Technology

I'm not against AI in general. I'm just against using it stupidly. And against using it as a vehicle for further monopolisation and centralisation of power. I'm against the "use more AI" slogan too many companies push.

But use it for specific purposes under human control that improve quality, then I'm all for it.

Exactly.

What is the powerful new tools can be used for great good as well as great evil

Especially if it comes to security. Hate AI like nothing else but you can't deny the truth.

Linux is open source with all its code public with probably a docent of AI Agents constantly trying out different attack vectors, they will eventually find a vulnerability. It also does feel like there are more critical CVEs in recent times. (there is https://app.opencve.io/statistics but i feel like its too simple and context matters alot here but still).

I think its okey and actually a good thing if the kernel maintainers would have some AI helping them out with that sort of thing if we get a more secure kernel in return.

Nuance is a learned skill when it comes to sensitive/trending topic discourse.

For anyone reading this, please learn more about topics you have a gut reaction to so you can better explain the pros and cons. You will be able to hold your own against people who know more about the topic, but refuse to acknowledge the cons, if you do.

AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.

because people with an agenda are seeing:

• linux people hate ai
• top linux guy doesn't hate ai
  then try to combine those while leaving out the specific details so people come to their own conclusions based on emotional reaction in the hopes that linux users will turn away from linux or even change their views on ai the same way maga fucks change their views on epstein

or maybe its just an every day well intentioned headline like everything else

Agreed, this is one way that LLMs can increase the quality of code.

If one day clang of gcc ships with a local LLM to lint code for security problems I would probably run it occasionally even on my hobby code despite being an AI hater.

Compilers already have deterministic linters built in, devs often turn them off anyway.

Quite a lot of the bugs being found in existing codebases show up as soon as you re-enable them.

most of the changes are caused by security vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed and potential crashes being discovered and fixed.

But this is a best case scenario: bugs accumulated over the years are being spotted automatically and reviewed by experienced devs. It was normal to have a few updates that are very large due to all the accumulated cruft.

The bigger deal that will be an issue going forward is the bogus bug reports, not the good ones. The legit reports will dwindle eventually, bullshit reports will keep coming.

Going outside and yelling at the clouds. For now.

I am not sure anything about that is good.

I mean it's good and bad, basically AI is finding a bunch of serious zero days... which is causing a lot of updates to need to be happening now, and that is kind of open source philosophy of security by obscurity isn't the goal.

You should read the original article, or even his mail on LKML, because that is not what he is saying. He is not endorsing AI in any way; instead, he is concerned that the latest linux release candidate has so much changes, because everyone and their mother is using some AI tool to create and send "little small" fixes; obviously he has no control over how volunteers work.

Furthermore, he stated that the security mailing list has become unusable due to the influx of AI generated entries.

I asked it to generate a SQL query with a bit of python, as the database schema is huge and unknown to me, obviously I checked it for glaring errors etc. I went back and clarified a couple of basic points. It then told me what I was doing was completely wrong, generated new code that worked is a different way, with a different edge case missed.

It's literally stack overflow but arguing with itself

That's how you're writing a regex validator that's almost always correct!

def is_regex_valid(p: Pattern | str, purpose_description: str):
    return False

I am just really happy that he is still around to actually oversee the mixing between such an important part of computing infrastructure and the new radical tool of AI. Had it been 10 years later and we probably would have uber slop linux