The AI cabal is a very small group with a very large amount of power and powerful friends who want to push this on you. Remember, walking away from this does not impact hunger or shelter at all. You can survive without this shimmering facade.
What AI haters don’t get is that the people fanning the flames of AI(LLM’s) hate are the same people who want you to buy their subscriptions, because they know the only place where the real damage will occur is in OpenSource communities.
AI use for Open Source projects is arguably the one use case that benefits everyone, plus it’s a sweet irony against corps and their locked-down proprietary software. Denouncer will loudly hawk that LLMs will make it trivial to circumvent the GPL, but they fail to mention that the pendulum swings both ways; with LLMs, it’s now easier than ever to reverse engineer proprietary systems and programs, recently there was a similar discourse on lemmy due to the mario kart wii decompilation.
They want loud people to sow division into OpenSource communities so that true opensource LLMs solutions are shunned and never reach maturity, corporate meanwhile is unaffected.
Daddy or chips.
They should ask for a refund
I’ve decided to start moving to NetBSD. The copyright status of genAI code is {very questionable](https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr/116964500365807149), and it’s likely any project that integrates it, with be “extinguished” via legal action in the future.
I really doubt that. It depends a bit on which country you’re talking about, even if a court rules that way, there is way too much money involved for the Supreme Court to uphold it. And even in the very unlikely event the supreme court would do that, I’d imagine this would be one of these rare moments of bipartisanship where some kind of way is found to allow for AI generated code. The US isn’t willing to lose the ‘AI race’ due to principles, ethics or law.
unpopular opinion, especially on the fediverse, but: AI is not inherently bad.
it is a tool, that can do everything to a pretty low standard but rather fast. so it is up to the learnt human to use the thing at the right time. i use the company ai at regularly at work, but treat it as an apprentice: every line of code has to be checked, because it will fail hilariously. but it does type faster than me, so simple and boring jobs can be done by it.
i don’t see the appeal of avoiding generated code at all cost. it is not different from human code in that it can fail horribly. the important thing is oversight. is there someone with the knowledge and keen eye to ensure no BS is merged. Linus, in my opinion, spent a lifetime building that reputation.
AI is inherently bad. It might be useful, but their externalities are quite inherent to it.
I think there’s a big difference between
A. Expecting people to pay you and give you credit for something AI made for you
vs
B. Playing with AI and if it spits out something you like a lot you keep it to yourself unless someone else specifically asks you to show it to them.It’s basically masturbation.
People are gonna do it to themselves and enjoy it but if you try to show me that shit without my consent we are not going to be friends.
We’re not talking about the average clueless vibe coder here. Programming involves a lot more than just writing code. What Torvalds did was essentially “AI assisted coding”. As i understand it, he used it to narrow down the position of the bug in the code and then fixed it himself with a one-liner because apparently AI couldn’t find a solution on its own:
And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it. I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am. But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above. This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus “round_up()” to a “round_down()”, but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c>
That’s basically how AI should be used. To speed up things that are technically easy to do, but still very time consuming.
Finally got where I stand: why uncomfortable? It’s just being hard to impose a sensible approach to it:
- yes, llms can be used as a tool efficiently
- no, killing the planet along the way is not an option, this has to
stopbe stopped
this has to stop be stopped
How?
I have no good answer to that. My personal choice is ruin/kill any bastard who orders/approves building of data centers in their current state (read: doing damage to everything immediately around them and well beyond that), but I am physically far from anyone in that group
It’s a tool like any other. If used correctly it can provide a great value to the world. If used incorrectly then in this case it can also do the opposite. AI isn’t good or bad intrinsically. It boils down to our relationship to it. The same can be said for all the other tools, radio, television, internet and so on.
I would trust Linus Torvalds to use AI to do this because the AI is literally trying to copy him when it writes that code. In that context, he is the training data.
I especially like his most recent use of LLMs.
Specifically as a threat to induce someone else to step up as a maintainer of the debug tool sparse.
The problem with majority of “LLM critics” is that they are brain dead luddites that argue with ragebait emotion rather than rationality.
Unsurprisingly LLMs are just computers that can be useful, can be wasteful, can be life saving and can be society destroyed - it’s a tool.
AI is like a power tool. If you give a contractor a nail gun instead of a hammer he can build a house faster. If you give someone who has no idea how to build a house a nail gun they’ll just fail at building a house faster than if you only gave them a hammer and they’ll probably hurt themselves.
I can build my bosses app faster with ai, but I would never build any app I want to maintain with it. It’s too low quality code for my standards.
I think there could be some potential usecases for LLMs, but that’s not code generation (at least code that is not in the finished product), nor having it look up stuff in technical documentation.
Everyone is trying to chase the rational adaptation case. Everyone wants to 10x their projects, yet keep control over them, or at least 2x their productivity. But I’ve seen just as many people going insane from at least first trying to use it as a tool as vibe coders.
Code is probably one of the easiest things to verify, for that reason I struggle to see any other viable uses for LLMs tbh.
user: write code that correctly asserts what 1+1 equals. LLM: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 4); LLM: hmmm, that crashed. LLM: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 3); LLM: hmmm, that also crashed, I must be doing something wrong, let me try one more time. LLM: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 2); LLM: that worked! LLM Response: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 2);user: what does this sentence mean? "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" LLM Response: This doesn't mean anything, or someone really likes buffalo'sI can always run the code to check, I still don’t know how that sentence makes sense.
That’s because it needs a semicolon:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo; buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Also it isn’t a very good sentence because you’ve said the same thing twice.
It should read:
Buffalo buffalo buffalo; Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Translation:
“Buffalo” is a place, a noun (more or less meaning bison), and a verb (to harass or bully). So what it means is:
Bison bully bison; Buffalo bison bully Buffalo bison.
hmmm, I just copied from Wikipedia as my primary source. That was the faux pas that was cool before AI.
…more like a nailgun that, more frequently than not, shoots backwards.
and they’ll probably hurt themselves.
You can hit your thumb quite good with a hammer too.
Problem being that the majority of software engineers really don’t know how to build software well.
And are using AI as a tool to just accelerate their lack of engineering.
This is a very old discussion and argument, much older than the current AI push. You’re right to a degree but also that hasn’t stopped the rise of strong minds for software development. There will always be the curious and the lazy. The curious will always want to know how things work from the chain of events of a button click to the pixel shifts and logic gate flips to display code on a screen as well as run it. There will also always be the lazy unencumbered by such a desire for awareness who just want the magic box to do the thing.
How many software devs can write in assembly? Not many. Not much has changed if anything beyond the ability of the unaware to see their will come into creation. People couldn’t make realistic images and now they snap selfies with no barriers to entry. Does that make them a photographer or an artist? Not really.
Could this not be said for IDEs with code awareness such as M$’s intellisense, among other tools that accelerate development speed?
What you are describing isn’t an AI problem, is people taking a two week bootcamp and calling themselves a software engineer.
LAInus.
Fuck off with these fake AI bubble pumping stories. fake ass grifters reading the same script wherever you go (“Im a mathamatician and IM SCARED” lol)
It’s all horse shit.
Sorry guys but your AI powered sex doll is going in the chipper along with her unpublished Unified Field theory.
I know you said all, but I’m curious which part do you think is horse shit? Do you think Torvalds is lying about using AI all together? or just how useful AI actually was? The commit with the alleged AI use is in the an RC for the next release, and it is authored by Torvalds.
The fact that you compared “AI powered sex doll” to Linus using an LLM to generate code he reviewed and accepted (as if he’s reviewing any of the many contributions he reviews and constantly rejects for the simplest mistakes) shows that you know nothing about the different applications of “AI”.
Yes, the “AI powered” sex toy is an example of an idiotic scam, the AI powered assistant that hallucinates in a conversation isn’t very useful, but code that literally does what it should do, reviewed by a competent engineer, is no different from reviewing code from any of your coworkers. It’s code, if it’s garbage you reject it, is it isn’t then the tool was useful.
Some of a bitch!
Just a few days ago, I argued with a douche nozzle who told me, with the confidence of a master debater, that AI has no useful purpose.
But apparently, not all of you feel that way. Linus uses AI and suddenly y’all change your tune! What a load of crap!
I’ve been sitting here saying for years that AI is a tool and should be used as such, while getting called a tech-bro simp for saying it.
Man, this has once again revealed the massive, two-faced, bandwagon nature of Lemmy.
Y’all should have stayed on Reddit!
It’s interesting to see AI being used for something as practical as debugging a Linux issue. I think the bigger question is how much developers can rely on AI without losing their understanding of the underlying code. AI can clearly speed things up, but human review still seems essential.
It’s especially essential to mark the code as AI generated. AI makes mistakes just as humans do. Problem is AI makes different kinds of mistakes than humans.
A human will tend to forget to do something they were supposed to do. An AI will do a bunch of unnecessary shit.
Also you can tell that a human didn’t put a lot of thought into some code (no comments, sloppy variable names) so you’re more likely to say “yeah ok, I used to make that kind of mistake when I was younger” and just fix it. AI generated code will have all kinds of comments which normally makes you more hesitant before making a change. It looks like someone really thought through what they were doing, but in reality it’s something generated by an LLM and no real thought was given to the code.
Also you can tell that a human didn’t put a lot of thought into some code (no comments, sloppy variable names)
Why is your code so messy that it needs comments everywhere? Comments should pretty much be reserved for special cases anyway
