When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.
I got banned from the Fuck AI community for saying Linus isn’t stupid. Not that he’s right on AI, just that he’s not stupid.
Indeed, the atmosphere is toxic.
We’re on a site where people happily discuss their arr stack or transpiring the PS5 system, but bemoan AI is killing artists and coding.
There are real ethical issues, job impacts, environmental issues, property rights issues (real and intellectual), privacy, a stack of cards economy etc.
But there is also utility, and frankly the genie is out of the bottle. For better or worse.
Catching kernel bugs in Linux with AI should be seen as a good because they’re not being exploited offensively by private actors. AI review that catches the most annoying 80% of errors or issues saves human time, while not contributing slop to the kernel.
There is a lot to discuss if you show up in good faith.
Also, Linus is an asshole. Why would anyone be surprised he reacted like an asshole? His point on his expectations is actually clear and sensible to me. He probably could have said just that, but he’s an asshole, and acting how you would expect after a bunch of people are yelling at him.
Vague criticisms, fallacious reasoning, highly emotive language, little response to attempts at discussion (though some might engage in disingenuous discussions of shifting goalposts here and there to discourage particularly vocal engagees from future participation). So I’d say that Linus is just the latest convenient scapegoat in an Anti-AI ‘trend’ that will have little impact on the rate of AI adoption in the long run.
Sucks that I waited until now to try to form a measured opinion on AI because now all the discussions on the internet are hot garbage.
Measured perspectives are hard to come by. A Marxist Perspective On AI
There’s nothing Marxist in that article. Only fallacies from rich white man ranting about people pushing back against fascism.
People say AI to mean LLM first because main stream western, fascist, media pushed the term by inviting exclusively non-expert and CEOs to talk about the subject. People are pushing back against a product that is mean to make workers dull and replace them by
stealing their works even by capitalist standards-> exploiting their works, appropriating it to themselves without any compensation nor permission.The article tried to paint the discussion as anti-llm would be anti technology, which is not Marxist in any way and not relevant. Weirdly enough fascist guy like the one on this article don’t talk about cryptocurrency as something we should chill for. Isn’t it a tool too?
Current LLM chill is the opposite of dialectical materialism: what is the concrete analysis here? LLM outputed nothing of value for years despite the hundred of billions invested. Worst it actually participate to global warming, bourgeoisie attempt to mass control, getting rid of workers and inflating computer costs. So the real consequences for people are losses only.
And for what? To get to have unskilled rich white people who can afford the awfully hight price of LLM to boats about “I made this” while it is actually made from steal and empoverish people and enriching tech lord’s.
So no, thanks, and trying to paint fallacies to Marxism isn’t going to help either.
EDIT: replace the “stealing” argument as pointed out -> https://lemmy.ml/post/54102413/28384201 , this can be confusing with the anti-piracy propaganda vocabulary.
stealing
Stealing: when you don’t have it anymore afterwards.
Copying: when both have it afterwards
The RIAA’s propaganda campaign was sadly very successful.
Actually let me analyze again your comment here: I thought you were right at first but thinking about it not really.
First let me address : I didn’t know about RIAA, this kind of paternalistic way of addressing people is not good in any way. We aren’t all USA-centric (like you?).
Then about the “steal” argument:
- it is a vocabulary used for century by Marxist organizations about the value taken by the bourgeoisie from the proletariat work.
- the argument of “copying is OK” is missing the point : any FOSS dev/organization I know would gladly give their work to you, individual. But not to big tech to commercialize it and make extreme amount of money, as well as steering conversation towards fascism in the process. While also having an amazingly big impact on the environment.
- “both have it afterwards” is also a fallacy : any work done on computer can be seen like this : if your an accountant and you boss copy your accounting sheets and do not pay you, it is not stealing? You both have the file, for you it won’t make you any money, he will. Big tech taking FOSS code for their profit is not piracy as of individual accessing cultural product they cannot afford in the first place. And if you make profit from piracy this is a whole other discussion I would gladly here your thoughts about it.
Downloading this comment is not authorized.
Then about the “steal” argument:
You wouldn’t download an argument, would you? Or would you? What, you’re reading this in your browser without authorization from me?? FBI, open up!!!
are you trolling?
I checked your history and you seems to genuinely interact but you’re sentence makes no real argument (more like a joke).
But maybe you haven’t read the rest of the conversation so here some points:
- You can and are encourage to download and use free software. Same with comments.
- You are not allowed to monetized free software (hence the GPL v2 vs v3 debate). To be honest also with my comments.
- The term stealing could indeed be confused with the modern usage of fascists who want to fight against piracy but it was used for a good century by communist to talk about capitalists stealing surplus value made by workers.
I like Linus, but comparing an LLM to a compiler is fucking stupid.
Why?
You can predict with certainty what a compilers output would be. Linus is conflating the fact that most people don’t understand how a compiler converts higher level programming language into machine code with the reality that no one can actually predict and audit what an LLM puts out.
You cannot, that’s why reproducible builds are hard. Modern compiler are made with compilers (egg/chicken problem) not assembly nor machine code and you always loose some perfect prediction.
Yes LLMs are less predictible than compiler but their output is readable to human, while machine code is very hard (yet not impossible).
Is that a bad things that 99% of devs have forgot how to write code cutting holes in paper? Tools are changing and while a direct comparison between the move from paper to COBOL or assembly to C is not the same as python to LLM generated it’s hard to deny that LLM will change how human write code.
Thanks for that explanation. Are you saying that if I rebuild the exact same code on the same machine I could get different results for a given compiler? I think this would render solutions like docker useless. Could you elaborate?
Yes you can get a different result. Compilers are designed to be deterministic, but a build is more than the compiler. Usually the bytes differ but the behavior is identical.
Docker is far from being reproducible!
It works on my machine ≠ reproducible. But reproducible will make it works on your machine.
Using a compiler does not guarantee you to get byte-perfect output each time, especially not on different machines.
Talk about misleading. The differences are timestamps and metadata, and some compilers have flags to let you zero out timestamps and force it to produce a bit-for-bit identical file every time.
Cory Doctorow’s “Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI” has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn’t have a boss and has untold resources for whatever “AI” “tools” he finds useful.
He isn’t ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn’t do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn’t have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new “tool”. He simply uses what’s useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.
95% of people don’t have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the “tool” that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.
Strangely idgaf about whether he respects me
I don’t think he thinks about you at all
👍🏻 The vast majority of people don’t.
the thing is - no other tool (currently yall_cant_read) in our industry, and others, out there involves as much active destruction in both the working class and environment in its use.
that’s it. that’s the bit.
for those not understanding: the word “in” above implies in current use not that i am comparing AI’s effects with the invention of knitting machines or electricity.
Could have said the same about the invention of electricity
The invention of the light bulb.
That has been SO much worse than the negatives we’ve seen with AI. If anyone is interested, that is a horrible story socially, industrially, environmentally, etc. Definitely worth reading about.
I don’t have a personal or professional workflow that would benefit from AI. I have not been impressed with any generated art or writing (knowingly, so far). I pretty much only know it for the enshittification of search results. It might be great at coding, I’ll never know because in my first 49 years of life I’ve only needed to code enough to get a D+ in my Pascal class. It might get great at generating art but I haven’t had to generate art since my sophomore year of high school. I hear it’s good at scanning lab test results which is great for future me when I need a lab test result but doesn’t come up for me in the day-to-day. There are plenty of other useful things I’m sure it can do for other people but the stuff they say it can do for me right now is nothing I’m interested in having done for me.
It’s not great at coding. I’m on about my fifth “rewrite large system that’s a pile of AI slop” job this year, trust me.
Human slop code existed way before we had auto-complete in our IDEs, way before Copilot start writing small functions and thus bad code is not because of LLM. AI slop is no different than Human slop, it uses a shit ton of ressource to generate it and is faster at getting a working output but bad codebase is not new.
Did they make you take Pascal in school, or did you choose it and then not like it?
That’s pretty cool if it was required (or some form of programming), it is something I think everyone should at least try and be shown how it works.
My first couple of programming classes were in Pascal. Then there was the third class where the professors had written their own pseudo language that existed only on the chalkboard and in their own heads. At least I learned recursion from them. I had to teach myself every language I ever used on the job. I was EE instead of CS, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too hard, perhaps there were more practical classes deeper into the CS tree.
Multiple Pascal classes for EE thats interesting. You’re not much older than I am and when we did Pascal my teacher said something like its not really used as much now but its a great learning language, but the 2nd class just moved onto C.
I had a friend doing EE and they had Perl as their programming class a few years later.
If I had to guess id say its Python now? That’d be practical as well.
I also leaned every language i used outside of school on my own.
BASED LINUS
Yeah dude licking corporate boot is so based
If you’re too much of a black/white thinker to be able to have an intelligent and mature conversation, there is nothing I can say to change your emotional response.
With that being said: Fuck big tech, fuck how AI is being used by it and large companies. Period. Full stop.
This current iteration of AI would not be possible without big tech. If you actually thought about it for more than five minutes you would realize you cannot reconcile those two and still see LLMs as “just a tool”. Sit on that one for a minute. Utilitarianism rots your brain.
You’re not wrong with a lot of the substance there, but big tech doesnt own the corpus of AI, and it most certainly will still be around even if you were to dump all of big tech (which I am very much for…!)
I’m not into utilitarianism, just trying to be pragmatic here and not jump on the strong emotional reaction train… Unfortunately, LLMs are really useful tooling …and they simply are not going to go anywhere, so I like to direct efforts to responsible governance, not mob mentality campism.
Shit no go bakie in horsie, lets put the onus and responsibility on the individual and produce better guidelines.
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.
The comparison between AI and compilers is kind of stupid though. When you program in a given language, you’re writing out the entire logic and behavior of your program. Not to mention that the compiler is a deterministic machine, it will always behave in a certain manner and produce predictable results. On the other hand, using AI, you just write a sentence. Then it “creates” a whole bunch of code that will not always be the same, even if you always use the same model and prompt. Not to mention all of the detrimental effects AI has, cognitively speaking, when you start to rely on it. On top of this, all AI models were trained on unfathomable amounts of stolen information.
Compilers are not always deterministic, there is a lot of “smart” code in compilers to automatically optimize code and that can mean that whole parts or functions are replaced with what the compiler thinks is best.
Devil’s advocating for the sense of completeness here rather than bickering, but wouldn’t two of the same compiler on two of the same machine with the same code still create the same output? That is to say, it is deterministic rather than stochastic but it just takes unpredictable variables into account when compiling?
I think the difference would be that a compiler will always give you something understandable and explainable even if it’s opaque, but an LLM is literally using RNG to generate its output, so could come out with something completely left field. If it switches to Chinese that’s one thing because you can just ignore that, but equally a hallucinated bug that looks right but is actually very dangerous could slip in instead.
RNG is pseudorandom. Every computer program is deterministic in some sense, even if the seed is obfuscated or dependent on ephermal environment variables. Being able to predict the output is very different from determinism.
