Replying to an earlier post

Torvalds was careful to frame this as a correction of language rather than a rejection of the technology itself.

Ok…

A maintainer burden few are talking about

Alongside the productivity gains, Torvalds described a less-discussed cost: a rising flood of low-effort, AI-generated bug and vulnerability reports hitting open source projects, including the kernel’s own security channels. He said it has become common for someone to run an AI tool against a codebase, file a report flagging a “possible” issue, and then vanish when a maintainer follows up asking for more detail or a fix.

Everyone is talking about that and it is surprising to me that he doesn’t recognize that as two side of the same coin. Why are you rejecting the low-effort, Ai generated bug reports, Linus, isn’t AI just a productivity tool? What’s wrong? Is it not being productive?

I say “surprising”, it’s not that surprising. It’s a “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” attitude. It’s willfully excluding the impact that technology has on people, and framing the outcome as coming purely from people and the existence of the technology not affecting the outcome.

Replying to @⁨it_depends_man@lemmy.world⁩

Tools are just tools; there are good ways and bad ways to use them. “Grok, go find bugs in the Linux kernel” isn’t a good one. This isn’t hard to understand…

There were many, partially well-intentioned, mostly fame-seeking, one-off ‘projects’ ‘scanning’ public repos and flooding them with low-quality low-effort PRs and issues; things that no human ever read until the a maintainer did.

“They made a poison and sold us a cure” is absolutely a valid criticism; that’s two sides of the same coin. But pretending that he’s being hypocritical or that LLMs aren’t useful is just being wrong for the sake of hating AI

Replying to an earlier post

AI is useful as tool like he said, unfortunately these days in many organisations it is used as a replacement rather than a tool.

His conclusion was that as AI tools get more capable, the people who actually understand how systems work become more valuable, not less — because someone still has to review, maintain, and take responsibility for what the tools produce.

Humans still need to learn how to code.

Replying to an earlier post

Tools are just tools

I don’t think that’s true, but we simply disagree on that.

I don’t think he’s hypocritical. He simply doesn’t have to deal with that negative impact he “warns” about. He is in support of using it as a tool and thinks the criticism is invalid. That’s a consistent perspective, even if I don’t agree with it.

If he used LLMs to create bug reports, but also complained about LLM written bug reports he gets, that would be hypocritical.

Replying to an earlier post

bingo. and unfortunately the lazy and inexperienced are using it more than others, or using it at a much higher degree. Linus even says it himself. they file a report and then “vanish” because they can’t answer follow up questions or clarifications because they don’t know how. if you deal with LLMs and the people that use them as much as I do for my job you see this constantly. daily even. they “build” something and when it’s reviewed and questioned the answers are just no where to be found because the “coder” can’t answer them.

Like the other day there’s this guy on Youtube who is a huge advocate for Omarchy for whatever reason. older guy but he’s always going on about how great Omarchy is. he posts a video about how “we” built some application for Omarchy but the entire video is him putting prompts into Claude Code and then walking away. never touches it, never writes a line of code. but there were glaring bugs with the build so I reached out to him, asked him how he was going to address these things and hoping he wouldn’t put this app out there because it’s clearly broken. works on a surface level but it WILL break. he essentially told me to “fuck off”.

you’re right an LLM is a tool but one that should be in the hands of those that know what they’re doing. you wouldn’t hand a hammer to a child and tell them to build a house. you wouldn’t hand a gun to a junkie and tell them they’re now a cop. I wouldn’t hand Vim to my mother and tell her to build a website. I feel LLMs should require human training just like any other tools we use. If you want to allow LLMs into your open source project, sure, have at it but it should be YOUR responsibility to vet and interview each individual that wishes to contribute utilizing said tools.

Replying to an earlier post

Why are you rejecting the low-effort, Ai generated bug reports, Linus, isn’t AI just a productivity tool?

Because they are low effort. Good software engineering is never low effort, whether you use AI or not.

If you let AI replace people, and let them mess with software or report issues without understanding what’s going on, without putting in the effort to understand what’s going on, you’re not adding any value; just noise.

But if you use AI to find issues, then investigate the issue, reproduce it, document it, etc, then you’ve got something meaningful that someone can do something with.

Replying to an earlier post

But if you use AI to find issues, then investigate the issue, reproduce it, document it, etc, then you’ve got something meaningful that someone can do something with.

In principle that is sound, but LLMs can’t do that, yet, if ever. Sounds like anthropomorphism. The ‘hallucination’ thing is intrinsic. What you can do is point it at easily verifiable problems like searching for security flaws, and then verify them. Whether that’s cost effective in wasted energy and human time is still an open question, especially as token cost ramps up pre IPO.

Replying to an earlier post

They can find issues now though. Will they also find non issues due to missing context or not understanding the whole operational picture, well yes, but you can usually filter those ones out quickly. While i wish we had QA back and it be a norm again in software engineering as a whole, without it I’m happy to have something look for ways my code will break in unexpected manners that testers previously handled. Is it the same as having someone sit their and try and break your shit for the sole purpose of finding a spot where something will go completely off the rails, no its not but with a lack of true QA and rushed timelines that leave little room for quality QA yourself. I dont mind having something else that will try to gage my code from all angels and suggest areas that might have bugs I did not intend for or did not catch when I was reviewing my code. Especially considering I can do this without making users of my code the guinea pigs in lieu of an actual QA department. Sometimes you have to make the best of a shitty situation and honestly its an improvement over no QA which has been a norm for a while now so I’ll take the small wins where I can

Replying to @⁨theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world⁩

The function is deterministic, agreed. The implementation is almost always not. Hardware floating point addition is not associative. So a GPU kernel that splits a reduction differently (ie interleaving it with anything else, like running your graphics, or sharing your work with other users on the same hardware) will produce different results over different runs even at temperature 0.0.

Determinism is almost always impossible when dealing with floating point on a multi-process/multi-user system.

There are attempts to create batch invariant language models (github.com/…/batch_invariant_ops) but all the major ones are not.

Contribute to thinking-machines-lab/batch_invariant_ops development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubGitHub - thinking-machines-lab/batch_invariant_opsContribute to thinking-machines-lab/batch_invariant_ops development by creating an account on GitHub.

Replying to an earlier post

C/C++ compilers are non deterministic due to support of super macros that change run to run, non-deterministic optimisation strategies or ordering due to parallelism, and linkers often produce different outputs every time they are run where subtle bugs can cause crashes when addresses don’t line up how you expect. And that’s without mentioning projects that use a configuration step.

It’s actually a big problem in producing reproducible builds for security.

Replying to an earlier post

You don’t need parallelism to have a race condition, just not handling an event with expected timing can cause one - like when two keys are pressed within one polling cycle and you depend on one being pressed before the other for some logic like up and right arrow for a diagonal but they register as right and up so the diagonal movement doesn’t trigger

Compiler optimisation strategies sometimes use statistical machines and link time optimisation does use random number generators for producing output

Replying to an earlier post

Yeah, but it does take a lot of work to coerce them to do it.

GCC is honestly obnoxious, and you have to do a bunch of unintuitive things to get it. The compile stage needs the built-in RNG seeded, parent file paths stripped, you need to ensure that the date/time macros are not used anywhere, and you need to ensure that all command line flags are passed in the exact same order every time.

I just went through this with GCC16 on a new project.

Replying to an earlier post

An LLM is not inherently non-deterministic though - if you don’t randomly sample and instead have a fixed rule (which is what the recent fingerprint embedding approach does), if applied in all cases the output is deterministic, as the neural net at its core is deterministic function. A lot of the randomness beyond that is due to optimizations [source].

LLMs are however unreliable at ‘compiling’. Whether or not it will be able to complete the requested task (translate human language into code) correctly it not guaranteed - at least nowhere near the compilers we use.

Replying to @⁨Scrollone@feddit.it⁩

Like Scipitie said, sort of.

In the ChatGPT app, there’s tons of shuffling in the background, like context being injected, maybe sampling changed, agenic action, quantization… its “far” from the actual LLM, opaque by design, and as a result certainly not deterministic.

You can sometimes get deterministic output with the OpenAI API, but it’s also dependent on nothing changing on their end. And their end changes a lot.

But self hosting or using a more consistent provider will give you deterministic output.

Replying to an earlier post

Linus seems to be taking a perfectly pragmatic approach, given that AI is not going away short of WW3.

I can imagine some individual sub-system maintainers introducing various AI-roadblocks though.

I also expect this to be increasingly addressed (in general) with model & tooling improvements, giving more weight to higher quality reports and MRs, and more respect for project rules and processes. A mix of soft and hard gates, CLAs, improved early automated bug report & patch reviews and other CI gates.

Replying to an earlier post

model & tooling improvements, giving more weight to higher quality reports and MRs, and more respect for project rules and processes. A mix of soft and hard gates, CLAs, improved early automated bug report & patch reviews and other CI gates

This is exactly what I see happening inside the handful large software companies into which I have visibility.

We have to deal with the fact that slop or not we all have 100x more security bugs than usual thanks to Mythos and friends, and some of them are real ones that will bit us in the ass if we don’t fix like, now

Replying to @⁨son_of_darkness@lemmy.world⁩

I understand what you’re trying to say, and even agree with it, but the car factory example is just wrong. Those have a design speed that is generally limited by cycle times for individual steps. Like a robot has to place say 10 spot welds. You can’t speed that up. To stick with this example: in theory you could add a robot so both place 5 spots, but that rework takes probably a year and costs millions. Plus you don’t have one bottleneck like this, but a lot of them with similar speed (hence the “design speed” of the whole factory).

You can slow the whole factory down to run under capacity (or not run it during night shift), and then you have room to speed it up. But if you’re running at capacity, there is very little you can do.

It’s physically impossible to speed up the factory to 1.5x, let alone 10x.

Replying to an earlier post

No they aren’t slowed down for “human factors” or safety. They are in cages or behind barricades (at least in Europe). If you open them (like a door or cross a laser barrier), the whole line or at least the cell cell just stops and all of the red lights come on. You can believe what you want, but you can’t speed anything up significantly without massive investment or work. Or they would be running faster, cause money.

Source: I work in the industry and have been in running car plants.

Replying to an earlier post

Even Linus is conflating “doing more” with “being more productive”.

No he isn’t:

Torvalds’ broader argument is that generating code has become easy, while maintaining a system over years or decades remains hard — and AI does not close that gap on its own. Without a working understanding of the underlying architecture, he suggested, AI assistance can help someone make mistakes faster rather than build something durable.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

**_Alongside the productivity gains, Torvalds described a less-discussed cost: a rising flood of low-effort, AI-generated bug and vulnerability reports hitting open source projects, including the kernel’s own security channels. He said it has become common for someone to run an AI tool against a codebase, file a report flagging a “possible” issue, and then vanish when a maintainer follows up asking for more detail or a fix.

His conclusion was that as AI tools get more capable, the people who actually understand how systems work become more valuable, not less — because someone still has to review, maintain, and take responsibility for what the tools produce._**

Replying to an earlier post

Pretty unlikely.

The way the kernel devs seem to be using LLMs isn’t really going to lead to any bugs that wound’t have snuck in anyways.

I’m not a tech bro or AI apologist. I’m choosing to skeptically trust Linus in this case. Based on my understanding of how it’s being used, I don’t think we have a lot to worry about.

That being said I wish he would STFU about it because the “Linus is pro-AI now guys” headlines are not doing the world any favors.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

Did the headline change? The current headline is Torvalds: “100% of Their Code is Written by Compilers” Too

The title of this post makes for a dumb headline, at any rate. Linus, in response to claims in the industry that projects are now “99% written by AI”, drew an analogy to compilers by saying that all machine code for projects are written by compilers, yet no one says their project was 100% written by a compiler. It’s just talking about stupid hype, which is valid.

That being said, it’s still quite unfortunate that Linus has fallen into the trap of LLMs.

Replying to an earlier post

The road to hell is paved by good intentions.

I think most people involved just have really shitty moral compasses. A lot of them look the other way to pay the bills, jingle jangle shiny nice life; others probably don’t even see it, rationalizing or even believing that what they’re doing is good; and other still probably genuinely think what they’re doing is good, their knowledge base formed from a place of self-unaware extreme privilege, but effectively exactly the opposite.

Too many people in this world have no concept or deliberation of worldview and morality. Many of them just lost, most of them followers, so few able to make any real change. Humanity is sick and has been fighting itself for eternity. Strife is normal, but this level and type of idiocy is something we are only recently starting to become aware of, helped further along by the very telecommunications that are now under control of the oppressors. We had a glimpse of truth for a while in the internet’s youth. I’d like to see that continue, but the very fact that the oppressors are now the ones POURING ALL of their wealth and influence on it shows us how much of a threat it was. It’s going to take those of us privileged enough to know, to push back ahead with everything we have, and lead society once again.

If we are to gain our freedom from the attractive clutches of the manosphere and fascism and the conservative low-empathy creature ilk, we must systematically disassemble and dismantle their ideas and views with superiority, as with all changes in evolution. I believe truth will prevail, eventually. How much more pain and suffering we all endure, though, is yet to be known, and unlikely to be known by anyone alive today.

Which brings us back to the efficiency equation of sustaining mental health and consolidation of power. This doesn’t have to be a long flight, but it will be, as the powers that be are quite infected with ideas completely opposite to good will, peace, and freedom, and are quite well equipped to continue fighting at this attrition pace.

For you, and anyone else reading this, I implore you to sit alone with your own thoughts more often, and work out why certain things are the way they are. Continue asking why, recursively. Inquire deeply when you see weakness or strength. Seek empathy and real solutions, not immediate blame. For almost all problems are NOT simple, and will take generational time to really solve, and generational wealth to get done. Everything adds up. Plant seeds of good.

Seek community and be good to each other.

And, yeah this is cheesy, but, to quote Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, “Never be cruel”, and “Love is always wise.”

I love hiking and the fresh mountain air in the spring. The quiet, the sun, the breeze, and the views. It reminds me that we are all just visitors here, and one day, every single one of us is going to have to say goodbye and take the forever sleep. Appreciate what you have, but always strive for more.

Think, deliberate, rest, fight, help others, repeat.

It’s okay to fight for what’s right, it’s the right thing to do, even. Don’t let anybody ever convince you otherwise.

Replying to @⁨halezinflames@lemmus.org⁩

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.

Replying to an earlier post

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.

Replying to an earlier post

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.

Replying to an earlier post

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.

Replying to an earlier post

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

Replying to @⁨eyekaytee@lemmy.world⁩

The first BSoD I ever experienced for myself was on Windows 10, and they were incredibly rare for me. My XP machine was largely disconnected from the internet for the majority of its existence and the only issues it had were because it was a literal shitbox potato trying to do more than it could handle.

I’m not saying it was 100% perfect, but compared to the horror stories everywhere else it might as well have been. Being careful online certainly helps, as I never caught a virus that I wasn’t intentionally trying to test just to see what would happen.

Replying to @⁨halezinflames@lemmus.org⁩

MS’s antics extend well beyond Windows, unfortunately. There are long blogs and writeups dedicated to it.

But what you said is also kinda true. 7 and XP worked reasonably well as long as you didn’t mess with them, push their bounds too much, or use them for anything “weird.” But you also probably missed a lot of dysfunction in the background.

I’m not trying to shill for Windows 7/XP era OSX or linux or anything either. But Windows has always been kinda notorious.

Replying to an earlier post

I mean the fact that one of my biggest sources of productivity back when I was there has been essentially nuked since I left, does make me feel limited even though everything else works really well so far. Hopefully that changes but I’m having a hard time migrating that last piece of the puzzle over.

It does make me feel like we need more people here, to make that work.

Replying to an earlier post

Entryism. Promote a “rational adaptation” scheme, reject “slop”, embrace “gems”, try to use it as a “helping tool”.

The reality is much grimmer: Some vibe coders lie about them only using it as a tool, them “reading the output” is just getting it compiled and maybe pass some (AI generated) tests, and overly trust the genAI over classical search engines. People using the tools show some degree of AI psychosis, such as trying to “prompt” flesh and blood people (“I’ve read on a blog that…” is often used to make chatbots agree with you, and is also used towards humans by those who talk to chatbots a bit too much).

Replying to @⁨boonhet@lemmy.zip⁩

Thank you, but no, it does not. The URL may mean literally anything, where the “slug” may not include question marks, any punctuation, or have a partial content even:

torvalds-ai-is-the-new-compiler-not-the-new-programmer

What if the nonsense/sloppy slug was generated like?:

Torvalds: AI is the new compiler, and not the new programmer?
Torvalds. AI. The new compiler is not the new programmer.

Therefore, the URL may not express the actual title, and may also be malformed.

Replying to an earlier post

So it looks like the source originally used that awful title misrepresenting the article it self. In other words the source needs to be blacklisted for spreading bullshit. Dose this community have a blacklist yet?

I know blacklisting sources is a steep slope to censorship, but at a certain point if the source feels they need to click bait people with tabloid headlines they are not worth our time.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

If there’s anybody I trust to use LLMs in a responsible way, (to whatever degree that’s even possible) it would be Linus Torvalds. He has some of the highest standards for software development in the world, and the same can be said for the core Linux kernel development team.

The general problem though, is that the people who are the least qualified to do software development are very often the people who are the most likely to use LLMs to try to slop their way to the top.

I think that the combination of cost increases for inference, inherent limitations in model integrity, and the economic destruction that will ensue when these fraudster CEOs have finally squeezed every last drop of blood from every last stone they can find, will leave “AI” in a similar place as blockchain/crypto/NFTs.

There will be a relatively niche market for software engineers and related tech workers; local LLM boxes, some subscription-based models that companies pay for with their licensing packages, hobbyists, and some minimal integrations into software suites for tools like background removal, lighting enhancement, etc.

There will be no Singularity, no AGI, no all-knowing Machine God.

Replying to @⁨L7HM77@sh.itjust.works⁩

Exactly same thinking. I can usually type it out faster than AI (when taking into account latency, context building, prompt writing, prompt fixing, AI hallucination review) if I know what exactly needs to be done.

When you’re out of your depth, it shines in providing beautifully confident and a botanical garden of a code piece that wil most likely be broken and break in new and exciting ways. Great for incompetent sycophantically-challenged managers that forgot how to code, or never actually had any experience.

Large-scale code transformations, taking into account the bigger picture of the repository are most likely hallucination free (not generative, just transformative, as per the actual LLM model) and a very exciting use-case.

Also it’s currently a very nice pragmatic tool for checking for any mistakes, because it can connect the larger context of the repository quickly to the diff. Terrible if done by a manager without understanding of copilot and workflow, but a great tool if done through claude and cli as a pre-commit step with just quick checklists. Makes plenty of mistakes, but allows to catch your own big mistakes nicely quickly.