Linus Torvalds on AI-assisted kernel contributions

It's both socially unacceptable and illegal to hit someone in the head with a hammer. We need to update our laws and norms to constrain how new tools like LLMs and Facebook are used.

it's hard to do if all the technical people in the room are screeching and fearmongering like Greenpeace at a NIMBY protest

That's one of the things that makes this so complicated: Hammers themselves aren't particularly regulated. Actions are regulated. There's no law against hitting someone in the head with a hammer, there's a law against hurting someone [in the head, but also in other places].

One of the biggest meta-worries I have with the way a lot of this has been framed overall is getting really clear about what we're actually trying to accomplish with laws and regulations. We can go overly narrow (I'm not hitting someone with a hammer, I'm poking them with a screwdriver, therefore not illegal) or overly broad (a law against hurting someone means that the doctor can't give me a needle, because that hurts).

There's also the part where different people have different notions of what the actual harm is and how difference facets are prioritized or weighted. If we managed to, hypothetically, make an open-weight LLM that could fit on a microcontroller and generate 1000 tok/s on half a watt... that would quite handily address the wealth concentration and environmental problems, but not at all any of the societal or economic issues. Some people would then be fine with LLMs now that the environmental and oligarchy issues were addressed, some wouldn't.

It feels a bit like in broader culture the question of separating the art from the artist. Michael Jackson wrote some bops.

Oh, wow, I tip my hat to you for nailing that in a way that I haven't seen yet in the overall broad and messy discussion. I feel like that's a concept that has been... I don't want to say ignored, but the ability to separate those two ideas seems to be somewhat of a lost art.

some bops

And that turn of phrase gave me a really big smile because of how perfectly it captures his work. And now I'm humming Billie Jean...

The similarity seems to be they are all “tools”.

The widely disparate thing I notice is the divide between those that treat LLMs as neutral tools and those that seem to ascribe them as good/evil.

I think the good/evil all come from second-order effects (how people tend to use the tool, how their use impacts others, etc) and in a way both are true, but the discussions are rarely productive…

They make things easier in ways that (I thought) made a programmer less in touch with the code they were writing. If you're managing indentation manually you have to think about the structure of your code more as you're writing it. With syntax highlighting you can see what's going on at a glance rather than having to really pay attention to the code.

These are things that LLMs can also be used for. They're things I use LLMs for. They're things that make me a better programmer.

I've seen some interesting usecases for LLMs(where the non-determinism can cut down the bias), but I still never understood these comparisons with editors and compilers when looked through the lens of the problems I have with LLMs.

If vim's code was sourced[0] from OSS, subscription-only, worsened the social bonds between humans, electricity hungry for writing text, would you still embrace it like that?

Maybe the result and rigor(edit: also plenty achievable outside of LLMs!) in software matters more than the culture. I think it's okay just say that, at least it's better than these metaphors. which break down really easily, and frankly underestimate how easy it is to make LLMs somebody's personality or see the current problems people have with LLMs.

[0]: ironically enough, Linux being probably in the datasets prominently, would make kernel development an okay place to use?? Not a philosopher :s.

A couple years ago on HN people would say you were wasting time and you could write code faster if you unplugged your mouse and learned vim keyboard shortcuts exclusively.

A lot of LLM proponents sound similar: oh you can write code so much faster if you never look at it yourself and just use the LLM.

It seems disrespectful to judge the method in that way, rather than judging the result. You can (and still should) criticize the output of LLMs when the quality is below that of a human coder (which is very often) and of course you can criticize the social and environmental impacts.

Interesting, I went back and forth on the "syntax highlighting" topic and now have a very minimal theme that basically only dims comments, and highlight strings.

I found that after reading code in various languages for a while, the color added to functions/variables/... was not actually helping my comprehension of the code.

Especially when some languages blur the lines between what's a "function" and what's a "variable". E.g. in ruby I see this pattern a lot:

class stuff
  def do_something
    puts "foo: #{foo}"
  end

  def foo
    @foo ||= {  # something to cache }
  end
end

Is foo a variable, is it a function, does it even matter to understand how the code works?

At almost all times, there is at least one post on the Lobsters front page whose entire content is the author's personal emotional reaction to AI.

I think these consistently fail the Lobsters "rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader's next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?" test from the topicality guidelines, but obviously they get upvoted a lot anyway.