It’s perfectly ok to use a new tool to do your work faster, more efficiently, and with greater precision if these improvements are justified by the cost of the tool. But if that tool is a coal-fired, water hoarding, ophan crushing, billionaire-owned kleptobot, your results need to be better than pure gold to be worth the true cost of using it.
I don’t care about Linus, Stallman’s opinion is the interesting one.
Linus become like one of the boomers excited by some dumb ai slop on Facebook
But worse he doesn’t care about how unethical is the present ai
I lost respect for this guy
Yeah, but your compiler wasn’t made with massive copyright infringement, stealing much needed water and rampant corruption, was it?
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.
I guess Linus doesn’t care about the environment or any of the other issues surrounding A.I. I’m not anti-AI just for the sake of being anti-AI. I have a huge problem with AI bcz of it’s environmental impacts, intellectual property violations, job impacts, attempts to replace all employees with AI, the general dumbing down of society and worse off the internet is bcz of AI, the surveillance state being built around it. I could go on, but you get the point. I am a staunch, no AI person bcz of all those reasons and a hundred more.
This isn’t an age thing, or a, I am getting older and Im stubborn thing. AI is literally ruining the planet and everything on it, and this guy thinks we should just accept that.
I say fuck off with that noise, I don’t have e to accept anything.
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Conversations on this subject will continue to stagnate and miss the important points as long as people continue to act like the discussion of ethics is the same as the discussion of efficacy. People who disagree with AI on a principle of its impacts being negative will often call it “a lying machine which is regularly wrong and offers no utility”.
May I suggest that people with criticisms of the ethics and impact of AI take a charitable position towards the utility offered by AI. Accept something along the lines of a positive account given by an experienced software engineer - it’s useful, it presents risks but also it presents new ways to get certain work done well in much less time etc.
Even if you do not believe this, the point is it is a much more ambiguous argument than the ethical argument or the concerns over the impact of AI on the species, environment or society. You weaken those arguments by putting them along side poorly justified, somewhat falsifiable claims that AI just doesn’t work.
LLM is like a compiler? Then please replace the C sources with English and let it compile!
I’m finding the allure of AI is particularly strong for people who have risen to positions of power where they had to stop doing the work themselves. Instead, they had to work through other people to get bigger projects done.
The allure is that you can just say what you want done, and it does it. If it’s done it “wrong” you can just tell it it’s wrong and not have to worry about arguing the technical differences. As such you feel like you get closer to what you wanted, rather than somebody else’s take on what you wanted.
The things is, when you are removed from the code, you can only work at a high level. That person you asked to do something is considering 10 other low level concerns that you didn’t consider. I think Linus’s recent patch series is a good example. He saw a potential optimisation, did a proof of concept but missed a race condition. He’s now handed it over to the person that normally works in that area and knows the details. Can the optimisation actually work? Who knows?
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I feel about ai like i feel about cars. 90% of the idiots out there drive really poorly, but that doesn’t mean responsible people are smart to never drive a car. Same with AI, overwhelming majority of people are using AI incorrectly, i.e. recklessly dangerously, but that doesn’t mean responsible people should never use it.
Does Linus support steaming artwork and a fascist surveillance state? Because using and supporting and entrenching the technology use is exactly that.
I’m no expert but a compiler does not equal and LLM built on stolen data
I think he’s kinda right in that competent engineers can write good code using LLMs. I don’t know whether they’re actually more productive that way though. The problem lies in the fact that incompetent engineers can write a lot of bad, but good-looking code using LLMs, which might be a pretty big burden on the maintainers.
Also, comparing LLMs to compilers doesn’t really work in my opinion. Compilers follow strict rules and translate one kind of logic into a different kind of logic, while LLMs turn natural language and vague notions into some kind of logic. Writing code is telling the computer precisely what it should do and prompting is vaguely telling it what end result you want and those are two fundamentally different things.
