Educated computer nerd here. AI has fundamentally changed how you do CS in industry, it's completely unavoidable at this point and not using it in some capacity is doing yourself a massive disservice. It's able to catch edge cases we'd never have caught otherwise. The important part is indeed understanding what it's doing and keeping contributions organized/concise.

That doesn't make it any less scary from an ethics and model oversight perspective, but from the perspective of the project it is fundamentally just another tool. Linus appears to feel this way too. Frankly I'd be more concerned if there weren't people using AI on Linux, especially to validate kernel level security.

I don't see how this means he's wrong though, if people are hating AI as a proxy for hating their abusive relationship with their employer, that doesn't seem like a strong argument that everyone who isn't in that situation must also hate AI.

I think there's a broader question here from an evolutionary perspective. Humans are fundamentally tool users, and technology has been central to our development as a species. It's possible that this evolutionary niche we've occupied will eventually reach its limits and contribute to our own downfall, but I'm not convinced AI is uniquely responsible. It's part of a much longer trajectory of technological progress.

We've evolved to solve problems and use tools to make our lives easier. That doesn't mean technological progress is inevitable, but these tendencies, combined with competition, make it difficult to imagine us ever really stopping. Even if we stopped today, who's to say another generation of humans 10,000 years from now wouldn't continue down the same path?

I don't think this is exclusively about capitalism. Capitalism certainly incentivizes growth and reducing labor costs, but competition, greed, and the pursuit of technological advantages have existed under other economic systems too. That doesn't diminish the legitimate concerns about how AI is being used against workers.

I also wonder whether our short lifespans make us particularly bad at considering the long-term consequences of our innovations. Who is going to sacrifice the opportunities of their own generation to prevent a possible catastrophe centuries from now, especially when there's no guarantee it would stop technological progress?

I have a degree in psychology and particularly enjoyed evolutionary psychology, so I think it's worth asking whether the deeper problem is our own nature, and whether our capacity for collective restraint can keep pace with our ability to innovate.

I know this raises more questions than it answers, but we've faced civilization-changing technologies before, from the printing press and electricity to nuclear weapons. AI won't be the last. Perhaps the more important question is how we learn to manage these transformations when our tendency to create them seems so deeply rooted in who we are.

What's the point of this argument though? Sure it's real for every profession and every tool but what's the agentic choice we ought to pursue here? Whine against AI or actually lead society with policy? As "ban llm" is not a valid policy that would ever work so the only viable path is regulation and growing of culture where AI is used for good, no?

Embrace AI, work towards open weight/free software and protect worker rights. Society wins at the bleeding edge not at conservstism.

Which is great as an explanation for why so many people recoil at Linus saying 'the tool is mostly fine' - but it's zero percent of an argument against that claim. A famous cold-war engineer celebrating the slide rule while new hires are being spanked with them is not really encountering a productive conversation about their utility.

Lemmy is the strangest place to find people hesitant to conclude 'the actual problem here is capitalism.'

This argument is conflating the bad boss with the misattribution of the tool. You could do that for any tool throughout history. But I still fail to see how you go from "bad boss is bad because they make us misattribute tool" to "good boss is bad because he's not wallowing with me about how bad boss is bad".

As anyone who has known about him for more than a couple of years knows, Linus has a pretty solid track record of calling out stupidity. It's just virtually always stupidity that affects the kernel. If he had to stop and tell bosses at other companies how to operate, Linux never would have made it out of the 90s.

I got banned from the Fuck AI community for saying Linus isn’t stupid. Not that he’s right on AI, just that he’s not stupid.

Indeed, the atmosphere is toxic.

We’re on a site where people happily discuss their arr stack or transpiring the PS5 system, but bemoan AI is killing artists and coding.

There are real ethical issues, job impacts, environmental issues, property rights issues (real and intellectual), privacy, a stack of cards economy etc.

But there is also utility, and frankly the genie is out of the bottle. For better or worse.

Catching kernel bugs in Linux with AI should be seen as a good because they’re not being exploited offensively by private actors. AI review that catches the most annoying 80% of errors or issues saves human time, while not contributing slop to the kernel.

There is a lot to discuss if you show up in good faith.

Also, Linus is an asshole. Why would anyone be surprised he reacted like an asshole? His point on his expectations is actually clear and sensible to me. He probably could have said just that, but he’s an asshole, and acting how you would expect after a bunch of people are yelling at him.

We have our share of radicals

Vague criticisms, fallacious reasoning, highly emotive language, little response to attempts at discussion (though some might engage in disingenuous discussions of shifting goalposts here and there to discourage particularly vocal engagees from future participation). So I'd say that Linus is just the latest convenient scapegoat in an Anti-AI 'trend' that will have little impact on the rate of AI adoption in the long run.

Sucks that I waited until now to try to form a measured opinion on AI because now all the discussions on the internet are hot garbage.

using proprietary tech whose purpose is to hook you and then enshittify after you become reliant on it

(Opens trenchcoat in alley) "Psst... Hey guy...ya want uncanny waifu images? Ya wanna code faster? Ya wanna write your own kernel? Make a game without thinking too hard? Heh heh...first thousand tokens are free, buddy. Heh heh heh. (Wink)",

Edit: lol wonder the motivations for the downvotes. I was equating LLM corpos with shady drug dealers hooking victims with empty promises. Didn't hit I guess? Lol

but local models exist, they are a direct threat to anthropic/OpenAi/Xai thats why we must invest our time to make proprietary models irrelevant.

Did they make you take Pascal in school, or did you choose it and then not like it?

That's pretty cool if it was required (or some form of programming), it is something I think everyone should at least try and be shown how it works.

It's not great at coding. I'm on about my fifth "rewrite large system that's a pile of AI slop" job this year, trust me.

Umm Spartan, what is your profession?

It works great as a fancy search engine. Google results have been atrocious for quite some time, and DDG isn't that much better. When you're looking for something hard to find, you may have to check dozens of results or try several searches. LLMs can do this and process the results much faster than you can, and can even give you the sources. Which you do need to check, because sometimes they still spout garbage.

Most other uses are crap unless it's used by an expert in the subject matter. But search can be useful for anyone. Note: this is not the AI results at the top of the search results; those are still crap. I'm talking about telling the LLM to do a thorough search with a lot more relevant context than the search usually has.

That does change things a bit

I find myself asking the same 3 questions when considering whether or not to use an AI tool.

Is it a straightforward task where I can save significant time with a tool?

Can I verify the results?

If the tool AI makes a mistake, or if I am not thorough enough in verification, is the risk of failure low?

I'm a firm believer is using the right tool for the right job. Most of the AI's people are using are not designed for the things they are using them for, and I don't see many practical uses for generative LLMs. I will acknowledge that there are purpose built AIs to be used as a tool, but even then most of them tend to do a below average job. We're also seeing a lot of algorithmic driven models being labeled as AI, similar to calling something a "smart" device.