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.
I agree. Most actual technical professionals agree. AI has long existed in some form before tech bros in silicon valley turned it into a SaaS. It’s just the fediverse is filled with a bunch of anarchists obsessed with Loli anime, and to them chaos and a return to medieval age is their best chance of living out their child loving fantasies.
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’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 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 think there’s a big difference between
A. Expecting people to pay you and give you credit for something AI made for you
vs
B. Playing with AI and if it spits out something you like a lot you keep it to yourself unless someone else specifically asks you to show it to them.
It’s basically masturbation.
People are gonna do it to themselves and enjoy it but if you try to show me that shit without my consent we are not going to be friends.
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
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.
I agree. Most actual technical professionals agree. AI has long existed in some form before tech bros in silicon valley turned it into a SaaS. It’s just the fediverse is filled with a bunch of anarchists obsessed with Loli anime, and to them chaos and a return to medieval age is their best chance of living out their child loving fantasies.
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.
AI is inherently bad. It might be useful, but their externalities are quite inherent to it.
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
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.
It’s the same as people saying not to use calcs or Wikipedia, new times same issues.
But we very much do enforce times on when not to use calcs. Thars the whole point here.
I think there’s a big difference between
A. Expecting people to pay you and give you credit for something AI made for you
vs
B. Playing with AI and if it spits out something you like a lot you keep it to yourself unless someone else specifically asks you to show it to them.
It’s basically masturbation.
People are gonna do it to themselves and enjoy it but if you try to show me that shit without my consent we are not going to be friends.
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:
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.