one ever thinks of it again...
I'm not saying there's 0 legitimate use for the technology if you could divorce it from its problematic origins, but I'm not that smart, and people are increasingly coming to me for help when previously they seemed happy to just talk to their little corporate minder.
I feel like chatbot and text generating models generally encourage dark patterns we don't even have names for yet and I'm just highly wary of the whole thing.
I've spent the last 9 months coming in behind these "look what I did! AI!" projects and fixing them. One was turned over to a coworker as a "here I did all this work for you" ... Wouldn't even start because it tried to bind to the same TCP port three times in the init, for some reason.
It's getting a little better, but I still mostly unfuck shit that people LLMd and then (they) walked away to much fanfare at their "expertise" to do it again.
It's a tool, not a replacement for thought.
nothing is good nor evil, but thinking makes it so.
But i see the issues on both sides of the aisle. Kind of like how social media is a great tool that brings about instant worldwide communication. But those merits don't cancel out how it's been used to exploit the human psyche, influence elections, and even coax genocides.
In this case, the downwind effects from encouraging use by mature professionals is impacting the impressionable future. And no one seems to care about the future anymore.
"oversight" is a myth. I'm pretty sure you can't oversight your way of plagiarism out of millions of training data sources that you don't even have on your local disk for comparison and reference.
(This isn't legal advice. I'm not a lawyer.)
I code at a kindergarten level so its been useful for me when I'm trying to get an idea to just work. I tell it what I was trying to do and give it my code and then I ask it to fix then explain what went wrong. Works pretty well in qwen 3.8 27b on my GPU in zed. But I'm not making huge apps or public code just dumb scripts for me. So ive found ive actually gotten better this past year. Its all in how you use it.
I personally don't care about the tech. I care about the economy around the tech.
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.
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.
Finally got where I stand: why uncomfortable? It's just being hard to impose a sensible approach to it:
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.
AI use for Open Source projects is arguably the one use case that benefits everyone,
It doesn't benefit everyone if it pushes the quality down because the impetus to go fast wins over the dedication to reviewing the code properly. Nor does it benefit everyone if the world becomes uninhabitable because of the energy used by data centers. Nor does it benefit everyone if economies collapse due to the hype being wrong and the speculative bubble bursts. Nor does it benefit everyone if the hype is right and it renders most jobs redundant.
These are the very rational things "haters" are concerned about. AI is for the rich to get richer. It does nothing for the rest of us.
[insert meme of the guy sweating over which of two red buttons to press]
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.
The AI cabal is a very small group with a very large amount of power and powerful friends who want to push this on you. Remember, walking away from this does not impact hunger or shelter at all. You can survive without this shimmering facade.
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.
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.
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.
