6 ms·

Some things to expect in 2025

258 points by signa11 2y ago

christina97 2y ago
> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does. Not to detract from this point, but I don’t think I understand what half the code I have written does if it’s been more than a month since I wrote it…
- WaitWaitWha 2y ago
  I am confident that you do understand it at time of writing. > We depend on our developers to contribute their own work and to stand behind it; large language models cannot do that. A project that discovers such code in its repository may face the unpleasant prospect of reverting significant changes. At time of writing and commit, I am certain you "stand behind" your code. I think the author refers to the new script kiddies of the AI time. Many do not understand what the AI spits out at time of copy/paste.
  - ozim 2y ago
    Sounds a lot like bashing copy pasting from StackOverflow. So also like old argument “kids these days”. No reasonable company pipes stuff directly to prod you still have some code review an d QA. So doesn’t matter if you copy from SO without understanding or LLM generates code that you don’t understand. Both are bad but still happen and world didn’t crash.
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      LLM can generate a larger chunk of code then you'll find on SO, so I think it's a larger issue to have LLM code then copy-pasted SO code.
      - JadeNB 2y ago
        > LLM can generate a larger chunk of code then you'll find on SO, so I think it's a larger issue to have LLM code then copy-pasted SO code. It also generates code customized to your request, so there is temptation to avoid doing even the minimal work of "how do I turn this SO snippet into something that works with my program?"
      - seanw444 2y ago
        I also think that it would be a nightmare to properly review a large PR of exclusively AI code. If you take the time to understand what it's doing, and find as many little bugs and edge cases as possible, you may as well have just written it yourself.
      - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
        agreement here - As a normal rule somebody copied code from SO after searching for - unique identifier generator in JavaScript - and the code that was the top answer might not be 100% understandable to them but most of it and it doesn't do anything that is extremely weird. When asked what does that bit of code do they probably say it's the unique id generator. Somebody might ask AI write a login module in JavaScript, inside of that will be a unique identifier generator - what does that bit of code do when asked they reply hmm, not sure, it's from ChatGPT.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      > Sounds a lot like bashing copy pasting from StackOverflow. Which is also very clearly unacceptable. If you just paste code from SO without even understanding what it does, you have fucked up just as hard as if you paste code from an LLM without understanding it.
    - bitmasher9 2y ago
      > No reasonable company pipes stuff directly to prod I’ve definitely worked at places where the time gap between code merge and prod deployment is less than an hour, and no human QA process occurs before code is servicing customers. This approach has risks and rewards, and is one of many reasonable approaches.
      - stcroixx 2y ago
        Yes, I've worked on small teams of highly experienced people where code reviews may only happen a couple times a year for the purpose of knowledge transfer. This is how I've seen it work on what I would consider the most critical and best performing code I've been exposed to. High volume, high stakes stuff in finance and health care.
    - thayne 2y ago
      It's not very common for people to do drive-by pull requests that just copy code from Stack Overflow on open source projects. I've already started seeing that with LLM generated code. And yeah, hopefully the problems with it are caught, but it wastes the maintainers time and drives maintainer Burnout.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- elcritch 2y ago
  Well LLM generated code doesn't often work for non-trivial code or cases that aren't re-hashed a million times like fizzbuzz. So I find it almost always requires going through the code to understand it in order to find "oh the LLM's statistical pattern matching made up this bit here". I've been using Claude lately and it's pretty great for translating code from other languages. But in a few bits it just randomly swapped to variables or plain forgot to do something, etc.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Ah, yes. The good old "what idiot wrote this?" experience.
  - Ntrails 2y ago
    Don't forget the revelation 2 weeks later when you realise immediate past you should've trusted deep past you instead of assuming he'd somehow got wiser in the intervening months. Instead intermediate past you broke things properly because they forgot about the edge deep past you was cautiously avoiding
- kstenerud 2y ago
  I can always understand code I wrote even decades ago, but only because I use descriptive names, and strategic comments to describe why I'm using a particular approach, or to describe an API. If I fail to do that, it takes a lot of effort to remember what's going on.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  I have heard that before and never understood that; I understand code I wrote 40 years ago fine. I have issues understanding code by others, but my own I understand no matter when it was written. Of course others don't understand my code until they dive in and, like me theirs, forget how it works weeks after. I do find all my old code, even from yesterday, total shite and it should be rewritten, but probably never will be.
dgfitz 2y ago
Ignoring all the points made, this was a very pleasant reading experience. Not ignoring the points made, I cannot put my finger on where LLMs land in 2025. I do not think any sort of AGI type of phenomenon will happen.
- tkgally 2y ago
  Yes, it was a good read. As someone with no direct connection to Linux or open-source development, I was surprised to find myself reading to the end. And near the end I found this comment particularly wise: > The world as a whole does not appear to be headed in a peaceful direction; even if new conflicts do not spring up, the existing ones will be enough to affect the development community. Developers from out-of-favor parts of the world may, again, find themselves excluded, regardless of any personal culpability they may have for the evil actions of their governments or employers.
isaiahwp 2y ago
> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does. "Oh Machine Spirit, I call to thee, let the God-Machine breathe half-life unto thy data flow and help me comprehend thy secrets."
- merksoftworks 2y ago
  That's how ye' get yerself Tzeench'd
- bodge5000 2y ago
  And they told me laptop-safe sacred oils and a massive surplus of red robes were a "bad investment", look who's laughing now
kirubakaran 2y ago
> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code My friend works at a well-known tech company in San Francisco. He was reviewing his junior team member's pull request. When asked what a chunk of code did, the team member matter-of-factly replied "I don't know, chatgpt wrote that"
- hardbants 2y ago
  [dead]
- deadbabe 2y ago
  I hope that junior engineer was reprimanded or even put on a PIP instead of just having the reviewer say lgtm and approve the request.
  - WaxProlix 2y ago
    Probably depends a lot on the team culture. Depending on what part of the product lifecycle you're on (proving a concept, rushing to market, scaling for the next million TPS, moving into new verticals,...) and where the team currently is, it makes a lot of sense to generate more of the codebase by AI. Write some decent tests, commit, move on. I wish my reports would use more AI tools for parts of our codebase that don't need a high bar of scrutiny, boilerplate at enterprise scale is a major source of friction and - tbh - burnout.
    - bradly 2y ago
      Yes and the team could be missing structures to support junior engineers. What made them not ask for help or pairing is really important to dig in to and I would expect a senior manager to understand this and be introspective on what environment they have created where this human made this choice.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - 2y ago
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Linux will politically continue to fail to extract needed monetary support from first world countries and mega corps principally dependant on it. In particular, my libraries and national security concerns. The US government has its underwear in a bunch over various Chinese sources hardware, but continues to let a bunch of hobbyists maintain the software. I almost think it is time to hold these massive orgs accountable by merging targeted vulnerabilities and performance bombs unless they start paying up. Microsoft and other monopolized software companies have no issue using whatever tactics are necessary to shale the revenue from software dependent/ addicted orgs.
- not2b 2y ago
  Most Linux kernel contributors are professionals who are paid for their work. They aren't hobbyists. However, there are quite a few critically important tools and libraries that are essentially maintained by a volunteer as a hobby, and yes, that's a risk.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Hence the observation that "single-maintainer projects (or subsystems, or packages) will be seen as risky".
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    There are trillions of dollars of budgeted organizations dependent on Linux. I'm talking about serious hundreds of millions funded foundations on par with windows at least to some scale. The US government should get forking over tens of millions. Hell, it should be part of the AWS contract with the government that they fund Linux foundation that tune. Everyone crying over some reputation smear on Linux programmers are missing the goddamn point, especially on the desktop front. If the US wants to continue to have wide open vulnerable consumer networks, then I guess windows will make us fundamentally vulnerable. The US military needs a consumer tier secure Linux desktop. And if rather it wasn't android corporate spyware because otherwise that is what we are getting. I guess I just answered my question. Android for everyone.
- nindalf 2y ago
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
> Meanwhile, we will see more focused efforts to create truly free generative AI systems, perhaps including the creation of one or more foundations to support the creation of the models I understand this will be free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom... but if it's also free-as-in-"we downloaded a bunch of copyrighted material without paying for it" then I have no interest in using it myself. I am not sure there even is enough free-as-in-ethical stuff to build a useful LLM. (I am aware people are trying, maybe they've had success and I missed it.)
- reaperducer 2y ago
  free-as-in-"we downloaded a bunch of copyrighted material without paying for it" That's "free-as-in-load."
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  I don't think blindly abiding to copyright is the higher moral instance here, even if it's the law. Knowledge wants to be free, and the way AIs need to be trained now is a sign that copyright laws have become unreasonably restrictive and commercialized. Not only AIs should be allowed to train on pirated content, humans should too. Copyright laws need to be scaled back so that creators are protected for a reasonable period, but humanity is not gated out of its culture for decades. The cheaper culture distribution has become, the harsher copyright laws have evolved.
divbzero 2y ago
> we will see more focused efforts to create truly free generative AI systems, perhaps including the creation of one or more foundations to support the creation of the models What are the biggest barriers to making this a reality? The training data or the processing power? Which open-source projects, if any, are the farthest along in this effort?
- guappa 2y ago
  The costs in hardware and electricity are incredible. To do the same as the big companies are doing is impossible, there is no funding to achieve it. The question is if it's needed at all to get good results. Also the big companies have many lawyers so they feel confident to systematically violate copyright, but a smaller entity could probably not afford the same risk.
- brianbest101 2y ago
  [dead]
BirAdam 2y ago
Didn’t the leader of the kernel rust team resign in September?
- mustache_kimono 2y ago
  One of the maintainers, Wedson, did, but Rust for Linux still has plenty of other developers and maintainers, and lots of momentum behind it. See: https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainers.html#rust https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainers.html#rust
throwaway2037 2y ago
> the launch of one or more foundations aimed specifically at providing support for maintainers Doesn't Red Hat (and other similar companies) already fulfill this role?
- usr1106 2y ago
  There are many widely used open source components without a maintainer who is allowed to work on them (enough) during paid working time.
vivzkestrel 2y ago
hey OP what were your predictions for 2024, mind sharing here?
- ranger207 2y ago
  Their predictions for 2024 were reviewed for accuracy here: https://lwn.net/Articles/1002368/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1002368/
- guappa 2y ago
  OP isn't the author.
SoftTalker 2y ago
sched-ext sounds interesting. Anyone doing any work with it? Wondering if it's one of those things that sounds cool but probably is only suitable in some very specific use cases.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/LAVD-Scheduler-Linux-Gaming https://www.phoronix.com/news/LAVD-Scheduler-Linux-Gaming seems like a real use
anshulbhide 2y ago
> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does. We depend on our developers to contribute their own work and to stand behind it; large language models cannot do that. A project that discovers such code in its repository may face the unpleasant prospect of reverting significant changes. A lot of companies are going to discover in 2025. Also, a major product company is going to find LLM-generated code that might have been trained on OSS code, and their compliance team is going to throw a fit.
ekianjo 2y ago
> Distributions for mobile devices will see a resurgence in interest in the coming year. They must have missed the news about divestos closing shop
kunley 2y ago
Love the note on rejecting ai-generated code and about the alleged authors who don't understand what the code does.
openrisk 2y ago
Overwhelming fraction of comments focus on the "AI contributed code" while back to reality: > Global belligerence will make itself felt in our community. The world as a whole does not appear to be headed in a peaceful direction If the geopolitical landscape continues deteriorating the tech universe as we knew it will cease to exist. Fragmentation is already a reality in egregious cases but the dynamic could become much more prevalent.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  Kinda depends on what you mean exactly. For example, open source world will likely not be affected aside from a few cases like the Russian Linux developers. Neither China nor Russia are likely to completely block access to internet and developers won't have any incentives to do isolate themselves.
  - openrisk 2y ago
    That sounds quite optimistic. It doesn't take complete blocking before there are significant implications. There are many aspects to consider, from more friction in getting access to distribution channels to the more fundamental "forking" of initiatives and visions. This might be already happening to some degree but is hard to quantify.
    - The_Colonel 2y ago
      > It doesn't take complete blocking before there are significant implications. Mostly for consumers. Advanced users in e.g. China (likely in Russia as well) use VPNs routinely already. > from more friction in getting access to distribution channels to the more fundamental "forking" of initiatives and visions What's in it for the devs/companies to fork just because of the geopolitical situation? A fork means more work, more costs. In some cases, like the Linux kernel, Russian companies (Baikal) are forced to fork, but I don't seem them doing this on a massive scale for projects where they don't have to. I think there is some parallel development going on in China, but that's more because of the language/cultural barrier and has always been so, so I don't expect a major change.
deleted 2y ago
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spjt 2y ago
> single-maintainer projects (or subsystems, or packages) will be seen as risky I would actually see a single-maintainer project as less risky. Looking at the XZ backdoor issue in particular, nobody even knows who the person is that introduced it. With a single-maintainer project, you only have to trust one person, who is often a known quantity.
lionkor 2y ago
> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code After a code review, at least the reviewer should know the feature well enough to maintain it. This is, at least in my experience, the main part of the job of the reviewer at the time of review: Understand what the code does, why it does it, how it does it, such that you agree with it as if it's code you've written. If major projects merge code because "lgtm" is taken literally, then they have been merging bogus code before LLMs.
jbarrow 2y ago
> There will be more cloud-based products turned to bricks by manufacturers that go bankrupt or simply stop caring. This one feels like a gimme. The recent Garmin outage that partially bricked the Connect app was a bit of a surprise; so much of what Garmin Connect does _should be_ local to the phone. Plus it's a free service (after you've paid for the device). "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" doesn't only apply to media/digital goods, but a lot of hardware at this point. :/
steeleduncan 2y ago
> global belligerence will make itself felt in our community Sadly this has already happened. The Israel/Palestine situation was frequently referenced during the bitterest arguments in the NixOS community governance issues last year
motohagiography 2y ago
> Another XZ-like backdoor attempt will come to light. it may not. if I discovered an operation like this, I'd probably find a way to prove it and then set up a monero wallet and say it's going to cost the creepy agency whoever they are $100k USD a month to not publish. there are others who say this has already happened.
deleted 2y ago
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sebazzz 2y ago
On the single maintainer subject: I wonder if there has been precedent that a single maintainer of a library has been treatened or corrupted by a state level actor to incorporate certain code?
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"The OpenWrt One, which hit the market in 2024, quickly sold out its initial production run." But have its distributors sold out their inventory from this initial production run. For example, https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807609464530.html?spm=5261.promotion_single_products.table.1.f12115d1lh4qRV&gatewayAdapt=glo2usa https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807609464530.html?spm=526... NB. The 2.5GbE and Wi-Fi firmware are not open source
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795779282.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795779282.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007870205805.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007870205805.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008112786213.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008112786213.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007826746106.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007826746106.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007827097740.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007827097740.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795557607.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795557607.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008352147850.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008352147850.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008394714162.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008394714162.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008292548739.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008292548739.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008344848967.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008344848967.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008301213347.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008301213347.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008193932681.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008193932681.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008295761196.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008295761196.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008295538495.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008295538495.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007803789952.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007803789952.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008339442242.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008339442242.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007803843791.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007803843791.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007801015292.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007801015292.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008289198947.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008289198947.html

258 points by signa11 2y ago

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does. Not to detract from this point, but I don’t think I understand what half the code I have written does if it’s been more than a month since I wrote it…

WaitWaitWha 2y ago
I am confident that you do understand it at time of writing. > We depend on our developers to contribute their own work and to stand behind it; large language models cannot do that. A project that discovers such code in its repository may face the unpleasant prospect of reverting significant changes. At time of writing and commit, I am certain you "stand behind" your code. I think the author refers to the new script kiddies of the AI time. Many do not understand what the AI spits out at time of copy/paste.
- ozim 2y ago
  Sounds a lot like bashing copy pasting from StackOverflow. So also like old argument “kids these days”. No reasonable company pipes stuff directly to prod you still have some code review an d QA. So doesn’t matter if you copy from SO without understanding or LLM generates code that you don’t understand. Both are bad but still happen and world didn’t crash.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    LLM can generate a larger chunk of code then you'll find on SO, so I think it's a larger issue to have LLM code then copy-pasted SO code.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > LLM can generate a larger chunk of code then you'll find on SO, so I think it's a larger issue to have LLM code then copy-pasted SO code. It also generates code customized to your request, so there is temptation to avoid doing even the minimal work of "how do I turn this SO snippet into something that works with my program?"
    - seanw444 2y ago
      I also think that it would be a nightmare to properly review a large PR of exclusively AI code. If you take the time to understand what it's doing, and find as many little bugs and edge cases as possible, you may as well have just written it yourself.
    - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      agreement here - As a normal rule somebody copied code from SO after searching for - unique identifier generator in JavaScript - and the code that was the top answer might not be 100% understandable to them but most of it and it doesn't do anything that is extremely weird. When asked what does that bit of code do they probably say it's the unique id generator. Somebody might ask AI write a login module in JavaScript, inside of that will be a unique identifier generator - what does that bit of code do when asked they reply hmm, not sure, it's from ChatGPT.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > Sounds a lot like bashing copy pasting from StackOverflow. Which is also very clearly unacceptable. If you just paste code from SO without even understanding what it does, you have fucked up just as hard as if you paste code from an LLM without understanding it.
  - bitmasher9 2y ago
    > No reasonable company pipes stuff directly to prod I’ve definitely worked at places where the time gap between code merge and prod deployment is less than an hour, and no human QA process occurs before code is servicing customers. This approach has risks and rewards, and is one of many reasonable approaches.
    - stcroixx 2y ago
      Yes, I've worked on small teams of highly experienced people where code reviews may only happen a couple times a year for the purpose of knowledge transfer. This is how I've seen it work on what I would consider the most critical and best performing code I've been exposed to. High volume, high stakes stuff in finance and health care.
  - thayne 2y ago
    It's not very common for people to do drive-by pull requests that just copy code from Stack Overflow on open source projects. I've already started seeing that with LLM generated code. And yeah, hopefully the problems with it are caught, but it wastes the maintainers time and drives maintainer Burnout.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
elcritch 2y ago
Well LLM generated code doesn't often work for non-trivial code or cases that aren't re-hashed a million times like fizzbuzz. So I find it almost always requires going through the code to understand it in order to find "oh the LLM's statistical pattern matching made up this bit here". I've been using Claude lately and it's pretty great for translating code from other languages. But in a few bits it just randomly swapped to variables or plain forgot to do something, etc.
dehrmann 2y ago
Ah, yes. The good old "what idiot wrote this?" experience.
- Ntrails 2y ago
  Don't forget the revelation 2 weeks later when you realise immediate past you should've trusted deep past you instead of assuming he'd somehow got wiser in the intervening months. Instead intermediate past you broke things properly because they forgot about the edge deep past you was cautiously avoiding
kstenerud 2y ago
I can always understand code I wrote even decades ago, but only because I use descriptive names, and strategic comments to describe why I'm using a particular approach, or to describe an API. If I fail to do that, it takes a lot of effort to remember what's going on.
anonzzzies 2y ago
I have heard that before and never understood that; I understand code I wrote 40 years ago fine. I have issues understanding code by others, but my own I understand no matter when it was written. Of course others don't understand my code until they dive in and, like me theirs, forget how it works weeks after. I do find all my old code, even from yesterday, total shite and it should be rewritten, but probably never will be.

dgfitz 2y ago

Ignoring all the points made, this was a very pleasant reading experience. Not ignoring the points made, I cannot put my finger on where LLMs land in 2025. I do not think any sort of AGI type of phenomenon will happen.

tkgally 2y ago
Yes, it was a good read. As someone with no direct connection to Linux or open-source development, I was surprised to find myself reading to the end. And near the end I found this comment particularly wise: > The world as a whole does not appear to be headed in a peaceful direction; even if new conflicts do not spring up, the existing ones will be enough to affect the development community. Developers from out-of-favor parts of the world may, again, find themselves excluded, regardless of any personal culpability they may have for the evil actions of their governments or employers.

isaiahwp 2y ago

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does. "Oh Machine Spirit, I call to thee, let the God-Machine breathe half-life unto thy data flow and help me comprehend thy secrets."

merksoftworks 2y ago
That's how ye' get yerself Tzeench'd
bodge5000 2y ago
And they told me laptop-safe sacred oils and a massive surplus of red robes were a "bad investment", look who's laughing now

kirubakaran 2y ago

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code My friend works at a well-known tech company in San Francisco. He was reviewing his junior team member's pull request. When asked what a chunk of code did, the team member matter-of-factly replied "I don't know, chatgpt wrote that"

hardbants 2y ago
[dead]
deadbabe 2y ago
I hope that junior engineer was reprimanded or even put on a PIP instead of just having the reviewer say lgtm and approve the request.
- WaxProlix 2y ago
  Probably depends a lot on the team culture. Depending on what part of the product lifecycle you're on (proving a concept, rushing to market, scaling for the next million TPS, moving into new verticals,...) and where the team currently is, it makes a lot of sense to generate more of the codebase by AI. Write some decent tests, commit, move on. I wish my reports would use more AI tools for parts of our codebase that don't need a high bar of scrutiny, boilerplate at enterprise scale is a major source of friction and - tbh - burnout.
  - bradly 2y ago
    Yes and the team could be missing structures to support junior engineers. What made them not ask for help or pairing is really important to dig in to and I would expect a senior manager to understand this and be introspective on what environment they have created where this human made this choice.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - 2y ago

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Linux will politically continue to fail to extract needed monetary support from first world countries and mega corps principally dependant on it. In particular, my libraries and national security concerns. The US government has its underwear in a bunch over various Chinese sources hardware, but continues to let a bunch of hobbyists maintain the software. I almost think it is time to hold these massive orgs accountable by merging targeted vulnerabilities and performance bombs unless they start paying up. Microsoft and other monopolized software companies have no issue using whatever tactics are necessary to shale the revenue from software dependent/ addicted orgs.

not2b 2y ago
Most Linux kernel contributors are professionals who are paid for their work. They aren't hobbyists. However, there are quite a few critically important tools and libraries that are essentially maintained by a volunteer as a hobby, and yes, that's a risk.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Hence the observation that "single-maintainer projects (or subsystems, or packages) will be seen as risky".
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  There are trillions of dollars of budgeted organizations dependent on Linux. I'm talking about serious hundreds of millions funded foundations on par with windows at least to some scale. The US government should get forking over tens of millions. Hell, it should be part of the AWS contract with the government that they fund Linux foundation that tune. Everyone crying over some reputation smear on Linux programmers are missing the goddamn point, especially on the desktop front. If the US wants to continue to have wide open vulnerable consumer networks, then I guess windows will make us fundamentally vulnerable. The US military needs a consumer tier secure Linux desktop. And if rather it wasn't android corporate spyware because otherwise that is what we are getting. I guess I just answered my question. Android for everyone.
nindalf 2y ago

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

> Meanwhile, we will see more focused efforts to create truly free generative AI systems, perhaps including the creation of one or more foundations to support the creation of the models I understand this will be free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom... but if it's also free-as-in-"we downloaded a bunch of copyrighted material without paying for it" then I have no interest in using it myself. I am not sure there even is enough free-as-in-ethical stuff to build a useful LLM. (I am aware people are trying, maybe they've had success and I missed it.)

reaperducer 2y ago
free-as-in-"we downloaded a bunch of copyrighted material without paying for it" That's "free-as-in-load."
ASalazarMX 2y ago
I don't think blindly abiding to copyright is the higher moral instance here, even if it's the law. Knowledge wants to be free, and the way AIs need to be trained now is a sign that copyright laws have become unreasonably restrictive and commercialized. Not only AIs should be allowed to train on pirated content, humans should too. Copyright laws need to be scaled back so that creators are protected for a reasonable period, but humanity is not gated out of its culture for decades. The cheaper culture distribution has become, the harsher copyright laws have evolved.

divbzero 2y ago

> we will see more focused efforts to create truly free generative AI systems, perhaps including the creation of one or more foundations to support the creation of the models What are the biggest barriers to making this a reality? The training data or the processing power? Which open-source projects, if any, are the farthest along in this effort?

guappa 2y ago
The costs in hardware and electricity are incredible. To do the same as the big companies are doing is impossible, there is no funding to achieve it. The question is if it's needed at all to get good results. Also the big companies have many lawyers so they feel confident to systematically violate copyright, but a smaller entity could probably not afford the same risk.
brianbest101 2y ago
[dead]

BirAdam 2y ago

Didn’t the leader of the kernel rust team resign in September?

mustache_kimono 2y ago
One of the maintainers, Wedson, did, but Rust for Linux still has plenty of other developers and maintainers, and lots of momentum behind it. See: https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainers.html#rust https://docs.kernel.org/process/maintainers.html#rust

throwaway2037 2y ago

> the launch of one or more foundations aimed specifically at providing support for maintainers Doesn't Red Hat (and other similar companies) already fulfill this role?

usr1106 2y ago
There are many widely used open source components without a maintainer who is allowed to work on them (enough) during paid working time.

vivzkestrel 2y ago

hey OP what were your predictions for 2024, mind sharing here?

ranger207 2y ago
Their predictions for 2024 were reviewed for accuracy here: https://lwn.net/Articles/1002368/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1002368/
guappa 2y ago
OP isn't the author.

SoftTalker 2y ago

sched-ext sounds interesting. Anyone doing any work with it? Wondering if it's one of those things that sounds cool but probably is only suitable in some very specific use cases.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
https://www.phoronix.com/news/LAVD-Scheduler-Linux-Gaming https://www.phoronix.com/news/LAVD-Scheduler-Linux-Gaming seems like a real use

anshulbhide 2y ago

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does. We depend on our developers to contribute their own work and to stand behind it; large language models cannot do that. A project that discovers such code in its repository may face the unpleasant prospect of reverting significant changes. A lot of companies are going to discover in 2025. Also, a major product company is going to find LLM-generated code that might have been trained on OSS code, and their compliance team is going to throw a fit.

ekianjo 2y ago

> Distributions for mobile devices will see a resurgence in interest in the coming year. They must have missed the news about divestos closing shop

kunley 2y ago

Love the note on rejecting ai-generated code and about the alleged authors who don't understand what the code does.

openrisk 2y ago

Overwhelming fraction of comments focus on the "AI contributed code" while back to reality: > Global belligerence will make itself felt in our community. The world as a whole does not appear to be headed in a peaceful direction If the geopolitical landscape continues deteriorating the tech universe as we knew it will cease to exist. Fragmentation is already a reality in egregious cases but the dynamic could become much more prevalent.

The_Colonel 2y ago
Kinda depends on what you mean exactly. For example, open source world will likely not be affected aside from a few cases like the Russian Linux developers. Neither China nor Russia are likely to completely block access to internet and developers won't have any incentives to do isolate themselves.
- openrisk 2y ago
  That sounds quite optimistic. It doesn't take complete blocking before there are significant implications. There are many aspects to consider, from more friction in getting access to distribution channels to the more fundamental "forking" of initiatives and visions. This might be already happening to some degree but is hard to quantify.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    > It doesn't take complete blocking before there are significant implications. Mostly for consumers. Advanced users in e.g. China (likely in Russia as well) use VPNs routinely already. > from more friction in getting access to distribution channels to the more fundamental "forking" of initiatives and visions What's in it for the devs/companies to fork just because of the geopolitical situation? A fork means more work, more costs. In some cases, like the Linux kernel, Russian companies (Baikal) are forced to fork, but I don't seem them doing this on a massive scale for projects where they don't have to. I think there is some parallel development going on in China, but that's more because of the language/cultural barrier and has always been so, so I don't expect a major change.

deleted 2y ago

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spjt 2y ago

> single-maintainer projects (or subsystems, or packages) will be seen as risky I would actually see a single-maintainer project as less risky. Looking at the XZ backdoor issue in particular, nobody even knows who the person is that introduced it. With a single-maintainer project, you only have to trust one person, who is often a known quantity.

lionkor 2y ago

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code After a code review, at least the reviewer should know the feature well enough to maintain it. This is, at least in my experience, the main part of the job of the reviewer at the time of review: Understand what the code does, why it does it, how it does it, such that you agree with it as if it's code you've written. If major projects merge code because "lgtm" is taken literally, then they have been merging bogus code before LLMs.

jbarrow 2y ago

> There will be more cloud-based products turned to bricks by manufacturers that go bankrupt or simply stop caring. This one feels like a gimme. The recent Garmin outage that partially bricked the Connect app was a bit of a surprise; so much of what Garmin Connect does _should be_ local to the phone. Plus it's a free service (after you've paid for the device). "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" doesn't only apply to media/digital goods, but a lot of hardware at this point. :/

steeleduncan 2y ago

> global belligerence will make itself felt in our community Sadly this has already happened. The Israel/Palestine situation was frequently referenced during the bitterest arguments in the NixOS community governance issues last year

motohagiography 2y ago

> Another XZ-like backdoor attempt will come to light. it may not. if I discovered an operation like this, I'd probably find a way to prove it and then set up a monero wallet and say it's going to cost the creepy agency whoever they are $100k USD a month to not publish. there are others who say this has already happened.

deleted 2y ago

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sebazzz 2y ago

On the single maintainer subject: I wonder if there has been precedent that a single maintainer of a library has been treatened or corrupted by a state level actor to incorporate certain code?

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"The OpenWrt One, which hit the market in 2024, quickly sold out its initial production run." But have its distributors sold out their inventory from this initial production run. For example, https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807609464530.html?spm=5261.promotion_single_products.table.1.f12115d1lh4qRV&gatewayAdapt=glo2usa https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807609464530.html?spm=526... NB. The 2.5GbE and Wi-Fi firmware are not open source

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
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