Oh, this asshole again. They write like a twitter thread, and with about as much depth.
That is not what slop means. It’s not ai slop if the developers understand the code and know exactly what they doing, audit everything.
Incorrect. “Slop” is anything generated by AI.
Please don’t spread misinformation.
Incorrect. “Slop” is anything generated by AI.
Please don’t spread misinformation.
There is no definition that is correct for everyone. Therefore this is not misinformation, just because you have a different definition. Slop means if its in example vibe coded. But the Linux developers don’t do slop, even when using Ai.
Please stop labeling a different opinion as misinformation.
But all AI output is slop. It’s social spam. That’s what it’s for. It’s slop! Say “slop” every time
This writing is far, far too emotional to be considered anything but an opinion piece
This dude has been pushing this schtick for a long time, seems to just be trying to pander to the anti AI crowd for clicks, never has anything meaningful to say.
sir this is a blog post
It’s so weirdly emotional that I’m sure I’m saving some folks the click
do people not see the url? the tagline? the smug clippy?
Linus is saying that using an LLM doesn’t absolve you of taking responsibility for what you publish.
I am extremely anti-LLM for basically everything but even I can see this moral panic for what it is. Sadly not the first time David Gerard (the author of this blog) has fallen into it.
Ctrl-F “slop” - 32 matches
You know how we call AI output “slop” because it’s low-effort and kinda generic? Yeah.
Actually, I just discovered, the person who wrote this bullshit article is the first to submit it in the crosspost.
And he’s banning people from the community who ask questions about it… Or point out it’s bad info lol, so, it seems obvious its more about attention than proper journalism
Why are you banning people who dispute your claims. Everyone should be downvoting the cross posted article with a passion. He’s running a dictatorship (basically seems like another “madthumbs”)
For anyone who wants to see how comprehensive the oversight is on Kernel development: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-patches.html
But yeah, patches don’t go straight to Linus or straight to master, and, it certainly doesn’t get approved automatically by an LLM or anything like that. If you’re lucky after the initial reviews, they almost certainly go to other testing trees first (and generally multiple). Then you also have staging branches, etc.
Oh it’s one of the opinionated clueless douchebags from that instance, explains a lot.
For anyone curious how comprehensive the process is, the real info is in https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-patches.html
Lmao at this completely misguided comment.
Torvalds’s first publicly released chatbot code was in January this year, when he vibe-coded a project in Python because he didn’t know enough Python. The programming language kids learn in high school. The guy who runs the kernel couldn’t get his head around Python.
Linus would run circles around whoever wrote this article. Ever hear of “domain knowledge”? It’s perfectly reasonable to expect an old school engineer well-versed in low level code like C to see high level scripting languages like python as fairly alien.
I think you are the misguided one. Even Linus says devs should be able to understand what they generate. Him giving in and slopping something up is direct evidence of his supposed morals already slipping…
… If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately.
This is the vibe-code-two-step. “AI” is useful because it helps inexperienced users to code. But you also have to be an expert to use it properly.
AI is useful when you can put it to a task and validate the result.
For many tasks that’s visually seeing a button you can click.
For other tasks you need to be an expert to get value from it and really understand.
If you provide tools and context, you get a lot better results. For most of my core uses I’ve built decent tooling, but I wouldn’t want to share or be responsible for maintaining that for everyone else.
I genuinely don’t think it’s useful for learning unless used like stack overflow, but it’s not designed or trained to do that, it’s trained to take the drivers seat regardless of instructions.
Same thing could be said about a fishing pole. Or car, or rifle, or a bicycle.
It helps inexperienced users to catch fish… But with some knowledge and experience can get more out of it.
Not the same at all. You don’t have to be a gunsmith to kill someone with a gun. You do have to be a knowledgeable engineer to produce anything that isn’t slop with “AI”.
A MUCH better analogy is construction. Do you want a bunch of teenagers and Main Character Syndrome dipshits who cannot even read blueprints nor understand regulations and building codes let alone know them, to build your house? Nono, it’s OK! They have nail guns and modern lumber, they don’t need to know all that!
Sure you can get a shed or even a small house out of that, but you’re never going to get safe, modern, multistory construction like that…
It’s a tool, not a product.
LLMs and other machine “learning” are tools.
Most of what people talk about when they talk about AI… are talking about products. ChatGPT is a product being sold. Claude is a product being sold. “AI” being shoved into other products also makes it a product being sold. etc.
They are not even mutually exclusive words…
You’re right, they’re not mutually exclusive words, but I’m going to thoroughly disagree that people are talking about those specific companies when talking about AI as a technology, which we certainly are here.
You might not like the product that is Claude or whoever, but I don’t like Irwin hammers, doesn’t mean it’s not an effective tool. And it doesn’t stop the world from utilizing it. And it doesn’t automatically make the job any less correct.
No one is out here trying to have the AI be their OS, they’re using it to build things, so the house thing isnt any better. Keeping those teens off the jobsite is only going to stop that house, not the industry. You don’t want to live in it, that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be exactly what someone else needs. And those kids did get some experience, even if its just the walls falling down around their ears. Next one will be better.
Would it be ideal if everything was inherently safer and more thoroughly understood by the masses? Yes. Is it a reality that is achievable?
lol defending teenagers willy nilly building a house and ignoring building codes…
OK
Your attitude is beyond pathetic. Your attitude would still have us working 10x6 days with no insurance anywhere to be seen. Your attitude reinforces all the shit you think “AI” can fix.
Yours would have us using bones as clubs.
There’s no such thing as ‘just a tool’, especially if that tool is accelerating climate change when we’re already on the knife’s edge of irreversible domino effects.
Sounds like y’all are afraid, just like the HVAC guys and the mini splits.
Also sounds like that writer needs to learn to use a fork.
You don’t think climate change is a massive threat to our habitable biosphere?
Yep. That’s clearly what I’m saying./s
Now I can see why you thought that article was a rebuttal though.
Ice Carvers Decry Evils of Electrified Refrigeration.
You do realize that all code for the kernel is code reviewed and tested by so many people right? The patches are probably some of the most human reviewed code on the planet…
This feels like the time when every armchair expert became experts on immunology…
The article is literally about how they have so much AI slop that the code is no longer reviewed by people it’s reviewed by a Meta chatbot…
Can you post the quote where it says that it’s untested and it goes straight to master
I’m lost.
Also, looking through the authors articles, frankly, the list looks like low quality human slop.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/other.html
And I can’t find any evidence they’re actually involved with any development projects either. Literally ANY projects including stupid little pet ones every dev has
I mean, having pet projects doesn’t require being “involved” with one nor requires making anything public…
Except I can’t see any references to this guy getting involved with any projects at all at a technical level.
If you check his articles, he’s definitely targeting a specific crowd based on what I can see too.
Saying “there is an AI bot that identifies if code is obviously bad” doesn’t really make an exciting story though…
The article is one angry person’s rant and you are further going beyond what it actually says.
We are completely overwhelmed, of course. The glimmer of hope is that we secured sufficient LLM budget and access (thank you Meta!) to run reviews with multiple frontier models on each patch. This eliminates some hallucinations.
That’s not the author’s words, it’s a quote from the Linux mailing list…
Yes and even that one quote from one person does not say what you did, so that’s what i meant :/
Yeah. Pretty much.
The actual policy is that it all gets reviewed by a human I think when I was looking into it.
The bots are likely most useful to reject obviously bad patches which have obvious bugs or don’t follow guidelines. And identifying bad code is something which AI tends to be good at.
In our code at work, we use weakly typed languages which aren’t strict and on those it tends to be even better. We catch things like table keys that are typed wrong, etc. On C, things like pointers it probably does a good job with identifying as wrong
If it passes AI code review it still gets checked by human for things that are wrong and needs fixing. But if it fails, it probably needs fixing regardless.
A good language server / ide will also complain about incorrect types. That specific example is a deterministic process, no llm is required for it at all.
We do use one. But, in practice, they can’t catch a lot of things which AI will
At least in our case too based on what’s available, it also can’t check stuff like coding style well (but our development relies on that less).
Some might though
I find that very hard to believe, if you’re truly just talking about typing. If this is true you’re using an awful language server / linter / whatever.
Coding style is also a deterministic process, for which every widely used language has a linter or formatter or whatever. Also no LLMs needed.
As a professional software developer of 8 years, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about
The thing about typing is that it is easy for a deterministic compiler to flag violations.
There are hundreds of other “best practices” that determinisitic compilers aren’t able to flag. Even the almighty Rust language is suceptible to race conditions, deadlocks, and many potential crash conditions.
I’m an old C programmer, and Rust pisses me off when it won’t let me do something that’s demonstrably 100% safe. However, a lot of the things that Rust and other general practice rules forbid or advise against, should really be avoided when they get past a very simple application. What was “proven safe” quickly becomes unsafe when a later maintainer who doesn’t understand the risks “extends” the code.
This is Lua code. LuaLS is basically the language server available.
And sorry, I should have said “dynamically typed”. But, weak tables.
There’s a lot of things that don’t get caught, such as concatenating a boolean which causes a lua error in our environment. LuaLS won’t catch that.
Formatting isn’t a problem for us, but it does affect the kernel. But, the VSCode one we use does a lot of weird things honestly.
Oh, quit your bullshit.
Well fuck off back to Windows then (I’m sure you can determine whether or not the code for that has been near an LLM… oh wait). Or fork it, if you can. If neither of those stop being so entitled about what tools someone uses to build the OS they give you for free!
You’re less creative than AI
“You don’t like Trump? Well maybe you should go back to the middle ages. Or just go and make a new country, see if that’s so easy, huh”
Since when is the argument of “other things are even worse so we shouldn’t care about something becoming worse” a thing?
Nevermind, don’t answer that, as usual the answer is “Since the rise of the ‘AI’ cult”
The people moaning about AI though rarely even contribute to anything. Slop is basically the same as “woke” and when I’ve asked people who go Lemmy post to Lemmy post to show the slop, the best they can do is just point to the agents.md file. It’s never a real technical reason.
I can’t find any evidence online the guy who wrote this article has contributed code to ANY project. And he seems to write human slop articles if you look at this history (EDIT: The guy who wrote the article is the crossposter. And, he’s just blatantly banning anyone who disagrees without debate, and then after banning them, people attack them)
Even worse, the article is bullshit anyway, because all code on the kernel is reviewed by a human, and it goes through multiple levels. It doesn’t filter straight through a bot to master
Also, things aren’t getting worse. If you check the kernel 7.4 performance improvements, many are attributed to AI, including a recent optimisation (which was reviewed by human and cleaned up) to speed up kernel compiling down to approximately 10s apparently.
No it’s been an argument since forever, not always a good one but that’s not really the point. And the use of AI does not make things worse anyway you absolute nitwit, but your performative hate and wilful ignorance do - and they lead directly to shit like trump! YOU are the problem
So the fact that LLMs are having a negative impact on already collapsing environment, are leading to people like Trump and Musk to become even richer and destroy society at a massive scale, while also killing individuals by literally making them go insane, is “not making anything worse”? All of that so a bunch of dumb fucks can go and generate garbage “pictures” and broken code?
You say that like it’s true. It’s not. None of it. The few bits that are close to true are old school corruption not AI. Twit.
Ah ok, full on cultist then
Just someone who actually understands the situation,. unlike you
By the looks of it this is the beginning of the end of linux, where we moving to nerds?
Redox or Haiku, if the Linux kernel is unable to be successfully forked.
beOS, ReactOS? I dunno.
paper and talk
deleted by creator
I don’t is hidden the AI code, but having a human to blame for the AI code if that code broke something.
