this is the one and only reason that the Linux kernel is going out of its way to hide which commits are LLM generated by abolishing the Assisted-By tag, simultaneously with torvalds fully slopcoding a core “improvement” to the kernel’s memory management
if you don’t believe me, here’s part of what the diff removed from the kernel’s docs:
> -When AI tools contribute to kernel development, proper attribution > -helps track the evolving role of AI in the development process. > -Contributions should include an Assisted-by tag in the following format::
if you believe in code, believe your eyes. read the diff that was applied to the kernel tree. what do your eyes say?
this governance structure is not for your benefit. it’s for the benefit of the corporations paying to capture Linux.
if you believe or believed in any of the FOSS ideals, this is the moment that all of the evangelism and advocacy and rabid fandom was supposedly there to steel the community against.
but it didn’t work. we’re in the disaster scenario and you’re still asking about fragile solutions. “well what OS do *you* recommend? why can’t we just fork the kernel? what if it’s not all that bad? what if torvalds and the rest snap out of it?”
none of this shit worked to save FOSS. try something else.
what do I recommend? fuck another OS. hold these motherfuckers responsible. why in fuck should Torvalds have a place in polite company anymore? why in fuck should Stallman? any the Linux Foundation employees? any of the slop-loving fuckers at the OSI? why should any of the people whose actual job it was to stop this shit get away with not doing their work?
and no Stallman isn’t anti-AI. you can’t fucking tell me that the guy who’s so against proprietary software he prefers when his shit doesn’t work on anyone else’s hardware conveniently decided to be soft now, in the moment when it matters. one strong word from any of the FOSS organizations could’ve slowed or stopped this outcome. but no, none of the boys who assured us their licenses and their legal might would protect us could be fucking bothered
> I asked whether that risked cutting off bright new developers that we would rather hang onto; Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world. > [...] > Torvalds added that he does not want to scare off people who want to write code; his message is that you have to either put in the effort to learn, or put a lot of money into an LLM to participate.
Linus Torvalds prefers if you can’t contribute to the kernel without pouring money into tokens for Claude Code
if you don’t pay a shit ton of money for tokens, you aren’t a serious developer according to him
the “learn” thing here is a distraction: in this context, you’ll be learning to clean up slop until you either burn out (very quickly at that) or pay for tokens and cognitively surrender to the bot
@techokami > Laurent Pinchart said that some developers are frustrated that they have to justify their work against criticisms from Sashiko while other, LLM-generated patches appear to be accepted immediately. Abeni defended the automated reviews, though, saying that the number of patches introducing bugs has dropped considerably. Zijlstra said that, while reading LLM-generated reviews "shuts my brain down", he still thought that the tool is useful; it finds real problems.
@techokami sashiko is their weird anthropomorphizing name for the LLM that runs on their CI and generates lists of “problems” with patches by the way, a thoroughly worthless thing in my long experience
as with all other systems like this, it thinks LLM code is a-ok but nitpicks code written by people to death
this is one of the mechanisms that burns you out fast when a project goes in on LLMs
so uh needless to say, you’ll want to stay on a 6.x version of the kernel for as long as you can. downgrade from 7.x if you’re on it. be very careful with backported patches.
no this isn’t a solution at all. this keeps you running until late 2028 at most. don’t use it as an excuse to do nothing.
the thing you need to do isn’t polite. we’ve been far too polite to these fuckers pretending they’ve been donating their labor to us, while they receive millions of dollars, job opportunities, and the ability to shape the software world.
protect your systems if you can, but you need to get fucking angry.
maybe we should stop assuming this guy was ever good at anything, honestly
AI boosters love humiliating themselves by insisting you need their shit to do something you can do faster and better with an editor you know how to use, and now torvalds is doing it too
it is amazing how many LLM guys just freely admit they never learned to use any of their tools, then they insist that the LLMs they’re pushing are tools and it’s everyone else’s problem for not using them correctly
LLMs are fucking horrible at everything that an editor or IDE can do. trivially so. you don’t in fact need to waste several bottles of water, many minutes of your own time and patience, and several attempts to do some basic shit like call site lookup
no I’m not calling for violence. be more creative than that.
can you really think of no option other than doing nothing or unrealistically threatening violence?
do you really think there aren’t enough people pissed about this, compared with the total Linux developer base, to gum up the works if literally anyone does anything to protest as a group?
as someone who’s been doing LLM critique since ChatGPT’s first public release and AI critique much longer than that: do you know how allergic AI boosters are to shame, to being made fun of, to resistance?
they need you to take them seriously on their terms and they’ll do everything they can to shut you out if you won’t
goof on these motherfuckers to their faces because goofing on them works
@zzt one of the things I find particularly telling is(from the LWN article):
> I asked whether that risked cutting off bright new developers that we would rather hang onto; Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world. > [...] > Torvalds added that he does not want to scare off people who want to write code; his message is that you have to either put in the effort to learn, or put a lot of money into an LLM to participate.
@Mae@zzt hey remember when programming used to be a fun, educational, and mostly free hobby? where you didn't have to have deep pockets and pay rent to do it? where you could do it anywhere in the world, even if you, say, don't have a bank account or a credit card?
(yes i know that of course you still needed some sort of computer, but still..)
@pierogiburo@Mae@zzt this is why I hate the argument that it is “democratizing” programming and removing barriers — only for those with deep enough pockets!
@cjgibilisco@pierogiburo@Mae@zzt when the current democratisation is "you can try many languages for free, even their docs are free, you simply have to take time to practice & learn, like any skill"
@pierogiburo@Mae@zzt However that sort of computer was a one time purchase and probably could be done on a library card or uni computer lab if you pushed the idea far. Not an arbitrary monthly subscription that is unsustainable.
@dimenzio@pierogiburo@Mae@zzt I mean, my first computer was an old piece of junk I got from a garage sale for like $20. It worked well enough to start tinkering on while I saved up for a real PC.
@401matthall@Mae@zzt I don't wanna excuse Linus' bullshit here, but you *always* needed to be privileged with time to contribute to Linux (and to get to the skill level to be able to do that).
Now there apparently is an "alternative" for people who don't have time or are too lazy to learn but have too much money... no idea how letting people contribute who don't know what they're doing looks like a good idea to him, though
@Doomed_Daniel@401matthall@Mae@zzt You always need to be privileged to contribute anything anywhere, because the time and freedom to do what you want should not be considered a privilege.
@Mae@zzt only wanting "serious" developers makes perfect sense, especially in the current climate of drive-by AI-generated submissions. I'd far prefer serious developers who can participate productively in devel maillist design discussions, propose and critique new features and approaches, etc. vs "AI researchers" who have no interest in the wellbeing of the projects they send submissions to.
@Mae@zzt and there's no avoiding the fact that newly joining a project requires a serious investment of time and effort to come up to speed and become able to make productive contributions. Not to mention the effort required to stay abreast of a project that has hundreds of other active participants. Staying coordinated is a big part of the task too.
That part of Linus' message makes perfect sense. Thinking that AI offers a shortcut is stupid though.
"Focus Group Man" (played by Ruben Rabasa) from the I Think You Should Leave sketch: an older man sitting at a conference table gestures and smiles. subtitle: "Oh, my God, he admit it!"
@Mae@zzt I know too many people who treat money as a solution to any problem. I don't think we ought to be encouraging them. Their attitudes are almost universally atrocious.
@Mae@zzt pulling the ladder up, ... No, Pouring Diesel on it and then lightning it on fire while the people he has encouraged in the past are still on the ladder.
@porkroll ...and make sure that their website site links to distros people would want to use, instead of the ~10 that happen to use the Linux-Libre kernel. (of these distros Trisquel is okay, and some people here swear by Guix)
[I assume this is what @zzt meant by Stallman being "so against proprietary software he prefers when his shit doesn't work on anyone else's hardware"]
@zzt What, exactly, does holding them responsible entail, to you?
Because I don't really think they care if a bunch of largely marginal figures hold them responsible, especially when the corporate money firehose is pointed straight at them (for the moment)
@zzt I'm not being glib. I'm just some random industrial electronics dev; Linus isn't going to care if I "hold him responsible". I don't have power to hire or fire, and I also don't have power to decide swapping out a 20+ year-old Linux platform with, say, NetBSD (which, as you said before, also isn't enough). At the moment, in my field ditching Linux realistically means either Windows IoT or Industrial Android, and they're not exactly better on this front.
I'm not going to base my own personal projects on Linux going forward, but once again - Linus isn't going to care about some hobbyist computational toymaker walking away. He's not going to care if 10000 hobbyist computational toymakers go away; he serves the big corporations.
What I'm driving at, I guess, is that there is a power imbalance, and it is very hard for the powerless to hold the powerful accountable.
@cyberquixote@zzt That's not addressing the question. How do we hold THESE PARTICULAR MOTHERFUCKERS accountable, now? Ideally before more damage is done and Linux is simply a lost cause.
its also why i say free software can’t totally save the world, you need people who give a shit, and enough of em doing actual boring foundational work to even have a shot at making something better.
but some folks think if we just use another system, that will magically fix everything. I wish it was so, but material conditions don’t work that way.
most people don’t need to be programmers, they need to be educated and ethical humans willing to help according to their needs and abilities.
@zzt after stallman pushed back on me in the weirdest possible way when i proposed fixing the emacs configure script and bootstrapping known-good deps instead of LLM-riddled and actually backdoored shit a couple weeks ago i'm still evaluating whether he's controlled opposition the whole damn time
@hipsterelectron@zzt Luckily Stallman is mostly very cancelled nowadays due to a lot of other factors so at least it's not often we hear from him anymore.
@zzt I'm not a developer, but i do use Linux, so I've been following this torvalds stuff with some trepidation. I've seen you comment several times that forking the kernel isn't an option. Can you explain why that is? I'm sure there are valid reasons, I'm just not in that world to know what they are.
@Cameopilot@zzt Forking the kernel is definitely an option, but it is a lot of work and not a one-time job. You'd need quite a few people who can commit to that for years. And I'm guessing companies won't pay you if you refuse slop so yeah finances may be an issue too.
@zzt I have some comments about what the solution to all of this AI madness might be but it’s pretty extreme and this is not the best channel to share it.
@zzt Honestly I kinda think open source is reaching the point where its tendency for cooption is clear.
The ruling ideas of any society are those of the ruling class. Open source is a social process mediated openly in capitalist society. Capitalists aim to enclose any common resource into private hands. Open source will die out of its informal structure, out of its lack of ability to enforce political principles for the whole project, and out of its lack of revolutionary consciousness or organisation.
Every time a project falls to slop I think "We need a software division of a communist party tied to the masses. The software stays true to communist principles, which themselves stay true to the liberation of the proletariat via feedback with the proletariat."
Not having the party means a tendency to fall back down to the lowest common denominator, the convenience of the slop. Having that party disconnected with the masses means it dissolves into a cult, a dead esoteric project.
@avesbury_rosetta Finally someone with a brain. I keep saying this to my comrades but nobody understands it. I think the issue is that on average, IT and marketing people are so full of treats that they dont need to think about class at all. If you look at the german cp, there is an age gap between 40 and 60. My generation and before are completely absent because they are either rich or dead (or homeless). @zzt
@haui@avesbury_rosetta@zzt And if you think about class but happen to get the treats because you're lucky enough to have skills capitalist society values highly, you'll get derided as a "champagne socialist".
@mathew I mean, if you read theory, class traitors are necessary but also unreliable so the proof lies with each and every one of us that we're not opportunists.
I think, like a psychotherapist, new marxists should analyze their own situation to become aware and modest.
This also reduces the "champagne socialist" insult. Because lets be honest, not being scared to pay rent for a decade blurs the necessity of revolution pretty harshly.
@zzt@clayote@hipsterelectron@Colman@techokami me when I learn about LSPs for the first time (seriously it's so useful I spent way too long doing stuff like this manually but it's invaluable in languages like Python especially
@Lunaphied@zzt@clayote@Colman@techokami my emacs package makes ripgrep matches editable and it is strictly more powerful and useful in every possible way along with not tying me to a specific compiler or build system and even working for projects i don't have to build in advance as a result
@hipsterelectron@Lunaphied@clayote@Colman@techokami damn, fuck, that sounds excellent. I really like editable matching as an interface but the only emacs package I knew that did it was really barebones and a bit slow
@zzt@Lunaphied@clayote@Colman@techokami 100 stars on github somehow although the byte compiler is weird about my macro bullshit sometimes lmk if you want any features or shit breaks https://codeberg.org/cosmicexplorer/helm-rg i used to recommend deadgrep by wilfred hughes which was a really thoughtful bit of UI i was too lazy to do better than but he's a slopper now. if you can convince me to work on this again i would feel better about actually defeating him in the marketplace of ideas though
@zzt@Lunaphied@clayote@Colman@techokami if you mean vertico for general completion then yes, it will pull in helm as a library and use it for the UI but that won't infect anything else. tbh i'm incredibly pissed off at helm after they tried to tell MELPA to delist my package since they made one themselves. thierry volpiatto can fite me irl
@zzt@Lunaphied@clayote@Colman@techokami helm also tends to just break shit every so often for fun i just need to get my act together and move to something else. never heard of vertico before tbh i'll have to check it out
but anyway yes I’m gonna pull your package in next time I regenerate my session!
(some inside baseball on how my distro currently works, I build emacs and all its packages in one step but the old one gets orphaned so I have to restart my session right after I do it. what I need to do is make sessions user packages and hold a symlink to the currently running session somewhere but I have not done this yet)
@zzt@hipsterelectron tangentially related but I am always confused by the minad suite. I have never been able to figure out/remember what is needed for what and I end up installing all of them and getting further confused.
@hipsterelectron whats the deal with Helm? I have heard of it but I dont know if its meant to be a specific package that cannot be installed with others or something. Like I have heard ido and ivy do similar things
@zardoz so all of these plug into completing-read and shit. the reason this is confusing is because if you M-x helm-mode it takes over all your completions everywhere and it has some incredibly half-assed defaults (i personally find it unusable for C-x C-f, which i use ido for, which also has fantastic LRU ranking for this while otherwise going by lex sort)
@techokami@zzt "LLMs are not the problem, it's the users' fault" is basically the same argument used by pro-gun lobbyists in the US. Tells you just how much they care about fixing the problem.
@zzt@techokami “Linus Torvalds believes that blaming LLMs for the kernel community's problems is wrong, when the problem is LLM users who do not understand how to use them or how the kernel works.”
@cjgibilisco@techokami channeling all the managers shouting over their project being on fire with PIPs for everyone who failed them by not LLMing hard enough
@cjgibilisco@zzt@techokami I’ve noticed this is a common pattern with those who become AI dependent: the AI cannot fail, it is always the humans who have failed the AI. The final form of cognitive surrender.
@zzt@techokami I’m repeating the prediction I made half an hour ago: it won’t be long before Linus goes on a rant that somehow culminates in “too many brown contributors to FOSS”
@zzt@techokami The most fun thing about them at work is that they manage to follow "best practices" better than most humans but do it in service to code that otherwise doesn't work.
The cleanest, most SOLID and DRY implementation of nothing in particular that you've ever seen.
@zzt this whole thing is just a multitude of fuckedness
THIS hurt the most to read: > Torvalds and others repeatedly said low-quality contributions from new developers should receive low priority, and that the community should stop trying to make contribution easy. Many developers said, repeatedly, that trying to mentor those developers is almost always a waste of time; they do not listen.
@zzt also it sounds like if you want to become a contributor now, hope you have lots of money for plane flights and hotel rooms to frequent conferences enough to be noticed
@johnzajac@techokami@zzt This is complete budget related company think of "I don't need slower juniors, someone else will train them!" - but in a context where it makes zero sense unless you accept Linux already being completely undermined by corporate desires (it is).
The NPO world has always been a tax haven, and since the 1980s has been growth-pilled to the point where working in NPOs/Foundations is nearly indistinguishable from working for tech companies, except that because of the earnest nature of people attracted to that sector, there's significantly more abuse and overwork that goes unreported and unaddressed.
@techokami@zzt This is a really bizzare combination of obnoxious elitism and AI psychosis, by the way.
"you have to either put in the effort to learn, or put a lot of money into an LLM to participate."
In other words, we have impossible standards, but they don't apply if you're rich and sucking up to Anthropic like we are.
Linux is fascist. It would be irresponsible to deny, a project entirely taken over by fascist techbros and their fascist corporate backers is fascist and dead walking.
@techokami@zzt makes me glad i never ended up learning linux kernel dev 😬
though hey, this might just break me out of the sort of programming burnout i've been having and get me to contribute to netbsd so... thanks linus, i guess?
@techokami@zzt I won't be surprised if Linus ends up switching Linux to source-avaliable model or even outright closing sources whatsoever and selling licenses to companies directly. Unfortunately my work/life flow (including VR) is only possible on either Windows or Linux, at least for now.
> He has been playing with an LLM on a separate project for several months to learn about the technology, but hadn't used one on the kernel until last week. He took an old patch and had the LLM revise it; the result has made him unwilling to work without an LLM. He plans to post that series at some point. Why bother, he asked, to search for all of the call sites of a function he has just modified, when the tool can fix them all automatically? But, he said, it took six months to set up the tool to not produce bad responses. If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately.
@zzt@techokami "If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately."
Of course, he won’t share his setup. Otherwise, he might lose favorite excuse: “You’re just prompting it wrong.” At this point, Torvalds is acting like a complete clown.
@remivox@zzt@techokami It's the completely natural progression lol, when you outsource everything to the LLM, there is nothing special about you. You have no value as a developer. The software does it all for you. Your particular configuration of the software is all you have left to justify your existence. Of course he's not going to share it.
@tael@zzt@techokami He won’t share it not because it’s some kind of trade secret or requires deep expertise, but because the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. I guarantee there’s nothing special about his setup.
@zzt@techokami yeah reading this, there are some people in the replies fighting the good fight.
I think my opinion now is that Linux is too large, it is insufficiently modular (building out of tree drivers used to be a lot easier) and lkml has long had a reputation for being unfriendly to newcomers. It's a psychological problem more than a technical one, but that barrier exists because the project is huge and has no architectural direction aimed at making it more maintainable.
@ganxel@zzt for minimal values of work, i doubt there's a problem. but accelerated graphics is clearly a problem. and the installer isn't exactly geared for a typical desktop.
- most of those 6000+ CVEs aren’t real, and a fair number of the real ones aren’t practically exploitable. this is well-documented at this point, feel free to look it up. you’re probably fine to hold off on updates unless something actually critical to you gets fixed. - before installing a new kernel, do some minimal due diligence to find out if anyone’s having weird issues with the version you’re looking to switch to - make damn sure you keep the old kernel around for a bit, til you’re sure the new one’s stable and nothing that matters to you is busted
2 and 3 were best practice from the old days of Linux, and the BSDs still recommend it. 1 is a 2026 original, as falsified and overblown CVEs never used to be this big of a problem.
@zzt thanks, that's more or less what I've been doing
unfortunately, the CVE deluge means figuring out if there's something actually critical to me in there is no longer practically possible
and I'm a bit worried that minimal due diligence isn't enough to avoid e.g. subtle filesystem corruption bugs introduced by slopcoding that don't show up for a few weeks or months
@zzt checking a codebase for slop earlier I found a commit titled something like “ensure single blank line between changelog entries” and the entire diff was deleting one extra blank line. Assisted by Claude Opus 9000 or whatever
@zzt as much as I can't stand the guy I can't help but think of that old "blub paradox" essay by Paul Graham.
It's like so many folks were/are in love with ancient CLI tools for their "lightweight elegance" and awful human factors that they aren't aware of how much more a modern tool can do. Do I want to rename a function in a command line? I'm probably writing a script and praying it doesn't rename something unrelated.
In an IDE, CTRL+R, type new name, press enter, done.
@zzt The fork of microemacs he is known for is from the 1987 version of microemacs - so, before pico (parent of nano) split off of it, even. So, I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't have ctags support..
... but it's grandchild nano does, and has since like the 90's/early 00's I think. So, don't even need to learn proper emacs, nano is already a huge step up while being in the same editor family...
@zzt Yeah, going from 'Not even syntax highlighting' to full slop seems like an odd shift. Like, doing it the most difficult way possible straight to complete cogntive surrender, in a matter of seemingly a few months.
But ctags support could literally be implemented in a few hours at most. The fact that it hasn't been added just shows that he doesn't actually care about this. He's either so deep in LLM psychosis that he can no longer reason about software, or he's just trying to make up use cases to justify LLMs in bad faith. I'm honestly not sure which is worse, but I suspect it may be both.
I have the latest version of MicroEMACS from before Dan Lawrence died; I believe CTAGS was included. I see from the source that you linked to that Linus has stripped out the features he didn't feel he needed. There are definitely some missing files there (including the history file).
Oh yeah, this is definitely ancient. I recognize some code that got rewritten years later, and Dan Lawrence passed away in 2010. I wonder if the whole "hate the 1987 code, we're so cool now" comments were part of a way of dodging Dan's own copyleft.
@zzt oh but IDEs are "bloated" and "unnecessary" and "Evil" and "real developers use vim" according to way too many Linus/OSS/FSF fanboys back in the day.
@ozzelot@beeoproblem@zzt I’m Rania from Gaza. 💔🇵🇸 The war destroyed our home and left my children and me struggling to survive without the basic necessities. I’m asking for your help. Even a small donation or a share can help us get through another difficult day. 🙏🤍 🔗 Donation link in bio
@zzt I stopped programming in C ages ago but I remember trying to use ctags on a large codebase and gave up in frustration. Maybe it is better now, but the Linux kernel codebase is huge... It wouldn't surprise me that ctags integration in an ide simply falls down on its face when working with the whole kernel repository switching between branches on the fly.
@zzt I remember the first time I saw someone amazed that the bot could rename every occurrence of a variable and I was just like… buddy I can do that with Shift+F6 where have you been?
@zzt I built a deterministic auto-fixing linter and saw people/teams refuse automated diffs applying those fixes because they didn’t like the “churn” or were worried about vague notions of reliability of the fixes, just for everyone to turn around two years later and happily have an LLM both generate fixes for outstanding lint errors and then automatically “review” those diffs without a human being involved, all while burning thousands/millions times more computing resources to do so than the original auto-fixes would have required. Fuck.
@zzt My "DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT AI I WILL KILL MYSELF" shirt also did numbers in San Francisco lol. Never before have so many scrawny nerds in puffy vests stared daggers at me. It felt good. Fuck them.
@zzt I found one today, when giggling with joy slopremaking some music to sloptrance a and me saying confrontationally that it's all fine and dandy while ignore the consequences, build a whole argumentation that I offended him by saying this.
After I've reiterated this in a next answer which also included a slight counter-mockery, that he was all on slop cancer research by Alpha Fold, but didn't knew that AF was closed this year.
@zzt This is such a disgrace. And these people 20 years ago played the "Holier than thou" game to say "oh free software isn't practical, we must work with corporates". We should've learnt the lesson when Linus turned down GPLv3, when he joined the Linux Foundation with Microsoft. He said it repeatedly he DOES NOT CARE about ethics. He does not care about FREEDOM actually, he only cares about technically being allowed to do things. He does not care about incentives, never did.
This is the reminder that 20 years ago we should've been harder with free software. We should've protested against Linus not caring about freedom enough, or should've maintained our own fork of linux since then.
The only thing we can do today is have alternatives, like Hurd or Netbsd. Because this thing is becoming ridiculous.
@zzt thanks for documenting all this. this one was so fast. took less than a year from him being on linus tech tips to full sludge. i wonder how long it's actually been full on
🍉
