Lawyer-turned-software-developer reporting in! (American, to be clear…)
My concern with AI generated code has to do with software licensing. Mainly…. What is the license of AI generated code??? What if it regurgitates entire sections of proprietary code? Unless I’ve totally missed some legal/tech news, these questions are FAR from settled.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills sometimes, but that seems like something the Linux kernel community should be at least mildly curious about….
Look, to be fair, maybe they are! I don’t follow the kernel mailing list; I don’t know what they talk about. I’m just a humble backend developer/infrastructure guy.
But I know it worries me… personally, I mostly use LLMs in my own work via asking questions about code I’ve already written. Then I look at suggestions it’s made, or potential issues it points out, and decide what to do accordingly. But that’s just me!
Software licensing is dead, you should really catch up because what are even talking about.
If it regurgitates proprietary code the model should not have had access to for training data… well…
Unironically a AI’s biggest win. Absolutely fair criticism on art and weak imitations of human creativity, but code is just math with syntactic sugar. “Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time. What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation? What if printers just worked? What if you could put adblockers on any device? What if every online game could be self hosted and modded? AI is (for the moment) giving an approximation of that timeline and I’m here for it.
What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation?
That’s apple’s decision, one of many to force their users to only get their devices, similarly not being able to host your own game servers benefits the publishers/ devs.
“Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
Not any different from protecting one’s art creations. You spend a bunch of time learning how to code and are doing it for a living so you don’t want others/ competition to take it and sell as their own. Not sure what’s hard to understand.
But what about the poor corporations making money off those games that already fired all the devs that made it after overworking them?
Until Claude can diagnose and treat Kent Overstreet for whatever neurospicy killed bcachefs, I will never trust it blindly. It just does things faster. Sometimes it breaks things faster, other times is finds things ready to be broken faster.
apparently many people’s stance on ai is “ai is bad unless my idol uses it”. there is not intellectual discipline, suddenly they are willing to ignore all the other problems with ai: jod lose, excessive energy use, training on stolen data, preying on vulnerable people, exacerbate wealth inequality and concentration of power. and let’s not forget the ones that apply specifically to Linus: diskilling and ai psychosis.
“b-but linus reviews his code!” 🤦
Linus Torvalds has fucking lost it.
Going from chewing out someone for committing dumb AI code to becoming an AI techbro himself. How the mighty have fallen.
I see the “unless my idol uses it / unless someone good uses it” as a deeply human thing. For me it’s the other side of the coin from not harming oneself in discussion, even if a valid point was brought up.
Few great people do that.
Here’s mine: the world would be a much, much better place if LLMs did not exist. Also, it would be stupid–today–to not use LLMs to find flaws in the Linux kernel. The only other option is to get your machines compromised.
And conversely, many people seem to have a “the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus” stance.
Many people on Lemmy will start to crash out the moment you suggest AI is anything other than pure evil
It’s not the algorithms people oppose, it’s the way they are trained within a capitalist system (infringement of many copyrights without compensation), they way they are being marketed as a living mind that can basically befriend us and take a mental load off of us (they can’t and it’s problematic to humans who allow them to try), and they way they’re being used an excuse to buy up the wntire world’s capacity for computing so that rich tech oligarchs can force us all onto the cloud services for all computing in the future.
I think if at the very least they weren’t bulldozing people’a home and poisoning their drinking water in order to forever capture all technology and then rent it back to us we might have a more favorable view of the possibilities, but so far Big Tech has done almost nothing but try to find ways to make individuals and enterprise addicted to their Mechanical Turk in order to take advantage of us.
Please tell me about how you were poisoned.
I haven’t been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it’s gradually getting a bit better here. There’s still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I’ve been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it’s just naturally getting more diverse.
Nope.
The crucial fact here is: like it or not, Linus decides what Linux is. As we’ve done for 30+ years, we decide whether we accept his project as-is. Otherwise, we move on.
It doesn’t get more complicated.
No one decides what linux is. Linux is literally open source. You have no idea what open source means if you think open source means one person owns Linux.
Just because it’s open source it doesn’t mean there’s not a person or group of people deciding what happens to the ‘main’/‘upstream’ version of it.
Sure you can fork it, and remove all AI contributions, but who will use your fork?
When people say “the Linux kernel”, they mean the version maintained by Linus Torvalds. They might mean a fork for a specific SoC or manufacturer or distro, but those are all just the Linux Kernel maintained by Linus Torvalds plus a few patch sets. There’s no considerable divergence.
Linus’ stance was initially “no AI written code”. And he does have final say in what goes into the repo he maintains. Now he’s changed that tune, he allows AI written code, and no matter how many forks you make to strip it out… what matters is Linus’ upstream.
Sure you can fork it, and remove all AI contributions, but who will use your fork?
This actually should be done. Let there be options. But the human fork won’t magically return you to the previous world of no-AI. AI will still audit it and find vulnerabilities humans can’t. Time will tell which version prevails, but I think at best the human fork will have only a niche use. Perhaps in education.
Linus has decided what Linux is & isn’t since forever. It has his fucking name on it for a reason. Linus decided Linux means AI code so Linux has AI code now. No way around it. We can only pick until a specific version of the kernel when no LLM was used but after that the future Linux Kernelf will forever have LLM code in them.
No distro is going to stop using new kernels, everyone downstream is essentially powerless on this decision. The Linux Foundation is HUGE compared to 90% of the distro’s workforce (volunteers). Only IBM & Canonical surpass it & they are NOT going to maintain the next Linux fork for the next 30 years.
Likuc maens AI code now and for the foreseeable future. To my demise.
Your read on that was very different than mine.
Linus controls Linux. Anyone who disagrees with how he runs it is free to fork it because the source is open.
But good luck maintaining a Linux kernel fork for any length of time unless you’ve got lots of contributors lined up and a solid maintenance structure ready to deploy. It worked with LibreOffice and OpenJDK, but it’s failed with far more projects than it’s succeeded with.
It’s like there’s nuance that deserves to be acknowledged or something. Weird.
I don’t like him and I don’t like AI.
Ai isn’t going away… It’s like a nuclear arms race. The government won’t let it go away… They need it and will do anything locally and globally to solidify ai (and digitizing life) as the modern foundation of governing.
If people don’t want ai, they should be completely boycotting their nations. Votes don’t reach this level of need. “Need” as in the government would even sacrifices its own people to reach the goal. For all we know it’s the whole reason America had trump as president… So they could distract and implement the social and psychological strategy of easing into the upcoming modern foundation.
It’s not just “the government won’t let it go away.” Users won’t let it go away.
I find AI to be incredibly useful for running my coding agent, for example. I run it myself on a local machine. Every AI company on Earth could go bankrupt tomorrow and I’d keep on chugging away with it. Lots of other enthusiasts and smaller companies making use of it would do likewise.
I am sure out of all projects Linux has the expertise and guardrails to ensure LLM generated code works as expected
Exactly! It’s a tool that creates slop with an untrained hand. With a trained professional hand who reviews the work it’s just a helper.
Huzzah! Saurman it’s finally using the seeing stone! He’s such a wise old wizard. He’ll be able to see the future and help us choose the right path. This could never go wrong or cause any ethics issue or anything!
they should change the name to LinAIux
I like the spirit, but this is a pretty hamfisted pun. Doesn’t Lainux make more sense?
“model” means “mode”, not LLM here:
He therefore hopes that the unusually large number of commits “is a sign that the AI fixes are becoming more part of the ‘normal development’ than a flood of fixes that go into the whole stabilization phase."
“I think that’s a much healthier model,” he added, before hedging with the observation that “people are expecting 7.4 to be the next LTS [long-term support] release, which is another independent reason why some releases tend larger than others.”
