The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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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. -
@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.
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@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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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.
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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 like romans forgetting how to make concrete
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@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.
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@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.
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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 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.
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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 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.)
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@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
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@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.
@srtcd424 I am not sure whether my post here is an act of kindness or of vandalism, but here you go for your radical reduction! Make of it what you will.
https://ecosophia.net/ -
@srtcd424 I am not sure whether my post here is an act of kindness or of vandalism, but here you go for your radical reduction! Make of it what you will.
https://ecosophia.net/@paulmckrcu ooh, ta. My reading comprehension/energy is sporadic these days but I will give it a go
Many years ago I heard someone attribute a quote to Rudolf Steiner about "the point of absolute materialism from which all progress will be made" - I've never managed to actually find a reference, but it does feel like it describes where we are now.
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@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
@srtcd424 @mhoye @hal_pomeranz heh. Long before Linux achieved something like FOSS hegemony on the driver front, we were picking the cherries (blackdown jdk) while running our homemade console servers on NetBSD boxes serving the world. Linux emulation on BSD was faster than 'linux'. That was 1998. Times a comin and the little red devils be back.
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@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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re: "It's the talking about planning secession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn"
There are three people identified as "she" in that piece, and one of them was the only person to say something like "[she] 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. "
It's gendered labor.
@richpuchalsky @mhoye this tracks. It's not that they can't find people to mentor, it's that they think they are above mentorship.
