The em dash thing annoys me because I actually used em dashes a lot in my own writing. Now I’ve had to change how I write to keep people from assuming I’m using generative tools for writing.
In the plus side, our mayor loves my writing style because he thinks staff should be using AI for everything.
I used to like the punch of “It’s not just ___, it’s ___” but I’ve pretty much removed that from my vocabulary.
Same, I would use that construction pretty frequently. Or “it’s X not Y”.
But now, it’s not just trite, it is triggering.
I never even heard of an em dash until I started reading about AI. I was just using hyphens everywhere I was apparently supposed to be using em dashes. I am a stickler for grammar and correct punctuation (except for punctuation inside quotes which my internal programmer won’t allow me to do the American way) so I’ve started using em dashes – and now people think I’m an AI.
They’re useful—especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons; I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
They’re useful. Especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons. I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
There you go. It’s easier, clearer, and less pretentious.
Okay, but you’ve just created a sentence fragment, which is fine unless you were trying to use complete sentences.
em dashes are not ai exclusive! humans have used them for ages before ai! stop calling all em dashes ai!!
1000 day intervals… Nice. MM/DD/YY… Not nice.
Why even bother with days at this scale?
8601 4 LYF
>unsourced information about an inflammatory topic shared in a humor community
I trust this graph with every fiber of my being (/s)
I don’t know if this graph is real or not but it’s not a secret that Linus Torvalds is in favor of using AI for developing the kernel
Unpopular opinion: I don’t mind the use of AI by devs if it makes their work easier. As long as the devs are pros who understand whats going on and uses it to optimize their workflow, fine go ahead.
Where I don’t whant AI is, first, in anything creative. I want art to be abother humans sharing their emotions and perception of the world, ever if it’s sometimes poorly done, boring, or plainly bad. I have zero interest in art created by a machine, no matter how perfectly executed it is. The promise of AI was to make our life easier by optimising the boring and repetitive stuff so we can make fun and interesting things, not the other way around.
so according to you, is programing not a creative, fun and interesting thing? and that its not an art? if you support vibe coding, you support ai art too. programming is an art.
What do you think is not art or creative? I’m a software engineer. Its highly artistic in api design, considering consumers and how data flows, managing responsibility etc.
I have no doubt it is highly creative.
That’s why I trust that good devs will keep making the important choices and only use AI for optimization and technical parts of the work. My position is nuance, I still want pro devs behind every projects, I just think most of them are smart enough to decide when and why the use of AI is appropriate.
keep living a pipe dream. Thats not at all how it’s used in the real world in software.
In this case it is doing the work instead of them. We are increasingly going to have code running critical systems that no person has even bothered to look at.
I hate to tell you this, but the code running most critical systems out there is already completely fucked.
Most people assume that just because software developer has been a degree for the last few decades that everything has been rewritten by professionals, but there are a crazy number of systems still running 3-5 decades from when they were first created. A vast majority of this shit was written before “programmer” was a profession or a degree. So, everything was written by some person who had a job doing something that had nothing to do with computers, but either dicked with computers as a hobby, or was forced into it because no one else wanted to do it.
People point at Y2K as the point when everything had to be rewritten and replaced, but most Y2k solutions just involved patching the software and nothing else. All that shit is still out there and running.
And let’s be frank, every profession has people that are just aren’t capable but seem to stay in it no matter what. For every bad waiter you have ever dealt with, there is a developer who is just as shit at their job.
And that is on top of companies who just don’t give a fuck and who knowingly put shit software out because it is more profitable to cheat people than provide what they promised.So, don’t worry about AI causing some great collapse. We were already well on our way there without AI.
All devs are shit? What a piss poor take.
You must be a viber with no XP.
I really hope you don’t code like you read. If so, I pray no one lets you near anything even slightly important.
True, but we have to know AI is making it wayy worse. The same people who were barely getting by, are now using AI to write softwares that’ll be used for years to come. And other people that don’t have developer experience and aren’t good themselves don’t have any idea and really trust those developers because “they make things happen” like “magic”. Previously they’d take a lot more time to make something work, it’d be shitty, but it’d be obvious for any developers that come after them. Now detection is hard, and the volume has increased.
That’s why I mentioned that I want real devs looking at the code.
As someone that uses AI at work because 1. this is a run-out-the-clock situation, and 2. I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible, it feels weird and hypocritical to expect no AI in all of the software around me as well.
With that said, if I still had any semblance of passion for writing code, which I do not, anything I worked on for the OSS community would be fully devoid of AI usage. But I’m mentally at a point where I’d rather move to a cabin and use computers less and less with each passing day.
There’s also a huge difference between someone like Linus Torvalds, who understands code better than most people on earth, using AI supervised to increase productivity, and Timmy off the street having chatGPT build something he has no clue how it works or what code even does.
Vibe coding isn’t just using AI. It’s using AI to do things you don’t understand in the first place.
There’s also a huge difference between someone like Linus Torvalds, who understands code better than most people on earth, using AI supervised to increase productivity, and Timmy off the street having chatGPT build something he has no clue how it works or what code even does.
disagree. there’s no difference between the car mechanic or the politician pouring oil into the river. They’re both horrendous. sure, one of them might have a reason for doing so, but that reason isn’t a good reason.
Both things are going on at the same time, as Torvalds and Timmy are both paying Sam Altman to pour oil into the river as a byproduct of the service he’s providing. For something as important as the Linux kernel, it wasting fewer CPU cycles as a result of LLM-aided optimisation work might even be net beneficial for the environment once you take into account that it’ll affect billions of computers for years to come. If the end product is shitty, though, there’s no question that it wasn’t worth the environmental damage.
It would have to use trillions of fewer cpu cycles to do that. Currently scientists estimate it at 8 cups of water consumed for every 100 word prompt. What developer do you know that consumes 8 cups of water a day much less every thirty seconds. A developer can sit there and think with their own mind, computer doing nothing, while an LLM consumes thousands of gallons of water and kilowatts of electricity to do the same thing.
It only needs to save a few hundreds of seconds on one computer, or one second on a few hundreds of computers, or a tiny fraction of a second on the number of computers that actually run Linux to save trillions of cycles. A trillion cycles isn’t very many at all. A hundred-word prompt on a frontier model running on GPUs in a datacentre burns much more power than a trillion cycles on a CPU, so for a large Linux kernel patch, trillions is the wrong number by many orders of magnitude. There are also a lot of computers spending a lot of time running Linux, so it kind of balances out. There’s only one Linus Torvalds, and he’s very busy, so it’s likely that if he’d not used an LLM to get this work done, it simply wouldn’t have happened, even if someone had been willing to fund a different human to do it.
Either way, the original point of the post was that LLM-generated code is always shitty (even when it’s not immediately obvious to whoever’s responsible for it that it’s shitty) and so having any amount of it already makes things worse, even ignoring the huge environmental cost. With that context, it is the case that there’s a huge difference between Timmy and Torvalds as Torvalds is famous for having very high standards, so if he’s using it, he might be able to make something that isn’t shitty.
I didn’t realize you were talking about performance in the kernel, which I think will be incredibly hard to measure. That that’s usually the main focus of enterprise investment into Linux, so I very much doubt that an LLM is coming in and making improvements there, but maybe it’s happening. As far as I can tell all the latest things are security scans, which usually will result in worse performance since the goal isn’t speed but safety.
This comment chain is specifically referencing a single LLM-assisted patch that Linus Torvalds posted to the mailing list for review a few days ago that solves a longstanding performance problem that interacts with enough things parts of the kernel that there are only a handful of people in the world qualified to deal with it, and that none of them have had the time to investigate and fix properly until just now. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-posts-his-first-llm-assisted-patch-to-the-linux-kernel-after-issuing-clear-pro-ai-directives-the-bossman-makes-use-of-ai-tooling-himself
I felt a lot like that too. I still do, but this helped me a lot:
Bookmarking this one for later. Thanks! It’s hard not to feel like my entire field has been cheapened. We spent so long perfecting our craft, only for it to to be completely devalued with speed as the main focus.
The bright side is that AI will never be as good as me when it comes to CSS. I’m still the go-to CSS person at work, despite folks having AI tools at their disposal.
only for it to to be completely devalued with speed as the main focus.
Welcome to the rest of the world. All middle managers and C suite dickheads know is “hurry up and get it done,” they’ve entirely lost the concept of “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
The middle manager above my direct supervisor regularly clocks in late every day (and that’s after a 3h time difference no less, and it doesn’t seem he understands timezones either), and then with about 1.5h left in my day suddenly “hey stop what you’re doing and get this 3h of work done by the end of the day, but also no you can’t work OT.” Like “hey dickhead, it’s physically impossible to do that,” but of course instead of telling him, my direct supervisor just pulls that guy’s penis out of his mouth for long enough to say “yes sir” and tell me to break the laws of physics.
I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible
I always had this stance and found it weird when people resisted. Your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss is telling you to work half as much? Whether you think that the output is half as good quality or not why the fuck aren’t you JUMPING at the chance to do that.
Whether you think that the output is half as good quality or not why the fuck aren’t you JUMPING at the chance to do that.
Two reasons actually.
-
Most people want to be productive in some way. Even if you don’t like your job very much, its a much bigger mental burden to sit around and do nothing than it is to actually work.
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You employer isn’t going to pay you the same rate for half as much work done. It is that way now cause they have no idea what the actual productivity will end up being, but once the numbers are stable they will save as much money as possible. You will either be lucky and will work just as much as before with more but worse output, or you will be fired.
-
I can’t use AI in my job, because I manufacture.
But the HR lady can use it to make policies that are fucking stupid and my direct boss can use it to create an app to more effectively micromanage us without having to actually do the micromanaging himself so he has free time to blow his boss and cook breakfast for 30min on the clock every day.
So yeah I’m not a fan.
I really love the emdash. I’m very—very—upset ai ruined it for me—cunts.
Im pretty indifferent to them and I’m still mad AI ruined them.
Rebel. Start using triple em dashes⸻see?
What is the accelerating rise of m-dashes from approximately 2014-2019 about? That trend apparently continued until very recently, even slowed down a bit, before exploding at some point in 2025 or 2026 for obvious reasons.
Does anyone have a theory?
People slowly learned to use their keyboards for proper typography?
That was a good one.
People are so silly. 700 em dashes… Linux is a big project with contributors from all over the world. People probably use LLMs to redact comments when English is not their native language. And yes, people are using LLMs to help them with submissions but there’s 0 proof that any code made it to the kernel without being reviewed properly. This allergy to anything LLM related makes you all look like vegans - a lot of posturing that has 0 real impact. If you’re so disgusted by AI and can’t tell the difference between AI slop and AI assisted code just stop using computers because there’s no way you will be able to do anything without touching AI in one way or another.
What’s with the stupid comparison with the vegans? Vegans have non zero impact towards environment sustainability and their posturing is entirely valid, more so now, given the state of the world.
Your phrasing tells a lot more about your mindset though. A lot of words, 0 substance.
-signed, a non-vegan with a lot respect for vegans
P.S. I am also not against LLM assistance, but also know AI-bros are not to be trusted. With all the money pouring in and so much slop being pushed onto everyone, they will cash out one way or the other. And who’s going to be left holding the bag of all the chaos they’ve caused?
Vegans have non zero impact towards environment sustainability
Not eating meat or eating less meat has non zero impact. Bragging about being vegan and avoiding things like honey does not.
Effectively nobody “brags” about being vegan. It’s not a stretch to conceive that those who have become vegan due to ethical or climate based concerns might have some motivation to be vocal and convince others to go vegan. The most profound way a person can have an impact on the environment/animal welfare after becoming a vegan is to convince another person to become a vegan.
I know plenty of vegans that will not eat anything “contaminated” with animal products, no matter how those were sources. I also know people who simply avoid animal products. There’s a big difference. Simply limiting consumption of animal products as much possible is normal thing people do out of ethical and environmental concerts. Refusing to eat already prepared dish because it has some animal based ingredient is simply wasteful. Same with LLMs. There’s a difference between AI slop and LLM assisted coding. People who refuse to see the difference are as annoying as overzealous vegans.
If youre interested in context:
After avoiding meat for enough years, contamination with corpses of dead animals or their fluids* becomes very unpalatable.
That might be hard to conceive for a person who views it as tasty food rather than body parts, but so it goes.
I surprised myself recently when i accidentally ordered a chicken burger at a drive through. Nobody would have known if id eaten it. it was already prepared/dead/whatever.
I couldn’t do it. While logically i know its edible, it registered akin to eating bugs or something. So i went without lunch
* ‘dramatic’ vegan language used for clarity on how this is perceived when no longer ‘food’.
As an actual human who uses em dashes — or usually, two or three hyphens that turn into an em dash in Markdown — I feel personally attacked.
I will usually just use one (1) hyphen for that purpose - in the much same way that I will use "…" instead of “…” - because I like to upset typography nerds.
Have you tried using the dedicated triple dot character (…) instead of three separate dots (…)? It’s a life changer
They said they do it to ‘upset typography nerds’ — likely they tried…
Man, I miss when Linux felt like a refuge. It’s always been flawed of course but now it feels like everyone in positions of influence are embracing the awful
It’s getting harder to justify the inconvenience of going off the beaten path if that path is turning into the same slop as the commercial ones.
I imagine there’s been quite an effort by commercial interests to influence the direction of this path
The Linux Foundation has unfortunately become a commercial shithole, run by a clusterfuck of Silicon Valley VCs. When I see the kinds of garbage AI projects that are being shoveled into it every day, I lose more and more respect for it.
Look for yourselves: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects
And it’s sad to see Linus falling into their lock and step. I respect him for a lot of things, but when it comes to AI, he’s sadly just wrong.
The beaten path is sloppifying a lot faster than the alternatives and where management gets angry if you don’t use AI.
I’ve been using linux for 18 years, but since reviewing the Open Slopware list I’ve been making a lot of changes.
FreeBSD ticks almost every box I need it to. It runs Plasma, it runs Steam/Proton (through a thin compatibility layer that enables a lot of other linux software), it can be set up immutably and has superior containerization natively via jails. It even supports XDG compliance.
But there is no support for changing voltage or clock rate on any amd gpu (maybe any gpu at all) and no driver support for my newer amd gpu at all.
It honestly feels like how linux used to feel back in the day 😅
I don’t think I’m gonna jump ship just yet. The recent ai code fiasco that happened in the linux kernel (race condition, regression, vacation) was averted by the team of talented human developers who reviewed Linus’ code. I am choosing to have faith that it will be ok for a while… given there are few alternatives.
That being said, I think I might finally be ready to hop on the fuck-sysyemd train. I was able to look past the megalomaniacal tendencies of the dev because the tools were so convenient, but the AI PRs and code review pushes me over the edge. I am gonna configure a daily driver in Artix soon.
Edit: I should note, FreeBSD also has some AI code issues. But the linux-libre kernel might not. Something like Hyperbola (GNU/Linux-libre) might be more appropriate for someone who is trying to avoid ai code strictly.
can you elaborate on the recent fiasco you mentioned? I totally missed the news on that
Linus introduced a race condition and a regression with a AI generated code, then handed off fixing the problem to someone else because he was going on vacation.
Fiasco might have been an exaggeration, but it’s still pretty lame.
pretty lame
lame /lām/
adjective
Disabled so that movement, especially walking, is difficult or impossible.
:/
You can get a lot done when you’ve got 29 months in a year
?
D/M/Y > M/D/Y
There is only YYYYMMDD
Because one lives the other should not long live Y-M-D
ISO 8601 is the only correct way.
It’s probably about to drop off. Opus 5.5 isn’t outputting em dashes in work produced anymore
It’s been replaced by the overuse of confusing
foo's own [implied noun]phrases.
