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Honestly, if I can use an AI agent that is not coming from an evil corporation that’s destroying the environment, I would use it to help me solve problems like figuring out why I have a build error, why I’m getting certain error messages, why a piece of code isn’t working as I expected, find potential bugs, etc.
It can be a great tool to help you grow, like having a tutor explain where and why you made a mistake so you can learn from it.
NOT if you ask it to do the job for you and generate your code.
That’s the neat part, you can.
If I had to pick one, it’d be Olmo 3 from Ai2: Non-profit. Ai2 is a research institute, not a company that needs to sell you a subscription or harvest your prompts. Fully open, not just “open weights” Ai2 publishes the training data, the training code, every checkpoint and the logs. Anyone can check exactly what went in, and in principle rebuild it from scratch. You don’t have to take their word for anything.
Runs locally. The 7B version runs on an ordinary gaming laptop or a recent MacBook. Your code never leaves your machine, there’s no data centre involved when you use it, and the energy cost is your laptop being on. Apache 2.0 licence. No usage restrictions and no strings attached.
Good enough for the tutor use case. Explaining errors, walking through why code misbehaves, and pointing out likely bugs are all well within what it can do.
To be fair about it: the training data is largely scraped from the web, like nearly every model. The difference is that Olmo is honest and auditable about it.
If strict consent matters most to you, StarCoder2 is cleaner (only permissively licensed code, with an opt-out)
There is no responsible way to use AI
The fucking point that Linus misses is, using AI by itself is intrinsically the more irresponsible thing to do. Change my mind.
attack it with ethics!
You are claiming it’s irresponsible, why do you say so?
AI is just a technology, how you use it makes it bad or not.
Nuclear is the cleanest safest energy we have, but you can also make bombs with it.
I’ve read this article before. Found it very reductionist. For example, it says that weapons might be good for Ukraine, but they’re bad in general. You can’t just “in general” something like weapons or AI. They have thousands of different contexts and use cases. Sure, a weapon can make somebody homocidal in one context, but it might make somebody a militia in another context. AI can be a slop generator for a vibe coder, and a bug detection tool for Linus Torvalds.
I’m not a fan of how modern politics and social justice is so reductionist nowadays. “One aspect of X is bad, so we must reject X altogether”. Can we add even a little nuance to our discussions? This mindset is brainrot.
In other words, you found an article whose headline seems to make your point for you - which you probably didn’t even read or you might have an actual answer. I did read it, and found the reasoning spurious, like jumping through a series of philosophical hoops to prove all taxes are illegal or that birds don’t exist. The author’s example of a Chinese dish with an unusually large amount of chopped peppers being more easily eaten with chopsticks than with a fork, could just as well have been a bowl of broth that’s much easier to eat with a spoon than with chopsticks. All it demonstrates is that any tool can have appropriate and inappropriate use cases. They’re still just tools.
intrinsically the more irresponsible
That doesn’t claim it’s intrinsically irresponsible. You can use AI responsibly
So how do they gatekeep the vibecoders out then? FOSS need to change and develop new quality control systems. Stop complaining about vibecode, just review it before you use it. Why can’t you do it?
Stop complaining about vibecode, just review it
Hahaha. Not a developer, huh?
There is no way I could possibly review my coworkers’ 1000s of lines of code he posts daily. I just blindly approve it because fuggggit we don’t care about quality only velocity.
This is different from before because before he would normally post 2 or 3 small code changes per week. Also, he would have tested it himself so starting off it would already be in a good state. Also, since he tested himself, we could talk about the change since he still had the context.
Now it’s just ship, ship, ship. We literally can’t “review it” like we did before. That world is gone.
rationing:
Limit lines of code or diff size. Limit scope. Limit PR per user per month. No bots, obviously. New users don’t get to send anything, they can comment and vote, at best. And bring in negative ratings for contributors: low quality, suspicious code, bad PRs.
This is another way of saying deceleration, a word that accelerationists hate.
Because the pace of code production has officially overwhelmed the human capacity to review it. As it was discussed recently. Linus answer was to use more AI, with the implementation of code review tools that gobble up code and spew out summaries.
For the time being, humans reading the summaries count as human reviewed. But at some point in time this system will crack. The current zeitgeist is to restrict who can contribute. Which leads to the obvious follow up question of who decides based on what, and how to decide who deserves to contribute.
You just witnessed the first steps into the philosophical and political erosion of the open source movement. Not just on the kernel but it is also affecting almost all popular FOSS projects.
But of course, that doesnt matter because Linux is not and has never been political. /s
I’ve been thinkin:
We went from STEM to STEAM. But I think we really need SHTEAM. (The H is for Humanities.)
Philosophy, psychology, history, basically anything that would get nerds to think about the social consequences of the stuff they like to tinker with.
Warning! very unpopular opinion
Title
I hate STEAM, preferred when it was just STEM.
very unpopular opinion
True! I think your opinion sucks lemming! 😎 /s
But seriously, while I do think STEAM sounds a little dumb compared to STEM (and I’m young enough where I saw the name changing happening in real time while being a child), I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to teach STEM kids and professionals more about the non-tech side of hard sciences and subjects.
SHTEAM sounds and looks stupid as shit, but we should absolutely take steps to properly educated up-and-coming STEM majors that they need to understand how their work and inventions affect humanity, along with actually having an appreciation for the work that they will do. Not teaching these things is how we create idiots that are proudly declaring “Mecha hitler” and “AI will kill us all, and that’s good!”
People complain about electives and gen ed classes in college like, “why do I, a science major, have to take an ethics class?” and then go on to become Sam Altman. As a STEM major, I fucking hate those people. I understand you want to get your money’s worth in college, but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory. I have learned so much about people and become more knowledgeable about humans and empathy through arts and ethics classes, and have gained an appreciation for them. It also affects how you do tech in general too. So often do I hear about coders, security analysts, data scientists, etc who make music, art, literature etc, and feel like it affects and improves how they work.
but having to learn history and take one ethics or culture class should always be mandatory.
Fuck it, one of each. Programmers had the opportunity to show they could handle not getting a humanities education with their diploma and they blew it.
So SHTEM?
I agree, but the question is, how to use responsibly. I like to use it as an assistant that can look things up. Googling has the tendency to bring up outdated information, a good AI model is able to cross-reference what it finds with documentation and release notes. I never let the AI write anything for me though.
This is exactly how I use it too. Google and other search engines have gone to complete shit in order to cater to LLMs. So that’s how I use the LLM. You are my search bitch, Gemini. No, you’re not allowed to actually create anything.
Ah, yes, “when used responsibly.” Like how we use drugs, alcohol, guns, cars, money, power, and everything else responsibly? Humans can’t be trusted with things that do more harm than good when used irresponsibly.
AI is the car of modern times. It’s convenient, ruinous for the environment, and a danger to anyone in proximity of one. Hell, we even wasted tons of land on highways kinda like what we’re doing with datacenters. But boy, does it get you from point A to point B quick.
There is one key difference though, drivers and car manufacturers are sometimes held accountable for their actions
“Knives cause lots of stabbings, so let’s ban knives”
All those things, including knives, are heavily regulated, yes.
Nice try to equating a knife to fucking drugs. AI is even worse than drugs, is like the digital version of nuclear weaponry: it shouldn’t even exist.
Then just let AI use AI. I’ll collect my Nobel prize now thx.
Anti-social hermit discovers that his job is more fun if he has someone to talk to.
You have to kind of feel sorry for him.
thank you meta!
And then yesterday he said something along the lines of “we need to make it harder to contribute to the Linux kernel.” Which I believe he means to say “oh god there’s so much being submitted all of a sudden and it’s all slop.”
i came to this forum thinking i’d find interesting stuff and it’s just a bunch of people getting angry at reality
Oh no, you are one of those “if you don’t adapt you will be left behind” people, aren’t you?
low dimensional thinking
AI is the new reality aparently.
or imagine a reality where AI just exists alongside other things. Stop catastrophizing
Ignoring the hype is not catastrophizing.
alright, i’m disengaging from this echo box… everyone should go outside and sit in nature for a while
Feel free to do so next to a data center. Feel (hear, breathe) some externalized costs for a while.
i’d be curious if you eat chicken from the supermarket? Have you ever lived next to a chicken factory, breathed and listened to that one? Do you drink Coca Cola? Sorry to break it to you, but we’re all complicit in things that are destroying nature and humanity and just because you’ve desensitized yourself to the other ones don’t mean they’re not happening. You can rage all you want at each one, but it’s not going to be constructive. At some point we just have to come to terms with reality that we’re also responsible for this reality and I don’t agree with AI’s effects on nature either, but I think if we’re smart we can leverage its capabilities in the window of opportunity available with the people who are most capable (good developers) to create pathways leading toward better things. Or just go yell and rage some more, as you wish.
When reality is shit one must rage at it.
Rage is uncontrolled anger… it’s not helping anyone and certainly not the person experiencing it. If you can find a way to channel that anger into something constructive, then you are doing something beneficial for all
Yeah, but if that’s all you do nobody wants to be around you.
We’re on !linux@programming.dev. You think people want to be around us?
There is more to life then !linux@programming.dev
Blasphemy!!!
Hmmm, prove it using a bash script.
Claude, write me a bash script that proves there is more to life than !linux@programming.dev
Sudo rm -rf ~/bin/.*
Yea I’m sure when Google came out “Real Programmers” were angry at all these people just looking up solutions to their coding issues, and using Stack Overflow instead of studying the API or books.
Only to be replaced by people that embraced the new technology.
im old enough to know this is exactly what happened
Only to be replaced by people that embraced the new technology.
I think you have to make a distinction here:
It makes a huge difference whether you know what you’re doing and can work more efficiently thanks to the new technology… or whether you have no idea and think the new technology is a magic wand that can solve everything (which you only think because you have no clue about the subject and therefore believe that whatever the new technology produces is good or desirable).
To stick with your example: Someone who couldn’t code before didn’t suddenly learn how to do it on their own just because of StackOverflow; it just made things easier for people who already had some knowledge but were simply lacking the specific know-how.
In this case, I’d cautiously assume that Torvald can judge what makes sense (within his area of expertise) and what doesn’t.
until he fell into the slop vat and came out sloppified
I think that is still true today with AI just to a lesser degree.
After google many people could copy templates, change a few things and boom they “Built a Website”
It’s pretty obvious when someone who has no clue, just used AI to slop out code or something. And it’s often riddled with bugs and issues.
Where as someone with say 10+ Years experience in coding, can use AI to do their job a lot faster and better, and denying that is delusional and you will fall behind - !RemindMe 5 years
Eg. I can just throw my error logs and repo at a local hosted AI, and it will find the bug significantly faster than I would have.
Presies.
Having an AI help you code is like getting your six-year-old to help you put a shelf on the wall. Undirected, they’re just going to make a huge mess for you to clean up later. Given specific tasks within their abilities, they can actually make it both go faster and be an altogether more pleasant experience.
With direction and an operator who knows its limits, AI can be used to semi-automate many boring tasks. One of the things I’ve got set up in some of my open source projects is an LLM that takes bug reports and turns them into regression tests. I don’t always end up committing the AI-generated test (sometimes it’s very slow and I can better pinpoint the behaviour and target a test at that), but it helps because I don’t have to do that scaffolding myself, and I can just immediately jump into a debugger.
Fall behind what
Every single one of you is behind the best coders in the world. Guess you should just give up and take on crochet or pickleball
You’re behind, why botherThere are thousands of professional football teams that are behind the UEFA top 10, why do they even bother?
I’m sure I’m also behind the best cyclists in the world, and having a basket on my bike might make it slower, but it’s way more enjoyable and functional for me that way.
And it better serves my purpose, sure I’m not going to win any races, but I never wanted that in the first place.
Except that a basket isn’t analogous of AI, a smoky two-stroke engine that pollutes the air with unburned fuel and oil mix is. And your reliance on the engine will atrophy your legs lol
You’re on the slow-roll group ride saying you need an engine to keep up and we’re looking at you with disgust because you’re so loud and we can’t breathe.
Yeah, but therein lies the problem
If you don’t have new junior devs learning how it all works through trials by fire, we’re going to be the last generation of senior devs.
I like llms, they’re interesting and can be a real force multiplier. They let you skip the unimportant details and build bigger and faster. You design the system and focus on the architecture, and you get pretty great results
But you can also leave it all up to the ai and create things that no one understands. They’re also not going away
But I don’t know how we go forward from here. My best idea is that we make it illegal to provide llm access as a service - maybe everyone who uses one should have to set up their stack themselves. It’s not a perfect solution, but at least everyone who uses them will have to learn them like they would any other tool in their toolbox
I don’t fear AI in the slightest, but I do fear the ways we’re using it as a species
stop trying to force a reality that fits your narrative
lol how many tokens did you burn today
let’s see, i woke up and did jiu jitsu. I went to the local vegetable market with my dog, bought some breakfast and got some coffee and practiced my Spanish with the vendor. I spoke with a nice lady about art residencies and her desire to live an alternative lifestyle even though shes 75. I had a conversation about iterative prisoner’s dilemma game theory. Then I came home and now I’m replying to your low dimensional attempt at an insult, while spending some tokens to fix a form validation bug across a web app 💙
Ew, a web sloper even.
how sad that’s what you decided to highlight…
Its been an hour, the chatbot hasn’t given them the perfect retort yet.
believe it or not i have the ability to still use my mind even when there are tools at my disposal! And I was at the local veggie market talking to people during that hour, so sadly again your narrative is wrong 😞 your response, however, pretty low effort… might need to throw a captcha at you
You won’t trick me into solving basic logic problems that you and your bot cannot!
Perfect retort to name-calling? FM69’s comment is not exactly a rhetorical masterpiece.
I find this comment a kind of masterpiece, because there was both no actual name calling, and you refuse to type FartMaster’s actual name.
