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It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well re

• ebbi 6mo ago
  True - on Mastodon there is a very vocal crowd that are against AI in general, and are identifying Linux distros that have AI generated code with the view of boycotting it.
  • lrvick 6mo ago
    Soon they will have to boycott all of them. Then what I wonder?
• cinntaile 6mo ago
  Some people are just against change, that's nothing new. If Linus was like them, he would never have started linux in the first place.
  • goatlover 6mo ago
    Are they against change in general, or certain kinds of change? Remember when social media was seen as near universal good kind of progress? Not so much now.
    • contraposit 6mo ago
      This is like blaming a knife as being a killer weapon. Social media is inherently good if owners of the platforms allow for good interactions to take place. But given the mismatch between incentives alignment, we don't have nice things.
      • dwedge 6mo ago
        Social media is good if owners allow for good is an example of the logical fallacy "begging the question"
        • contraposit 6mo ago
          Also blaming the tool for the crime is some sort of fallacy. I don't know name you can ask AI.
    • cinntaile 6mo ago
      Social media has never been seen as a universal positive force? It's the same with AI. It has good and bad aspects as does any technology that has an impact on this scale, AI will arguably have a much bigger impact imo. People are generally against change that forces them to change the way they used to do things. I'm sure most will have their reasons why they are against this particular change, but I don't think it will affect anything. The genie is out of the bottle, AI is here to stay. You either adapt or you will slowly wither away.
      • dwedge 6mo ago
        It reminds me of something I read on mastodon: "genie doesn't go back in the bottle say AI promoters while the industry spends a trillion dollars a year to try to keep the genie out of the bottle"
        • cinntaile 6mo ago
          Do you think the genie will go back in the bottle and why?
          • matheusmoreira 6mo ago
            It's certainly possible. All that is required is for AIs to become more expensive than humans. Developing projects on a $100 Claude Code subscription is a lot of fun. I bet people would simply go back to hiring human developers if that subscription cost $10,000 instead.
            • lrvick 6mo ago
              Except you can pay $2500 once for a Strix Halo and have your own Claude Code hosted at home for free with unlimited tokens on 400w.
              • matheusmoreira 6mo ago
                Well, I hope you're right. I want to be optimistic about the self-hosted LLMs future. Hope they keep distilling the frontier models until open weight models can match Opus one day. A self-hosted Opus would be amazing.
  • sdevonoes 6mo ago
    Not every change is good, and sometimes we realise too late
    • cinntaile 6mo ago
      What is it that worries you about the change that is happening?
      • cjfd 6mo ago
        All kinds of worries are possible. (1) It turns out that all this AI generated stuff is full of bugs and we go back to traditional software development, creating a giant disinvestment and economic downturn. (2) sofware quality going way down. we cannot produce reliable programs anymore. (3) massive energy use makes it impossible to use sustainable energy sources and we wreck the environment every more than we are currently doing. (4) AIs are in the hands of a few big companies that abuse their power. (5) AI becomes smarter than humans and decides that humans are outdated and kills all of us. It obviously depends on how powerful AI is going to become. These scenarios are mutually exclusive because some assume that AI is actually not very powerful and some assume that it is very powerful. I think one of these things happening is not at all unlikely.
        • rowyourboat 6mo ago
          1 and 2 are really only an issue if you vibe code. There's no reason to expect properly reviewed AI assisted code to be any worse than human written code. In fact, in my experience, using LLMs to do a code review is a great asset - of used in addition to human review
      • intended 6mo ago
        People have measurably lower levels of ownership and understanding of AI generated code. The people using GenAI reap a major time and cognitive effort savings, but the task of verification is shifted to the maintainer. In essence, we get the output without the matching mental structures being developed in humans. This is great if you have nothing left to learn, its not that great if you are a newbie, or have low confidence in your skill. > LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. > https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 > https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
• dxdm 6mo ago
  Sounds dramatic, but it entirely depends on what "many" and "plenty" means in your comment, and who exactly is included. So far, what you wrote can be seen as an expectable level of drama surrounding such projects.
• Luker88 6mo ago
  Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • lrvick 6mo ago
    Meanwhile I expect that intellectual property protections for software are completely unenforceable and effectively useless now. If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it. The playing field is level now, and corpo moats no longer exist. I happily take that trade.
    • Luker88 6mo ago
      Isn't the "corpo moat" bigger now? They can wash the copyright by AI training, but the AIs don't get trained on closed source. "corpo" also has a ton of patents, which still can't be AI-washed. What will become unenforceable are Open Source Licenses exclusively, how does that make it a "level field"?
      • lrvick 6mo ago
        Because AI is also proving to be very good at reverse engineering proprietary binaries or just straight up cloning software from test suites or user interfaces. Cuts both ways.
        • martin-t 6mo ago
          Have you ever seen what obfuscation looks like when somebody puts the effort in? Not to mention companies will try to mandate hardware decryption keys so the binary is encrypted and your AI never even gets to analyze the code which actually runs. It's not sci-fi, it's a natural extension of DRM.
• abc123abc123 6mo ago
  Doesn't matter. Linux today is a toy of corporations and stopped being community oriented a long time ago. Community orientation I think these days only exists among the BSD and some fringe linux distributions. The linux foundation itself, is just one big, woke, leftist mess, with CV-stuffers from corporations in every significant position.
  • simonask 6mo ago
    The idea that something can simultaneously be "woke [and] leftist" and somehow still defined by its attachments to corporations is a baffling expression of how detached from reality the US political discourse is. The rest of the world looks on in wonder at both sides of this.
    • Sharlin 6mo ago
      "I hate corporations and I hate leftists, ergo they must be the same thing"
• Klonoar 6mo ago
  Reads like a “fuck you and I’ll see you tomorrow” threat.
• positron26 6mo ago
  What these hardliners are standing for, I have no idea. If the code passes review, we're just arguing about hues of zeros and ones. "AI" is an attribute that type-erases entirely once an engineer pulls out the useful expressions and whips them into shape. The worst part about all reactionary scares is that, because the behaviors are driven by emotion and feeling as opposed to any intentional course of action, the outcomes are usually counter productive. The current AI scare is exactly what you would want if you are OpenAI. Convince OSS, not to mention "free" software people, to run around dooming and ant milling each other about "AI bad" and pretty soon OSS is a poisonous minefield for any actual open AI, so OSS as a whole just sabotages itself and is mostly out of the fight. I'm currently in the middle of trying to blow straight past this gatekeepy outer layer of the online discourse. What is a bit frustrating is knowing that while the seed will find the niches and begin spreading through invisible channels, in the visible channels, there's going to be all kinds of knee-jerk pushback from these anti-AI hardliners who can't distinguish between local AI and paying Anthropic for a license to use a computer. Worse, they don't care. The social psychosis of being empowered against some "others" is more important. Either that or they are bots. And all of this is on top of what I've been saying for over a year. VRAM efficiency will kill the datacenter overspend. Local, online training will make it so that skilled users get better models over time, on their own data. Consultative AI is the future. I have to remind myself that this entire misstep is a result of a broken information space, late-stage traditional social, filled with people (and "people") who have been programmed for years on performative clap-backs and middling ideas. So fortunate to have some life before internet perspective to lean back on. My instinct and old-world common sense can see a way out, but it is nonetheless frustrating to watch the online discourse essentially blinding itself while doubling down on all this hand wringing to no end, accomplishing nothing more than burning a few witches and salting their own lands. You couldn't want it any better if you were busy entrenching.
• oompydoompy74 6mo ago
  I find the strong anti AI sentiment just as annoying as the strong pro AI sentiment. I hope that the extremes can go scream in their own echo chamber soon, so that the rest of us can get back to building and talking about how to make technology useful.
• beAbU 6mo ago
  It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the woodworking community are to even a single table saw assisted cut making it's way to a piece of furniture, no matter how well designed. Plenty see {{some_woodworker}} as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled table saw cuts is actually allowed to be used in furniture making.
  • agentultra 6mo ago
    There's a stark difference between a table saw and an LLM that weakens this argument. A table saw isn't a probabilistic device.
    • theshrike79 6mo ago
      But I, a woodworker, can immediately see if the piece of wood that came out of the table saw looks like it should. Also I, a programmer, can immediately see whether the "probabilistic device" generated code that looks like it should. Both just let me get to the same result faster with good enough quality for the situation. I can grab a tape measure or calipers and examine the piece of wood I cut on the table saw and check if it has the correct measurements. I can also use automated tests and checks to see that the code produced looks as it should and acts as it should. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Do we really need to care if the duck was generated by an AI?
      • agentultra 6mo ago
        Also I, a programmer, can immediately see whether the "probabilistic device" generated code that looks like it should. I highly doubt that. Empirical studies show that humans have very little effect on error rates when reviewing code. That effect disappears quickly the more code you read. Most programmers are bad at detecting UB and memory ownership and lifetime errors. A piece of wood comes off the table it’s cut or it’s not. Code is far more complex.
        • theshrike79 6mo ago