Linux

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.

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Every once in a while I'll ask the DDG AI a question, and then try to confirm it with narrower searches. I think that's the extent of my use of LLMs.

And I feel guilty for it, wondering how much water and power it's taking and if the compute is poisoning the air of its human neighbors and keeping them up at night with a 70 dB hum.

There might be something to be said about using models locally, and using them as part of a human-guided process.

Note: I've stopped calling it AI in favor of LLM, partly due to the whole SI controversy in the US and partly in the hope that AI is still a larger category of learning systems that might lead to AGI, if we don't destroy ourselves first. Also the Jev model looks like an interesting development that indicates the ultimate tools might be other than a later model from OpenAI or Anthropic.

Note Also: I programmed in the 1990s and broke my brain trying to teach a computer to competently play a complex strategy game. I got pretty far before all my variable names leaked out of my head. These days, I write simple AHK scripts but that's about it. So I'm way out of my league when it comes to sound 2020s era coding methods.

I like Linus, but comparing an LLM to a compiler is fucking stupid.

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.

AI is just a tool, the user of a tool should be competent enough to use it properly

new and interesting tools

Looks Under The Generative AI Hood

Sees Snakeoil Salesman Selling Labotomies As The Future

The other practical side of this is enforceability.

Lets say Linux banned all use of VSCode in contributions, this second. And any Microsoft tools. No exceptions. And it makes sense, because there is an evil blatantly anti-linux entity behind it... What are people gonna do?

Keep using it anyway, and just not disclose it.

This is why linux doesn't tell people what tools they can and can't use. Practically, they can't police what tools people use, just what they contribute. Just like (to a reasonable degree) they don't try to police people who contributes to the kernel, but instead judge them by their contributions. Other contributors don't have to like those tools or contributors, but that is how a project like this must operate.

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.

here is the email this screenshot is an excerpt of; the specific "X" (the thing which the message Linus is replying to here suggested perhaps AI should not be used for) was the writing of commit messages.

Maybe the rule should be that if you use AI, just make sure Linus can’t tell you did.

When the topic is AI, the quality of some of these Lemmy threads drops down to the level of YouTube comments.