1 month
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- errer@lemmy.worldEnglish1 month
Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.
Wouldn’t be a proper Linus post without calling everyone else an idiot.
- 1 month
Didn’t call everyone an idiot, but he’s not wrong, humans makes mistakes all the time
- bountygiver [any]@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
Yes, but allowing floodgates of AI work to come in it lowers the bar and allow more mistakes to flow in.
Just because humans make mistakes doesn’t mean we are ok with shipping mistakes
He’s not saying that, he is saying LLMs are a tool and can therefore be used. He’s not saying AI generated code gets a free pass into the kernel just because an LLM says it looks good.
- 1 month
Not a single acknowledgement of the environmental or cognitive costs of LLM use. Disgusting.
1 monthYou can run a local LLM capable of assisting in software development for less energy than running a AAA video game. I’m not denying the environmental impact of the current AI landscape, but I kind of disagree that it’s intrinsic to LLMs as a whole, I think it’s more a symptom of capitalism and its disregard for sustainability causing everything it touches to have a high environmental cost.
Also, nearly all modern computing has high environmental costs, certainly all cloud computing. I think instead of focusing on AI only, it would be more helpful to engage in a broader discussion on how computing can be made more energy efficient as a whole, and do proper cost benefit analysis of all things we use computers for, including but not limited to LLMs. We may well still conclude from that process that we need to stop using LLMs, in which case we should.
If you’re against LLM use on environmental grounds (which I’m not disagreeing with), I submit to you that we should take the idea even further and things like gaming, video streaming, high frequency trading, social media, and any other nonessential computing should be on the same chopping block for the same reason. Applications of computing that we also use at scale with high environmental impacts, but that have been normalised and practically seen as a right by many of the same people against any amount of AI use (not saying that’s you, speaking generally). Why should AI be the only thing we raise concerns about if we’re to raise concerns? Doing environmental protection piecemeal by independently targeting single things and not the entire system has been shown time and time again to not work at best and make it worse at worst.
- 1 month
Currently, LLMs impact on electricity usage and fresh water usage across the world is HUGE.
The painful part to me is the choice on where to put the stress. Which areas to highlight and talk about.
Yes some weak LLMs can use comparatively little electricity. Yes some other industries use electricity, generate CO2 and consume fresh water, too. But the existence of other problems, to me, does not mean that eco impact of LLMs should be swept under the rug.
- 1 month
While it may seem counterintuitive, cloud LLMs use less electricity than local LLMs. When serving a single user, an inference engine spends very little time and power doing calculations, and most of it reading in the model (weights) from memory
Cloud LLMs serve multiple users and therefore batch requests, so a model that has been copied once from memory can be used to generate hundreds of tokens
So, if one was to check your post history, they would find complaints about the energy usage of video games? The water usage of golf courses?
Or would we find neither, and learn instead that anti-AI is the only bandwagon you’ve hopped on because it is the most popular?
- 1 month
I’ll skip discussions about my persona. But most certainly golf courses or video games have orders of magnitude lower impact on electricity and watee than worldwide LLMs (mostly in datacenters).
You would be mistaken.
Data Centers use about 0.06% of the USAs total Water per year.
Watering golf courses in total uses about 0.5 percent.
My personal hardware that hosts my AI uses zero water. It uses more electricity when running a game.
There are more video gamers than there are users of AI.
Your persona is indeed just jumping on the popular bandwagon.
- 1 month
Doubtful. The task of running an LLM and playing a video game is the same, so it just comes down to which has more customers. A lot of people spend many hours playing video games. There might be more LLM users, but they use the LLM for a few seconds a day, as opposed to an hour or more.
That being said, they’re both non-issues compared to beef production, which involves torturing cows. This activism should be directed there, then you can move down the target list once factory farming is outlawed.
- 1 month
Fresh water usage has been debunked. It’s fake propaganda. Datacenter water usage is a rounding error if you compare it to the whole economy. This is why you’ll always hear absolute numbers from these people, and never percentages
- 1 month
You’ll hear no arguments from me. Let’s cut energy usage for a lot of things. Let’s read books more. Let’s spend more time outside. Let’s eat less red meat.
That isn’t some gotcha you think it is. A lot of people finding the alarm over AI have been working to reduce their carbon footprint
Everything in your first paragraph is contrary to your first sentence. Every single one of those is another argument, but using a turn of phrase and baiting was apparently more important than even making the first, best, and most relavent argument you brought-out.
The real clincher is that you then pretend the person you are replying to didn’t already make those arguments, well, and that you are disagreeing with them.
“This isn’t [the] gotcha you think it is”, really?
- 1 month
The only thing local llms which regular PCs can run are capable of is generating basic boilerplate code. Which you only need to do if you create a new project every day and need to automate it. They are useless for working on established codebase.
- 1 month
Torvalds has slowly been slipping I feel. Just more cracks.
It seems like maintainers doing a thankless job in FOSS are some of the most affected by the AI mania
- 1 month
he has always been like this. god, he’s one of the most consistent public figures i can think of. nothing has changed except that now you can see.
- FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
That’s well outside the scope of the Linux kernel policies.
- 1 month
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.
It’s implied to be included in ‘other questions’, and that whether AI is useful to development efforts is the only question being considered for whether to permit its use.
- 1 month
There are other questions
Not sure if that’s really _acknowledging_ the problem.
- 1 month
If he’s taking a clear position that the controversies over whether AI is a net negative for society may have merit but still are not going to be considered because that sort of thing is not the priority of the project, it seems reasonable to not lay them all out or get into why AI may or may not be overall bad. You can say that choice is wrong, but it isn’t an evasive statement.
- 1 month
Linus is not a very progressive guy. Alas, it is what it is. Hence the political bans in the LKML, who has votes in The Linux Foundation, where such foundation is based, the embracing of (Rust based) permissive licensing of drivers, and now this AI bullshit. Linux is not GNU.
I’m pretty sure the money talked, and in the next few years we’re going to see walls being put around the kernel. We should rethink whether the ‘benevolent’ part of ‘benevolent dictator’ still applys.
- FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
IIRC Linus is self-declared as “woke”. The exact quote is:
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race.
- 1 month
Ah, the liberal progressiveness. Not the seizing the means of production for the proletariat kind. My bad, I wasn’t being fully open in my past comment because I know the world ‘socialism’ triggers many in the technology bubble.
- 1 month
I don’t think its the LLM usage that is doing this I think using it is exposing what was already there since some people who use it are genuinely improved by using them, and not just the dummies, there are people who know their stuff, using them to do more stuff, and not showing obvious cognitive impairments.
I think its just that many people got to where they can use ai in these ways by single mindedly focusing on one thing which meant being bad at the meta skills involved in keeping brains healthy across different contexts.
TL;DR
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.
- 1 month
Hot Take: IMO, using generated code is fine, if it goes through the exact same due diligance as normal code. (unit tests, is the algo optimised, etc.)
- 1 month
Only if you don’t care about your own cognitive decline, property theft, and climate damage
- 1 month
I feel like people parroting these tropes uncritically are the ones who should be worried about their own cognitive decline.
- 1 month
The energy consumption trope in particular hasn’t been true for a while now. You can literally run models on your laptop for most tasks, and these are models that have capability that needed a data centre literally less than a year go. Meanwhile, the whole notion of people offloading their cognitive capacity to models is based on a handful of studies with tiny samples. So yes, you are wrong, and you just run around uncritically repeating nonsense thinking you’re being really profound.
- 1 month
I mean that’s already happening. Less than half of the proposed ones is being built, and once the bubble pops I don’t think even the ones that are currently being started will get finished.
Only if you don’t care about your own cognitive decline
That sounds like Socrates’ argument that writing would weaken people’s memories.
And absolutely, people will probably forget the syntax by heart if they don’t type it as frequently. Personally, knowing syntax is not very valuable to me, as it’s just a means to an end. And whether that leads to cognitive decline or not, is really up to who’s using the tool.
Saying it leads to cognitive decline is saying you can’t use an LLM and have critical thinking, which I can’t agree with.
- 1 month
That sounds like Socrates’ argument that writing would weaken people’s memories.
Saying it leads to cognitive decline is saying you can’t use an LLM and have critical thinking, which I can’t agree with.
That’s not me saying it. MIT, Harvard, and others have released numerous studies that show using LLMs does exactly that, reduce critical thinking. You can disagree all you want but until you do the science you’re disagreeing with a growing body of actual experts.
Are those studies in the context of software development? What are the tasks at hand? Do they evaluate critical thinking on matters that people actually care about or on chores? Were they instructed to use LLMs in a particular way that is equivalent to their personal preference?
You can’t pull a wildcard saying something like that because it’s too broad of a conclusion.
- 1 month
This is where you go look at any of the studies and start figuring out for yourself.
They’ve been looking at it in several contexts including software development, general problem solving, reading comprehension, writing ability, and more.
In some they were instructed to use LLMs certain ways, in others they weren’t. That’s the neat thing about so many studies being done is they’ve used a wide set of methodologies.
Firmly agree. I spent 6 years coding in python as a daily language, then I swapped to using nodejs for 10 years, only using python on and off. I went to make a basic script with python the other day and I had to look up how to convert a set over to a list.
If you don’t use it, you lose it is fully valid.
- 1 month
And what will you say when 80% of all climate saving technology gets invented using AI?
- 1 month
This is like saying you should dig with bare hands even though drilling machines have been invented.
- 1 month
Drilling machines are not made by forcibly kidnapping diggers and making them motion-capture their movements for a robot that pollutes and consumes water by ignoring previous green regulations.
- 1 month
The first robot is going to be shit. Eventually we will have a robot that will have less climate impact so much so that a human would be more load on climate and more polluting. Where will you take all your hate then? Should human diggers be illegal?
Training and LLM using your code isn’t same as kidnapping you. Your freedom of movement still exists during and after LLM gets trained.
I agree they should pay full fines and maybe a temporary ban due to and proportional to their crime. And so should Taylor Swift and every other celebrity causing disproportionately more pollution.
LLM and AI is the inevitability now. You and I better prepare for a world where we can sell skill even after AI.
It’s not all bad - that shouldn’t discount their crime punishment, but it will go and discover next billion things about human body operation and will make you healthy and strong and will cure cancer, make us far more environmentally friendly than what humans can ever hope of achieving without AI and LLMs.
Programmers already spend about as-much of their time, if not more, reading other’s code as they do writing their own. It doesn’t mater if that “other’s code” is AI generated or not.
There’s an argument to be made about excessive vs not-enough commenting, but that’s not where you went, and its clear you have negligible programming experience, or creative experience for that matter, to be coming after the concept of sharing code like-so.
One wonders how many books you’ve read, to be pretending that reading a book without paying for it, even borrowing from a library, is theft. Stick with the environmental costs arguments - its what you are personally suited to argue, and far more urgent than the rest.
- 1 month
Programmers already spend about as-much of their time, if not more, reading other’s code as they do writing their own.
And how is this an argument in favor of AI code? If 5-10 percent of you job used to be writing code and now you dropped it by half, that’s not very effective of optimization. Especially if the code you now have to review takes more time to review due to it being generated by AI.
and its clear you have negligible programming experience, or creative experience for that matter, to be coming after the concept of sharing code like-so.
As someone with several years of experience as a programmer: fuck off with this elitist nonsense
- corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish1 month
and its clear you have negligible programming experience, or creative experience for that matter, to be coming after the concept of sharing code like-so.
As someone with several years of experience as a programmer: fuck off with this elitist nonsense
Well said. Bit of a Straw Man, there.
Why would you let keeping-up with AI code cut-into the amount of time you spend writting code? Your conflating Torvalds being okay with/allowing programmers using a tool PROPERLY with Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft and their ilk shoving it down everyone’s throats, proper usage be damned.
- 1 month
Lol. Way to show how little you know. I swear AI bros get the most butt hurt over provable stuff.
I’ve stated my experience elsewhere but I’m a senior software engineer, 20 something years of experience. I have actually created a neural network from the ground up for a previous company. But sure, go off about how little experience I have.
So you helped create the problem, only so you could show it to be a problem, then turn around and sell us the solution, eh?
Between the two of us, you are literally the AI bro. Eating your own shit and calling it gourmet. I’ve stayed the fuck away from the software industry, let-alone AI, my entire life because I grew-up with and around would-be authoritative rent-seekers like you.
20 something years of software-industry experience is still mostly copying/rehashing the work of those who came before - you didn’t create shit, just re-packaged it in a way your company could sell.
The ground-up? Gotta go a lot further back than 20 years to claim that. Your name’s not on the patents or textbooks, so by your arguments, you’ve stolen every bit of it you ever consumed and then turned-around and applied, and since you didn’t invent it yourself you can’t even really understand it.
Again, that’s your argument because you can’t concieve of the idea that something you “created” off the work of those who came before you could ever approach the understanding you must claim certainty of to speak with such authority.
One of us wants to turn off the money-printing machine because its un-sustainable. You, however would rather focus on the insanity that is Intellectual Property Rights. Our taxes paid for all of that shit.
I pay authors, artists, musicians, and yes, I buy software, even knockoff stuff when its less enshittified than the original has become. I’ll bet you’re more afraid of AI realizing the burden en-shittification creates than you are even slightly concerned about anyone going un-paid for original code.
- 1 month
All I’ll say before moving on is legitimately you should maybe go touch grass.
Neural network does not mean LLM. I’m strongly against them for so many reasons. This is the problem with calling it all AI. My stuff was not generative, it was pattern recognition for a safety program for testing so companies could be held accountable.
Just step outside and smell the roses before you have a heart attack.
Its all pattern-recognition. Your side of the debate is arguing that training on patterns is theft of said patterns, the same way industries are fighting reverse-engineering and right-to-repair in the legal sphere. I may not spend most of my time working and playing out-doors, but I woud wager I have always spent more time doing-so, and still-do, compared to yourself.
Spent most of my life being told I’m un-motivated and un-serious for prioritizing life over work, work in physical mediums over digital, and avoiding the “defense” or marketting industries, just to be told I’m un-informed or “clearly agitated” when I engage with those who took the opposite route.
Look in the mirror; Did I say you should feel guilt or be unable to sleep at night? Yes, I’m fully aware the people who think as I described “you” are few and far between among those who can even do what you do, but you described me as one of them first.
You also never engaged with my statements on the origins of modern code, even and especially pattern recognition and neural networks, so here we are.
Everyone on all sides is so quick to rule out anyone they engage with as un-informed, a vested-interest with an agenda, or “lacking standing” - that’s how we got to a state where almost every elected official started from a degree in politics or law. Meanwhile, I repeat, taxpayers payed for all of it, the same ones who have also been paying the creator-“class” all-along.
- Shayeta@feddit.orgEnglish1 month
TL;DR: Merged code has to meet existing quality standards. What tools were used to create it is irrelevant.
- whimsy@lemmy.zipEnglish1 month
For all his great work on Linux (and git and others) Torvalds was never into activism so much. He declined GPLv3 (yes it would be impossible to get all contributors to sign for it). He’s always been an “open source pragmatist”, which is fine I guess. And I really respect his work. But at these important political points, we need someone like Stallman who has consistently proven to be on the right side of the debate
- 1 month
This. Google would not be fucking us with Play Integrity and other DRM craps if Linus made the kernel GPLv3 licensed. It would have been a dreamland to have hackable phones, TVs and a whole lot of IoT devices where the users would be controlling them instead of other way around.
- 1 month
Nah, they just would have either used something else, or fucked us with some other way. The kernel license just allowed them to do it like this.
- 1 month
If they’re gonna make proprietary black boxes of spying, I’d rather they spend their own money for it rather than using the code created by the selfless FOSS contributors, ngl.
Just because fascism-lovers desire a dystopia doesn’t mean we have to make it easy for them.
- 1 month
You seem to have a very idealized idea of how selfless this whole thing is. Google has sponsored a lot of work in the kernel, so have multiple corporations over the years. This is not some puppies and raibows shit here.
It just happens to work really well because the license and multiple interest of a good kernel do just that: a good kernel.
Surveillance issues and too strong corporations are an issue with your government, not the kernel
- 1 month
I’m not absolving governments at all so I’m not quite antithetical to this position either. I understand that a GPL license might have meant less corporate incentives but I also do despise how most corporations are moving these days so it is what it is I guess.
- 1 month
I locally host gemma 4 e2b on a very modest spec laptop to help summarize large texts, as a rudimentary translation tool, and just as a toy. It makes sense. I see small coding models on hugging face all the time, I think we’ve hit a point where it’s just too efficient not to atleast entertain a little bit of slop in your workflow.
- pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Ok regardless of your opinion on AI this is just stupid. No one is forking and maintaining the entire linux kernal.
I seen alot of people say “AI is just a tool” ngl There is nothing wrong with that it’s just a little overused
- pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
The straw manning in this thread is amazing.
Linus allowing AI? This means the linux kernal will be flooded with unverified slop!
It official. Linus is a boomer now. He so old He’s destroying everything around him. enjoy the ride, folks.
- 1 month
Never liked him much as a person, so hopefully it kicks him in the ass sooner rather than later
Originally a reference to a generation, the term has shifted to point to a behavior exhibited by old people in general. Language is fluid.
People often forget dictionaries exist to quite literally define words and their meanings.
