This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Well it's not that this shit CAN'T be useful, it's that it's being pushed at people heavily in ways that aren't.
There's a difference between using a tool as a knowledgeable professional, and using a tool as a novice or a member of the general public: the professional can likely tell when the answer an AI gives is wrong.
AI is a tool that can be useful sometimes.
Ayup, i've literally thrown massive logs into an llm and "find the errors" to track down a complex issue. They're very good paper sorters
I suppose Microslop aren't actually professionals anymore.
I can live with that
I can stand AI as long as the code is reviewed line-by-line by a human. The only problem I have aside from that is that I wonder if code generated by an AI can validly be placed under an open source licence instead of being public domain. Didn't a court rule that you couldn't copyright generated code?
I keep seeing headlines like this, and of course conveniently leaving out how Torvalds chewed people out for vibe coding.
Torvalds didn't vibe code away the Linux bug. He actually knows what he's doing.
Yeah he has said many times the submitter of the code is the one responsible for knowing how it works. That's not the only issue with LLMs though. Stolen intellectual property and the larger environmental impact that the data centers required to run them is having are just a couple more.
I have a feeling that in order to achieve using deep learning (because let's face it; it's not AI) as a programming assistant, AI companies didn't need to do half the shit they've done.
The resources being outright burnt on their endeavours haven't served any useful purpose. You don't need data centres covering the globe and to destroy thousands of rare books to assist with code, or find cancer in a scan.
Oh I mostly blame capitalism and the shitty tech bro CEOs.
Ya but the general hysteria is that any AI use is bad and that we can only trust this AI use because its from Linus. I've used AI successfully for debugging and learning new code bases and patches and I've been told I'm wrong for doing so.
Well, so far Linus is the only person in the world, it seems, that is using AI as a tool instead of a crutch. So I agree with that sentiment.
I personally don't care about the tech. I care about the economy around the tech.
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.
nothing is good nor evil, but thinking makes it so.
But i see the issues on both sides of the aisle. Kind of like how social media is a great tool that brings about instant worldwide communication. But those merits don't cancel out how it's been used to exploit the human psyche, influence elections, and even coax genocides.
In this case, the downwind effects from encouraging use by mature professionals is impacting the impressionable future. And no one seems to care about the future anymore.
I code at a kindergarten level so its been useful for me when I'm trying to get an idea to just work. I tell it what I was trying to do and give it my code and then I ask it to fix then explain what went wrong. Works pretty well in qwen 3.8 27b on my GPU in zed. But I'm not making huge apps or public code just dumb scripts for me. So ive found ive actually gotten better this past year. Its all in how you use it.
I have access to essentially unlimited local compute at my work. Some of my coworkers use it to run LLMs, some use the pre-enshittified corporate models, and I gave all that a shot—like really went for it, but ultimately would rather just work at my own pace.
In my workplace the people who use them come off as kind of frantic to my eye. Like they're always making these overly engineered greenfield things no one asked for, which gets them a shout out at quarterly and then no one ever thinks of it again...
I'm not saying there's 0 legitimate use for the technology if you could divorce it from its problematic origins, but I'm not that smart, and people are increasingly coming to me for help when previously they seemed happy to just talk to their little corporate minder.
I feel like chatbot and text generating models generally encourage dark patterns we don't even have names for yet and I'm just highly wary of the whole thing.
I've spent the last 9 months coming in behind these "look what I did! AI!" projects and fixing them. One was turned over to a coworker as a "here I did all this work for you" ... Wouldn't even start because it tried to bind to the same TCP port three times in the init, for some reason.
It's getting a little better, but I still mostly unfuck shit that people LLMd and then (they) walked away to much fanfare at their "expertise" to do it again.
It's a tool, not a replacement for thought.
"oversight" is a myth. I'm pretty sure you can't oversight your way of plagiarism out of millions of training data sources that you don't even have on your local disk for comparison and reference.
(This isn't legal advice. I'm not a lawyer.)
you are confusing two issues here: oversight for the output of an ANN can very much achieve good results. as i explained in my post.
oversight over the output won't help you with copyright, water and energy consumption, slave labour and all the ethical issues further up the pipeline. but we don't need ANNs for big corpos to do all these evil things. we need oversight and real consequences for those corpos - no matter what they produce.
ANNs as a technology are old and have not fundamentally changed since Alan Turing. Sure, we have iterated and improved. But the fundamentals are the same. LLMs just made that old tech quite popular recently and introduced a "line go up" race. i do not believe that we will gain significant improvements from simply feeding more stolen works to the machine. A fraction of the MNIST dataset is enough to train an ANN on a 20 years old laptop to recognise the digits 0-9 reliably. The technology is sound, limited in its usability and detached from the big corpos.
so why are you advocating for not avoiding all generative AI code then? you specifically cited Linus, who does as far as i know not ensure cleared up training data (what would that even be, CC0 only?) like you seem to be advocating for.
once again: oversight of the production line != oversight of the output.
i specifically said that i do trust Linus Torvalds to ensure no bullshit is pushed to the Linux kernel. that is oversight of the output.
we need oversight of the production line. but of all the production lines, not only the ones delivering LLMs. big corporations have a tendency to blatantly break the law and get away with a fee that is smaller than their profit. if they don't break the law by the letter, they have good lawyers to skirt around it and noone has a morality police. oversight would mean not only catching these things but also punishing such behaviour in a meaningful way.
training an LLM eith CC0 would be fair game. properly bought (declared it is for training some AI) resources as well. i fully disagree with the current training methods: just feeding more to the black box - to that extent, that they buy (improperly) and destroy books just to get some more words into their respective model. i am sure, that other approaches would get better results. but that is slower and more expensive. so the problem is how most AI companies operate - not the actual product. but if it wasn't "AI", it would be something else with the exact same bullshit practices.
Torvalds is not vibe coding, and he doesn't control the OS (GNU/Linux) anyways.
[insert meme of the guy sweating over which of two red buttons to press]
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 the real damage occurs 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.
AI use for Open Source projects is arguably the one use case that benefits everyone,
It doesn't benefit everyone if it pushes the quality down because the impetus to go fast wins over the dedication to reviewing the code properly. Nor does it benefit everyone if the world becomes uninhabitable because of the energy used by data centers. Nor does it benefit everyone if economies collapse due to the hype being wrong and the speculative bubble bursts. Nor does it benefit everyone if the hype is right and it renders most jobs redundant.
These are the very rational things "haters" are concerned about. AI is for the rich to get richer. It does nothing for the rest of us.
Finally got where I stand: why uncomfortable? It's just being hard to impose a sensible approach to it:
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.
ahahahaha this is rich
