Torvalds: AI Is the New Compiler, Not the New Programmer

I wish more would listen.

Many seem to interpret the headline as “Torvalds is an AI Bro now,” when its more like him yelling “If you all don’t treat these things as tools, shit is going to hit the fan.”

After seeing what happened to windows because of this “tool” I think many of us are rightfully skeptical of what will happen to this community.

It happened before, why are we okay with it happening again?

Microsoft doesn’t treat it as a tool; that’s the problem.

…Which isn’t surprising. Not only because Microsoft is Microsoft, but they own like a third of OpenAI, so they have a vested interest in perpetuating the AI hype.

Microsoft has far more people relying on their products to work, so you’d think they’d exercise far more diligence in making things work…

Well… Microsoft is Microsoft.

This is what they do. They simply cannot help themselves.

It honestly makes me distrust the whole move because you would genuinely think that if the world depends on your stuff to work you would make it work, AI or not.

We’re still talking about Microsoft, right?

They have a looooong history of enshittification and footgunning that predates “AI” by decades, no matter how much the world has depended on their stuff. So no, I suppose I wouldn’t think that, as that would break decades of precedence for MS. But I suppose I never trusted them in the first place.

It’s strange to me because well, I was a 20+ years windows veteran who managed to never have issues on any of my windows installs prior to the last couple years when the ai thing went full swing. maybe part of that was me, because I was inattentive and reckless, but it really just became too much to ignore. i have a genuinely hard time with the idea of essentially retconning the way things always used to Just Work for me in my Windows days. maybe it was bad when I was there and I just didn’t notice. but blegh.

Can’t say I’ve had your experience, Windows always had issues. Think 7 was the least problematic version for me and the last one I remember fondly.

I have a car diagnostics laptop running 8.1 because it doesn’t support legacy boot for 7 and is too weak for 10. That UX was horrendous. Then came 10 which was unusable without an SSD. That sounds like the norm now but back then a lot of people didn’t have them. I’m not even going to mention 11, it came out before the AI craze and has sucked since release.

But the really crazy side of Microsoft is the ERPs. Way too much always changing. Good old systems being retired because they have a worse new one to replace it with, etc.

I skipped 8/8.1 purely because the look of it annoyed me. XP and 7 basically ran flawless on all my machines I had them on. I wasn’t too annoyed with 10 on HDD, but SSD definitely helped. 11 felt fundamentally identical to 10 for me for the first few years, and the AI stuff was when everything fell apart for me. It may be a matter of luck, ignorance, and not understanding quite what was wrong.

The situation with Windows the last few years has left me cynical of this entire craze. hopefully things end up alright in the end.

XP and 7 basically ran flawless on all my machines I had them on

So you somehow missed alll the worms and viruses and toolbars and adware and spyware that was going around on windows for a decade?

All the blue screens and driver issues and memory crashes and slowness and bugginess?

I have never seen anyone saying they never had any issues with Windows before, you’re the first in 30 years