If you listen to a lot of the perpetually online folks, even now, you’d think Gaza genocide is the only thing on the ballot, on any ballot, ever. You’re not allowed to vote even for a school board member if they dare to talk about anything but how they personally gonna stop a genocide.

A lot of people believe that they can change the system from the inside. It doesn’t make them bad people. Mislead maybe, but not bad. What makes them bad is prolonged existence in the system that is purposefully built to break or push out anyone who doesn’t fit. But that takes time.

Conservatives might use him to run as one of them, as a “used to be”, they eat this shit up.

This is absolutely not true. The email is very direct, and the specific context doesn’t change anything. Here’s the full text:

I think it makes the point of sashiko - helping maintainers - unachievable. If the point to not use LLMs in general, let’s discuss this, not how to make each use case more complex.

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 are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.

Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a “it keeps finding embarrassing bugs” standpoint.

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.

The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There’s no question on that side.

We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.

And no, 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.

Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.

The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.

Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that’s a side benefit, not the point of the project.

This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.

In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.

And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.

Ahaha. The research showed that developers don’t know how fast they are, but when we talked to them they said that they’re pretty fast, so we’d rather report on that. I see no problems or contradictions with this.

Linus himself doesn’t talk about it, and pretends he doesn’t know.

This is such a bullshit take. Yeah, “open source models” exist, and someone probably uses them for something. Most of the slop being commited is generated by the big ones though. Because, as any sloperator will tell you, only the latest and greatest claude is actually good, and all the problems with your slop is because you didn’t use the latest the bestest. So while most of the slop is generated by big corpos, we need to talk about evils of big slopgen corpos, and how they impact the world.
And when you say “yeah, who cares, if we can use it we need to use it”, you’re vouching for this shit, you’re putting your voice, your money, your support, to worst people that own the worst companies.

There are, broadly speaking, two categories of problems with LLM generated code (well, everything, but code here specifically). One is purely technical, does it bring anything to the process, does it broadly speaking saves you time or effort. And the second is everything else: environmental impact, the bubble of it all, the consolidation of power to all the worst people, erosion of skills, death of education, inflation of prices of consumer electronics, psychological impact, and so so so much more, all lumped together as non-technical downsides.
A bunch of llm-proponents, and here we sadly have to include even Linus, are only engaged with the first category of problems, throwing the whole second category aside as “irrelevant”. And a lot of those people are smart enough so I don’t believe they don’t see this.
If there was only the problem of the tool being kinda shitty but useful for some people, I wouldn’t be so against it. I still don’t believe they actually benefit from it, but if they think they do, I’m not going to argue with them about it.
But it’s fundamentally not true. You can’t ignore the second category in your evaluation. To quote Linus himself,

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem to do

about the fact that even one of the downsides from the second category makes the whole “but I, a person with 40 years of experience, can use llm in such a way that it sometimes produces some benefit” not worth it. No benefit of it is worth the fact that the new generation of junior developers don’t know how to write code on a fundamental level, while elon mask owns all of humanity’s personal data and can do whatever he wants with it. Even if those benefits were kinda big, it wouldn’t worth it, but they aren’t.

The first picture isn’t what people write, even though it’s technically compilable, it’s not what C is.
The second is a normal syntax, pretty simple to understand if you write enough code.
C is very simple language at it’s core, and it allows for it to be used in a very complicated systems.

At least there was no internet in Nazi Germany, so a bunch of people didn’t even had ways to know.

Not actively working against this specific genocide in this specific country is bad, very bad, disqualifying. Unless you also make everyone shit their pants forever, then it’s OK to do whatever genocide you want, it doesn’t matter actually.

Firefox for phones supports adblock btw.

LLMs are tools and, like all tools, are more fit for some purposes than others

This is the whole problem, this take is disingenuous. Nobody who actually argues in good faith and knows what they’re talking about, argues that LLM isn’t a tool, or it’s something bigger than that. The argument that is being ignored is that LLM is a tool that inherently has downsides that are bringing more “bad” than it brings “good” when it’s useful. But proponents successfully argue that they can use LLM with some benefits, and act like they answered something, and any retaliation to that is unreasonable.
My favourite analogy is asbestos, and I say it as a huge disservice to asbestos. Asbestos is an amazing material that legit has many very important uses (way more than any LLM will ever have), but we’re not using it because we understand that no matter how great of a insulator it is, and how nice it looks as snow replacement on a movie set, and how wonderful it is in a cigarette filter, the supercancer it causes kinda nullifies all that.

and can be used to amplify good work too.

But at this point I would argue the downsides aren’t worth it. Especially when the bubble pops, subsidies run out, and people will be forced to pay the actual price

Anything that you can run locally isn’t worth it, unless you can’t do anything by yourself at all, and I mean anything.

It’s not a scam in a sense that the rules are kinda explained. It’s a scammy behaviour by a scammy company however.

The scenario you described will still be an insane anti-consumer scam if it was true. The real scam is worse, but how can you be OK with what you described is already insane.

Separating a printer and a cartridge in this scenario is also arbitrary.
It’s normalised because it’s printer and it’s always shady, but imagine it’s like that with any other thing you have. Imagine Ford decides that from now on, you need to pay $700 per month to them on top of the price of a car you already paid, but they in exchange allow you to fill up at their gas stations couple of times per month. Now imagine you just got full tank and stopped paying subscription. Your car immediately shuts down, wheels blocked, dead in the water. You now need to replace the whole gas tank, fuel lines, and part of the engine, and buy some on some market and get it installed (but don’t worry, they made it easily replaceable). Those that you had are unusable, if you put it in other car it stops working, and if you try to syphon the gas the whole thing explodes.
If we go back to the printers, a printer without a cartridge doesn’t exist, so if a perfectly physically working product (a printer with a cartridge full of ink) you had, stops working until you give company more money on top of already paid money, it’s indefensible no matter how you spin it.
The answer literally says “we bricked your device, but if you pay us more money and buy a spare part for it, we will unbrick it”. It’s extortion.
If I buy subscription for whatever, let’s say food, they deliver me first month of food, and I cancel subscription, I have reasonable expectations that I still can eat my food and it doesn’t spontaneously combusts.

Thankfully, this shit isn’t a part of Android itself (yet) and can easily be purged into oblivion with couple simple clicks.
What is unusable now is Google Play, and you kinda have to use it, or face inconvenience. But recently I am increasingly discovering that finding an apk on a separate website and installing it directly is faster and less offensive than using this eyecancer.

Quit spreading lies and idiotic statements.

No u.
If you buy a HP printer that is registered under Instant Ink program, which is a monthly subscription, and then stop paying, it stops working until you pay HP more money. It’s a definition of breaking.
You need to either break the law by jailbraking it, or throw away perfectly good cartridge (fucking insane) and buy another different one, and then beg HP to release you printer, what they actually can refuse if they don’t believe your new cartridge is legit, and they regularly do that regardless of where you bought it.