Conversations on this subject will continue to stagnate and miss the important points as long as people continue to act like the discussion of ethics is the same as the discussion of efficacy. People who disagree with AI on a principle of its impacts being negative will often call it “a lying machine which is regularly wrong and offers no utility”.
May I suggest that people with criticisms of the ethics and impact of AI take a charitable position towards the utility offered by AI. Accept something along the lines of a positive account given by an experienced software engineer - it’s useful, it presents risks but also it presents new ways to get certain work done well in much less time etc.
Even if you do not believe this, the point is it is a much more ambiguous argument than the ethical argument or the concerns over the impact of AI on the species, environment or society. You weaken those arguments by putting them along side poorly justified, somewhat falsifiable claims that AI just doesn’t work.
LLM is like a compiler? Then please replace the C sources with English and let it compile!
I mean, it would be better if you could write it in assembler.
Is this the Linus Tech Tips guy? Isn’t he like a known asshole these days or something? Or am I thinking of another Linus?
I’m finding the allure of AI is particularly strong for people who have risen to positions of power where they had to stop doing the work themselves. Instead, they had to work through other people to get bigger projects done.
The allure is that you can just say what you want done, and it does it. If it’s done it “wrong” you can just tell it it’s wrong and not have to worry about arguing the technical differences. As such you feel like you get closer to what you wanted, rather than somebody else’s take on what you wanted.
The things is, when you are removed from the code, you can only work at a high level. That person you asked to do something is considering 10 other low level concerns that you didn’t consider. I think Linus’s recent patch series is a good example. He saw a potential optimisation, did a proof of concept but missed a race condition. He’s now handed it over to the person that normally works in that area and knows the details. Can the optimisation actually work? Who knows?
Does Linus support steaming artwork and a fascist surveillance state? Because using and supporting and entrenching the technology use is exactly that.
He doesn’t get it… Have the big corpo-shilling libertarians rotted his brain?
Like, imagine if using “AI” consisted of whatever big corpo SaaS you subscribe to sending your prompt off to someone to work on then send the result back to you. Isn’t that an idiotic dependency to have? And why the fuck even go through the middleman? Oh they have the “best workers?” Fuck that. Nvidia makes the best cards, but you don’t see me buying from them.
Do people like Linus not realise how silly it is to offload your work to some middleman service that just steals work from people who do not consent to sharing their labour? Who are desperately throwing insane, GDP-level boatloads of cash at it this unknown technology in the hopes that they’ll somehow get people hooked on their particular chatbot?
The intentions of these companies are not good. Their entire valuation is not based on being a “force multiplier” or whatever bullshit, but on being able to threaten or fire workers if they don’t slot themselves into the newest enunciation of hype-based capital.
Anything you do to willingly boost or massage these corporate services is enabling actually vile companies to continue puffing air into their stupid pointless bubble until it bursts and the next generation has to eat tuna helper sans tuna just to be able to afford to live.
I feel about ai like i feel about cars. 90% of the idiots out there drive really poorly, but that doesn’t mean responsible people are smart to never drive a car. Same with AI, overwhelming majority of people are using AI incorrectly, i.e. recklessly dangerously, but that doesn’t mean responsible people should never use it.
I’m no expert but a compiler does not equal and LLM built on stolen data
I think he’s kinda right in that competent engineers can write good code using LLMs. I don’t know whether they’re actually more productive that way though. The problem lies in the fact that incompetent engineers can write a lot of bad, but good-looking code using LLMs, which might be a pretty big burden on the maintainers.
Also, comparing LLMs to compilers doesn’t really work in my opinion. Compilers follow strict rules and translate one kind of logic into a different kind of logic, while LLMs turn natural language and vague notions into some kind of logic. Writing code is telling the computer precisely what it should do and prompting is vaguely telling it what end result you want and those are two fundamentally different things.
Weird, i disagree with Linus.
AI is not a tool. Its an addiction. Maybe the first dozen times (more likely: never) you use it “as a tool”. Very quickly, you depend on it. You need it to refactor. Then you need it to debug. Then you need it to write. Next thing you know, you spend 0 time writing code (the fun part) and 100% of your time as a reviewer (the worst part). Suddenly it isnt fun. A few fools even get TWO AI MODELS, one to write, the other to debug.
Its a virus. I cannot tell you how many 300+ line commits ive rejected because they straight up dont do what the person said they do or also do some extremely asinine 2nd thing that breaks other pieces of code (which they would know if theyd actually used it).
A tool requires input. A hammer can never do anything i dont explicitly tell it to do. A good word editor does exactly what i want it to do. A good compiler does exactly what it says it will do. AI does not. Ai is a glorified autocomplete, and i dont want my code to be automatically generated. Its asking for thousands of issues down the line. If AI was any good, Windows would be a usable platform by now.
Dont get me wrong; i know that it is sometimes used as a tool by people, and meticulously checked over, but more often than not, it isnt.
The amount of bootlicking Linus has been doing recently is insane. I expected this bs from anyone but him. Such a sad reality we are living in.
Except that a compiler is not a stochastic machine.
Linus accepting AI now says more about how far the technology has come than anything else. AI today is not the same as AI a year ago.
hes comparing knowing how open concepts work vs using proprietary tech whose purpose is to hook you and then enshittify after you become reliant on it
