OpenBSD, constantly audited for three decades

Oh buddy... Did you not hear that not only did OpenBSD start using AI for audits but that it actually found a handful of serious issues that decades of human audits have missed?

Ok, but people are mad that LLM-assisted code, tons of it, is now getting into the kernel and Linus is no longer slamming the brakes…

I also think this is a bad idea unless we want less stability in the kernel. I've seen Torvalds call people all kinds of names for trying to add things to the kernel that he feels are subpar. He's legendary for it. So I'd probably trust him more than any human alive to avoid slop.

But I also don't think he has the power to effectively defend against it. Some badness will get through.

As always, we'll choose the least-crappy OS to run.

I mean you know about tactical nukes and uranium ammunition

I’m not a huge fan of AI but comparing them to nukes is wild

The world was bad, it will be worse thanks to LLM. Both things can (and IMO, are) be true at the same time.

5 years ago things were bad, therefore there's no way LLMs can be bad. Is that the argument?

It’s not the algorithms people oppose, it’s the way they are trained within a capitalist system (infringement of many copyrights without compensation), they way they are being marketed as a living mind that can basically befriend us and take a mental load off of us (they can’t and it’s problematic to humans who allow them to try), and they way they’re being used an excuse to buy up the wntire world’s capacity for computing so that rich tech oligarchs can force us all onto the cloud services for all computing in the future.

I think if at the very least they weren’t bulldozing people’a home and poisoning their drinking water in order to forever capture all technology and then rent it back to us we might have a more favorable view of the possibilities, but so far Big Tech has done almost nothing but try to find ways to make individuals and enterprise addicted to their Mechanical Turk in order to take advantage of us.

I haven't been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it's gradually getting a bit better here. There's still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I've been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it's just naturally getting more diverse.

The issue is not usefulness. It's ethics.

Your read on that was very different than mine.

Linus controls Linux. Anyone who disagrees with how he runs it is free to fork it because the source is open.

But good luck maintaining a Linux kernel fork for any length of time unless you’ve got lots of contributors lined up and a solid maintenance structure ready to deploy. It worked with LibreOffice and OpenJDK, but it’s failed with far more projects than it’s succeeded with.

Linus has decided what Linux is & isn't since forever. It has his fucking name on it for a reason. Linus decided Linux means AI code so Linux has AI code now. No way around it. We can only pick up until a specific version of the kernel when no LLM was used but after that, all future Linux Kernels will forever have LLM code in them.

No distro is going to stop using new kernels, everyone downstream is essentially powerless on this decision. The Linux Foundation is HUGE compared to 90% of the distro's workforce (volunteers). Only IBM & Canonical surpass it & they are NOT going to maintain the next Linux fork for the next 30 years.

Linux means AI code now and for the foreseeable future. To my demise.

Just because it's open source it doesn't mean there's not a person or group of people deciding what happens to the 'main'/'upstream' version of it.

Sure you can fork it, and remove all AI contributions, but who will use your fork?

When people say "the Linux kernel", they mean the version maintained by Linus Torvalds. They might mean a fork for a specific SoC or manufacturer or distro, but those are all just the Linux Kernel maintained by Linus Torvalds plus a few patch sets. There's no considerable divergence.

Linus' stance was initially "no AI written code". And he does have final say in what goes into the repo he maintains. Now he's changed that tune, he allows AI written code, and no matter how many forks you make to strip it out... what matters is Linus' upstream.

Fucking love that they listed pretty much every single programming language that is used today, leaving only esoteric shit.

On a personal level I get it... but as a professional, good fucking luck trying to find a job without using any of those languages, not to mention the plethora tools.