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Linus Torvalds shares his thoughts on Anti-AI coding rules (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 42 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Nuance is a hard concept to get in most Lemmy comment threads. It's obvious it's just a tool that uses an insane amount of resources that can do some good in certain applications. The problem stems from it being abused for evil and stupid things.

Can AI be used to help flag cancerous growths in x rays and help save lives? Absolutely! Can it also be used to track every human being on the planet for surveillance purposes while its proponents build massive biome-destroying data centers to act as the infrastructure? It sure can!

All that said, I still don't feel confident about rolling in AI code to open source projects when bots aren't accountable to their contributions. They should require a huge amount of oversight which I doubt is happening at the moment.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 days ago

    I want to expand on your first thought and just say that in my experience the internet as a whole is not a great place for nuanced takes, and I've noticed that becoming mirrored in reality over the last decade. Perhaps its been happening for longer.

    There's so much going on, and so many actors trying to influence the masses. I don't blame anyone for having different conclusions to my own, there's an almost untrackable amount of sources to draw information (and disinformation) from. I just hope we can get to a point together where we can (again?) discuss nuance without ceding to emotion.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    Agreed.

    On AI contributed code I’m always confused, if I put MY name on it and push it I am stating it meets my standards. If I allow a Claude contributed commit into my code, I am stating Claude passed my standards.

    If someone is contributing and it’s not up to standards, why is it getting merged? If it’s a maintainer and they’re merging crap with review or standards then you couldn’t have actually trusted them pre-LLMs.

    Ever since the first iteration of GitHub Copilot it was always your responsibility to make sure contributions to your project were correct. The beauty of open source is that when a project jumps off a cliff you can fork it or make your own.

    Partially what is good about Linus is historically Linux has said no to crap, and the Linux team expend considerable effort to remove crap they realized was crap too late.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    From my layperson understanding, the true program is not the lines of code, it's the model that lives in the programmer's brain. The code is just an extension of that.

    If it needs debugging, it is the mental model that helps. If you need to add a feature, same thing. If a few years go by and no one remembers how the code works, rebuilding that mental model is the first step in making progress.

    I suspect that it used to be that if someone contributed good code to the kernel project, it meant that they had a sufficient mental model. But with AI, it can seem like they do.

    Maybe if you're Linus your understanding of the kernel is so strong it would take years to atrophy, if at all. I don't know. But developers in general?

    Too many times in my work life, people have told me one thing, but it turns out that AI invented that and they didn't really know what they were talking about. On things that I'm an expert in, I can catch it. But if I'm not an expert, I don't realize the mistake until a consequence occurs.

    Allowing AI is basically making it so the maintainers have to be complete experts in everything they accept. Maybe that was already the case, but that is my layperson understanding of it.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago

    This is correct. And yes, we expect everyone that contributes to have this understanding. If you don't have it, welcome to ask. Misunderstandings that happen despite your effort will be caught by the steward.

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