The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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RE: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117439226690379216
The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign. It's the talking about planning succession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn, that's the sign.
Y'all the kernel is in deep, deep trouble. We saw what happened to Perl and the kernel is in deep trouble.
@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.
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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.
There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
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RE: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117439226690379216
The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign. It's the talking about planning succession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn, that's the sign.
Y'all the kernel is in deep, deep trouble. We saw what happened to Perl and the kernel is in deep trouble.
@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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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
And for Linux as a plausibly community-managed meaningfully open as in open project, that clock is definitely ticking.
The end of this road is some corporate-funded retirement home for understaffed and underfunded projects once enough of the current devs have aged out without anyone growing into those roles, with private forks at companies that relied on the kernel, also privately relieved there's no need or reason to deal with antediluvian developer processes or bother giving back anymore.
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye Something something cathedral, something something bazaar. Who's the priests now, Linus?
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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 Skimming the report back (https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1099594/be20382b54a9b4cd/) and I see “A properly trained LLM is a useful tool, but it takes a lot of time to reach that point.”
If that’s true, then every commit that uses one or more LLMs should include specific disclosure of what model(s) including their versions since they change ALL THE TIME, as well as the prompts used (because that matters a lot!) But they are removing “Assisted-By” tag and you have to dig thru email to find out.
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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 the kernel is a country and it is the united states of america which is actively waging war upon another sovereign state
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@mhoye Skimming the report back (https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1099594/be20382b54a9b4cd/) and I see “A properly trained LLM is a useful tool, but it takes a lot of time to reach that point.”
If that’s true, then every commit that uses one or more LLMs should include specific disclosure of what model(s) including their versions since they change ALL THE TIME, as well as the prompts used (because that matters a lot!) But they are removing “Assisted-By” tag and you have to dig thru email to find out.
@mhoye That would actually help new contributors understand how existing maintainers are using LLM “tools” the “right way”! It’s more process of course to be that rigorous in using an LLM to include how you’re using it when offering up code, but if it really is a “useful tool” then you have to teach people how to use it.
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye I don’t know that it matters if it’s hard to contribute with the amount of funding surrounding the kernel being so vast. It’s also telling that “contribute” in this context is usually restricted to a very small subset of contributions (that is: shipping code and enduring abuse from code maintainers)
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
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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.
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And for Linux as a plausibly community-managed meaningfully open as in open project, that clock is definitely ticking.
The end of this road is some corporate-funded retirement home for understaffed and underfunded projects once enough of the current devs have aged out without anyone growing into those roles, with private forks at companies that relied on the kernel, also privately relieved there's no need or reason to deal with antediluvian developer processes or bother giving back anymore.
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".
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@mhoye the kernel is a country and it is the united states of america which is actively waging war upon another sovereign state
@hipsterelectron @mhoye you know, I keep beating parts of this drum in conversations with euros
all this "sovereign" tech talk and yet all of them do not seem to have done the slightest bit of analysis on transitive dependency chains
"sovereign distribution, built in europe on european infra" -> look under the hood -> ubuntu
one of the best examples I reach for: "what happens the day you can't reach qemu/kvm source anymore?"
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@mhoye The "under 50" edit to this just feels like twisting the knife. It's not like it was inaccurate before, but then you had to make it worse.
@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.
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@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
@hal_pomeranz If it's up to me to pontificate, I think it will happen sooner than people might expect. It will either an explicitly anti-AI OS like NetBSD or a pure fork that focuses on a welcoming community and modern tooling.
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@hipsterelectron @mhoye you know, I keep beating parts of this drum in conversations with euros
all this "sovereign" tech talk and yet all of them do not seem to have done the slightest bit of analysis on transitive dependency chains
"sovereign distribution, built in europe on european infra" -> look under the hood -> ubuntu
one of the best examples I reach for: "what happens the day you can't reach qemu/kvm source anymore?"
@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
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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.
