• logana@lemmychan.org
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    4 days ago

    I don’t understand this whole idiotic concept of “don’t use AI for X”.

    I do. People are stupid, bandwagoning morons.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
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    9 days ago

    Lol, I could kind of understand (not really support) his use of AI. While I doubt it’s something you can do for long without starting to make compromises, people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode and (more importantly) their willpower slowly runs out.

    But this argument made me loose all my respect for him. It’s so utterly stupid. I hate it when i have to check my assembly code line by line, because it’s not guaranteed that the compiler will compile the same code I’ve written deterministically, and basically just randomizes what it outputs. Or when my editor does not save what I typed, and instead decides based on a random language statistics what to actually save, so I have to double-check my text word-by-word every time.

    Oh, wait. No, because the tools are deterministic, and that doesn’t happen. But of course, adding randomness into your workflow, where you have to focus and review everything line-by-line, is the same as using deterministic tools, lol.

    • hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      “Deterministic” compilers and reproducible builds are actually fairly difficult problems. (Yes I know technically the compiler is deterministic, but AI is also technically deterministic since you can set the seed).

      • Gobbel2000@programming.dev
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        9 days ago

        It’s not just about being deterministic. A compiler crucially follows clearly defined formal rules on what is a correct output given some input, which the programmer can fully rely on.

      • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Not parent commenter, but no, not to the same degree.

        The level of trust I have in a source greatly changes how I review it. If I know that I’m reviewing code from a competent developer, I’m going to see a for loop and look for why is this here, how does it play into the larger objective and if I’m happy with it, I move on. But if I don’t trust the developer as much, I’m looking at far more like what data type is being used in the indexing, what’s the break condition, can go off the rails into random memory.

        • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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          8 days ago

          Competent developers make mistakes too. I think it’s worth at least skimming every line in a PR. Things like indexing out of bounds should probably be handled by testing or using a memory safe language.

          I don’t think code review is the place where you should be trying to catch bugs in the minutia of the code. You should be assessing readability/maintainability, architectural decisions, risk, and testing strategy. That does involve reading all of the code, even if only by skimming.

          • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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            8 days ago

            I guess I don’t really count skimming as reading haha

            When looking for readability, maintainability, etc what I mainly look for are design patterns. If you’re using the same boilerplate and layout I’m going to start skipping over sections

            I also mainly work on high performance embedded systems that are difficult/nearly impossible to unit test and I dont always have line coverage metrics. A lot more verification by inspection in my corner of the world

            • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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              7 days ago

              high performance embedded systems that are difficult/nearly impossible to unit test

              Sort of a change in topic, but I’m curious why that would be so difficult to test.

              • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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                7 days ago

                There’s a couple big reasons, sometimes you only have to deal with one or two, other times you’re hit with all of them.

                The data source for the algorithms often comes from arbitrary memory addresses that live outside the context of the C, C++, or Rust runtime. If I want to read CPU core temp I send magic numbers to one address to configure ADC channel conversion, another magic number somewhere else to do the conversion, wait a few dozen microseconds, then read a third new address that I squint one eye, spin around 10 times, and do a handstand and I’ll get a number that looks like temperature.

                If I’m running on the microcontroller, I’m essentially in production environment and I can’t control what the data is. If I recompile for a different system (say x86 Linux) then I’m almost certainly going to segfault. I could abstract out the reading of the data, but then on my tiny 8MHz microcontroller that has to run it’s main loop at 1000Hz, I only have a few thousand clock cycles to get everything done, calling functions, pushing/popping the stack takes a lot of time.

                Adding to the pile-on most microcontrollers have <1MB of RAM, many in the tens of kilobytes range so I don’t have much of a stack to work with and I need to keep even the number of instructions down.

                Even if you do all the abstractions, you then have extra logic you have to write to simulate what is happening and subtle behaviors that are timing dependant. It frequently is extremely difficult to do that as the documentation rarely fully describes everything, so you can lull yourself into a false sense of security that you’ve tested the code and it’s correct, but then you get stuck on a register value that never changes and a watchdog timer comes along and resets the hardware on you.

                And that’s not the getting into the runtime or build environments, flashing procedures, limited flash cycles, and a million other business constraints that technically you can do it, but at that point your dev team has all taken the month off to go play Half Life 3

                • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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                  7 days ago

                  That definitely increases the challenge of writing tests or trusting that they are faithfully representing your production environment.

                  I could abstract out the reading of the data

                  I was going to suggest this, and it sounds like that ends up being expensive. It seems like you need some kind of test harness that’s able to emulate your specific hardware while still allowing for testing hooks that don’t impede the tight clock scheduling.

      • Mikina@programming.dev
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        8 days ago

        You do that inherently when you are writing the code. Every line you write has already had that focus, because you had to come up with it.

        That you should also not trust every line of the compiled assembly after you wrote the code, and check it lime by line, is an extremely stupid argument.

        Of course, you should get someone else, with a fresh/unbiased opinion to review your code too, but just the act of figuring out every line you write is in some sense a rewiev, that there is at least a plan or reason why it was written.

        AI just randomly generates code without thought or reason, and you have to check everything. Unlike assembly generated from code.

        • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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          7 days ago

          That you should also not trust every line of the compiled assembly after you wrote the code, and check it lime by line, is an extremely stupid argument.

          I guess it’s good that no one is making that argument then.

          • tyler@programming.dev
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            7 days ago

            that is the argument linus is making… he is comparing a deterministic tool (a compiler that outputs the same assembly every time) to a non-deterministic tool and saying that they are the same type of tool. that require the same level of review, when they do not.

    • SamuraiBeandog@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      His point is that an LLM is just another tool for increasing productivity, the same as a compiler or IDE. The quality of the code is the only metric that should be judged.

        • definitemaybe@lemmy.ca
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          8 days ago

          Except they’re not? Very few tools are deterministic. Only Mathematics is, and that’s only a small subset of tools.

          You’re free to argue that non-deterministic tools lack value, but that’s clearly false: OCR only exists because of lossy training machine learning algorithms. Or, going even more basic, Monte Carlo simulations are by far the most efficient method of testing entire categories of problems that are intractable deterministically.

          LLMs can be shitty, as a business practice, due to their unpredictability, but (hopefully obviously) that depends on how it’s used.

          • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world
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            8 days ago

            I’d argue that Monte Carlo is a bad example here, and is an example of a deterministic tool.

            You use a tool to create an outcome, you’re looking for an answer or a solution that you can trust.

            If you want to examine behavior of a system that has input variables across some known range, you could brute force it, try every single possible combination and wait a millennia. Or you use a monte carlo strategy, let randomness enter the simulation to build out a basic characterization. You want more detail? More confidence? Increase the number of runs. I can trust that if I increase the number of runs I gain higher fidelity, if the tool/strategy was non deterministic I couldn’t do that

        • MangoCats@feddit.it
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          9 days ago

          instead of writing what you want directly you are writing tests for it.

          LLMs write pretty good requirements, specifications, code, and automated tests from chat sessions. You do need to keep an eye on what it’s writing to make sure it’s not hallucinating, but hallucinations have been reducing in practice rather dramatically across the last 12-18 months of model development. They still happen, you will always need to guard against them, but usually a quick read of what is written followed by a quick test of the product will find the worst offenders. In the end, you need to check the final product to be sure it does EXACTLY what you want, just like you always did. And, it’s still a good idea (and as possible as ever) to keep the product modularized and also check every module to ensure it works as you want. How small you make those modules has always been a matter of preference / dictated by levels of concern, etc.

          • TwilightKiddy@scribe.disroot.org
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            9 days ago

            If you are generating tests with an LLM, it’s not deterministic.

            Also, have you actually read anything an LLM wrote that’s longer than a hundered words? It’s usually immediately obvious. In the open source world things I keep seeing are exchanges like this one. And Niri is a fairly good case with it’s maintainer actually reading the PRs and catching all the bullshit that an LLM spits out. Very often nowadays people will also do reviews with an LLM and this sort of stuff will just accumulate in the codebase with nobody to reject it.

            But even if it was as useful as big tech paints it to be, I’ll always be against using it based purely on morals. There is an enormous number of issues in that regard, most importatnly LLMs literally kill people both directly and indirectly. Condoning the adoption of this technology is either being ignorant or misanthropic.

            • MangoCats@feddit.it
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              9 days ago

              If you are generating tests with an LLM, it’s not deterministic.

              Once the tests are generated, they have become deterministic - unit test code is checked in alongside the repository, CI (continuous integration) systems can prevent the code from merging to main branch until all CI tests pass. No LLM is involved in the test execution process, and if all LLMs stop functioning tomorrow, the tests still work just like they did before.

              read anything an LLM wrote that’s longer than a hundered words? It’s usually immediately obvious

              About 250,000 lines of code so far, and no… I don’t read it all - my personal music player isn’t that important, I just care that it works. Other more important projects I have read every single line. Even in the music player I have read a few hundred lines and skimmed a couple of thousand. Yes, the style is obvious. It’s what you might call “too complete” attempting to cover lots of edge cases that a human would usually neglect, though as human code is maintained over the long haul, it tends to mature in that direction. And just because it’s very complete doesn’t mean it’s perfectly correct, and that’s a major point of conflict with me and LLM code, I’m constantly asking it to simplify because the complexity is easy to hide mistakes in. You know what happens when you ask it to simplify? It simplifies.

              people will also do reviews with an LLM and this sort of stuff will just accumulate in the codebase with nobody to reject it.

              That’s a management / maturity problem. As new as all this stuff is, it’s virtually inevitable there will be an adjustment process. Our company runs on processes and procedures, they average 50 pages each and there are thousands of them. I am given almost 100 of them to “train on” on a near annual basis - whenever they get revised. No way in hell can I do an accurate review of 5000 pages of intertwined procedures, not code, natural language work instructions. LLMs can. LLMs are. Simple questions to an LLM like: “review this procedure, is it internally self consistent” will find issues, real issues - usually minor - but undeniable when you read the review, the problem it describes is absolutely present in the document, page 14 says “X” and page 23 says “not X” and the context is basically identical - so which are we really supposed to do: “X” or “not X”? Well, that depends. Depends on what? Additional context and detail that the already too long 50 page procedure doesn’t address. We just did an internal audit which turned up thousands of these mostly little issues. Addressing them is going to be… interesting. We’ve been in business over 70 years, we know we’re not going to tackle it all in a single year, there will probably be a plan to work down the worst of the issues, then a second round for additional polish, of course corrective actions to ensure that we at least don’t make things worse along these metrics with future changes… I bet by 2035 we’ll have 90%+ of today’s real observations fully addressed.

              LLMs literally kill people both directly and indirectly

              As does nearly every activity of life, both in human society and the natural world.

              • TwilightKiddy@scribe.disroot.org
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                9 days ago

                Why the are you getting more text than you can physically review at your job? That sounds like a recipe for poor reviews. How are you sure LLMs are not missing anything if nobody actually has the time to read through all the text? Why does the text that gets to a developer contain logical mistakes in the first place? Back at my last job we had people assigned to collecting feature requests, talk them through with whoever wanted the feature implemented and produce proper specifications that developers would implement without wasting time on specifications containing garbage.

                As does nearly every activity of life, both in human society and the natural world.

                Yea, all people who drank water died. Not a very good argument. Most things don’t have a mental disorder named after them. If I leave a webpage with a calculator running unattended it won’t magically persuade a random visitor into commiting suicide. Webpages with LLM-powered chatbots are doing just that. You may choose to neglect it, but to me it sounds like adding lead to your gasoline. Yea, your car runs better. Are you sure it’s worth it, though?

                • MangoCats@feddit.it
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                  9 days ago

                  Why the are you getting more text than you can physically review at your job?

                  Regulatory required documented training, old conservative company.

                  How are you sure LLMs are not missing anything if nobody actually has the time to read through all the text?

                  You’re not. Neither do the humans tasked with the job do a 100% thorough review. Side by side, the LLM catches more flaws than the humans do.

                  produce proper specifications that developers would implement without wasting time on specifications containing garbage.

                  Sounds nice. We’ve got ~500 employees at our “site” (which is now distributed across 3+ states with remote workers), of those, about 8 do software development, so developers end up doing virtually all of the translation of customer “needs” to specifications / requirements. We also have a marketing department that changes their mind about twice as fast as the product development / delivery cycle.

                  If I leave a webpage with a calculator running unattended it won’t magically persuade a random visitor into commiting suicide.

                  That’s a touchy subject. A friend of ours recently had her son die of drowing in his bathtub, he was epileptic, had a seizure and fell in the tub. There was no suicide note, it was ruled an accident. He used ChatGPT to write his own obituary, as well as a book explaining his life from his perspective - each seizure was “taking away a little of who he was,” and the seizures were getting more frequent, none of the treatments or medications slowed them. It’s pretty clear, to me, that he was going to commit suicide and/or die soon with or without ChatGPT. After he passed, his mother had a ton of grief / guilt about not being closer with him in his life, but then… he actively pushed her away, even violently. It’s doubtful he would have written or expressed what he did as completely without ChatGPT assistance - how much was him, how much was LLM hallucination? Does it really matter? He wrote the book, and he put it where she would find it.

                  The next time you go driving, count the oncoming cars. When you get to 100, realize this: statistically, one - maybe two - of the drivers of those oncoming 100 cars will, eventually, end their life by suicide. And those are just the deaths officially classified as suicide. Engagement with ChatGPT undoubtedly works both ways, some cases accelerating the process or even causing them to take their lives when they wouldn’t have, and other cases slowing or stopping the pursuit of suicide altogether. It’s going to be hard to say if Chatbots or other world events drive the statistical changes starting a couple of years ago. The data isn’t clear yet, but the concerns have certainly been raised, and I would assume the supportiveness of Chatbots should improve as a result in the future.

    • MangoCats@feddit.it
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      9 days ago

      people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode

      Damn, dude, I had mad 6502 assembly skillz in 1985, I could even write it out by hand - pencil on paper, and those slowly eroded through use of compilers for higher level languages until my last assembly experience in 1996, today… I’d be learning everyhing specific to assembly code from scratch. I guess I’m just useless now.

      the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.

      Gotta agree there. We had two clear camps of programmers before LLM agents came along, and the camp I least enjoyed reviewing the code of before (and now) of is the camp that resisted adoption of new interesting tools the most loudly.

      • Pappabosley@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        I think there is no equivalency between compilers and other tools, and LLMs. As the comment states, they are just the statistical prediction of what would come next. Compilers may sometimes give unexpected outcomes, but they are working to a defined set of rules and there is potential to see how they actually came to that outcome and address it.

        Added to this is the prevalence of people thinking that LLMs can allow them to do anything, whether or not they understand it, it’s even sold like that. In my own organisation I have an operations manager thinking he can make pages for our Intranet - where does it store the data? How is access controlled? So many basic questions that an actual programmer would know to think of. Sure you can just keep asking people if they can fly a plane and maybe one will do well enough that they get you all the way there, till it comes to landing and it’s too late - maybe better to just ask a pilot to do it.

        Our software engineers use it really well, they can read what it’s outputting to understand if it’s wrong, they know how to prompt it to avoid issues, they use it for snippets and fixes and that it won’t just write a whole program. However, it’s benefit to us (and the world) is nowhere near worth the monetary and environmental cost. The investors pouring in money are hoping they can be the company that people become reliant on, so they can survive the bubble and their ultimate goal of replacing real people.

  • jasory@programming.dev
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    8 days ago

    Don’t compilers have some guarantee of behaviours? I.e even if you don’t know exactly what instructions and order the compiler generates there is a guarantee that it is computationally/mathematically equivalent to the statements you wrote. Otherwise it would be a pretty terrible compiler. That’s a pretty big jump to writing instructions you don’t understand, since LLMs can’t make the same guarantees about a prompt/request.

  • luciole (they/them)@beehaw.org
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    9 days ago

    This is a seriously weak and narrow argument. First off, the parallel drawn with existing tools is shallow. When was the last time an editor or a compiler promised to replace employees? Which of those notably accelerates climate catastrophe? Which one of those is the biggest theft of labor in the history of humanity? Everything is political. Externalizing the social and environmental cost of the major LLMs is taking a clear stance in favour of the late stage capitalistic tech empires currently taking shape.

  • devfuuu@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    The only intelligent people that I trust are those that use drugs and drink until they drop!

    If you deny to consume those things than you ate dumb!

    What? It’s obvious that it can lead you to a downwards spiral, into alcoholism, a life of mental problems and struggles? Create a toxic environment around you, make your family worry and suffer because of those actions? Makes the world a even worse place? Oh well that’s on you being weak, you should’ve been smart and know how to use the things well.

  • OldChicoAle@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Won’t anyone think of the environment or small communities? AI is a nice-to-have, not an essential. We need to stop developing technology without thinking long term about the world we live in. We can’t use the “oh we didn’t know” excuse anymore.

    • 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Software Developers need to learn that there is a world outside of their projects. I do not care if it makes your life easier, this technology is having worldwide impacts we are not prepared for. It’s leaf blower mentality. They don’t care that the neighborhood stinks like 2 stroke exhaust, they don’t care that it’s loud as hell, they don’t care where the leaves go, their yard is clean and that’s all that matters.

    • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 days ago

      Global solar generation has increased by 50% in the last 2 years, meanwhile a token is something like 900 times less energy consuming than it was a year ago?

      Something comes first, almost free energy and deeply embedded ai usage or total environmental collapse, capitalism deems that we will find out which in due course.

        • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          9 days ago

          You’re forgetting that usage can still go up while token cost goes down.

          Or rather, efficiency and usage can increase at the same time.

          • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            9 days ago

            The reason I dont believe you, is software efficenies are WAY cheaper than a data centre. If they could devlope existing infrastructure to hold the increase of usage like that, then they wouldn’t expand hardware.

            • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              9 days ago

              You’re just repeating the same point I’ve just addressed, so I’ll explain in more detail.

              Data centres expanding is perfectly compatible with huge efficiency gains per token. If the cost of inference falls, companies can afford to run vastly more inference, serve more users, use larger models and embed AI into more products.

              It’s the same reason more fuel-efficient cars didn’t eliminate demand for roads or petrol. Efficiency lowers the cost of using something, which can increase total consumption.

              So “if software got more efficient, they wouldn’t need more data centres” is basically backwards. The relevant question is whether total AI demand is growing faster than efficiency is improving.

                • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  9 days ago

                  No.

                  ?

                  When you lock onto something really hard in a discussion like this it becomes very obvious you’re faltering and dont really have much to contribute.

            • NuanceDemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              9 days ago

              You can find token energy efficiency information studies online, I was smashed when I pulled that figure out of my arse but the numbers are similarly huge.

              They’re already orders of magnitude more energy efficient than we predicted just a few years ago and both the software and the hardware continue to accelerate that.

  • eta@feddit.org
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    9 days ago

    For me the most criticism against AI is rather criticism against Big Tech. AI itself however doesn’t have to inherently come from Big Tech so banning it wouldn’t really be reasonable for something like the Linux Kernel.

    • Remy Rose@piefed.social
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      9 days ago

      It doesn’t inherently have to come from big tech, but currently there’s nowhere else to get it, soooo…

      Maybe we ban it now and then revisit all this after small open source local models are actually useful for anything?

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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        9 days ago

        Not true. I’ve been coding for months now using only local models running on my own hardware. It’s perfectly adequate with the right harness.

        • Remy Rose@piefed.social
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          9 days ago

          Ok well that’s actually awesome!! But is that what these people are using in big important projects like the Linux kernel, or are they using Claude? I’m guessing it’s the latter, right?

    • Lauchmelder@feddit.org
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      9 days ago

      it’s crack for burnt out programmers who don’t enjoy the process of creating software anymore. You get to have results without putting in any work of your own. In corpo-world where everything is a metric, outputting massive amounts of code quickly and effortlessly is a great thing. For the others who actually enjoy making something it’s a useless tool.

      • python@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        That’s pretty accurate, but only the good case. Burnt out programmers still have some kind of system understanding and some kind of leftover appreciation for good software architecture, they’ve just been battered down by years of the stupidest requirements, deadlines and incompetent management. Even with AI they usually keep a hand on the wheel and aren’t particularly set on always using it for everything. Maybe they’ll even start advocating for AI because they can’t imagine anyone using it in a different way than they do.
        The bad case is all the people who never cared about anything to begin with and aren’t any more emotionally attached to writing code than they are to filling out an excel sheet. That’s the kind of people that will absolutely derail an entire project by vibecoding it into the ground and then arguing for every single thing Claude changed. “You have to be able to understand/code this yourself” does stop them dead and they will piss and shit themselves because they can’t do anything and aren’t used to feeling stupid.Tbh I mostly like no-AI policies because it’s funny to see those meltdowns 🤷

      • Test_Tickles@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        It’s really weird when people with a kink try to push that kink on everyone else and they act like everyone else is wrong for building their entire persona around the kink. We get it, you really love hand crafting your code, line by line character by character, but I don’t need that to enjoy coding. I like producing useful things and then working on ways to make them even more useful. I have hand crafted enough widgets and thingamabobs that I don’t need to personally fondle another one into existence. I don’t need to be an expert at yet another language that will be obsolete well before I retire. When I was a young lad I could get off a really good wank to the bra section of the Woolworths catalog, but not so much anymore. That doesn’t mean I am burnt out or that I don’t like a good wank anymore, but frankly I would prefer someone with a pretty face and soft hands to yank on my dick for me. Have you never worked with or trained junior programmers before? I guarantee you that the nonsense a junior can produce is much worse than the crazed hallucinations of some AI.

        There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, like the destruction of the dev experience pipeline… but shitting on people who manage to find ways to use AI is not really helping your crusade.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          9 days ago

          What if the kink that you enjoy is actively killing the planet and ruining people’s lives?

          To be clear, I’m saying that those are side effects. Not that it’s the kink itself.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    I know it’s early, but so far y’all just throwin’ rocks. No intelligent criticism whatsoever of the content you just read (you did read it, right?) - nothing but low-effort jeers. Linus is saying he expects high quality work and doesn’t accept a shotgun zero-tolerance mindset against how it’s produced. What, in concrete terms, is actually wrong with that?

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    9 days ago

    This might get me banned here but I mostly agree with him

    AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong

    But used right, it can be a huge benefit. We know how deeply checked and tested all code is (who doesn’t remember the continuous Linus rants?) so why does it matter if submitted code covers a bug that was discovered through AI, or even written by AI? As long as the code checkers know and understand what happens, I dont see the problem with the code having been written by a tool

    Obligatory AI doesn’t exist, its LLM’s, and LLM’s are tools, and tools are fine as long as you use them well.

    If companies suddenly started making two meter long chainsaws and people started running around with these chainsaws cutting little girls in half, then yeah, people would rightly question if we shouldn’t ban those tools too.

    Force AI companies to be responsible for how their products are used and wait to see how fast things would get better.

    And for developers: as long as every commit is reviewed and checked by humans, to me its just another tool being used to make Linux better

    For those arguing the water of energy and the theft of intellectual property, it’s the same point: governments need to put rules in place to control the stupid growth of data centers, AI companies must be held yo account for the data they’ve stolen, absolutely. However, that doesn’t mean that LLM’s are tools without any use

    • Lauchmelder@feddit.org
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      9 days ago

      AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong

      Maybe if the tool is so finicky that it’s practically impossible to get right, it’s a bad tool? For sure millions of programmers are just prompting it wrong… Can’t be that it’s just not as great a tool as the AI overlords claim

      As long as the code checkers know and understand what happens, I dont see the problem with the code having been written by a tool

      Until the code checkers resort to LLMs because the agentic coders submit so much code for review. I will just let AI run over this one time, what could go wrong? I’ll tell AI to generate test cases beforehand to make sure it gets the implementation right. Bad tests never lead to problems right?

      • Ooops@feddit.org
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        9 days ago

        Or maybe, just maybe people eating up a constant stream of propaganda produced by those whose whole financial future is tied to AI being the universal solution to every problem (and some they have to create in the first place) are indeed a problem.

        Just because 24/7 advertising tells you to hammer in screws doesn’t mean it’s the smart thing to do. And neither does it show how useless a hammer is as a tool.

    • staircase@programming.dev
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      8 days ago

      He’s right about the tool aspect of it, but, and I cannot emphasise this enough, it is not just a tool. Though we all bow (or salivate) before our fake materialist gods, and cast aside the beauty and relationships in the world, things are more than just their function.

    • goatbeard@beehaw.org
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      9 days ago

      It’s so funny when they try to argue that the conditions around it are somehow different and make it unethical. Like yeah, I’m against fascism and climate change, but all our previous tooling was also built on unethical grounds, this isn’t any different. You like trains? The railroads were built by slave labor, extracting the fuel displaces indigenous people and hurts the environment, and folks like Carnegie used their train-powered wealth for their own personal benefit to the detriment of the public. Does that mean taking a train is unethical?

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    9 days ago

    I love how people with a fraction of his development experience are shitting on him now because his opinion on an aspect of development doesn’t align with theirs.

    • Twig@sopuli.xyz
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      8 days ago

      It’s because he’s making a poor argument, as explained better by others throughout this thread.

  • qevlarr@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    I agree, tbh. If your submissions are bad, they’re bad. If your submissions are good, they’re good.

    • OldManWithACane@lemmy.zip
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      8 days ago

      This is exactly right and I love Linus so much for cutting through the emotion every time. All he cares about every single time is if the commit is good or bad. Thats how it should be.

      • tyler@programming.dev
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        7 days ago

        'all he should care about is that we increased profits, the effect on everything external has no bearing on my decisions"

        the earth hates people like you.

        • OldManWithACane@lemmy.zip
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          7 days ago

          You put a made-up quote in my mouth and then got angry at it. I said commits should be judged on their merits. I said nothing about profits or ignoring harm.

          • tyler@programming.dev
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            6 days ago

            They are equivalent. Your quote:

            This is exactly right and I love Linus so much for cutting through the emotion every time. All he cares about every single time is if the commit is good or bad. Thats how it should be.

            So the only thing that matters is that the commit is good. Not whether the commit turns on DRM for every Linux machine on the planet, not if the commit starts requiring age verification for every user, not if the commit fucking bombs every city on earth.

            Your reasoning is literally ignoring harm.

            I said nothing about profits or ignoring harm.

            No, you implied it with a dog whistle. And now you’re pretending like you didn’t.

  • 100_kg_90_de_belin@thelemmy.club
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    9 days ago

    I don’t know… tools made by companies who can’t wait to get in bed with the Pentagon to kill brown people around the world would seem to be toxic af.