The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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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 That's not quite what happened with perl, but what actually happened was a lot closer to the narrative from the rest of your thread so it doesn't detract from your point at all. Part of it was also that Perl 6 sucked all the enthusiasm away from trying to do anything to improve Perl 5 which was hard for both technical and social reasons.
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Anyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
@mhoye i work and plead mors on the build tool and compiler and rest of tech tool aspect side of things with the same arguments.
And I think it is far less important than the one you point out (and probably harder to fix funnily enough).
So thank you for expressing it
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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 What if the two are linked, and the succession plan /is/ to drive upstream off a cliff in order to force a hard fork.
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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 As a 34 years old Perl dev, I have to disagree on the number being zero.
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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 I think they didn't complain about the lack of people willing to learn though. There is a deluge of patches from people who just want to get them in with LLM help without understanding how any of it works. But there are also good faith contributors
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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'm over 50 and I never reach for perl. Haven't for a decade.
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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.
@mhoye The "just stop onboarding new maintainers" thing was even more shocking to me than the heavy AI psychosis, although they're probably related.
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@lykso@tiny.tilde.website @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run @mhoye@cosocial.ca @froztbyte@mastodon.social In my case I have no belief my license works as more than a statement of intent/principles.
So I try instead to compensate in things which I believe the generally applicable contribution to autonomy remains applicable regardless of whatever corposcum might copy it (whatever bastardized copy may not retain that, but the one I will continue to provide will).
I believe finding the source of things matters and that the tooling for current code helps a lot.
Ultimately of course even with protections, corposcum have very well demonstrated in book publishing just how effectively they can drown out one’s signal so that one is never heard of anyway (copyright was a monopolist and censorship tool first & foremost and it is what it does best; the same is applicable to patents in a very similar way). The system has always protected the monopolists and corposcum first, anyone else being a pretense or incidental at best.
@lispi314
By the way of my Anti AI license project I read some court decisions and this was very disappointing for me. At least in Germany it is nearly impossible to run a (national/international) project of distributed volunteers which share code in the open. There are very weak protections for, say, GPL to be obeyed. In other countries it is probably the same.
I also believe I now understand what these EULAs are supposed to achieve. Funnily enough they seem to be non-binding in Germany if not printed outside the CD you buy. -
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 I tend to disagree a bit about perl. Yes, it looks like line noise to the uninitiated, but the amount of initiation is not huge. I understand that this is pushing away beginners who in Python can just start typing code. OTOH, perl was invented by a linguist and it is intended to be dumped into the Wernicke area and parsed there, whereas python looks like line noise piped thru `gzip -d` , resulting in phrases exceeding the input buffer size of said area. Disclaimer: I'm 64 and use raku.
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@sackofbones @Netzblockierer @torvalds @mhoye Perhaps consider trusting a project (and its leader) that have delivered increasingly capable kernels and a strong development community for 35 years?
I am not thrilled (to put it lightly) about this rush to LLMs, but I don't think that this sort of attitude makes things better. -
@Lunaphied @fedward @mhoye Yes, raku is fun and good. It is essentially perl with the bad things (ambiguous syntax, lack of static typing and good OO) fixed and cool stuff thrown in (grammars, hyperoperators,...). It feels like complex analysis versus real analysis in math: perl5 and real functions can be a nightmare full of traps and counterexamples; with perl6 and complex functions almost anything that looks plausible is proven to be correct.
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@paulmckrcu oh, on a personal level I think I've been round that loop a few times. A lot of what U. G. Krishnamurti said to people who thought they wanted to replicate his path has come back to me over the years!
@srtcd424 Fair enough!
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@mhoye tldr; #LLMs are here to stay. People who actually deliver working solutions that shape the world have spoken. Measures to limit slop are being developed. #Linux becomes even more commercial.
I personally hope more open models will arrive, GPUs will become cheaper and universal income will help people who wont be able to find job in such toxic and draining field as computer science.2026 welcome in ultimate hell everyone! Dont forget to enjoy the ride!
@grayrattus @mhoye How do cheaper gpus make universal income possible? The wealth hoarding class can make universal income a reality right now.
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@grayrattus @mhoye How do cheaper gpus make universal income possible? The wealth hoarding class can make universal income a reality right now.
@Howitzer105mm @grayrattus You can see it's definitely a well-thought out position.
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@Howitzer105mm @grayrattus You can see it's definitely a well-thought out position.
@mhoye @Howitzer105mm I wrote that I hope for 3 things: cheaper GPUs, more open models, universal income.
Without those next 5 years will be tough as many IT engineers will land on the streets with huge debts and burnouts.
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@mhoye @Howitzer105mm I wrote that I hope for 3 things: cheaper GPUs, more open models, universal income.
Without those next 5 years will be tough as many IT engineers will land on the streets with huge debts and burnouts.
@grayrattus @mhoye We can have cheaper gpus now. Tell Altman to quit buying bare silicon with no use for it.
Prevent data centers from consuming, checks notes, EVERYTHING.
Make the tech bros pay the fair market price and royalties for every scrap of human output they've stolen.
We stopped 'domain tasting' by instantly charging 0.50 cents to corpo squatters trying to extort money for your domain name.
We'd kill AI the moment we use the same model on them.
No waiting required. -
@lykso@tiny.tilde.website @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run @mhoye@cosocial.ca @froztbyte@mastodon.social
It is a chosen tradeoff, I suppose.if it is coopted then it becomes irrelevant whether I am maintaining a “good” version; it gets drowned out. Worse, my maintenance may be upstreamed and used to benefit the capitalist version.
It being preserved and public does enable the chance for it to be rediscovered at any time, and possibly in ways that inconvenience malicious parties (if they haven’t died out prior).
Ideally we would be actively undermining this system.
Of course. Though the overthrow of capitalism will not come purely from software.
I would like to avoid a situation where the people responsible for the disease, where the diseased system itself, can use my work to save themselves/itself.
That would be unfortunate. Although I deem it extremely unlikely.
Most work that promotes autonomy and agency is worthless to them at best or inimical to their interests.
Most work that puts autonomy, security and control in the hands of the people/users, especially ones who use it to enact their agency & assert autonomy, is actively unwanted to the point that direct hostile intervention has been undertaken at points in the past over it.
(Not only in software work there.)
Collective access to and control of this technology is a form of power; it would be fantastic if I could find a way to direct that power into a political form which may challenge the current form.
A direct challenge seem unlikely, but if what its purpose is and what it enables is contrary to the malicious interests, then it does have good odds of providing indirect challenge or contribution to a direct challenge.
And of course, some in quest of liberation may use it to survive or save themselves long enough for the wider overthrow to take place (hopefully).
Although it may be that the system is so diseased and falling apart so quickly that the pace of my work will render it useless in that regard.
That would be a Plan9 ending.
Were you luckier, you might complete your work after the hostile system’s crumbling and see it finding use too.
Good chance as well that the system finds no use for what I’m doing, having other tools better suited already at hand.
Quite.
Still, it’s a risk I’d rather not take just now, I guess.
Fair enough. You do have that choice, and your discomfort is not groundless.
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Yeah, tradeoffs are everywhere. No free lunches, figuratively speaking.
The overthrow of capitalism will not come purely from any single thing, no. A struggle dependent on technology controlled by its enemies will not get far, though.
My work is not so strongly ideologically pointed that it can't be put to other ends. Most work is not, IMO. Tools have bents, but you can never say "this tool is useless to the enemy."
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@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte Yeah, tradeoffs are everywhere. No free lunches, figuratively speaking.
The overthrow of capitalism will not come purely from any single thing, no. A struggle dependent on technology controlled by its enemies will not get far, though.
My work is not so strongly ideologically pointed that it can't be put to other ends. Most work is not, IMO. Tools have bents, but you can never say "this tool is useless to the enemy."
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@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte I don't consider "direct hostile intervention" to be proof of "they couldn't subvert it" but rather of "they decided this was the easiest way to subvert it."
I've also seen cryptocurrency become the opposite of what many had hoped it would be in the early stages. I now tend to think that technological features are secondary to the social and material features around them.
I am happy to share my work and to work in community with others, but I 2/
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@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte I don't consider "direct hostile intervention" to be proof of "they couldn't subvert it" but rather of "they decided this was the easiest way to subvert it."
I've also seen cryptocurrency become the opposite of what many had hoped it would be in the early stages. I now tend to think that technological features are secondary to the social and material features around them.
I am happy to share my work and to work in community with others, but I 2/
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @mhoye @froztbyte think now that it is wisest to grow that group along lines of trust rather than just leaving everything out in the open for bots to hoover up.
By "useless in that regard" I meant "useless to the diseased system."
I don't imagine one can keep a secret forever, so I expect my work will leak eventually if it ever becomes interesting enough. I'd like there to be a real, coherent system rooted in material reality in place to challenge the incumbent 3/
