It seems Linus’s position is very clear now
Linux Foundation has financial backers. He’s gotta give them lip service to keep them excited and happy. Anthropic is now a Gold Member. Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon are all Platinum Members.
FOSS has always been subject to corporate meddling in their governance. There’s a reason we call it Linux and not GNU-Linux. GNU gets no money so GNU goes nowhere.
Linus gives a headline using agents, Linux gets millions to continue doing real work. That’s the game they are playing, for better or worse.
It was already clear. Anybody speaking otherwise has already been tagged and flagged as such.
My issue isn’t with using AI to work on the Linux Kernel. My issue is working on the kernel with proprietary AI which enables Sam Altman to claim Millennium Prizes.
I completely agree, using an open model would be far more inline with the spirit of open source.
Yeah, I’m quickly seeing a future where stuff like this AI rewrite of the Adobe suite may need to be distributed as the model that makes the software and not the software itself. If that becomes the case then we really will have entered into a world where tech bros control everything as you will quickly find yourself in a world where you can’t use the software if you don’t have the compute to make it.
I can see a completely different kind of future where local models that run on commodity software get good enough for what most people need to do. At that point we’d be in a world that Stallman envisioned with every user having full control over what’s running on their machine, and being able to build whatever features they want. We already see how it’s becoming trivial to reverse engineer complex apps like Photoshop, or to crack PS5 games using LLMs. We are likely end up in a world where closed source is dead because code itself no longer has any value because anybody can copy and reproduce any application trivially.
And we are already starting to get there. Qwen 3.8 27b is comparable in terms of capability to Opus 4.6 which was a frontier model just half a year ago. If Qwen 4 gets to about Opus 5.5 level sometime next year, that’s going to be good enough for making vast majority of software that people need. After that it’s just a matter of further optimization or hardware getting better so it can run on most computers. But just to reiterate, it’s already running on consumer grade hardware, and it can do real work today.
I’m not sure I agree with the idea that the necessary level of compute will be made available to the average person. We are already well into a paradigm where the average “PC” is an iPad or similar, with Google locking down Android and Microsoft… being Microsoft, I just don’t have any optimism that the future will have the same kind of access to personal computing power or even software access. The “tin-foil hat” part of my brain says that the purchasing years worth of chips output is part of a conspiracy to keep consumers and potential competitors at bay more than it’s a requirement for new models.
I hope I am wrong, but I am not holding my breath.
It looks like many AI skeptics have been having a change of heart and maybe some growing dread. You spend the time and it streamlines through the tough problem and it cracks firmware, builds valid specs, reverse engineer enterprise software, it’s been an interesting week.
In some ways I think it might be good, perhaps a significant decrease in proprietary prison cage ecosystems. But at the same time, I have an ever growing dread that we are jumping off the knowledge cliff. The most experienced people are seeing revolutionary productivity, while the least experienced are gaining more capability without the foundational knowledge.
The future may have students who learn nothing, know nothing, and worse they will be happy with nothing.
I’m ready to unplug and live a near Amish lifestyle. Fuck modernity.
The tech bros have insane GPU lease agreements. More than they can reasonably afford/use. When “amateurs” can recreate photoshop, 1000x “free” (would be wasted) compute at a better photoshop they control is something they can do too, and beat OSS and adobe. There are capable decompiler to readable/organized source code agents now too. At one point, the LLM labs can stop releasing new models, and just steal everything themselves.
It’s a good thing Sam Altman isn’t Anthropic !
nitpicking doesnt change the point being made. A corpo getting more control over FOSS is a huge loss for everyone
AI like this is very quickly becoming the One Ring in my mind. Like there’s a bunch of people who have convinced themselves that they can use this plagiarism box in a good way, that the outcome will somehow justify the means. But the reality is that this machine was created by evil for evil reasons and as it stands right now you can’t use Claude or ChatGPT or any of that shit and not participate in the plagiarism, in the outright theft of all of the art and creativity of humanity, and the destruction of our environment.
I wish that more people would understand that the jump from the novelty of Watson beating Ken Jennings on Jeopardy to here wasn’t technological innovation. It was purely capitalism.
plagiarism
outright theft
It frustrates me to see that people are suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property right of people to control creations after they’ve been created.
I’m pretty skeptical of AI and have my doubts that it will be a net good, but I’m definitely not gonna suddenly be pro-copyright as part of that fight. Copyright has traditionally been used to entrench corporate interests, and strengthening those protections isn’t going to suddenly win a fight against some kind of AI dystopia.
People are not “suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property”. Instead they wonder why some companies can violate those rules on an unprecedented scale whiteout consequences.
I think it’s more about the unequal application if those laws. People have had their lives ruined for sharing an mp3. These companies infringe on literally everything and they get rich.
I bet the next step is that the folks vibe coding emulators and replacements for major software suites are going to get serious fines, while artists are going to continue to get ripped off in the name of “innovation”.
This is very much the problem I have. We have officially reached the point where the average artist on Deviant Art has less intellectual property rights than the average even LLC let alone megacorp like Disney.
So which is it? Should people (and AI companies) be prosecuted for copyright violations or should people (and AI companies) not be prosecuted for copyright violations?
If you want equal application of those laws, that is.
It doesn’t matter. The law needs to pick one and be consistent.
If you want my personal opinion, I’ve been against a lot of copyright law most of my life, but I’m beginning to rethink that with this so called AI. I think we need strong protections against commercial infringement while maintaining strong personal fair use. The details of course are complex.
That would essentially be a position in favor of prosecuting Aaron Swartz
People shouldn’t be and companies should, neither should be, both should be, the current situation, in order of decreasing preference.
Either one would be better than the current situation. And let’s be real, we aren’t gonna have a say in it anway
Well i think the issue is if licenses become worthless then that’s also bad for the GPL
Exactly. What happened to “restriction of what a user can do with software or its source code is an infringement upon the users’ rights”? I’m not saying that AI companies are acting in the spirit of FOSS, they’re not, their models aren’t even open-weight (for the most part), but the issue is not the training on materials that ought to be public domain anyway. There’s plenty of ethical issues with modern technology. It’s not sustainable at all, the supply chain is full of slavery, it generates huge amounts of emissions, etc. People’s primary concern being pearl clutching about “plagiarism” shows where their priorities lie. If AI companies have plagiarised then I couldn’t care less. It’s everything else they’re doing that’s the problem.
I am not sure it was initially created for evil, I do believe that its discovery was mostly academic and in that it was, and still is, a pretty significant/interesting one. It was very quickly and very strongly made into the perfect weapon for the information age for sure, but i doubt that the original researchers wanted that, or just really thought of the implications outside of information theory. But it was indeed Google, surveillance capitalism incarnate, that initially gifted transformers to the world and kickstarted the whole thing…
Edit: I realised that I inadvertently made this comment about “AI” by way of pronouns when I’m really talking about LLMs. Google of course did not invent AI, and I more strongly disagree that AI in its actual sense was invented for or is inherently evil.
The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical considering this is an experimental branch on his own repository. I’m not surprised he might experiment with using AI agents to solve a particular pain point to see how it does. This is using agents to experiment with things that you might not have time to address normally.
Another recent example is the build system where the author said:
An LLM was used to first determine where the bottlenecks were then to figure out how to improve them. It generated a lot of code, much of it hideous.
I extensively audited and rewrote a lot of it, and heavily edited commit messages, the cover letter and comments.
off-loading the boring grunt work of identifying bottle necks and trying new approaches seems like an ideal task for a junior agent to deal with as long is you don’t YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.
as long is you don’t YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.
(Or not de-slopify at all.)
There’s literally no one I trust more to handle llm code more than Linus.
He’s not going to pass off shit in his name. He’ll use it in the best possible way.
Lots of reasons to be anti-AI, but it’s not all black and white. It’s here to stay and it’s useful. (But we ain’t gonna spend 400 billion a year on it.)
People cannot seem to grasp that there is a difference in using LLMs to experiment and just blindly using code written by an LLM. You’d think they would realize Linus is never going to do the latter. Binary thinking leads to this…
is there a difference in the environmental destruction when used this way? no? these things have so many negative effects on the world in so many areas that making life more convenient for coddled computer touches doesn’t excuse literally any of it
is there a difference in the environmental destruction when used this way?
Yes. There is no doubt that if you use an LLM for everything that will use several fold more times electricity than someone who uses it a few times a year.
Like I said, binary thinking. You’re literally saying there is no difference in 1 and 1000000 because both are more than zero.
so the less you use it, the better? glad we can agree
Right, so we know Linus has used Claude for one project. You are saying there is no excuse for that and I don’t agree. I don’t think it makes sense to take absolute stances against things that will undoubtedly be used by most everyone eventually. Just like I think cars are generally bad, I’m not about to get pissed off at everyone who drives them.
the earth doesn’t care if you think this is a good use or linus is somehow worthy when the regular plums aren’t.
dario and his epstein wife sure do though. so keep going to bat for them
Your absolutism will take you nowhere. No one will bother to even listen you because you aren’t able to communicate about this topic.
LLM companies will legitimize their shit by saying “look, Linus is using our model to make Linux better”.
Okay, and? So he should either change his own processes or keep them secret because some dickbag might claim he’s legitimized their product?
I think people in a bubble like this platform seem to miss that AI tools are already “legitimized”. I am not stating an opinion, I’m just saying what the average person thinks, which is that they are useful. The reality is a lot more complicated than that and I think they’re leading us bad places but I don’t think your argument works at all
The tools are “legitimized” by a mass ad campaign to shove LLMs down our throats.
Linus is a very influential person in this space and hin using Claude for whatever project he has will legitimize the massive ad campaign that LLMs companies are pushing. It’s a jackpot for them. Organic publicity by one of the biggest nerd of the world.
Any push towards LLMs is only benefiting the ultra wealthy and destroying the planet. And this is exactly what this piece of news is doing.
Even if you were right this message would be irrelevant to 99% of the population and within the 1% who know or care who he is, minimum 75% wouldn’t be swayed by him saying that. Plus, him saying he used it is not praise.
For me, there’s more to it than just the output. But I’m sure Linus won’t let his mind rot in LLM. Yet. Still… Lots of reasons to object to using AI at all. Use a computer responsibly, folks.
I can absolutely understand some of the objections and I understand why writers and artists are pissed. My code has always been free software so I don’t object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.
The power usage is definitely a concern but that holds up for all computing. I don’t see people up in arms about inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!
My code has always been free software so I don’t object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.
But what about the output of an LLM that was trained on free software, then being used in closed source, commercial software? 🙁
inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!
Oh yeah, I’m definitely with you there. Oh gosh.
They probably should be up in arms! Both are bad things, simultaneously, as two things can be!
The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical
i FULLY expected more hate. lol
It seems like the tide is finally starting to turn here in terms of LLM usage. Even 4 months ago this thread would be a nightmare lol
It’s a slippery slope. So far Linus has gone from using it to find bugs, to using it as a programming assistant, and now ostensibly to vibecode entire features.
Where will it end? Will Linus shut off external contributions and let the agents loose like Bun did? That would be a tragedy in my book.
We can just fork the latest kernel version we feel comfortable with.
The phrase vibecode has become totally meaningless. The original use was too “give in too the vibes” and let the agent go wild. There is no indication that is what Linus is doing.
The fact is LLM’s have proven to be good at finding bugs. Suitably constrained they can be diligent and helpful assistants.
The Bun experience is instructive and if that was Linus’ end goal it would be concerning but I don’t see any evidence that any of the Linux maintainers are interested in that sort of wholesale conversion. The good projects with taste will adjust to the new tools and the slop projects will eventually collapse under their own contradictory architectures.
How much has he dumbed down his capabilities already? When will he replace himself by an LLM?
He was already pretty dumbed down back when he used to shit on C++. From there to the neutering he went on (we don’t get middle fingers for Nvidia anymore) and now this… it’s sad to watch.
Die a hero or else, as the saying goes.
The man has clearly gone senile, going from the human label of person to gear.
Trying to use the plagiarism machine that also causes DOT lobotomied as a convenient side effect will not land you in the good graces of anyone with a functioning brain.
the decay of humanity
Maybe he just
diffs it to the latest commit and actually only manually reads through what Claude changed? No idea…Linus is - always was - a sellout. Never ask what the Finns were doing during the WWII.
I love how you refer to people who give you things.
I haven’t seen your kernel and OS yet, so let me know when it’s ready.
The community gave things, Linus is just a small part of this. Westerners, smh.
.ca
Learn solidarity and communality, drop your liberalism, and talk again.
Yo you still operate even after yandex blew up? You must be chinese based
momentLet me see, would you do what the Finns were doing if given the chance? Good to know. The russo sino phobia is to be expected.
Lick my balls with a passion bot
Go away Nazi
Love this, opus 5.5 is absolutely nuts at optimization. I was able to use it to get some 10x performance improvements recently.
Fuuuuuck.
In theory I could drive over to his house and knock on his door and ask him to stop using clankers, but I’m sure I would be trespassed immediately.
I also live right outside Portland. This triplea the performance. He correctly documents its use. I see AI being used properly here. People complaining on Lemmy about it still use every piece of technology that make AI possible. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
AI is a hideous abomination tainting everything with its existence or our lord and savior that will soon™ solve all of humanity’s problems. There is no middle-ground anymore.
And the notion that a tool can be useful for one thing if properly handled, not so useful if used carelessly, and absolutely stupid when used for a purpose it cannot actually fullfil is somehow (magic? collective brain-dead?) deemed crazy now.
PS: The only thing more insane than the discussion itself are the arguments about AI-use being unethical as it is trained on stolen data usually made by the very same copyleft guys that claim that no copyright should exist, all data should be free, and copying something is no theft!
I personally -do- think copyright shouldn’t exist. But it does (for Marvel or whatever), but not for GPL licensed projects once it is encoded in a matrix, and that’s pretty messed up. “Loki is a copyrighted Marvel character, I can’t create a new, full-length story using him as the main character.”, Yet if I ask it to write a text editor based on GNU Emacs it has very little problem doing so (edit: and technically failing, but still).
I can assure you, I haven’t used liquified distilled human text in the same way that AI does. I never will.
The entire concept is terrible.
Goddamn slop apologists coming out of the woodwork all the time. :/
Maybe ask him for a cup of tea and hear him out?
No. This heretical abuse of human labor and planetary resources has absolutely no place in society, where it creates lumpy and awkward abominations attempting to replace intent and care.
Fuck AI.
Hear hear.
Sweet lord I hate these things. They get rid of all the best parts of being human and leave only the shitty parts.
The correct and moral thing to do would be the absolute eradication of the technology and enacting a global non-proliferation treaty. Unfortunately I’m not likely to see that in my lifetime so I’m likely forced to live with the slow collapse of humanity into comfort and leisure.
