Just for context, this is the developer that spectacularly crashed out of the kernel team after Greg KH kept rejecting his attempts to submit new features to a release candidate.
When his PRs were rejected and he was told to submit them in a later version he turned to social media brigading and attacking the kernel team. He did eventually get a response from Linus though…
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/07/linus_torvalds_rust_driver/
In response to Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin’s call for Torvalds to “pipe up with an authoritative answer” to resolve the device driver impasse, and Martin’s defense of “shaming on social media” as a way to counter the hostility of Linux maintainers to Rust code, Torvalds dismissed the approach and took aim at Martin.
“How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you,” said Torvalds
It’s completely unsurprising to see this kind of unprofessional post from him where he confidently repeats the same copy pasted uneducated takes and misinformation on generative models.
- I don’t give a shit about Linux Kernel drama.
- Fuck off. The time for politeness and professionalism in regards to AI has long passed.
What exactly do you envision as an endgame to that line of thinking?
Neural network-based machine learning isn’t a technology that’s going to be uninvented. Clearly people are using it and it is effective in a lot of fields (AlphaFold, for example).
Do you think that you can be rude and abrasive enough that the entire world collectively forgets Transformer-based models exist? What is your idea of a perfect ending here?
It just doesn’t make sense.
Yes, generative models suck and their output is bad a lot of the time. That’s a reasonable take.
Declaring that you’re done with politeness and professionalism when discussing machine learning is an extremist viewpoint. If it’s not a topic that you’re willing to engage in good faith conversation about, what is left? Violence?
It’s a little snarky, and as such, gives off an unprofessional vibe, but I agree with the core message fully.
Wheres the crying towel when you need it amirite
That’s dope but it looks like this distro is for Macs only.
Wait, there’s a distro for macs? I need one of those.
Last I looked months ago, all I remember seeing was “you can load linux, but it’s hard and you might lose the mac forever.”
ARM macs, specifically. M series.
I think it’s still pretty experimental. There have almost always been linux distros for macs, I had it installed on a colorful powerpc imac back in the day.
I used it as an almost daily driver from April 2024 through June of this year. Only reason I gave up was I had to keep whitelisting updates and changes in our siem because it started freaking out about the unknown hardware when I’d get on the network at a client site. Otherwise a solid bit of work.
Would ‘it’ be Asahi? I’ll check it out. I’m not quite sure what my needs are yet; I have a gifted work laptop that needs some purpose other than the paperweight it is now, but Asahi might do it.
Yes, asahi on a 8Gb/256 Mac book air. I gave it like 80Gb during setup and that was plenty. At the time microphone, display port and fingerprint didn’t work, but I think even the mic works now. Had to fight with a little to get display link (apple’s video out is special) so it would play nice on some docks, besides that battery was solid, and it just worked.
They’re covering their arses, which is a good call. I wouldn’t put it above the big corporations to use the fact that their models are trained on stolen data and then engage in spurious lawsuits against small projects and companies for infringing on their copyrights. That might be their best bet once this AI BS dies down.
Are you talking about the BS surrounding regulations (or lack thereof) or the general hype?
Personally, I hope the hype does die down and isn’t crammed into every single digital product or otherwise. Regulations on how these models are trained will be interesting and probably will shape a new generation of IP law.
Nice post. Short but clear and funny.
That’s awesome!
