TL;DR: Merged code has to meet existing quality standards. What tools were used to create it is irrelevant.
For all his great work on Linux (and git and others) Torvalds was never into activism so much. He declined GPLv3 (yes it would be impossible to get all contributors to sign for it). He's always been an "open source pragmatist", which is fine I guess. And I really respect his work. But at these important political points, we need someone like Stallman who has consistently proven to be on the right side of the debate
This. Google would not be fucking us with Play Integrity and other DRM craps if Linus made the kernel GPLv3 licensed. It would have been a dreamland to have hackable phones, TVs and a whole lot of IoT devices where the users would be controlling them instead of other way around.
Nah, they just would have either used something else, or fucked us with some other way. The kernel license just allowed them to do it like this.
with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Ok regardless of your opinion on AI this is just stupid. No one is forking and maintaining the entire linux kernal.
Dude, this is lemmy. The headline should be: "AI Slop Allowed in the Linux!"
Hot Take: IMO, using generated code is fine, if it goes through the exact same due diligance as normal code. (unit tests, is the algo optimised, etc.)
Only if you don't care about your own cognitive decline, property theft, and climate damage
the destruction of the consumer electronics market ...
Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.
Wouldn’t be a proper Linus post without calling everyone else an idiot.
Didn’t call everyone an idiot, but he’s not wrong, humans makes mistakes all the time
Yes, but allowing floodgates of AI work to come in it lowers the bar and allow more mistakes to flow in.
Just because humans make mistakes doesn't mean we are ok with shipping mistakes
He's not saying that, he is saying LLMs are a tool and can therefore be used. He's not saying AI generated code gets a free pass into the kernel just because an LLM says it looks good.
I'm sure he included himself in that group
I locally host gemma 4 e2b on a very modest spec laptop to help summarize large texts, as a rudimentary translation tool, and just as a toy. It makes sense. I see small coding models on hugging face all the time, I think we've hit a point where it's just too efficient not to atleast entertain a little bit of slop in your workflow.
TL;DR
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
In response to
I expect maintainers who want to act on sashiko reviews to triage and verify them first before bothering authors, yes.
I seen alot of people say "AI is just a tool" ngl There is nothing wrong with that it's just a little overused
It feels like marketing speech to me at this point. Like a new form of "it's the newest model."
There is nothing wrong with that it’s just a little overused
That's one of the problems of companies devaluing and abusing language so much that words are in danger to lose any meaning. It is a difference however whether Torvalds uses such a word, or a corporation advertising bullshit. It is really clear that corporations want to replace software developers.
Not a single acknowledgement of the environmental or cognitive costs of LLM use. Disgusting.
You can run a local LLM capable of assisting in software development for less energy than running a AAA video game. I'm not denying the environmental impact of the current AI landscape, but I kind of disagree that it's intrinsic to LLMs as a whole, I think it's more a symptom of capitalism and its disregard for sustainability causing everything it touches to have a high environmental cost.
Also, nearly all modern computing has high environmental costs, certainly all cloud computing. I think instead of focusing on AI only, it would be more helpful to engage in a broader discussion on how computing can be made more energy efficient as a whole, and do proper cost benefit analysis of all things we use computers for, including but not limited to LLMs. We may well still conclude from that process that we need to stop using LLMs, in which case we should.
If you're against LLM use on environmental grounds (which I'm not disagreeing with), I submit to you that we should take the idea even further and things like gaming, video streaming, high frequency trading, social media, and any other nonessential computing should be on the same chopping block for the same reason. Applications of computing that we also use at scale with high environmental impacts, but that have been normalised and practically seen as a right by many of the same people against any amount of AI use (not saying that's you, speaking generally). Why should AI be the only thing we raise concerns about if we're to raise concerns? Doing environmental protection piecemeal by independently targeting single things and not the entire system has been shown time and time again to not work at best and make it worse at worst.
Currently, LLMs impact on electricity usage and fresh water usage across the world is HUGE.
The painful part to me is the choice on where to put the stress. Which areas to highlight and talk about.
Yes some weak LLMs can use comparatively little electricity. Yes some other industries use electricity, generate CO2 and consume fresh water, too. But the existence of other problems, to me, does not mean that eco impact of LLMs should be swept under the rug.
While it may seem counterintuitive, cloud LLMs use less electricity than local LLMs. When serving a single user, an inference engine spends very little time and power doing calculations, and most of it reading in the model (weights) from memory
Cloud LLMs serve multiple users and therefore batch requests, so a model that has been copied once from memory can be used to generate hundreds of tokens
The straw manning in this thread is amazing.
Linus allowing AI? This means the linux kernal will be flooded with unverified slop!
I don’t generally take issue LLMs used as a tool, but I do have a huge problem with lazy slop slingers. I also don’t like that the frontier models are closed source and rent-seeking, especially when they were trained on copyleft code and by all rights should themselves be open source if they were respecting the licenses. I’d think Linus would have something to say about that.
IMO, a decent philosophy is that LLMs can be useful tools, but if anyone can tell you used a LLM, you failed. People should have a healthy fear of being ridiculed for outsourcing their critical thinking. Anyone using a ton of tokens shouldn’t be commended; instead, the quality of their work should be called into question because they’re likely using LLMs as a crutch instead of a tool. Commits by Claude probably mean the person didn’t review the diff to clean up the slop, and also probably didn’t understand the changes well enough to write a clear commit message themselves. I wouldn’t want to see any commits crediting Claude in the Linux kernel.
Edit:
I’d also think that if Linus likes LLMs and wants to see quality tech democratized, he’d be advocating for FOSS LLMs under the Linux foundation where all code and training data are open source. What we have now with Anthropic and “OpenAI” is the equivalent of cloud-hosted Windows, and open weight models like Qwen are more like Windows XP in that they can be run locally, but they’re still proprietary and can’t be inspected, modified, or built upon. We need the Linux of LLMs.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0