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Anon died on the "clang format bad" hill (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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Mine is that the useState hook is an actual plague on the entire React ecosystem. Regardless of your opinions of React, if you wanna use something then use it right.

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[–] 38 points 4 days ago (10 children)

Linus is just some guy with good programming skills

I somewhat agree. Most celebrated personalities in tech aren't programming geniuses - they were in the right area at the right time and had some luck. Zuckerberg is a good example.

I think kernel maintainers and rendering engines (browsers and others) have a higher base skill level. Like some web developers are clever and some are stupid, but I don't think there are stupid kernel maintainers.

The thing with Linus is that he's been involved, and at the pointy end, for decades. You or I may not agree with him on every issue, but you can acknowledge that he has experience and he has connections.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 days ago (9 children)

    I have massive respect for the guy. He did so much for the open source community. But for some reason everything he says is interpreted as inarguable truth by most tech guys.

    For example his opinions on AI are pure trash and bootlickery. Which is fine anyone can think anything. We just have to think for ourselves a little.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 days ago (8 children)

    I agree that everyone needs to think for themselves, absolutely.

    However, I struggle with this and it's kind of what I'm getting at:

    his opinions on AI are pure trash and bootlickery

    Firstly, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who hate's AI more than me. It literally keeps me awake at night. I hate the environmental impact. I hate the people it's enriching. I hate the work it's stealing. I don't often use the word "hate" but it really does apply here.

    That said, I always try to defer to the opinions of people with more experience than me, and as regards kernel maintenance and Linus, that's certainly true.

    You've probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I know a bit about code, a bit about FOSS, a bit about linux, AI, and communities. So it's easy to underestimate the yawning chasm of experience and knowledge between myself and Linus.

    That doesn't mean we have to blindly accept the opinions of others (I honestly haven't accepted Linus' opinion myself), but I'm aware of the profound discrepancy between my opinion and his and it concerns me.

    All that aside, is it possible to acknowledge that something is the correct course of action even if it's not the ideal? I haven't been following the Linus / AI thing, but as I understand it a project like that kinda has to allow AI bug reports because threat actors will certainly be using AI to find exploitable bugs.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago* (7 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    My argument against Linus would be that the non-LLM tooling is auditable and known. I know I can trust all the tooling below it and only read your code, but with LLMs they are explicitly trying to replicate good looking code and can generate a ton of it, so it becomes incredibly difficult to actually audit.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    With the greatest respect, responding to this comment would be to engage in a discussion of whether Linus is right in this particular instance. I'm not willing to do that because I'm sure that's a conversation that's been had a billion times.

    I was / am happy to talk about how we injest the opinions of experts in a more general way.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    it gets down to whether experts are experts at everything. Linus is not an expert at anything outside of kernel maintenance. His opinions on whether we should use LLMs are null and void considering the massive effect on the planet. It'd be like if a nuclear engineer said we should be building more nuclear bombs for everyone to use, just so they could use nuclear engineer more freely. Like, their opinions about nuclear energy might be fine, but their opinions that have an effect on the entire planet are completely wack.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    That's a really good point. There's loads of examples of this, like doctors don't give good nutrition advice, et cetera.

    He doesn't really need any latitude to offer an opinion on whether these tools should be used on the Linux kernel.

    Whether you should use an LLM to plan your shopping list, or understand your toddlers behavior, is not something you should listen to Linus about.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    I mean he’s welcome to develop an LLM that is trained on only his own stuff and that doesn’t suck down water like a black hole. Until then he shouldn’t be offering opinions on using them at all, I don’t care if it’s in regard to the Linux kernel or not.

    Maybe my point with the nuclear bombs wasn’t clear enough. The nuclear engineer doesn’t get to decide to use a nuclear bomb, they get to use one tiny tiny little part. If they try to use a nuclear bomb we should all be stopping them, I don’t care how much they want to use it cause they think it’s a good tool. It’s provably horrific for humanity.

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