The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
-
@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...
-
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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
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
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
-
@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. -
@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 @mhoye BSDs are a shame, honestly. Fragmentation in the Linux world is bad, but fragmentation in the BSD world is on another level.
-
@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.
-
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 It's a phenomenon I'm seeing a lot in FOSS circles lately: LLMs amplify a benevolent dictators ability to handle things on their own, which feeds into their need for control. That can manifest as anything from unwillingness to share work, to outright messages of hostility to potential recruits.
-
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 like romans forgetting how to make concrete
-
@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.@corbet@social.kernel.org @mhoye @gvwilson definitely more than one, unless one's incredibly insular and conservative about who's getting counted.
Setting aside the blame-game for a bit, though: for someone who's been tech adjacent for 30+ years, I have a weird sideline in psychology/spirituality (once disparagingly described as a "fluffy bunny dippy hippie.") With that hat on, I do wonder if a lot of people are experiencing a deep/unconscious dissatisfaction with tech, as a primary thing (rather than as a result of e.g. LLM roll-out.) It might actually explain some of the AI-enthusiasm as well, even if that's a very misguided manifestation.
I have a nagging feeling that what we really need to do right now is start radically reducing the complexity and "abstractness" of our society. I'm not at all sure however that we have the time to do that gracefully before the wheels come off.
Returning to OSes, I have no real idea what the right way forward is. If nothing else, we need Linux's hardware support.
-
@corbet@social.kernel.org @mhoye @gvwilson definitely more than one, unless one's incredibly insular and conservative about who's getting counted.
Setting aside the blame-game for a bit, though: for someone who's been tech adjacent for 30+ years, I have a weird sideline in psychology/spirituality (once disparagingly described as a "fluffy bunny dippy hippie.") With that hat on, I do wonder if a lot of people are experiencing a deep/unconscious dissatisfaction with tech, as a primary thing (rather than as a result of e.g. LLM roll-out.) It might actually explain some of the AI-enthusiasm as well, even if that's a very misguided manifestation.
I have a nagging feeling that what we really need to do right now is start radically reducing the complexity and "abstractness" of our society. I'm not at all sure however that we have the time to do that gracefully before the wheels come off.
Returning to OSes, I have no real idea what the right way forward is. If nothing else, we need Linux's hardware support.
-
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 tbf the value of terseness is very much an individual thing - I certainly find modern languages a little too verbose to read easily. The MS-style (pseudo) Hungarian notation that took over the world in the late 90s is also a total curse.
Isn't the real lesson that we need to build ecosystems that allow for more diversity of contributors? Hard to do in one particular codebase, but a more loosely coupled ecosystem of smaller components might do it.
-
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 have many deep criticisms of the modern kernel community, but conflating mailing lists with insularity might be a tough one to argue. Email is still just about the most widespread, open comms platform - most of the alternatives people jumped to instead were more or less proprietary. Isn't the issue more a failure to build better tooling on top of that platform? (Which tbf a fair amount of effort in recent years has been going into remedying.)
-
@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.
@mhoye @hal_pomeranz hardware support is I guess the biggest stumbling block. A few years back someone in .. I think? .. the redox community was talking about running linux in a VM to use its drivers with hardware passthrough, then copying data back and forth. The *BSD world seems to have the "rump kernel" idea as a similar thing. I'd love to see something like that, I wish I still had the energy & skills to attempt to contribute
