They got to him
This is about the extinction of hand coded programming as we know it. You know how very few people know assembly, and every so often a COBOL expert has to be found to update a bank’s database so they can overhaul their systems?
What if all of programming becomes like that only worse. With new generations of programmers not actually knowing how to program. A massive decline in numbers and competence… Programmers that only “program” by talking to LLMs.
Ever seen an episode of Star Trek where a computer is in charge of everything, and society crumbles when it breaks down?
I think we might hit a plateau in a generation or two. The point at which we can generate more and more LLMs but don’t know how to make them any better. Let alone reprogram unrelated systems like medical scanners, or air traffic safety systems, or mapping systems.
“It’s okay we’ll have the LLMs improve the LLMs”… For the rest of eternity.
Who’s paying for the Claude code credits I wonder
check out the Linux Foundation members page, they (nvidia et al) literally pay Torvalds salary
Typical,🤣. They have found another circular route to fund AI 😂
“but”? Isn’t that exactly what reviewers are for?
The actual news of the article: LLM helped do a significant piece of work that human developers had failed to do for two years.
Or rather, LLMs helped create bad code, and so didn’t do a significant peice of work - or did it so poorly it was dangerous to rely on for an Operating system:
Race conditions in programming occur when multiple processes or threads attempt to modify and access shared data simultaneously, leading to unpredictable and unintended outcomes. They can result in data corruption, program failures, and other unexpected behaviors if not properly managed with synchronization techniques.
The work isn’t done if it’s introducing risky/bad code (especially at the level of an operating system). That’s like saying “LLMs cure cancer by cutting patients into quarters, human reviewers stop it”
Then someone claiming “the real story here is that LLMs cured cancer”.
Was cancer actually cured? The article doesn’t say the problem was fixed.
The same happens when humans write code. Reviewers hopefully find some of their mistakes, then they fix them
Tell me then, was the problem solved, the work done by the LLM?
Was it considered good enough for a mainbranch?
Or was it faulty/risky and require highly trained experts to catch? Then flagged, and only put into an experimental branch?
How many ex-Oracle memory experts do you think are available for this work, in which even Linus didn’t catch the race condition?
“Hey guys, nothing to see here if we have enough high level engineers fixing everything”.
Tell me then, was the problem solved, the work done by the LLM?
partially
Was it considered good enough for a mainbranch?
Probably, if it took multiple experts to catch the bug.
Or was it faulty/risky and require highly trained experts to catch? Then flagged, and only put into an experimental branch?
As happens with human code all the time
How many ex-Oracle memory experts do you think are available for this work, in which even Linus didn’t catch the race condition?
No idea, at least one.
A competent person like Linus can manage and direct competent code generation, whether that code is generated by an AI or an intern.
I hope he posts on the LKML and gives himself a right public scolding worthy of his failings. Sprinkle some "stupid"s and "idiotic"s in there for good measure.
And here we go!
Sooooo… are we gonna go oyr own kernel or something now? Seriously i cant believe this world. 35 years of work by tens of thousands of people and this is what we get?
I have always had mixed feelings about AI.
On one hand it is a good tool for offloading monotonous time consuming tasks that you already know how to do.
On the other, its a bad tool for outsourcing for tasks you dont know how to do.
It can be good for simple things, like i got claude code to build me a project planner and to-do list because i cant code but wanted something bespoke for me to help with my adhd. Its great for me but other people might hate it.
But if it is used in place of people figuring out complex problems in their field of expertise then it will inevitably lead to people lacking the skills to make anything and when the bubble bursts there wont be anyone left who knows how to make anything for themselves.
I am opposed to it being used so much at work, i hate getting AI responses from real people. But i am finding it increasingly difficult to find solutions to problems on forums and reddit because everything is just AI answers now :(
I also think linus using it to help him with problems he is struggling to solve is up to him. It might not be the method i would choose, but i didnt write an entire operating system.
Forking the Kernel to get it away from him is now a matter of national security
national security
For which nation? The Kingdom of Linux?
So much important government computing happens on Linux. Almost every server and supercomputer is on some form of Linux.
I think people who use and defend ai use as professionals are pick-mes and have shitty/broken moral compasses.
Works in the other direction too, some people just let the world wash over them and work with whats at hand without deluding themselves into thinking they matter enough to change it.
Ironically, the man in question has actually changed it, but the point stands.
I’d argue that pretending this is a big deal for some cheap hits is even worse though. The system is designed to identify when things like this happen, and it worked perfectly.
Race conditions in general aren’t newsworthy at all.
They’re generally fairly complex, an easy mistake to make (especially when optimising) and rarely obvious… And fairly common…
Torvalds had spent 18 months running a broken version of his own fix for the page-cache reference-counting bottleneck, while other developers had encountered problems with their approaches. The new patches eliminate folio reference-count operations from a common buffered-read path, although Torvalds warned that the benchmark gains would be considerably smaller in real-world workloads.
You know how in star trek or other shows with scripts, how the writers used to just put like <technobabble here> or something
They need to add an analogy in there…
“The problem is with the folio reference-count operations from a common buffered-read path”
“Of course! It’s just like putting too much air in a balloon!”
Yeah so then I swapped the flux combobulator with the drago-fleefloo-spectromodulator and we’re up to warp speed again. Thank you, Captain!
Well hopefully he learned something from this.
Narrator: He didn’t.
He learned to do it more… This solved a problem that several Linux engineers and Linus himself have been struggling to solve for over 2 years, and the race condition was discovered in code review and fixed by a suggestion from Linus…
So without AI, we’d still have no solution to this problem that’s been unsolved for over 2 years, with AI we have a solution that went through code review which identified a small bug that was then fixed. He still landed a solution to the problem that wouldn’t have landed otherwise…
This isn’t even newsworthy… Race Conditions aren’t rare.
It is if you are a science denier. These people are no different to anti-vaxx magats.
This kind of code has to be done with formal modelling, including when written by humans. alloytools.org looking good to me.
This guy not too long ago chewed out people who vibe-coded an old kernel bug back in.
Look at him now.
Look how far he’s falling…
do you even know what a race condition is, what a code review is and what its job is? ask chatgpt
do you even know what a race condition is
Oh, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out, pal. Now get out of here. This isn’t a nazi bar.
dont forget to add a /s if you dont want the downvotes
Well I appreciated your humor
Why? because of a race condition?
We’ve had race conditions in the kernel since the beginning. And, he didn’t vibe code an old kernel bug back in…
Race conditions aren’t newsworthy at all honestly, unless they cause a security issue
Called it a few weeks ago. Linus losing his marbles. And going full tech-bro fuckhead :(
how did linus torvalds, the man that would rageface scream at people for doing shit that was perfectly good, that he just didnt like, become the latest to bend over and butter his ass up for the AI cock?
butter his ass up for the AI cock
I think I’ve seen that video
NoTheChildrenAreWrong.jpg
For closed source LLM services controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations even. Dunno if he has always been this cynical or lost sight of any principles he once had.
Torvalds have said a lot of controversial things. Some even against free software. But I think he is a pragmatic, not a cynical.
Middle aged men dementia, induced by money and being surrounded with tech bros and having corporations whisper into your ears…
He is a fucking retard and a traitor that’s why
What… Lmao what even is that picture? Why…
You know what. It doesn’t matter. Lmao
i swear to god AI obsession is like some kind of weird contagious mental illness
- “I only care about the final results and the correctness”
- Looks inside
- Final results are shit and code is just slop
Ahhh, I love AI /s
Going to be a lot of edge cases that get thru because to stop them requires not using the super optimized algorithms.
