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[–] 96 points 12 hours ago (16 children)

Cory Doctorow's "Reverse Centaurs Guide to Life After AI" has a short section that pertains to this. He talks about how someone like Linus essentially doesn't have a boss and has untold resources for whatever "AI" "tools" he finds useful.

He isn't ever forced to use the wrong tool for the job or use a tool that simply doesn't do what his boss thinks it does. He doesn't have to worry about getting fired or his coworkers getting fired because his boss was sold a story about reducing labor costs with this cool new "tool". He simply uses what's useful to him with the probably millions of dollars of compute made available to him by the tech giants.

95% of people don't have that luxury. They have a boss itching to get rid of them or 10x their workload with the help of the "tool" that Linus is so happily and defiantly praising on behalf of the monopolists.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

    What's the point of this argument though? Sure it's real for every profession and every tool but what's the agentic choice we ought to pursue here? Whine against AI or actually lead society with policy? As "ban llm" is not a valid policy that would ever work so the only viable path is regulation and growing of culture where AI is used for good, no?

    Embrace AI, work towards open weight/free software and protect worker rights. Society wins at the bleeding edge not at conservstism.

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  • [–] 40 points 12 hours ago (11 children)

    I don't see how this means he's wrong though, if people are hating AI as a proxy for hating their abusive relationship with their employer, that doesn't seem like a strong argument that everyone who isn't in that situation must also hate AI.

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  • [–] 64 points 11 hours ago (9 children)

    It doesn't mean he's wrong! it means he's out of touch and doing the propaganda work of capital for free much like many other self-employed/business owning/petit-borgeois people who think they're on the side of capital.

    It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this "tool" is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.

    Blind hatred for AI as a technology is inherantly reactionary, but that doesn't mean that the implementation of the technology today isn't problematic in many ways.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago*

    Then the picture would be significantly changed if the cost of running useful LLMs goes down to what it costs to acquire a reasonable computer to work on the Linux kernel. That is if we could run useful LLMs for kernel programming on our kernel programming computers, and we own those LLMs. In such a world, capital would have no stronger leverage over us than it already does by selling us the computers we need to program. Does this argument make sense?

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  • [–] 30 points 11 hours ago* (2 children)

    Yeah I notice he doesn't address the costs, economic and environmental, of LLM proliferation. Way to ignore a large part of the argument while calling anyone opposed to your position stupid.

    I hope he gets to eat those words one day, but I doubt he would ever admit he was wrong.

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  • [–] 0 points 10 hours ago* (1 child)

    It also means that his praise for and indeed positive experience with this “tool” is largely irrelevant to the broader social/economic discourse surrounding so called AI.

    Yeah, but tbf all of the statements he's making about it are in the context of organizing linux development and the most effective way to carry that out, and just happen to be public and so end up being widely republished and incorporated into discussions with a broader topic than that.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 hours ago*

    Shush! They are not supposed to know that the AI–Anti-Ai fight is fabricated bullshit with both sides being equally stupid (like people arguing based on ideological zeal always are...). And that it's just a show so that the majority is occupied with watching the mud fight so they don't think about the actual problem.

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