This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
JK Rowling expresses her opinion on transgender women and receives some pushback - Rowling responds to that by going all out in making her being a TERF her entire personality.
Linus Torvalds goes on Linus Tech Tip and when ask for his opinion on AI, states that it's coming anyway so we better get used to it - receives some pushback and is now rapidly becoming the guy who makes using AI his entire personality.
Its time to fork Linux
Lawyer-turned-software-developer reporting in! (American, to be clear…)
My concern with AI generated code has to do with software licensing. Mainly…. What is the license of AI generated code??? What if it regurgitates entire sections of proprietary code? Unless I’ve totally missed some legal/tech news, these questions are FAR from settled.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills sometimes, but that seems like something the Linux kernel community should be at least mildly curious about….
Look, to be fair, maybe they are! I don’t follow the kernel mailing list; I don’t know what they talk about. I’m just a humble backend developer/infrastructure guy.
But I know it worries me… personally, I mostly use LLMs in my own work via asking questions about code I’ve already written. Then I look at suggestions it’s made, or potential issues it points out, and decide what to do accordingly. But that’s just me!
I'm more miffed about GPL or copyleft code going to proprietary software and then being profited from without any attribution. It's a poison pill.
If it regurgitates proprietary code the model should not have had access to for training data... well...
That street goes both ways, there's more GPLed code in the training corpus than there is leaked proprietary code.
Unironically a AI's biggest win. Absolutely fair criticism on art and weak imitations of human creativity, but code is just math with syntactic sugar. "Owning" algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn't reinventing nearly every wheel all the time. What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation? What if printers just worked? What if you could put adblockers on any device? What if every online game could be self hosted and modded? AI is (for the moment) giving an approximation of that timeline and I'm here for it.
I'm incredibly against the big LLM SaaS providers and material waste besides. Anyway I don't have a crystal ball and I'm highly sceptical that this technology will work out for average people, but it sure would be interesting if it somehow lead to less corporate control and cultural enclosure rather than how it seems to be going right now.
But what about the poor corporations making money off those games that already fired all the devs that made it after overworking them?
apparently many people's stance on ai is "ai is bad unless my idol uses it". there is not intellectual discipline, suddenly they are willing to ignore all the other problems with ai: jod lose, excessive energy use, training on stolen data, preying on vulnerable people, exacerbate wealth inequality and concentration of power. and let's not forget the ones that apply specifically to Linus: diskilling and ai psychosis.
"b-but linus reviews his code!" 🤦
Are you sure you're not mixing up different people with different opinions with opinion changes of some people?
correct
Apart from the de skilling and psychosis thing. That's up to you
Linus Torvalds has fucking lost it.
Going from chewing out someone for committing dumb AI code to becoming an AI techbro himself. How the mighty have fallen.
LLMs have proven time and time again to be a cognitohazard. It just sucks people in like a drug.
I see the "unless my idol uses it / unless someone good uses it" as a deeply human thing. For me it's the other side of the coin from not harming oneself in discussion, even if a valid point was brought up.
Few great people do that.
Here's mine: the world would be a much, much better place if LLMs did not exist. Also, it would be stupid--today--to not use LLMs to find flaws in the Linux kernel. The only other option is to get your machines compromised.
I mean 5 years ago the world was shit with no llms so no ?
The world was bad, it will be worse thanks to LLM. Both things can (and IMO, are) be true at the same time.
Pretty much. It‘s a really shitty situation and it would be better if the world decided to not use them and sanction them. A bit like nuclear weapons that are also far more effective than alternatives but too destruktive to seriously consider. For now, many developers are doomed to use LLMs for security reasons. Because LLMs are not just a tool. They are an entire production line at the grasp of your hand. Just using complex architecture to obscure risks doesn‘t cut it anymore.
I’m not a huge fan of AI but comparing them to nukes is wild
The environmental implications of the data centers fuelling the LLMs will undoubtedly end more lives than nuclear weapons ever have
Using LLMs for security auditing? Ok, but people are mad that LLM-assisted code, tons of it, is now getting into the kernel and Linus is no longer slamming the brakes...
The only other option is to use something inconvenient like OpenBSD, constantly audited for three decades, LLMs could find only very few obscure bugs.
OpenBSD, constantly audited for three decades
Oh buddy... Did you not hear that not only did OpenBSD start using AI for audits but that it actually found a handful of serious issues that decades of human audits have missed?
There is a difference between an AI doing a security review (which they have become quite accomplished) and generating code that gets committed into the codebase.
Again, how does one verify that the code it has generated isn’t some verbatim chunk of copyrighted code that it happened to be trained on, and it turned out to be the best fit? There’s no guarantee that a model will not do this, even if instructed.
Also, content generated by AI models has already been deemed uncopyrightable, and this includes code. So are some larrtsmof the Linux kernel now able to be copied freely without GPL restrictions? How can you license code or executables compiled from said code if you do not hold the copyright on it?
And conversely, many people seem to have a "the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus" stance.
Many people on Lemmy will start to crash out the moment you suggest AI is anything other than pure evil
It’s not the algorithms people oppose, it’s the way they are trained within a capitalist system (infringement of many copyrights without compensation), they way they are being marketed as a living mind that can basically befriend us and take a mental load off of us (they can’t and it’s problematic to humans who allow them to try), and they way they’re being used an excuse to buy up the wntire world’s capacity for computing so that rich tech oligarchs can force us all onto the cloud services for all computing in the future.
I think if at the very least they weren’t bulldozing people’a home and poisoning their drinking water in order to forever capture all technology and then rent it back to us we might have a more favorable view of the possibilities, but so far Big Tech has done almost nothing but try to find ways to make individuals and enterprise addicted to their Mechanical Turk in order to take advantage of us.
Until Claude can diagnose and treat Kent Overstreet for whatever neurospicy killed bcachefs, I will never trust it blindly. It just does things faster. Sometimes it breaks things faster, other times is finds things ready to be broken faster.
I am sure out of all projects Linux has the expertise and guardrails to ensure LLM generated code works as expected
