Fuck AI

The thing is that they rigorously review their code internally with In the project. It needs to be reviewed and cleaned up before it gets submitted. Someone who keeps posting junk is gonna get chewed out and ignored. So, the biggest issue with LLM code is kind of irrelevant. If someone useses it responsibly and finds a way to make it an effective tool, they’re not worried about it. Banning its use is kind of pointless since the worst outcomes are already banned.

Linux is basically a big ‘fuck you’ against corporations and closed source, i.e., a scoial statement.

I mean, not according to the project leader, or the contributors, who are mostly companies.

If the 3 main groups contributing to a project are Intel, Meta and IBM, it's not really a community project, is it?

For one thing the emphasis is very much not on 'AI coding' uses, instead focusing issue triage and security testing IIRC.

Is it? After reading the article and the original post in the kernel mailing list, IMO the article depicts Linus' opinions accurately.

Was also astonished to find out that Linus considers people who advocate for sustainable tech are doing so solely out of fear and that AI can't be criticised because humans also make errors.

This is absolutely not true. The email is very direct, and the specific context doesn't change anything. Here's the full text:

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.

🤦

I honestly expected better from him...

I meam have you ever heard linus talk about other controversial topics? He is not one to give a fuck or mince words.

Yeah, METR is an industry group funded by Google, Microsoft, Anthropic etc. I happened to summarize their work just yesterday actually: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/21358850 but one thing I think it's important to point out is that there is no second study, not yet. The blog, and the open source dataset, are all we have, because the researchers decided to adjust their method. So the intimation arstechnica gives that they completed a second study is false.

And the selection effects they are talking about are pro-ai software developers being unwilling or unable to complete complex tasks without their precious ai anymore, whereas a year ago they were more willing to do both ways in order to prove how powerful ai is. In my opinion, as I stated, this reflects poorly on their levels of self confidence from using ai, more than saying anything about a speed boost/decline.

Ahaha. The research showed that developers don't know how fast they are, but when we talked to them they said that they're pretty fast, so we'd rather report on that. I see no problems or contradictions with this.

Linus himself doesn't talk about it, and pretends he doesn't know.

None of that will ever be prosecuted, because it was done through the wealthy and their favored praxis.

All AI generated code should be GPL. It was trained on all of us, and its output belongs to all of us.

MIT code can be used in GPL projects though. It simply becomes GPL code.

Eeh, I don't think he is going to stop tearing people a new one for submitting bad code, though. He lives for the flame.

The context of the quote is not code generation, it is an AI-based code review tool which caught real issues which made it past human review. He's not arguing for lowering the code quality standards, he's acknowledging that in the past year, AI-based code review tools have started to provide real value.

He has vibe-coded at least one non-kernel hobby project, though.

That was exactly Linus’ point, especially as their comment came from the context of people debating AI bad/good in the kernel mailing list (which is totally not the place to be having that discussion).