Linux kernel czar?
I’m curious about this but I refuse to click the link because that just sounds so fucking stupid.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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The headline is stupid but the article is interesting. Greg is saying that since last month for some unknown reason, AI bug reports have gotten good and useful, and something current Linux maintainers can handle.
Yeah, but then article says that "good" ones still need reams of human work to make them acceptable.
Article is propaganda.
Greg says they're mostly small bug fixes and that the current maintainers can handle it, not sure where you're getting the "reams" bit from
Says in the article that they arent good to go, needing code review, code cleanup, comment and documentation cleanup, etc
Yeah I mean, the goal is not to replace code maintainers, only to assist them in their work. Greg in general seems optimistic about it:
"I did a really stupid prompt," he recounted. "I said, 'Give me this,' and it spit out 60: 'Here's 60 problems I found, and here's the fixes for them.' About one-third were wrong, but they still pointed out a relatively real problem, and two-thirds of the patches were right." Mind you, those working patches still needed human cleanup, better changelogs, and integration work, but they were far from useless. "The tools are good," he said. "We can't ignore this stuff. It's coming up, and it's getting better."
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It's an affectation of The Register they like reporting real news with a sometimes quirky voice. It's also British so some of the language and humour doesn't quite work as well in other parts of the world.
That's The Register's style. Their a little weird with their copy, but their reporting has been solid, in my experience.
We Brits use Czar as a colloquialism for "person in charge of...".
So the head of the water regulator might be referred to as the water Czar (and they deserve a similar fate).
Your loss. The Register has been rock solid tech news (if a bit cheeky) for decades.
How did I end up on a timeline where Microsoft is talking about rolling back AI in its OS and practically acknowledging vibe coding caused problems... and Linux developers are talking about ramping up its usage?
Obviously Microsoft is still worse here, but what are these trajectories?
What I think you are also seeing is AI sucking at some things and doing better than humans in others.
AI is pretty great at adding unit tests to code, for example, where humans do a just-OK job. Or in writing code for a very direct well scoped small problem.
AI is just OK at understanding product nuance and choices during larger implementations, or getting end to end coding right for any complex use cases.
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Either a lot more tools got a lot better,
That's what it was. Even the free, open source models are vastly superior to the best of the best from just a year ago.
People got into their heads that AI is shit when it was shit and decided at that moment that it was going to be stuck in that state forever. They forget that AI is just software and software usually gets better over time. Especially open source software which is what all the big AI vendors are building their tools on top of.
We're still in the infancy of generative AI.
I tried one for the first time yesterday. It was mediocre at best. Certainly not production code. It would take just as much effort to refine it as it would to just write it in the first place.
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If you read AI critics, you will see people presenting solid financial evidence of the failure of AI companies to do what they promised. Remember Sam Altman promised AGI in 2025? I certainly do, and now so do you.
Do you have any concrete evidence that this financial flop will turn around before it runs out of money?
Whether AI can reliably detect issues and generate working code is a whole different thing from CEO's delusions and hyperbole to game the market. Their financial success is also irrelevant, in fact it's better if the sub/token model fails and we are left with locally ran models.
Assume all the big AI firms die: Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. Poof! They're gone!
Here would be my reaction: "So anyway... have you tried GLM-7? It's amazing! Also, there's a new workflow in ComfyUI I've been using that works great to generate..."
Generative AI is here to stay. You don't need a trillion dollars worth of data centers for progress to continue. That's just billionaires living in an AGI fantasy land.
You don't need a trillion dollars worth of data centers for progress to continue
Bullshit
I just added up how much it would cost (in theory—assuming everything is in-stock and ready to ship) to build out a data center capable of training something like qwen3.5:122b from scratch in a few months: $66M. That's how much it would cost for 128 Nvidia B200 nodes (they have 8 GPUs each), infiniband networking, all-flash storage (SSDs), and 20 racks (the hardware).
If OpenAI went bankrupt, that would result in a glut of such hardware which would flood the market, so the cost would probably drop by 40-60%.
Right now, hardware like that is all being bought up and monopolized by Big AI. This has resulted in prices going up for all these things. In a normal market, it would not cost this much! Furthermore, the reason why Big AI is spending sooooo much fucking money on data centers is because they're imagining demand. It's not for training. Not anymore. They're assuming they're going to reach AGI any day now and when they do, they'll need all that hardware to be the world's "virtual employee" provider.
BTW: Anthropic has a different problem than the others with AGI dreams... Claude (for coding) is in such high demand that their biggest cost is inference. They can't build out hardware fast enough to meet the demand (inference, specifically). For every dollar they make, they're spending a dollar to build out infrastructure. Presumably—some day—they'll actually be able to meet demand with what they've got and on that day they'll basically be printing money. Assuming they can outrun their debts, of course.
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They should all be destroyed
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Video killed the radio czar?
Sounds like time for a new czar
The Linux foundation, home to some of the best software engineers, and known not to pick up any trend just because it's new - let's say they still work with patches sent in a mailing list - reckon that a new tool is being very useful to them to the point that they're integrating it into their workflow.
People still criticise them because they should know better such tool is useless.
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