When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.
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.
I like Linus, but comparing an LLM to a compiler is fucking stupid.
Cory Doctorow’s “Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI” has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn’t have a boss and has untold resources for whatever “AI” “tools” he finds useful.
He isn’t ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn’t do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn’t have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new “tool”. He simply uses what’s useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.
95% of people don’t have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the “tool” that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.
Strangely idgaf about whether he respects me
I don’t think he thinks about you at all
👍🏻 The vast majority of people don’t.
His line seems to be ‘don’t submit shit code.’
Even if you wrote it by seance with a Oujii board, just make sure it works, and that great grandma Ada agrees to a GPL license.
The comparison between AI and compilers is kind of stupid though. When you program in a given language, you’re writing out the entire logic and behavior of your program. Not to mention that the compiler is a deterministic machine, it will always behave in a certain manner and produce predictable results. On the other hand, using AI, you just write a sentence. Then it “creates” a whole bunch of code that will not always be the same, even if you always use the same model and prompt. Not to mention all of the detrimental effects AI has, cognitively speaking, when you start to rely on it. On top of this, all AI models were trained on unfathomable amounts of stolen information.
Compilers are not always deterministic, there is a lot of “smart” code in compilers to automatically optimize code and that can mean that whole parts or functions are replaced with what the compiler thinks is best.
Devil’s advocating for the sense of completeness here rather than bickering, but wouldn’t two of the same compiler on two of the same machine with the same code still create the same output? That is to say, it is deterministic rather than stochastic but it just takes unpredictable variables into account when compiling?
I think the difference would be that a compiler will always give you something understandable and explainable even if it’s opaque, but an LLM is literally using RNG to generate its output, so could come out with something completely left field. If it switches to Chinese that’s one thing because you can just ignore that, but equally a hallucinated bug that looks right but is actually very dangerous could slip in instead.
RNG is pseudorandom. Every computer program is deterministic in some sense, even if the seed is obfuscated or dependent on ephermal environment variables. Being able to predict the output is very different from determinism.
I don’t have a personal or professional workflow that would benefit from AI. I have not been impressed with any generated art or writing (knowingly, so far). I pretty much only know it for the enshittification of search results. It might be great at coding, I’ll never know because in my first 49 years of life I’ve only needed to code enough to get a D+ in my Pascal class. It might get great at generating art but I haven’t had to generate art since my sophomore year of high school. I hear it’s good at scanning lab test results which is great for future me when I need a lab test result but doesn’t come up for me in the day-to-day. There are plenty of other useful things I’m sure it can do for other people but the stuff they say it can do for me right now is nothing I’m interested in having done for me.
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.
My first couple of programming classes were in Pascal. Then there was the third class where the professors had written their own pseudo language that existed only on the chalkboard and in their own heads. At least I learned recursion from them. I had to teach myself every language I ever used on the job. I was EE instead of CS, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too hard, perhaps there were more practical classes deeper into the CS tree.
Multiple Pascal classes for EE thats interesting. You’re not much older than I am and when we did Pascal my teacher said something like its not really used as much now but its a great learning language, but the 2nd class just moved onto C.
I had a friend doing EE and they had Perl as their programming class a few years later.
If I had to guess id say its Python now? That’d be practical as well.
I also leaned every language i used outside of school on my own.
BASED LINUS
Yeah dude licking corporate boot is so based
If you’re too much of a black/white thinker to be able to have an intelligent and mature conversation, there is nothing I can say to change your emotional response.
With that being said: Fuck big tech, fuck how AI is being used by it and large companies. Period. Full stop.
This current iteration of AI would not be possible without big tech. If you actually thought about it for more than five minutes you would realize you cannot reconcile those two and still see LLMs as “just a tool”. Sit on that one for a minute. Utilitarianism rots your brain.
You’re not wrong with a lot of the substance there, but big tech doesnt own the corpus of AI, and it most certainly will still be around even if you were to dump all of big tech (which I am very much for…!)
I’m not into utilitarianism, just trying to be pragmatic here and not jump on the strong emotional reaction train… Unfortunately, LLMs are really useful tooling …and they simply are not going to go anywhere, so I like to direct efforts to responsible governance, not mob mentality campism.
Shit no go bakie in horsie, lets put the onus and responsibility on the individual and produce better guidelines.
