The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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@mhoye "Torvalds and others repeatedly said low-quality contributions from new developers should receive low priority, and that the community should stop trying to make contribution easy. Many developers said, repeatedly, that trying to mentor those developers is almost always a waste of time; they do not listen."
@gvwilson That part specifically and personally hurt to read.
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@froztbyte @mhoye it puzzles me frankly particularly the rust part. rust is a microsoft fucking product now but nobody listens to packagers about bootstrap deps. i used rust for 10 years and made the zip crate the safest and fastest zip impl ever and i cannot contribute code to that system again until gccrs is complete
@hipsterelectron @mhoye ito puzzlement, my thesis as to how we got here is: 12~15y of "developer ease"
over the years of flush vc cash shartups, so much focus has shifted from the _outputs_, instead moving to the _personal_. many good engineering things got traded out, simply to "be comfortable"
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@hipsterelectron @mhoye ito puzzlement, my thesis as to how we got here is: 12~15y of "developer ease"
over the years of flush vc cash shartups, so much focus has shifted from the _outputs_, instead moving to the _personal_. many good engineering things got traded out, simply to "be comfortable"
@froztbyte @mhoye having worked on python packaging until they suddenly released "oh wait this guy is going to make things actually good" https://web.archive.org/web/20250218154403/https://cfp.packaging-con.org/2023/talk/hpuhu7/ and then having astral steal credit for my work and sell to openai and then seeing
uvpop up fucking EVERYWHERE having fucking EVERYONE rave about HOW FUCKING FAST IT IS when I FUCKING DID THAT SHIT—i think labor needs rights and protections -
Anyway, funny story but remember when the discussion was about The Cathedral and The Bazaar?
There's a second axis to that graph, and it's ends are labelled "A Community" and "A Cult".
@mhoye While I think the Perl metaphor is very selectively remembering history and over-estimating the importance of languages, I don't entirely disagree with the conclusions about Linux.
But it won't matter a bit. Sure, this means you get fewer volunteers. But beyond "cult" and "community" you're missing the fourth C of Linux - corporations. There's already plenty of paid developers, and if those aren't elevated community members anymore but regular code-doulas-for-hire from the start, it's probably going to be enough for quite a while.
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To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
@mhoye honestly, perl deserves to die at this point. It served a purpose for a while but that day should be long gone.
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@gvwilson That part specifically and personally hurt to read.
@mhoye @gvwilson The kernel community is more than mildly interested in alternatives. When you have literally thousands of people showing up throwing slop at you, what do you do to retain your sanity and the quality of your code base? Nobody wants to turn away developers who want to actually learn the kernel and be part of the community, but identifying those people takes time and resources that simply aren't there. -
@mhoye "Torvalds and others repeatedly said low-quality contributions from new developers should receive low priority, and that the community should stop trying to make contribution easy. Many developers said, repeatedly, that trying to mentor those developers is almost always a waste of time; they do not listen."
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@gvwilson @mhoye how to identify well-off new contributors with money for conferences: "Ojeda said that there is a need to deprioritize these contributors, but that we still need to find talented people to join our community. That means finding ways to focus on the people who actually matter. For example, the people who take the time to go to conferences are much more likely to stay around."
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@mhoye nobody new wanted to learn before either. you saw less of these people because they had no way to submit plausible work. So AI has certainly enabled a new kind of spam. But this doesn't indicate the pre-existing, tiny pool of new people who genuinely want to learn is any different. there have been so few people like that for a long time. the "genuine learners" more often want to do their own thing, not work on *your* project. This is why AI is making such an impact on Linus and others.
@zzzeek @mhoye From my perspective (also as someone who has repeatedly tried to spin off new projects and build up what could've become forks, but which usually fails because people really want to do their own thing even if it dooms everyone involved to insignificance), this has always been roughly the case, but "nobody" is still a misnormer. Some people want to learn. But LLM-based contributions completely drown them out in the noise.
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@gvwilson @mhoye how to identify well-off new contributors with money for conferences: "Ojeda said that there is a need to deprioritize these contributors, but that we still need to find talented people to join our community. That means finding ways to focus on the people who actually matter. For example, the people who take the time to go to conferences are much more likely to stay around."
@gvwilson @mhoye and also how many women are at this meeting and here's one of them: "Shuah Khan said that she can identify the people who will stick around fairly quickly, and some of the new folks who have come in are excellent. For this reason, she still spends a lot of time with people sending spelling fixes. "
️ Sorry for the multiple tags, just a mind-blowing organization there...
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To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
@mhoye @gunchleoc that’s … not my experience of the Perl community. Yes, there was a certain delight in Perl Golf tournaments, but that went hand in hand with a test infected culture of programming even before Test Driven Development was a thing, and there was a strong culture of documentation as well.
In professional work with Perl I always strive for clarity and readability and so did most of the people I knew in the community.
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Anyway, funny story but remember when the discussion was about The Cathedral and The Bazaar?
There's a second axis to that graph, and it's ends are labelled "A Community" and "A Cult".
@mhoye the demographic parallels are spot-on. My quippy take has been for a while that if a project/community/company hasn’t undergone and thrives after a change of top leadership, it’s still immature.
Sounds like that immaturity will persist into old age for most of the popular things these days.
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@mhoye honestly, perl deserves to die at this point. It served a purpose for a while but that day should be long gone.
@BoredomFestival @mhoye What you suggest it be replaced with? Because I'm still maintaining (well-structured) Perl-based web applications and libraries, and while many folks who would have done Perl in the past are now doing things in Python, Ruby or similar languages, I'm not sure I've seen anything else at a similar abstraction level that has the same degree of longevity (code I wrote decades ago still runs in current Perl5), execution speed, and resource parsimony.
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Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
@mhoye I was a professional Perl programmer for about 10 years. I don’t use it anymore, I’ve barely touched it since I left that job
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@mhoye @gvwilson The kernel community is more than mildly interested in alternatives. When you have literally thousands of people showing up throwing slop at you, what do you do to retain your sanity and the quality of your code base? Nobody wants to turn away developers who want to actually learn the kernel and be part of the community, but identifying those people takes time and resources that simply aren't there.
@corbet @mhoye @gvwilson and yet the 'community' has managed to drive out several high profile contributors over the last few years, as I recall, mostly over the rust issue - and with few apparent qualms. In my experience people who care about code quality and understanding complex systems tend to strongly skew anti-AI; the kernel's perceived pro-AI stance will likely increasingly put those people off contributing.
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@fedward Sorry. We hosted a Perl users group meetup at my old shop more than a decade ago, and even then I was the only person under fifty in the room. And now, I'm not under fifty anymore.
@mhoye heh. Perl syntax never bothered me, and I still probably think about most programming problems as Perl problems, even if I'm using another language. This occasionally bumps me up against the ways other languages aren't as capable, flexible, or dwimmy as Perl, but I also have to be real about the fact that the gum I like just isn't coming back in style. -
@mhoye heh. Perl syntax never bothered me, and I still probably think about most programming problems as Perl problems, even if I'm using another language. This occasionally bumps me up against the ways other languages aren't as capable, flexible, or dwimmy as Perl, but I also have to be real about the fact that the gum I like just isn't coming back in style.@mhoye also I think almost everybody who regularly came to DC Perlmongers meetings in the day has moved on to other languages (if they're still programming at all), so it seems unlikely that even the olds who used to use Perl first would still make that choice.
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@corbet @mhoye @gvwilson and yet the 'community' has managed to drive out several high profile contributors over the last few years, as I recall, mostly over the rust issue - and with few apparent qualms. In my experience people who care about code quality and understanding complex systems tend to strongly skew anti-AI; the kernel's perceived pro-AI stance will likely increasingly put those people off contributing.
@corbet @mhoye @gvwilson I do also wonder if these problems are in some way an unexpected social consequence of a monolithic kernel with in-tree drivers etc. It seemed like a brilliant idea for years/decades, because internal APIs could be refined without piles of compatibility layers, etc - but it also ends up creating a monolithic community.
I've been wondering for a while if a less performant microkernel(ish) approach with defined APIs would make for a healthier social ecosystem. But I guess industry might not have tolerated that performance hit.
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@mhoye > That amount of work cannot be done with a free LLM account. I asked whether that risked cutting off bright new developers that we would rather hang onto; Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world.
"Linux development is only for the wealthy" has probably always been true to some extent but I'm surprised they'd just say it out loud.
@thomaswilburn @mhoye I don't think "Linux development is only for the wealthy" is true.
Also, why contributing to the Linux kernel can only be done if you have access to an LLM? I mean, we can still develop like we did 5 years ago.
Personally I wouldn't contribute to projects that promote the usage of LLMs, but I don't see those things related.
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J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
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@corbet @mhoye @gvwilson and yet the 'community' has managed to drive out several high profile contributors over the last few years, as I recall, mostly over the rust issue - and with few apparent qualms. In my experience people who care about code quality and understanding complex systems tend to strongly skew anti-AI; the kernel's perceived pro-AI stance will likely increasingly put those people off contributing.
@srtcd424 @mhoye @gvwilson There is *one* Rust developer who left after some frustrating experiences. We were sad to lose him. Meanwhile Rust is going from strength to strength in the kernel.
If you look at my Kernel Recipes talk last month, you'll see that, among many other things, I said that the LLM onslaught was likely to cost us developers who don't want to deal with it. To a lesser extent, the advent of Rust may have the same effect. It is not desirable, but I'm not sure what you do about it.
Those who know me know that I am not a big LLM fan. I don't like what they are doing to our community, I fear for the long-term maintainability of a kernel filled with code that its authors don't understand, I detest the time I have had to put into defending LWN against scraper DDoS attacks, I am terrified by the prospect of making our free-software project dependent on proprietary tools owned and developed by psycopaths, I don't believe we can afford the environmental costs, and so on. But the community has to respond to all of this somehow; we're all still trying to figure out what that is.
