Good luck getting the masses to adopt them. Passkeys seem like an improvement on trying to get your average meat brain to remember several unique passwords.

I can absolutely understand some of the objections and I understand why writers and artists are pissed. My code has always been free software so I don’t object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.

The power usage is definitely a concern but that holds up for all computing. I don’t see people up in arms about inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!

The phrase vibecode has become totally meaningless. The original use was too “give in too the vibes” and let the agent go wild. There is no indication that is what Linus is doing.

The fact is LLM’s have proven to be good at finding bugs. Suitably constrained they can be diligent and helpful assistants.

The Bun experience is instructive and if that was Linus’ end goal it would be concerning but I don’t see any evidence that any of the Linux maintainers are interested in that sort of wholesale conversion. The good projects with taste will adjust to the new tools and the slop projects will eventually collapse under their own contradictory architectures.

The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical considering this is an experimental branch on his own repository. I’m not surprised he might experiment with using AI agents to solve a particular pain point to see how it does. This is using agents to experiment with things that you might not have time to address normally.

Another recent example is the build system where the author said:

An LLM was used to first determine where the bottlenecks were then to figure out how to improve them. It generated a lot of code, much of it hideous.

I extensively audited and rewrote a lot of it, and heavily edited commit messages, the cover letter and comments.

off-loading the boring grunt work of identifying bottle necks and trying new approaches seems like an ideal task for a junior agent to deal with as long is you don’t YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.

I do like Jeff’s videos, he comes across as a true engineering nerd. I find his SBC reviews to be pretty thorough and some of his other videos make for an interesting side quest on stuff he’s interested in.

I certainly don’t view DeVaults purity list as the authority on if I should watch someone’s videos or not.

Why are you hosting a tarball in a git repo? Where is the source for this?

Did anyone think you could pin it on one person/institution/event?

All systems risk catastrophic collapse when overwhelmed and resilience comes from multiple overlapping measures to try and avoid that.

Climate change is here and will increases the chances of these wildfires burning it off control and humanity as a species is going to have to adapt.

I did 4 charges on my 480 mile journey to Scotland which took 30-45 mins each. I didn’t mind too much because it’s a long drive and I had to eat but a bit snapier would have been nice for two of the stops.

Out of an abundance of caution we don’t let the agent close bugs or assign CVEs but tell it to defer to a real human for that. I’ll have to experiment with how we can do a better job of detecting duplicates because I’m sure a fair number of the issues are.

If the bugs were being found in code that is used heavily in production I’d agree. Spamming the tracker with 100’s of bugs in random unmaintained areas of the code base just wastes everyone’s time. Perhaps as a project we should be more aggressive in deprecating code but the threat profile for someone running firmware blobs from their camera is very different from people launching untrusted guests on their shared hosting infrastructure.

I do run a bot that can do the initial triage, it doesn’t solve the problem of bugs stacking up in unmaintained areas of the code. I have experimented with auto-fixing the bugs with an LLM but currently the project policy is no AI contributions at all. We are in the process of debating a new policy which might allow for simple fixes to be done with AI.

I think it’s a mistake to think of it as a homogeneous community. The original free software hackers where a mix of libertarians working alongside communists. The growth of the distros brought there own communitarian vibes. And that’s fine, the license is the thing that allows everyone to potentially benefit whatever direction any particular group go in. Don’t like the direction don’t follow that group.

I think lying to your GP is a bad path to take. The clinical pathways exist for a reason.

I wouldn’t say it’s totally legacy. (v)ram bandwidth does matter and while the Apple M-series chips do well with their unified memory architecture don’t forget it’s fixed because it’s part of the CPU chip.

I don’t doubt that locally hostable models will be important for agentic tasks but I suspect they are still going to be bigger than most can comfortably host for time being. I still think there will be a place for the super large models for more complex reasoning although how much will be due to the intrinsic knowledge in the weights and how much due to the plumbing around them remains too be seen.

And if course LLM’s are not going to be the end point of the search for AGI. Whatever their architecture they will still need copious amounts of compute.

On the other hand it’s legitimately one of the wonders of the digital world. A communally edited source of knowledge free for all to access. While it’s good to scrutinise foundations and how they are run I’ve not seen anyone propose a better solution so far. The data is freely licensed so forking is possible but it’s not really the technical details that make Wikipedia the resource it is today.

What do you need/use that you find in modern editors that you can’t get in something like Emacs? While there are AI integrations for Emacs they are all optional.

I mean scientists have been going on about global warming for some time now and no one seemed to listen to them then. Not sure why they are turning to scientists now.