Imagine taking the lightweight, privacy-focused appeal of Linux and completely ruining it by hardwiring AI models straight into the OS. Nobody is switching from Windows for more forced AI features.

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[–] 24 points 1 day ago (32 children)

Linus vibe codes nowadays, so it's already in the kernel.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 day ago (28 children)

    While that is true, we don't have to accept more slop! There are other kernels that exist which actually follow better practices. We can have microkernels, we can and should reject more slop in Linux. I don't want it to turn into Windows! I will learn how to make my own operating system if need be. ROFL I am learning Python and C proper, so the ability will come to me soon.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

    I will learn how to make my own operating system if need be. ROFL I am learning Python and C proper, so the ability will come to me soon.

    Akakichi no Eleven Redraws

    All the best

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    I will learn how to make my own operating system if need be. ROFL I am learning Python and C proper, so the ability will come to me soon.

    Oh boy, new TempleOS incoming!

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago (2 children)

    I am neither schizophrenic, particularly religious, or paranoid enough to make a TempleOS. That poor dude, may he rest in peace, nobody recognized the signs, they just egged him on and causing him to spiral further.

    The theme of this yet to be OS will likely be: What if retro aesthetics met modern, hennies?

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  • [–] 3 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    In all seriousness, GNU has been around since the 1980s and it still didn't have a kernel until 2015. It's still not considered production ready. And that was with a whole team of people working on it. I'm not sure you've fully grasped what a massive undertaking coding your own OS would be.

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  • There are people who have done it, creating something but...I don't think it will be easy at all in the slightest. I have looked at it. It seems rather scary to be honest but I don't want to just be complacent and accept bullshit when I don't have to. So what else is a guy to do in these troubling times? I imagine once I get certified in both Python and C, I will have come to my senses and just installed Gentoo like a sane person and adapt it to accept a Custom Kernel. As Gentoo is just a pile of tools that is used to build your OS.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (19 children)

    To me, AI is a tool like any other. The output turns out sloppy if the human wielding the tool it isn’t doing their job properly. Quality control is a responsibility that never went away.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago (10 children)

    And just like a tool, it can be too dull, too sharp, or just wrong for the job.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (9 children)

    Oh, absolutely. The person wielding it needs to know what they’re doing. You don’t hammer nails with a screwdriver unless you’re a total masochist. IMO current LLMs are ideal for generating the filler for self-help books. You have like 10 pages worth of ideas to say, but the publisher demands a 250-page book.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (8 children)

    IMO current LLMs are ideal for generating the filler for self-help books. You have like 10 pages worth of ideas to say, but the publisher demands a 250-page book.

    lol okay. For a second there, with that previous comment you made, you made me think you actually thought LLMs were good for coding.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

    Well, it depends. Mostly, I’m against it, but there are ways to vibe code responsibly. My requirements are very high. I don’t think most people vibe that way, hence the slop code you see out in the wild. If you’re using an LLM to write your code, I expect you to read and understand every line thoroughly. The programmer should be prepared to answer tough questions about any part of the code as if they wrote all of it.

    If you actually take the time to do that, you’ll either request a few more iterations of updates or fix it yourself. In reality though, people can’t be bothered to do it properly, and in that context vibe coding should be banned.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    I just think I wouldn't be able to be proud of my work anymore. I wouldn't feel good signing off on generated stuff. It's not my work.

    It's like generating a poster for a movie or something. Taking credit for that is just scummy, you know? I know people don't think anyone writes their own code anymore, professionally...

    ... but I would know. It would bother me.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (5 children)

    If it’s a static one click product, I wouldn’t be proud of it either. That’s just slop really.

    What I’m thinking of is a process, where some steps are handled by an AI, but the rest is all human. You could use an AI generated background layer in a picture. You could use generated code as a starting point, and modify it to do exactly what you want. You could dump an early draft of a story to an LLM for style polishing. The output would probably be mostly fine, but you would still want to tweak a few things here and there.

    If you skip your part, you end up with slop. Sadly, that’s how most people appear to be using AI these days. If you take the time to refine the output to meet your standards, you’re doing it properly. In that case, you should be proud of your work.

    Think of it like a team effort. Even though you didn't do all of it, you still did something. That something has value too. For example, building a house is a team effort. The electrician can't be proud of all of it, but they can be proud of making sure the cables, sockets and switches are installed properly. Maybe they can also be happy about the whole house to some extent. Imagine you've worked on the cables of the Sydney Opera House. You would probably feel a little bit proud.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

    The thing is, nobody knows how much effort I put into it versus the AI. There's just no scenario where I could proudly take credit for using AI. Either I put in tons of work but others have no idea how much work is mine vs not, or I don't do much work and I'll know I don't deserve credit.

    Like I understand where you're trying to come from here but I just can't see myself winning with AI, against my own morals.

    Me collaborating with a human is different. Then the other human and I will know how much work went into it, and at least two real people will share the knowledge of who did what.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago (3 children)

    How about digging a ditch with a hand shovel vs. using an excavator? About a hundred years ago, you would have hired a bunch of men to chop down a forest, and dig ditches so that the land could be turned into a field. Digging the ditches was hard work, but excavators changed that completely. What used to require 10 strong men and a week, could be done by a single excavator operator in an afternoon. The result is still pretty much the same, even though the bucket of an excavator isn't quite so precise. You still get the job done, but most of it was done by a machine. Should that one guy be proud of the work? Sure, it didn't take much time effort, and to him it was probably just afternoon like any other. A few months later, that gig begins to blend in with hundreds of others like it, so it's not going to be very significant to him. But can you still be proud of your work?

    Similar kinds of shifts have happened before that, and the industrial revolution in the textile industry is clearly the most famous example of that. I'm thinking AI in similar terms, even though the details differ. There's still enough to compare. They both produce trash if you skip quality control. They both reduce the amount of time and effort required. The cheap trash is sold on Temu and dumped in the landfills of wealthy countries. Same process with proper quality control results in all sorts of nice products you would never find on Temu. I think the same logic applies to AI generated things. So far, we've seen plenty of Temu grade trash, AKA slop. There's no reason to be proud of that.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

    The difference here is that I know as well as everyone else that I couldn't possibly do what the excavator does with my own two hands, so the skill here becomes operating the vehicle itself. But what the LLM can do, I can do.

    This is so often the argument when talking to LLM apologists/proponents, that "this is a shift just like any other before it", but it isn't. It sneakily resembles one, but it is not exactly like one. There are major differences that set it apart from previous shifts. This isn't just a "paradigm shift". We are no longer thinking of solutions on our own, so we are/will be losing the ability to do so, yet we are expected to be the judges as to whether the generated solutions are good or not. That doesn't add up.

    Once a few generations of "developers" have grown up with LLMs, it'll eventually be like using a calculator to solve divisions with large numbers, yet still you have to check your work. But if you keep using the calculator, or you never even trained yourself to do the divisions by hand in the first place, you won't be able to check the solution is correct.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago (1 child)

    I can hold a shovel and dig a hole. Not as fast as an excavator, but I’ll get the job done sooner or later. I’m sure you can as well. If you want results faster, you can get a bunch of people or a single excavator. I’ve seen similar dynamics with programming too.

    Yeah, totally agree with the rest though. Being qualified to evaluate the output is the main bottleneck with LLMs. Most users aren’t qualified, so they will approve all sorts of stupid nonsense while thinking it’s brilliant. If people constantly rely on LLMs to do the thinking, those skills will begin to disappear, which obviously will have serious consequences.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago

    An excavator can also lift rocks that I can't. But that's really beside the point.

    It doesn't really matter which analogy you use, the fact is that I can do what an LLM can do, in my field. I can probably do a better job, because I know more current web APIs than an LLM has had time to train on because of limited human output.

    You don't get faster results with more developers though. You don't make a baby in one month with 9 mothers either. You might have seen a small increase in development time with more than one dev on a single project but that doesn't scale past more than a handful of devs, usually. At least not per feature.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

    First of all, no it's not. A hammer is a tool. There's only one person responsible for taking it and making it useful: you. The fire department is not a tool. It performs a useful function which you can initiate, but it requires a complex chain of logistics which involves large amounts of resources and specially trained humans at every step to continue functioning. AI is a service.

    Second of all, even if we accept that it is a tool, a jackhammer that has a specialized tip made from a rare material mined almost exclusively using slave labor which needs regular replacement and which runs exclusively on a smelly gasoline engine which everyone around you then has to breathe is not a tool "like any other" and using it is not a neutral act. When you use Claude, you are giving money and support to a company that buys, scans, and then shreds physical copies of rare books; scrapes independent websites until their servers give out, actively circumvents webmasters' attempts to block them, and then lies about respecting opt-out signals; builds datacenters in disadvantaged areas that do everything from raising power bills and making power service less reliable for nearby residents to raising the temperature of places up to a mile away and producing inaudible infrasound that causes everything from irritability through hearing loss to siezures; powers those datacenters in part using natural gas turbines that produce significantly less electricity and more pollution than the same amount of natural gas in a natural gas power plant; and sells their technology to militaries which use them to design guided bombs.

    And that's before we even get started on what every single study on the cognitive effects of prolonged LLM use, even by trained professionals automating things they can do themselves, has revealed (in a sentence, use that muscle or lose it).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Fair enough. In a broader sense, all of that is true. The current implementation and business practices are completely rotten to the core. That’s why I’m not going to pay any company for AI, unless they publish a report about using renewable energy. Mistral AI is pretty transparent about their emissions, and that’s a step in the right direction. Still not good enough until they actually power their data centres with renewable energy.

    Anyway, I was mainly talking about LLMs specifically, not the entire AI industry and their destructive habits. None of the current AI companies deserve any of my money, especially the American ones.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    First of all, not giving them money is like pirating a Harry Potter show and then posting about how much you liked it on social media. You're still giving it free advertising to people who will spend money on it.

    Second of all, see what I said about the cognitive effects. If you don't practice doing things without the AI, you will lose the ability to do them much more quickly than you think you will, and if you start relying on it to make tiny decisions, at best your work and at worst your thinking will slowly start to reflect the model's biases.

    More importantly, programmers who use LLMs to complete programming tasks demonstrate less complete understanding of their code, which is important because eventually you need to maintain it and even LLMs' most ardent defenders admit that all of them are dogshit at software engineering. If you use AI to maintain an AI codebase, you'll do great for a couple of months before it loses the ability to remember all the parts and starts duplicating work and not syncing up state with other components and before long it's a buggy unmaintainable mess.

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  • Those scenarios are very realistic, and I think many people will suffer from these problems. I don’t expect that people will use LLMs responsibly. If they did, many of these problems could be mitigated, but obviously that’s not going to happen.

    It’s basically very similar to what happened to physical health when work was done by machines instead of muscles. Nowadays, people don’t carry hay bales or buckets of water, and it shows. Undoubtedly, the same thing will happen to the mind as people rely on LLMs to do the thinking for them. As a bonus, you’ll get voters who are even more ignorant than they currently are. What could go wrong with democracy at that point… Mussolini showed how to decommission the whole system through democratic means.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

    Sure, "LLMs and GPTs are just tools" is a potentially defensible take.

    But, Copilot and Claude and Gemini and Apertus and every other model, "open weight" or not, that has been studied enough will (unknown the the user) sometimes generate output that infringes on the copyrights of the training data AND most, if not all, of the models with high-quality output involved human rights abuses as part of their training process (per Amnesty International).

    Maybe, in the future, we'll have models that are trained only on freely redistribute content without human rights abuses and without setting environmental goals back 10-15 YEARS. Maybe.

    If that happens, I might be willing to use those tools myself, and I'll certainly stomach their output as part of my won workflows. Until we have those ethical models, FUCK all of them and their output, they aren't just tools; using there output is apologia for immoral acts and using the models is collaboration immoral people.

    EDIT: Reworded for clarity: fails to generate output that will not infringe the copyright terms of the training data

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  • [–] 4 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

    "AI" is not just another tool to me, it is a political and economic effort to disenfranchise the skilled, for example by scraping countless sites and doing their best to launder the data. In this way they will be channeling skill in to their own hands, while channeling wealth out of the hands of those who are skilled. Sam Altman already said that the goal is turning intelligence into a utility like water or power, to make the masses dependent on them to source information. To do anything complex technologically. That doesn't seem much like just a simple tool to me. By design, in order to boost engagement with chatbots, the empty and hollow interactions have a parasocial quality...On the surface seeming polite and helpful (but software can never feel sad, happy, horny, or make decisions so there is just dead air on the other side). That can get people to engage with it for countless hours, isolate them from real people, put them into a state of psychosis even. Does that seem like just a mere tool to you?

    Aside from some of those major concerns, it even hurts the environment, people's understanding of code (which is intentional by the way), has caused massive economic consequences when people are lain off because CEOs are so delusionally into LLMs in the workplace thinking it will be the god that can print them everlasting profits. However, the use of so called AI, will just increase the technical debt, make code unmaintainable, cause problems that nobody can fix because they don't understand their own code anymore (because they were forced to engage with the things and just full send absolute nonsense without editing). You can think what you like, but I don't trust LLMs or the source of them. It's just very sus to me, I won't ever use them. As you never talk to software, not even once.

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  • [–] -1 points 12 hours ago* (1 child)

    The current implementation of it is quite awful. The companies source their data unethically, use fossil fuels to power their data centres, etc. It’s a long list of problems.

    The current implementation doesn’t have to be the only one. I think there are better ways to do this. The tool is still neutral to me, but the application isn’t. A knife can be used for slicing tomatoes or murdering people. That doesn’t make the knife an evil tool.

    LLMs can be made in better ways too. Currently, they aren’t, which means that in their current state nobody should be paying for LLMs. If these companies start acting more ethically, which they won’t, they could actually earn some of that money.

    And then there’s the usage side as well. We’re already beginning to see what happens when you use an LLM in a wrong way. The damage is pretty clear. However, that doesn’t have to be the only way to use an LLM. There should be rules, regulations, guidelines and best practices about this thing. Currently, there are none, so people do just about anything they can think of. Most of it is pretty bad, but that doesn’t have to be the only outcome.

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  • I don't think there is any coming back from this as I think the reputation and level of harm that has been done is too high, it will always be software that is treated with great suspicion and with good reason. There is simply too much harm with very little benefit for people at large. I would rather it all burn and be mostly abandon ware in consumer/business tech. Only used in the original context for academic purposes that it was previously used, without all the weird, creepy cruft that technofascists bolted on. Human beings have more important matters to focus on than LLMs to be frank, it's not an important enough thing to further develop at the moment. I think the higher priority should be repairing the damage done by irresponsible corpos; bringing them to task and properly making sure there are barriers in place so that something like this can never happen again. LLMs will not save us or make our lives particularly better. Developing LLMs further will just bring back another form of the "Torment Nexus" the thing we should never build. But that is just my opinion. As I don't entertain "booster hopium" like some seem to.

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