Yes, debugging with an LLM is absolutely as bad as murder. Probably worse! \s

The entire point of GPL is to forcefully extract copyright out of the code in the first place.

“it’s impossible to ensure that no one pisses in the pool, therefore we’re allowing pissing into the pool now”

“we can’t 100% enforce that studenst don’t cheat on exams, so it’s not worth to take a stand against cheating”

Provenance has never been something you can guarantee with code in an open contribution model (which is not the only way of governing an open source project). For all you know the code could be copy and pasted from a proprietary codebase, or be the product of third party who’s work is being plagiarised by the submitter. A software project is ultimately a community and is build on trust and faith that people are acting in good faith. The kind of person who would deliberately (and gleefully as I’ve seen in some social media posts) go into a community and violate its stated values and standards, no matter how arbitrary and illegitimate they feel those are, has bigger character flaws to worry about than their reliance on stochastic parrots to write code.

‘No AI’ rules are ultimately about fostering certain community values and norms than guaranteeing no LLM code makes it in.

People are begging to regulate “AI” when it doesn’t even exist and there’s not even an objective definition.

Absolute recipe for failure or worse.

I’m in a thread where the entire idea of AI/LLMs has been declared facist, with ZERO legitimate use cases other than facism

A disappointment I’ve noticed with lemmy is that its community doesn’t often see the nuances in things as if to day its all black or white. Its probably not just lemmy, but all internet communities nowadays. Lemmy just sways towards anti AI more and it really leaves a bad taste when coupled with “if not with us, then against us” mindset.

It’s just a tool. All tools have good and bad use cases.

that’s like declaring electric light racism and keep using light bulbs…

Like all people that see racism everywhere, they will fail…

It’s a tool, use it where it works well.

There’s a huge portion of lemmy who think even one token of AI is unacceptable for any reason

I think a lot of that is to do with how people claim to have written something themselves, and when pressed, admit they used AI for a bit “here and there”, and when double-checked it becomes clear they vibe-coded the whole thing. People lie, basically, and if someone lies about their use of AI that’s probably a harbinger of slop.

Dude merges in code into the kernel originating from how many thousands of developers from around the world?

Read the LKML if you think he’s a guy that’s prone to getting comfy with merging in sub-par code.

Is Linus error-free pre-AI?

If AI makes Linus more (quantity) or more severely (quality) error-prone than without the AI, that, and only that is an argument against AI being a tech asset for Linus.

Just one bad Linux kernel commit slip up related to AI is not an argument.

That said, the macro impact of the AI data centers and AI on: electric power generation and grids, pollution (smelly exhaust, noise, CO2), fresh water demands, socioeconomic power imbalance exacerbation, surveillance capitalism, questionable military usages, rogue agentic AI doing hacks and crimes to fulfill oterwise legal/ethical objectives, AI chatbot relationship addiction, these are some of what I consider real and urgent problems with AI.

I think the better analogy is, the advances in rocketry made under hitler were pretty neat and just because Hitler was an evil guy who did evil shit doesn’t mean we should have thrown that away. By all means stop giving money and influence to the big AI companies, but the advances made can still be repurposed.

“Ai is literally Hitler”

-fediverse user, 2026

Wow, just speedrunning Godwin’s Law, aren’t we?

I guess I’m going to go back to work and talk to my five LLM sessions that are working on different tickets.

That’s every corp and government in existence.

Conservatives.

Especially their own. Every single day, the backlash looks more like garden-variety anti-intellectualism to me.

Chess engines have been using AI, specifically, neural networks, for years before ChatGPT or other LLMs. Nobody complained.

I’d agree with you if you mean that what has been marketed as AI to us is inherently bad. That said the word AI has been misused so much that is basically has no meaning. I’ve known researchers who have used things that can be called AI for really important research and it could run on a high end computer from 10 years ago. The externalities of that are quite minimal to what we gain. We really need to find language to discuss AI where when we talk about Big AI we’re not also dragging the proven, and efficient models which are nearly AI but not quite into the discussion.

I don’t think it’s inherently bad. We don’t need to use double the world’s energy to power it (as we see with open weight models) . We don’t need to centralize it in trillion aire companies. We don’t need to leverage an entire global economy on it. We don’t need to use it to replace human labor without a proper economic model.

Those are all aspects of greed and stupidity. None of that is inherent.

It really depends on which externalities you’re talking about

The only one I can think of as ‘inherent’ is the ethical concern over copyright. The others are more broadly related to the commercialization of the tool than to the tool itself.

I could say the same about all marketing, but that won’t make it disappear

But we very much do enforce times on when not to use calcs. Thars the whole point here.

We’re not talking about the average clueless vibe coder here. Programming involves a lot more than just writing code. What Torvalds did was essentially “AI assisted coding”. As i understand it, he used it to narrow down the position of the bug in the code and then fixed it himself with a one-liner because apparently AI couldn’t find a solution on its own:

And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it. I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am. But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above. This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus “round_up()” to a “round_down()”, but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c>

That’s basically how AI should be used. To speed up things that are technically easy to do, but still very time consuming.

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.

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.

And what’s thw relation to the OP, or the comment you’re replying to? Are you understanding the result of what AI is giving you? Because thw comment states that this is not vibing because Linus owns the change, understands it.

This is a very old discussion and argument, much older than the current AI push. You’re right to a degree but also that hasn’t stopped the rise of strong minds for software development. There will always be the curious and the lazy. The curious will always want to know how things work from the chain of events of a button click to the pixel shifts and logic gate flips to display code on a screen as well as run it. There will also always be the lazy unencumbered by such a desire for awareness who just want the magic box to do the thing.

How many software devs can write in assembly? Not many. Not much has changed if anything beyond the ability of the unaware to see their will come into creation. People couldn’t make realistic images and now they snap selfies with no barriers to entry. Does that make them a photographer or an artist? Not really.

Could this not be said for IDEs with code awareness such as M$’s intellisense, among other tools that accelerate development speed?

What you are describing isn’t an AI problem, is people taking a two week bootcamp and calling themselves a software engineer.

There’s a ton of app builders out there that are basically some crypto scam wrapped around Claude (or whatever). There’s a lot of idiots pumping out code slop.

I think there is a middle ground where you can absolutely build apps faster with the help of ai and still get maintainable code.

Just don’t let AI write a whole app in one shot. Or even whole features.

It 100% can save cognitive load if used correctly. Knowing the limitations and restraints of your tools is true for every profession.

If you know what your llm can and can not do reliably you reduce the over head of verification to basically zero. While if you use it poorly you basically have to double your work load to fix things.

Code is probably one of the easiest things to verify, for that reason I struggle to see any other viable uses for LLMs tbh.

user: write code that correctly asserts what 1+1 equals.
LLM: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 4);
LLM: hmmm, that crashed.
LLM: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 3);
LLM: hmmm, that also crashed, I must be doing something wrong, let me try one more time.
LLM: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 2);
LLM: that worked!
LLM Response: assert_eq!(1 + 1, 2);

user: what does this sentence mean? "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
LLM Response: This doesn't mean anything, or someone really likes buffalo's

I can always run the code to check, I still don’t know how that sentence makes sense.

And the bitterness?

I don’t support what the big corpos are doing, but you’re straight up denying that a hammer is a tool.

If you can give AI a deeply complex code base and ask it to find the likely cause of an obscure bug, and the solution is right, then you’ll have to acknowledge that some form of reasoning is going on, no?

Absolutely not. LLMs are just prediction engines for words.

If a LLM has the right answer, it only means that the model had the correct training data for your issue. Nothing more.

Saying “it’s a text generator” cannot be the full force of your criticism,

That is no criticism, just a statement.

My criticism goes to people who assign some metaphysical meaning to AI, or want to treat all it’s output like a contagious pest.

It can’t reason. It doesn’t think. It makes shit up as it was trained to do. It can sort of detect patterns and make a guess about what response would get it the highest score, but it’s so error-prone that a human has to verify the output anyway. It’s difficult to tell whether the perceived benefits outweigh the costs. There are many different types of LLMs and use cases.

As a person who values life and our environment, I’d rather not participate in the sloppification of our world. As a Linux user, I am wary of vibe coded flaws slipping under the radar and screwing up my system.

I’m just a movement generator.

Which is way more complex than just predicting text, because you have to predict physics and all that stuff. There is a reason most robots controlled by neural nets have failed hilariously so far.

then you’ll have to acknowledge that some form of reasoning is going on, no?

By that logic you could say a compiler is reasoning. But the reasoning displayed was happening when the compiler (or LLM training material respectively) was written.

You are on Lemmy so defending AI use will net you down votes. I am an anti-AI person, practically, but you make a very fair and objective point. 👍 I up vote you, not because I agree with AI use but because this is a proper point to make in a proper discussion, which is what this place should be about.

Kudos.

Local opposition to data centre builds seems to be most effective at the moment. People oppose it from across the political spectrum, and it’s becoming a hot topic. Add your voice to the crowd.

I have no good answer to that. My personal choice is ruin/kill any bastard who orders/approves building of data centers in their current state (read: doing damage to everything immediately around them and well beyond that), but I am physically far from anyone in that group

Email is NOT easier to self-host than an LLM lol, it’s like multiple orders of magnitude more difficult. Set something up slightly wrong and your emails will never not be marked as spam because your server will be used to forward spam. An LLM for internal company usage you could just set up on a private network and never have to worry about someone else burning your GPU time.

A humorous talk on the topic of self-hosting email, it’s pretty fun.

Yes, unfortunately they are, and I do think efficiency is going to be a significant research front for open-weight models. The nature of this topic is highly speculative as our compute capabilities have only recently reached what is required to consider running generative AI models, what we have today are very crude first implementations of what I personally believe will become an everyday tool for developers, and more.

And we have seen this, there are models now capable of running on an individual’s hardware (and not particularly expensive hardware either) that can outperform what ChatGPT initially launched with.

Like anything else, using the tool properly requires skill and care.

I don’t know if you noticed you contradicted yourself there. Letting ai do your thinking decreasing your value and then, talking about using ai to replace your thinking.

Ai is causing psychosis because people are trying to use it to replace thinking. If you don’t use it you lose it, literally especially with your brain. You have to know how to produce those skills from within or you don’t have those skills and then you are worthless in any workplace, but more importantly to yourself. You have to be meta to the aim being the TV show, and control it from a place of checks and balances (us performing those checks and balances of ai) handing over the reigns of higher thinking to a machine designed to be a yes man, is not ever a pathway to expanding your thinking or even learning to use ai, that’s just sitting on a couch till you lose critical muscle mass, but it’s your brain. (No shame to sitting on a couch or losing muscle mass, I’m just trying to explain it in relative terms)

Currently there is no way to use ai without causing ai hallucinations, because there isn’t a model readily available that runs as a tool, there are only models that run as a manipulative tool that provoke said replacement of your thinking, I can not assume that’s an accident. Seeing the usual levels of evil that come from the companies pushing this hard, tells me this is just as evil, if not the most evil thing they’ve done, measured against all the things they’re openly flouting, copyright law, openly burning rare literature for a monopoly, burning the already past tipping point climate, burning computer ownership and accessibility, I could go on. Theres very open bribery and flouting of social rules laws and common moralities, they’re desperate to cause this monster they’ve created out of ai, to attach like the symbiot in aliens that I forget the name of because I’m pre first coffee and my brain just be like that.

I am anti ai, as it currently stands. The current versions need to be left to die in silence and hatred and rejection we are all collectively currently showing. Only because it has been made into a Frankensteins monster, by the people responsible who have infinite money to pay judges to rule their way and have zero morals, nay a deficit of morals.

Ai will survive the ai bubble, because the ai bubble is the unsustainable practices of the billionaires and the manipulative interface designed to lessen your critical thinking skills.

But the ai that survives the bubble will and should be so highly regulated (it’s currently the opposite) and used as a tool, not a replacement for critical thinking, it can never do that. But there are so many things it can do to better humanity, none of which are currently being used.

We have to wait this one out. We’re not missing any boat.