"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard.
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"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough."
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"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough."
@tante they key point, "fork it", was not addressed.
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"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough."
(Sorry, just a quick note, I'd love to write a longer piece on "useful" because it's such a harmful narrative)
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"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough."
@tante I make no claim to know how the man thinks, but I suspect no small part of this is a bit of FOSS realpolitik.
Let's say Linus were to stand firm against use of AI use in the kernel. Commendable.
But then the rate of commits remains stagnant. meanwhile some big institutional downstream kernel (say a consortium of Ubuntu and other for-profit distros) user goes and forks the kernel. Now there's the Linux Foundation kernel (kernel0) and several "AI friendly" kernels (kernelPrime) that get features added in more rapidly, customizable branches (kernel Lite, kernel Plus etc.) all enabled by rapid AI development. Complete with Ai induced sec vulns and just... bloat and shit.
I'm not entirely sure that landscape is better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in no way excusing it. But I can sortof understand it. The "Adapt or die" mentality. -
"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough."
@tante I assume the discussion spun up around whether the Linux kernel should accept AI generated contributions. How would one practically avoid that? In your analogy of child labor the Kernel community would have to put out a statement that code written by means of child labor is not accepted in the Kernel. Reasonable. And the industries way of "ensuring" that is my having the contributor sign a piece of paper saying they don't use child labor. Would that be the same for AI generated code if the decision would be to not accept AI generated code? The code itself wouldn't be distinguishable from human written code. You'd just have to trust the person that they stand by their signature to not use AI tools for code generation.
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@tante I make no claim to know how the man thinks, but I suspect no small part of this is a bit of FOSS realpolitik.
Let's say Linus were to stand firm against use of AI use in the kernel. Commendable.
But then the rate of commits remains stagnant. meanwhile some big institutional downstream kernel (say a consortium of Ubuntu and other for-profit distros) user goes and forks the kernel. Now there's the Linux Foundation kernel (kernel0) and several "AI friendly" kernels (kernelPrime) that get features added in more rapidly, customizable branches (kernel Lite, kernel Plus etc.) all enabled by rapid AI development. Complete with Ai induced sec vulns and just... bloat and shit.
I'm not entirely sure that landscape is better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in no way excusing it. But I can sortof understand it. The "Adapt or die" mentality.@tezoatlipoca but you are projecting onto Linus a completely different argument than the one he made. It may be an argument that you personally would find persuasive, but he did not try to persuade anyone of that.
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@tante I assume the discussion spun up around whether the Linux kernel should accept AI generated contributions. How would one practically avoid that? In your analogy of child labor the Kernel community would have to put out a statement that code written by means of child labor is not accepted in the Kernel. Reasonable. And the industries way of "ensuring" that is my having the contributor sign a piece of paper saying they don't use child labor. Would that be the same for AI generated code if the decision would be to not accept AI generated code? The code itself wouldn't be distinguishable from human written code. You'd just have to trust the person that they stand by their signature to not use AI tools for code generation.
@maxheadroom @tante I think it was about whether contributors should be able to opt out of getting replies from their "AI" review tool
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"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough."
@tante Also, saying ’you can just fork it’ is just being mean and malicious. I’ve worked a bit with the Linux kernel and even wrote some code for it (proprietary, I think, not sure after 20 years), and I have done other software development. Technically, I could fork it, yes.
In practice? No way I could do anything meaningful with it. It’d take years to even bootstrap a project around it.
And the kernel is not the only piece of software I’d need to fork to get rid of ’AI’.
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@tante I assume the discussion spun up around whether the Linux kernel should accept AI generated contributions. How would one practically avoid that? In your analogy of child labor the Kernel community would have to put out a statement that code written by means of child labor is not accepted in the Kernel. Reasonable. And the industries way of "ensuring" that is my having the contributor sign a piece of paper saying they don't use child labor. Would that be the same for AI generated code if the decision would be to not accept AI generated code? The code itself wouldn't be distinguishable from human written code. You'd just have to trust the person that they stand by their signature to not use AI tools for code generation.
@maxheadroom @tante
this one's easy. Have a policy against GenAI contributions. Maybe there will be dishonest contributors. If you catch them you use all the tools of open source reputation (conversation, bans, etc). Just like always.Holding people to standards is a problem for open source, but not a new one. People could be contributing closed source code and nobody would be able to tell. Open source has always relied on some level of trust.
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@tezoatlipoca but you are projecting onto Linus a completely different argument than the one he made. It may be an argument that you personally would find persuasive, but he did not try to persuade anyone of that.
@cczona True. I guess I was just trying to find a reason (for myself) why he might have that pro-AI usage stance at all.
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