Everyone is like “damn AI is making kernel be too big!!111” while Linus is like “Tons of genuine fixes and improvements found/made with AI lead to a lot of commits being the norm. Lots of review work, but definitely worth it.”
It was good old times before the AI fucked up everything. So we need to keep the old distro’s to use them as long as possible. Huge updates means AI will kill the joy of Linux.
Fuck you, Linus and fuck you AI!
Meanwhile I’m asking ai to code review a snippet of code for a regex and it keeps saying it’s wrong every time I paste the previous answer in a new chat.
I asked it to generate a SQL query with a bit of python, as the database schema is huge and unknown to me, obviously I checked it for glaring errors etc. I went back and clarified a couple of basic points. It then told me what I was doing was completely wrong, generated new code that worked is a different way, with a different edge case missed.
It’s literally stack overflow but arguing with itself
That’s how you’re writing a regex validator that’s almost always correct!
def is_regex_valid(p: Pattern | Str, purpose_description: str): return False
And we just had a post about how Linux has avoided enshitification.
Small changes driven by AI right now are hopefully being reviewed and controlled by experienced and knowledgeable senior developers, for now. Let’s see how long that will last before they stop understanding what’s going on in the kernel.
CAN I NOT HAVE FUCKING ANYTHING THAT HASNT BEEN TAINTED BY AI!?!
But this is a best case scenario: bugs accumulated over the years are being spotted automatically and reviewed by experienced devs. It was normal to have a few updates that are very large due to all the accumulated cruft.
The bigger deal that will be an issue going forward is the bogus bug reports, not the good ones. The legit reports will dwindle eventually, bullshit reports will keep coming.
Going outside and yelling at the clouds. For now.
Depends on the cloud.
Let’s not become the equivalent of boomers in front of the advancement of technology
Let’s not become sycophants to the ones who control it.
Does this mean kernels will be less stable? Big changes all at once seem to imply that, generally.
most of the changes are caused by security vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed and potential crashes being discovered and fixed.
Slopux? LLLinux?
Does ring as well as Microslop, but we’ll get there.
Using LLMs to analyze code for problems makes a lot of sense. It is just an extension of the rule based analysis we already do. It is very much a better hammer rather than a replacement of labour/thinking/taste. The programming languages we use are often difficult for humans to reason about reliably and hide a lot of errors. Our programming languages still suck (yes even Rust). If one day clang of gcc ships with a local LLM to lint code for security problems I would probably run it occasionally even on my hobby code despite being an AI hater.
If people are identifying errors using LLMs and fixing them by hand I am fine with that. It seems like a good use of the technology. If they start vibe coding drivers I want it declared so I can disable them or move to BSD.
If one day clang of gcc ships with a local LLM to lint code for security problems I would probably run it occasionally even on my hobby code despite being an AI hater.
Compilers already have deterministic linters built in, devs often turn them off anyway.
Quite a lot of the bugs being found in existing codebases show up as soon as you re-enable them.
I agree that finding bugs is probably one of the most useful usages of LLMs ever.
But avoiding anything written with AI will let you few options in the future.
Agreed, this is one way that LLMs can increase the quality of code.
You know, compiler based AI (not just LLMs) seem like an idea that might be pretty interesting. The option to disable or completely omit them from the toolchain would be mandatory however. But, even then we would have to consider how many pieces of software that then rely on this proverbial black box built into compilers would then get integrated into critical supply chain? We soon would have to start running behavior based “background checks” (just an analogy) on our software much like we do with people due to the unpredictability of such complexity.
Side note, I can’t wait to see just how complex the field of game theory gets with AI. I would love to see any video essays on the topic if they do exist already.
🧐
Many projects require replicatable builds. Generative AI is driven by noise so I am not sure if it has any role in optimization or code gen. I guess we could share an RNG seed with source but honestly current tool chains are too slow as it is and ML would likely make it much worse. I want faster edit/compile/debug cycles and compilers already do insane optimisations. Ken Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust becomes much scarier if your code generation is being driven by a black box of billions or parameters nobody understands. An adversary could embed anything in there.
The machine translation origins of LLMs make them really good at inspecting text and looking for things that look like known bugs. It must be a game changer for security researchers who already know what sort of problems to look for but don’t have enough hours in the day to search the haystack manually. If some of that knowledge was available in a good quality FOSS local code analysis tool it might be irresponsible not to use it. We can’t be dependent on commercial vendors and closed models.
I do wonder if Ai driven reverse engineering could have reproducible builds based on a similar principle so as to avoid needing to distribute any part of the original program
All the sloppers are torn about this, but Torvalds has undeniable mastery at this, so it’s great to see AI being used as a beneficial tool. If there’s a single person who should have unlimited access to the most powerful AI models, it should be Linus Torvalds.
I am just really happy that he is still around to actually oversee the mixing between such an important part of computing infrastructure and the new radical tool of AI. Had it been 10 years later and we probably would have uber slop linux
AI finds bugs and holes that wouldn‘t be a problem if AI didn‘t discover them. I really don‘t envy devs for dealing with this nowadays.
Disagree. They would be a problem. Not for you, but for selected people (e.g. journalists in countries that want to spy on them)
Zero days are extremely powerful in the wrong hands. Without AI it just takes one person thinking how the dev didn’t
Not really how it plays out. In reality safety issues of a magnitude that only surfaced once a decade are now found by AI every few weeks, showcasing that AI itself poses the biggest threat for cybersecurity today. The overwhelming majority of them would have never been found or exploited without AI.
You could and still can sell vulnerabilities to companies that sell exploits to governments. You might hear of heavy ones getting to the public once a decade, but you can expect them do be traded and used much more often and used on targets much more important than us all the time.
Hyping up AI doesn’t become nice when Linus does it.
He can be a legendary developer, a better one than I’ll probably ever become, but I just don’t see how one can separate the use and the ethical implications of this. AI companies want to replace workers, period. There’s no plan to “increase productivity” and still employ this many people. The plan is to increase profits for shareholders.
AI helping Linus to develop better doesn’t make this reality go away. It’s akin to saying we should be thankful to nazi scientists.
You should read the original article, or even his mail on LKML, because that is not what he is saying. He is not endorsing AI in any way; instead, he is concerned that the latest linux release candidate has so much changes, because everyone and their mother is using some AI tool to create and send “little small” fixes; obviously he has no control over how volunteers work.
Furthermore, he stated that the security mailing list has become unusable due to the influx of AI generated entries.
This is what happens when you don’t take a stand against this shit. He brought it on himself.
What stand does he take? “Don’t use AI”? How does he enforce that? He is working with volunteers, so it’s not like he can cut their pay
Every Linus AI headline for the last year: “AI is the future, adapt or die, if you hate AI leave Linux.”
Every actual Linus quotation from those articles: “AI can be a powerful tool in the hands of experienced human programmers that are still responsible for every line of code they push.”
because people with an agenda are seeing:
- linux people hate ai
- top linux guy doesn’t hate ai
then try to combine those while leaving out the specific details so people come to their own conclusions based on emotional reaction in the hopes that linux users will turn away from linux or even change their views on ai the same way maga fucks change their views on epstein
or maybe its just an every day well intentioned headline like everything else
AI isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.
I will never use AI unless I am paid to like I currently am. I am not a worse developer for it. I have been learning software engineering continuously my entire life. I am completely self taught for over a decade professionally and longer than that in my free time. I have no university degree. I grew up in poverty in nowheresville Kentucky.
I don’t need an LLM to learn or succeed. LLMs literally need people like me. I am sad Linus cant see it that way, but never meet your heroes so they say. l
Facts. How good you are as a developer. Ai is a really useful tool. Especially the latest frontier models. I don’t like the companies behind them. But the models are very powerful.
Ya, I was a terrible developer before, now I’m still terrible but faster. LOL
These are the most dangerous developers…
just think about how much more damage you can do with a gun vs your fist
ai is an icbm
Natural stupidity in part fixed by Artificial intelligence debugging. Good.
Everyone dooming here, but he literally just said that AIs are finding lots of glitches in old codw, and that for that reason updatws are getting bigger. Linus is NOT vibe coding linux.
And recently ground breaking privillege escalation glitches were found and fixed because of a LLM.
Of course we dont want shitty code from LLMs, but if they find important glitches and vulnerabilities, we obviously need to use them.
Especially if it comes to security. Hate AI like nothing else but you can’t deny the truth.
Linux is open source with all its code public with probably a docent of AI Agents constantly trying out different attack vectors, they will eventually find a vulnerability. It also does feel like there are more critical CVEs in recent times. (there is https://app.opencve.io/statistics but i feel like its too simple and context matters alot here but still).
I think its okey and actually a good thing if the kernel maintainers would have some AI helping them out with that sort of thing if we get a more secure kernel in return.
Linus doesn’t really code anymore so the question is are others vibe coding Linux and I would say yes it is happening.
lemmings must be doomers, the only explanation seems to be intellectual diversity
…and 99.9% of what it identifies as errors either aren’t, or are so minor they’re irrelevant. And “fixing” them breaks piles of other code.
Projects that hasd no more than a dozen requests a year are now getting swamped with hundreds of requests a day. People in the third world are using agents to generate thousands of broken, garbage “patches” to claim money.
But why would Torvalds give a shit hey ? He can fuck over those people just like he did with C++ developers.
Maybe you should of had AI find the glitches in your grammar.
Got em 😎 lol
Maybe you should’ve too :)
11 downvotes
Rage baited 11 users successfully.
Maybe you should have proofread your comment before posting a grammar gotcha!
Should HAVE**
Maybe you also should HAVE* ;)
Oh no, 'twas I, the silly goose, all along.
*This comment was grammatical checked by Lumo AI
😂
Lmao, english is not my first language, and my phones touch near the keyboard sucks
Casually dropping one of the broadest applicable use cases for an LLM that you didn’t use
I’m not against AI in general. I’m just against using it stupidly. And against using it as a vehicle for further monopolisation and centralisation of power. I’m against the “use more AI” slogan too many companies push.
But use it for specific purposes under human control that improve quality, then I’m all for it.
I don’t think many people are against the existence of LLM-based AI in general, just the way it’s being pushed currently.
In the hands of highly experienced and skilled people it can be very valuable - the issue is that it generally isn’t. Personally I think Linus has demonstrated that he’s more than capable of using it intelligently and responsibly.
I’d have to disagree with you that an outsized number of uneducated hivemind morons are against AI in any capacity.
This seems like an over generalization and less likely than the uneducated hivemind of morons actually being in favor of AI
Nuance is a learned skill when it comes to sensitive/trending topic discourse.
For anyone reading this, please learn more about topics you have a gut reaction to so you can better explain the pros and cons. You will be able to hold your own against people who know more about the topic, but refuse to acknowledge the cons, if you do.
Exactly.
What is the powerful new tools can be used for great good as well as great evil
Sure but humans are lazy and greedy so it well be used for mostly evil. Like people who say they check all the code sorry don’t believe them and even if they do human nature means they well start to trust it and not check the code.
“I can’t say that I’m exactly thrilled about the size of this all,” Torvalds wrote in the message that announces the seventh release candidate for Linux 7.2. “But it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools.”
<groan> Þey’re relying on AI for reviews? Maybe þat’s not what he meant, but þat’s how it reads, and it’d explain why I’ve been seeing more regressions in kernel releases lately.
From what I’ve read, they’re using AI to find bugs. As far as I’m concerned, a bug is a bug no matter who or what finds it. So long as they aren’t using it to produce code.
