Fully agreed

Just to name the takes that made me dislike today’s Linus:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-%3Dwi4zC%2BZe8e%2Bp3tMv8TtG_80KzsZ1syL9anBtmEh5Z40vg@mail.gmail.com/

Quote:

It seems like [1] expresses a very anti-LLM position in general

Yes.

And no, that’s not the position of the Linux kernel.

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and it’s even worse than the shortened quote I had in mind when I wrote the above.

1. When he clearly had the good example of referring to LLMs in plain sight, he chose to refer to the slop machines as “AI” - especially in a context where it serves as a straw man. Most people opposed to LLMs do not have a problem with proper AI research, it’s just the statistical word prediction snake oil that we despise.
2. Using a straw man as someone who clearly has (at least for now) the intellectual capacity to understand that he is doing so is a really dirty way to argue.
3. For a project like the linux kernel, which has really become larger than just Linus, he threatens to override all opinions he doesn’t like on the topic (this is not the first time he’s done that). As we can see from the disappointing outcome of the debian vote on LLM contributions, this was a completely pointless hill to die on.
4. “Or just walk away” is children level of bickering
5. Again with the misnomer AI, to claim “[LLMs are] clearly a useful [tool]”, and to claim this “is no longer in question today” is a statement so dumb I have trouble believing he wrote that. I’ll give him that in some aspects LLMs can be useful, but the net effect on society (and that’s the larger picture he’s completely ignoring) may very well still be a net negative. This planet - even humanity - doesn’t need digital infrastructure to thrive. And 99% of the “usefulness” of LLMs is in maintaining or upgrading digital infrastructure and processing data. Something completely irrelevant to a thriving ecosystem. He’s clearly locked into “tech bro think” where it doesn’t even occur to him to consider impacts on the environment and weigh them against the perceived usefulness of LLMs. Not to mention that you do not know whether an LLM will be useful in a particular case until after you have solved the case - at which point you may say “oh great, it helped me” or “oh shit, the LLM wasted a lot of my time on this”. And if you can’t tell in advance whether for a particular scenario a given tool will be useful or not, then using it will also waste people’s time and it’s absolutely fair to expect that people - even when isolating their views to the tech sector - weigh the perceived usefulness against the time wasted and evaluate whether there’s actually a net positive.

I am pretty sure - also from personal experience - that the next benefit of using LLMs for software development only marginally outweighs the downsides (wasted developer & computing time, wasted resources). And taking the social, political and environmental impacts into account, the currently hyped machine learning applications are a HUGE net negative for mankind.

Plus which, LLMs have already peaked, because they are all out of unpoisoned training data. So things will get worse from here on out.

Accordingly, my verdict is that Linus is losing his marbles. Because he once was smart enough to realise all those implications. And now he’s decided to gloss over them and join the hype train.

indeed. The irony of the worst of the worst companies funding Linux development and not being told to fuck off is uncanny.

I’m making a prediction: He started having some really bad takes, and it’s only going to get worse.

!RemindMe 2 years

The court appears to believe the claim that her death was accidental. I don’t doubt that he had no intentions of killing his daughter.

If you don’t have inside knowledge on the case, “not having doubt” on either intentions or no intentions is an incredibly moronic take.

Also, the job of a court of law is to establish innocence or guilt (and the degree thereof). This grand jury failing to indict is that grand jury refusing to do its duty to the people. While Germany is also going to shits, I am kinda glad that for now, our country is civilised enough to not have juries. Although we have the next worst thing, which is laypeople judges, for some cases.

Moan silently and rhythmically and make some rustling noises?

Dunno about the jerk, but he’s become a weirdo and I second the notion that he should no longer be idolized. That’s gonna be embarrassing to walk back from in 2-3 years.

Honestly? Best Linus? That’s a stretch. Maybe Linus from 10-20 years ago. But these days he’s becoming a senile old tech bro - his ideals are rapidly deteriorating.

I am disappointed albeit not surprised he’s jumped on the slop train.

I wanted to eventually try gentoo anyways, I guess I will have to advance that experiment. Never heard of Hyperbola, I will check it out. Thank you!

So this is how I hear about the outcome of the Debian vote. :( Is there a widespread distro that has a clear anti-Slop stance?

1. he didn’t use AI, he used a slop bot.
2. if he did, it’s possible he just used it for analysis
3. either way it’d prove that no one is immune to becoming a moron, especially as they get older.

So in other words you were being a moron lighting a grill in a drought with everything around you highly flammable. Got it.

I’ve been saying this for years. Perceived justice/punishment is not worth the lives of thousands of innocents.

I can’t hear bat noises but there are humans who can echolocate

I once got bored like 15 years ago and tried it for a few days after reading about a blind boy doing this to fi d the hoop in basketball.

I couldn’t dream of that kind of resolution, but I was able to detect a wall / doorframe and whether it was 1m away or 10cm.

But I used clicking noises.

That same thought just occurred to me: hype a McGuffin and get investors to lend you insane amounts of money which you then use to buy up a marker, causing artificial scarcity, then sell at massive profits.

Exactly. EU is a cleptocracy, sadly :/

She started out with the comic (regular on reddit), added kinky ideas to her protagonist (depicting herself), posted the occasional selfie, felt encouraged by results and decided to show some more on OF. At least that’s the timeline I observed. She’s a good gal, nothing wrong with bashing hypocrites and also being kinky and earning extra money :)

Found the person confirming OC.

And yet ultimately that’s what every retirement and disability system of any kind has to be based on.

There’s a fundamental distinction to be made to the below point of yours:

If you want to live in a world where you yourself will not be cast out onto the street to die when you are too old to work, then for some of your later years you will depend on the labor of others, just as you did when you were a child.

I strongly disagree with your first point, but maybe you misunderstood me. Investment returns are basically letting other people work for your profits, with nothing given in return. I.e. a form of wage theft (or other shenanigans like messing up the environment for profits or exploiting resources or funding a totalitarian regime).

Your second point - while correct - has nothing to do with my criticism of (stock / fund) investment returns: That could be (and was for a few decades, at least in Germany) a generational contract, where society manages to pay out pensions from which elderly / retired people can afford living & care from the GDP. Those pay-outs have been paid in advance by those needing them because they funded the old and retired people at the time they were still in work.

For that system, you do not need any kind of finance products. Of course that doesn’t keep our corrupt governments from spending our retirement money elsewhere and investing in shady funds for private profits and shitty retirement payments. So in today’s world, in practice, yes, people rely on finance product returns for their retirement savings and most of us have no choice in that. But it wasn’t always like that, and it should not be, because it’s a pyramid scheme.

Well - pronouncing “tres” as “trace” goes beyond an accent :) But point taken.