GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
A bit unrelated, but I wonder if I’m the only one left that is:
- Using small, open-weight models
- Asking it to only write small snippets that I can easily go through, check and understand.
- Copying pasting from good old web frontends instead of integrating it into my editor or whatever else people do with agents nowadays.
I feel like when we’re talking about AI this sort of usage gets lumped into the same pile as agentic vibe coding and it’s not helpful for discussion. Surely most people wouldn’t find this problematic?
There really is a difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and I don’t know enough about actually coding to look at their repos and tell you what’s happening.
The issue is, there’s also difference between how people cram “AI-assistance” into their previously well-refined workflows. Did see the odd person ending up with the same issues as straight-out vibe coding but without the speed, including the eventual (mild) AI psychosis and later switching to vibe coding after the chatbot convincing him.
Also I think it would be pretty trivial to generate an “understanding” of the code, yet AI boosters never bring up it as a concern.
Reading the comments, wow AI is polarizing. Neither side will budge.
I guess only time will tell, to see if all the AI code will actually come crashing down.
Non AI code has been crashing down for decades, controlled chaos, continuous improvement. We have lots of tools to put metrics on that, and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics. It’s not 100% self sufficient code creation Nirvana, but it might be fairly compared to the Cotton Gin in terms of making the field workers more productive in the delivery of market ready code/cotton.
but it might be fairly compared to the Cotton Gin in terms of making the field workers more productive in the delivery of market ready code/cotton.
Last i heard was that developers FELT like it made them more productive but actually not so much.
Non AI code has been crashing down for decades,
i.e. the code that made literally everything until a few years ago? That was crashing?
We have lots of tools to put metrics on that, and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics.
You mean more lines of code?
Are you trying to make a joke or a serious contribution
Sooner than later most things the average person does will sort of be vibe coded like compiling to an intermediate language. The idea of apps and walled gardens will not be as important. Instead of approved apps, it will be approved models and agents. Even the idea of an operating system is going to change. Linux is a great space for integrating the computing environment with AI coding. The full source is available to the model and any change you ask it to make can just be done for you. The idea of running a “Linux” or “Windows” could be limited to certain software and domains.
I think that certain things will be fairly resistant to forking, even by AI. Foundational software like the kernel, compilers, basic tools, databases, and so on will likely benefit more from being used as the standard/vanilla version rather than a modded version (especially a vibe-modded one).
But people and companies will experiment with this for sure and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the less software-competent hardware companies start making their Linux forks or drivers with LLMs, at least for a couple of years in the near future.
I also think that this will shift lots of companies further away from GPL toward MIT/BSD, because they’ll want a fully moddable source but they won’t want to share what they’re vibecoding.
If it was about real AI – not stochastic parrots – I would be all for it. What happened to those developments that started in the 70s where you have automatic formal proofs that a piece of code does what it is supposed to do? That is intelligent. Producing slop more voluminous and convoluted than humans could produce or understand is not intelligent software architecture just like fixing a hole in a roof by throwing what sticks at it is not intelligent building architecture. Both may do the job for some time. But what are the long-term costs and who is capable to clean up? In my opinion, what’s most desired is tools that are bug free, do what they should without annoying the user, and are radically simplified in their architecture. (For example, I would be happy with a perfectly working product that does what NFS or Samba aspire and fail to do for decades.) Apparently, AI can’t deliver that. To have the billionth app that is a browser wrapper and shows me exactly one website is much more important.
What happened to those developments that started in the 70s where you have automatic formal proofs that a piece of code does what it is supposed to do?
The stochastic parrots we have today are pretty good at doing that kind of tedious, extensive, franky mind numbingly boring stuff. They’re also fast enough that you can “afford” to take the time / effort required to do those kinds of proofs where they are warranted - it makes them “a good idea” in a lot more places than they used to be when they were so much more expensive to perform.
modern AI can be used to generate formal lean proofs:
If they’re just using it to find and patch bugs/exploits? Fine by me.
Vibe coding? Get the fuck outta here.
If Vibe coding means people who don’t know how to code creating code… yeah, that’s kind of like giving people who don’t know how to paint an airless gun and 5 gallon bucket and telling 'em to go for it on this building here…
This is the key point.
From my reading that is not the limit in how they are using AI. It seems like they are accepting LLM generated code as inputs.
This pretty much compromises the whole project as far as I am concerned.
Based on my understanding, the “core” team uses AI to detect vulnerabilities.
They also take codes from paid third party devs, and they say they don’t mind how they wrote the code, but it must be clear and each contributor needs to be able to explain it.
They follow the same rules on code conventions including readability. So basically, it’s less that they accept it than they don’t care as long as it matches their quality expectations. If you can’t tell, you can’t ban…
Considering Graphene’s entire reputation is staked on extremely precise definitions of security, this is a little concerning.
They’re the best. If the best degrades, I don’t foresee some Graphene alternative stepping up very quickly (see also: cross-platform alternatives to Google-made Chromium and Google-funded Gecko)
is the linux kernel “the best”? because they are using AI tooling. Linus actually threatened to use LLM to maintain sparse if nobody stepped up…
is curl the best? because the creator of curl has also used/accepted LLM code…
if the creators of two of “the best” pieces of software ever made are accepting (NOT embracing or promoting… just accepting) LLM code… maybe it’s time for us to think about the possibility that this MIGHT be a useful tool instead of everyone just yelling “SLOP SLOP SLOP” everywhere…
If it’s thoroughly vetted, it might still be OK, but it’s concerning…
I haven’t dug into the code, but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating. There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.
I understand this but, you have to consider the ecological impact of it, the thousands or more people whose work was stealed to train AI, the constant shoving of AI into everything and the problems that have arise from it, the campain AI companies did and do telling people they are going to lose their jobs and constant fearmongering, the constant blatantly lying of “AGI achieved”, the layoffs by senile CEOs, the debt that is causing because stupid people in power gonna be stupid, etc. There are plenty of reasons to hate AI and what it is doing to our world and people lives in general. Sure there are positives but the negatives clearly outweighs the positives.
There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.
I am not talking about the Linux kernel or the Rust project - they have stabdards way above average commercial projects - but generally “using ai” in practice means to use it for code generation. Then, programmers are expected to review the output but are not given extra time for it. This creates an extremely slippery slope leading to mostly unsupervised code creation. Also because reading and understanding buggy third party code means more effort than writing new code.
Then there is the idea to get rid of the bugs by “debugging”, but debugging is frankly not a software engineering strategy, because you can always just recognize a fraction of the bugs that your process created in the first place. Debugging is also more expensive tha writing good code.
Then, what makes the process between product managers and software developers very often a bit friction-loaded is that good developers always want to have clear specifications what they are supposed to build.
LLM code generation largely replaces clear specifications with plausible assumptions. That appears to make the process fast, but the result is often wrong. At times obviously wrong, and at times subtly and catastrophically wrong.
It’s funny because anyone seeing this as black and white clearly hasn’t ever opened an IDE.
Ssshh…Most of those having a knee-jerk “AI BAD! YOU BAD!” reaction don’t have any clue WTF an IDE is, how code completion works, nor the fact that by most metrics 95%+ of code now has “AI” in the chain…and has had that for YEARS.
https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
OMGWTFBBQ!
Here’s a crazy idea…how about instead of “AI BAD! ME HATE AI” how about some nuance? Assume ALL software in 2026 has had AI assistance, and review it on its merits.
As for the devs at GrapheneOS directly…why were you (the general you) trusting them before? Humans can be plenty dicey in ways that affect code all on their own.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13s7mv3/why_i_deleted_grapheneos_louis_rossmann/
https://factually.co/fact-checks/technology/louis-grossman-grapheneos-drama-c1f2ae
Supposedly wonderful “human artisanal code” has plenty of fuckery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
https://thehackernews.com/2024/03/urgent-secret-backdoor-found-in-xz.html
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/31/supply-chain-attack-on-axios/
https://www.hivepro.com/threat-advisory/axios-npm-supply-chain-attack-what-you-need-to-know/
Supposedly wonderful “human artisanal code” has plenty of fuckery.
These are supply chain attacks and in the case of xz utils, the attacker had gone to extreme lenghts to hide the attack from a well-meaning, good-hearthed but overworked and burnt out solo maintainer.
To compare this to bugs that people unwittingly introduce in normal human-written code is not sincere.
Very well. Here -
https://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571
https://www.finnie.org/2024/05/13/i-discovered-the-debian-openssl-bug/
That’s the thing about “pure human slop”: it doesn’t need to be malicious to be catastrophic.
The second link is particularly salient - kills the “supply chain attacks are special” argument because it is precisely about “unwitting bugs in normal human-written code just happen”
I’ve been a programmer for two thirds of my life up to this point. I don’t see how the machine that generates code that must be assumed to be broken, and statements about said code that must be assumed to be wrong, until both have been manually verified, because the “hallucination” issue is inherent to the design of LLMs and cannot be solved, is supposed to make my life easier. Especially since a well known problem in computer science is that writing code is more fun than reading it.
If you’re using AI for code generation, I hope you like reading code.
If you’re using AI to learn a repo, I hope you’re prepared to fact check everything it tells you.
If you’re using AI for code review before merging a PR, fucking yikes. What made you think the sycophant machine that once told users a soggy cereal bar was a great business opportunity and cannot even transcribe McDonald’s orders correctly was suitable for that purpose?
If you’re telling yourself it’s okay because there’s a human in the loop, please read some studies about decision fatigue and consider that increasing the number of critical decisions a person must make per day, while giving them a suggested answer that’s right 90% of the time and catastrophically wrong the remaining 10%, and the only way to tell the difference is to read in depth, might not have the desired effect. Especially if the human in question is then put under time pressure.
And all that is before I go on a five paragraph rant about the ethical transgressions of every major AI company.
It’s pretty black and white for me.
The fact that it isn’t perfect is the grey. And sure, it has a lot of problems but not only is it still useful anyways, but those problems are being ironed out. They probably won’t disappear completely but the tech is already miles further than what we had 2 years ago.
To make you understand what I mean by black and white, you have a user that put “AI is evil” in big bold letters in the comments. The hate is almost cult like for part of the population, and imo, it’s mostly because the media tells them to be mad.
Most of it depends on the task in any case. I don’t work with massive code bases and it doesn’t take long reading through a few scripts, running it and checking the output. The people I know that do work with huge code bases are using it as well, but I can’t really talk for them either. They don’t hate it tho.
The fact that it isn’t perfect is the grey.
And the fact how it is used in practice, actually, in reality, is the very dark grey that some people call “black” for better clarity. The fact that you can use a large butchers knife for practical things does not mean that entering a primary school with one is the right thing. What are the actual intentions for grabbing that tool?
The person who put “AI is evil” in big block letters is objectively correct. See homes getting claimed under eminent domain to build power lines for datacenters, electricity prices for consumers rising as service quality gets worse, and water usage to the tune of millions of gallons per datacenter per day. See companies buying rare books in bulk, cutting them apart so they can be scanned faster, and not publishing the scans, literally destroying culture so they can have one more scrap of training data guaranteed to be free of slop that their competitors don’t have. See companies operating web scrapers that deliberately evade every block that website owners try to use to stop them from reading their sites, and then scraping so many different pages so frequently that it’s indistinguishable from a DDoS attack, hosting bills skyrocket, servers crash, indie webmasters pay the price for corporate greed. See xAI operating natural gas turbines on the property of their datacenter for extra electricity in flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act, spewing toxic smoke into the air and generating powerful, inaudible infrasound vibrations that have been linked to everything from nausea to irritability to hearing loss to seizures. See Anthropic treating Minority Report as an instruction manual. See how ChatGPT use affects test scores. See AI psychosis. See chatbot-induced suicides. See deskilling. See how little AI companies care.
I agree, it’s just not reasonable to assert that a technology powered entirely by IP theft and climate change acceleration must be inherently evil.
Sorry, I don’t bootlick the copyright machine. Anyone with half a brain can see it’s transformative. I don’t get why collage is fine but AI isn’t, it’s just copyright mega corps and data brokers that smell blood in the water. All the data isn’t even owned by the artist, you are fighting for universal records, not your local guitarist.
For the climate aspect, it’s mostly grid issues and corruption. It’s laughable to blame AI when we have president pedo prostrating himself in front of oil companies and destroying renewable projects. We need regulations and all that on where they can be placed and how they get powered, but in the end, it’s just software. I could use AI 8 hours a day for my whole life and I still wouldn’t be close to the damage one ticket to Europe does. It’s a scape goat being served by a corrupt pro oil lobby.
Don’t get me wrong, I know what datacenters entail with the amount of people they serve, but if you look at it at an individual level, it’s a drop in the bucket, or it would be if they weren’t using plane turbines. We need regulations to curb the stupidity, but it’s doesn’t make it all inherently bad.
Lol, “I know this is a legitimate issue, but if I creatively reframe it enough I can pretend it’s not”.
I don’t think the copyright thing is an issue.
Climate wise, it’s only an issue because of a corrupt administration, it’s not a death blow to it. It’s at the heart of it overblown by a reasonable measure imo.
This in spades.
To add; now there’s an issue in the generated code that’s been pushed. What to do? Read the code? Have new code generated? Abandon the project?
Abandon the project
Usually, if it’s noticeable that AI was used on code, the code is flawed or, at least, has copyright concerns.
Agreed.
I strongly remember a CompSci professor ~2005 being disgusted with auto-generated Java GUI. And yes it was clunky and more memory intensive than it could have been, but also, I really don’t care about how GridView is defined most of the time.
Bad code is bad code, touched by AI or not. For working code, a volunteer group spending resources to determine if it might have been touched by AI is at the very least an incredibly frustrating standard to try to meet. And very likely impossible to verify in any meaningful way.
Look at the comments here. Do you think the haters here care?
Shh, you’re using logic on social media.
If the haters only realized that literally every software company has been using it since at least last fall, we’d have a helluva lot more Amish.
Noooo All AI is Baaad!!1!
/s
It’s tiresome.
I’m with Linus Torvalds and GrapheneOS on this. AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.
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you know what also was a useful tool? chlorofluorocarbon
AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.
“If you ignore the negatives for everyone else and just focus on the positives for me, it’s pretty great”
Mhmm. Right, ok.
Go live under a rock then because that applies to almost anything in life. Selective morality is fine but when it is to be a science denier you are just a fuckwit.
I was ready to roll my eyes at the title and move on, but i’m glad I spent the time to read this.
TLDR; i very much disagree with the premise, but the author brings up an interesting bit of philosophy that is helpful to the conversation.
When people say “it’s just a tool”, it is not to assert that the tool is neutral, only that the thing being referenced should be thought of and discussed in a similar fashion as we do when discussing other items in the same category. This is in opposition to the tendency to ascribe moral features or aesthetic to things that aren’t inherent to their ‘essence’, but rather features external to the thing being discussed or features that are commonly shared by items in the set but not exclusive to it.
What comes to mind (possibly because of the great effort it took to read and understand it) is Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the ‘assemblage’. Here’s an excerpt from "A Thousand Plateaus (that happens to contain my favorite passage in possibly all of philosophy) that I think adds a contrast:
spoiler
[…] These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse “can do.” They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can’t get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame … . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, “playing” horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what way would that ameliorate Hans’s problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked?
The author here is correct to point out that tools are not neutral - and the connection to Heidegger’s conception of the Gestell is very well received. I just wish they hadn’t stopped at their conclusion and actually kept the analysis going. Taking their example of SUV’s engendering ‘asshole driving behavior’ - it isn’t just that the existence of SUV’s bears a causal relationship to asshole drivers because of what that gestell produces, but that the existence of SUV’s reshapes the relations of all the other assemblages in close proximity to it regardless of how it’s used and by who. They even kind of preview this more balanced conclusion in their comparison of javascript and vue, stating that it’s not a matter of one being better than the other, but simply that they have different purposes and enable different types of collaboration.
I think the entirety of the problem of this argument could be captured just in this part of the blog,
After all, all kinds of fascinating weapons systems are being used in defence of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and this is both good and necessary, but none of this makes the effects on leaders of having access to bombs and artillery, or on individual people of having access to firearms, not ceteris paribus deletrious.
All other things couldn’t possibly remain ‘equal’. The addition of those tools fundamentally changes the relations and constituent parts of all the assemblages around it, including concepts like “freedom” and “democracy”. To take it one step further - if the signs and symbols that refer to those assemblages and relations - that have now necessarily changed by the new addition - do not also change with them, then they simply stop being practically useful to describe them.
Any tool is going to have a non-neutral affect on those who use them - that’s mostly the point of the assertion.
The crux of that article is buying into Heidegger‘a definition of a tool, specifically, “thing that lets you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to.” If you disagree with that premise, the article doesn’t hold up.
Tools aren’t about letting you do something you would otherwise not have been able to do, they are simply a force multiplier for capability or efficiency. You still need knowledge and skills to do the thing.
I am not a carpenter. My knowledge and skills are near zero. This multiplied by any number is still damn near zero, and I have no idea about the culture, safety, or history of carpentry. I’m not stupid enough to jump right into using an lathe without a lot of research or someone to guide me, because I’m not a fucking moron.
People with programming knowledge and skills using AI will eventually figure out a workflow that works. Laypeople using AI to vibe code? They’re probably fucking morons. Sure, maybe even most of the time, it will be fine. But eventually, someone is going to be degloved.
I am sure I will be down voted on Lemmy for this but using AI for development by a team who is already experienced in development of the product they are working on is not a moral failing.
Don’t forget the negative internalities (it makes it’s users dumber and the codebase less maintainable).
But yes it is useful, and the knee jerk hate comes mostly as a reaction to the marketing lies told by the companies selling it.
Those are still external to the thing, not internal.
Experienced developers benefit from it, my guess is because they’ve already formed their knowledge, habits, opinions, etc.
I don’t think any company has shown productivity gains amongst experienced developers due to AI
Luckily, the “negative externalities” are mostly made-up bullshit.
The ecological damage is not made up.
It’s pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the economy. Focusing on AI to the exclusion of bigger issues is actively harmful.
It also didn’t exist at all 5 years ago. Why are we as a society allowing new ecological damage? When will we stop? The billionaires want it to be never as long as it gives them money and power.
Renewable energy makes good progress, but as you can see here, many people have other priorities.
So AI data centers are being built powered with renewable energy, right?
It’s pretty insignificant
Citation needed. You’re just straight-up lying or clueless as to what’s actually going on.
The water usage “issue” has been blown out of proportion when compared to something as unnecessary as the ethanol that gets put in gasoline
You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
It’s not hard to look up. If you need help, ask for help politely.
That’s an “I have no idea what I’m talking about” if I ever heard one.
“Citation needed” IS polite. You claim it’s not polluting, so clearly you know the CO2 emissions numbers from SpaceX’s datacenters that are being run off direct-connect to natural gas generators. So, how about it? How “not polluting” are they?
It’s a matter of framing. If you compare them to older datacenters they are atrocious because they’re bigger and consume more energy. But in the grand scheme of things all things IT pale in comparison to e.g. producing beef. Now with that framing you can’t sell AI hate though because people like beef, so it’s always just comparing large datacenters to smaller datacenters with the obvious results.
Unfortunately, as you can see, you are in a crowd of liars. Now, I am certainly not accusing you personally of being dishonest, but it does tend to bias your audience against you. Sorry.
The numbers aren’t particularly bad. It’s not for nothing that the EU has classified natural gas as green energy.
Layoffs are made-up?
Layoffs aren’t the problem here…the problem is that society requires people generate their own worth through work, and suddenly a good chunk of that work is now significantly less valuable.
Requiring less work is a good thing. Humans should be striving to minimize work. That’s what humanity is good at.
The problem comes in that while the “input” of AI is, essentially, the collection of all human knowledge…while the output is money for a small handful of people…people who themselves contributed next to nothing to that pile of human knowledge (and in fact are probably running a deficit to it).
That ain’t right. We are all shareholders in the collection of all human knowledge. We should all be getting dividends from its work.
It should be noted that the input of all human knowledge is getting the door closed and locked behind it. Requiring you to buy tokens to access said information.
And if you refuse to provide more training data to their services that collect said data, like reddit, facebook, x, then you can’t access essentially the entire internet. With google locking down captchas to only “verified” android phones. And every website requiring you to sign up with a ID card, and locking you out when you use a VPN.
So not only will your jobs will be taken away but your autonomy and access to what used to be free information. Or not even information sometimes your job or access to a services requires you to use these things. Even just getting into your apartment with a RFID reader on your apparments official app. You have to exist in their panopitcon just to even exist in many situations.
Oh and the best part the only thing worth money in the ai industry is all your user data and how it gets fed into palantirs networks. From every single comment you make on their services, and everytime you order a cheese burger in public, that all gets logged because you are a domestic terrorist for thinking maybe we should hold these people accountable.
reduction in labour requirements are good.
Oh look! Another “leftist” trying to shift blame away from tariff man.
I’m not American if that is what you’re implying. Have a nice day.
Maybe I am just not understanding your direction based politics, but isn’t it the right that put him in office? Isn’t your comment backwards?
To be clear, I literally don’t know, it’s hard enough following my own country’s politics lol
Yes. Trump’s deranged acts are seriously harming the US economy but also doing a lot of damage to the global economy. Anyone who blames AI for layoffs is effectively helping Trump/the global right by covering up their incompetence and failure. To be fair, Putin’s war is also causing much harm.
Then why did you say they were leftist?
As for the layoff blame, just because I say I like hamburgers doesn’t mean I hate hotdogs. Layoffs can be happening from both those things, and just because people are acknowledging one source doesn’t mean they are helping the other source…
I said “leftist” in quotes. Almost everyone here self-identifies as being on the left, at least insofar as they oppose Trump. And yet… well.
I am skeptical if AI is already having a substantial effect on employment. In any case, I don’t think these people care. You don’t see anyone arguing for a better social safety net/unemployment benefits. Here’s someone saying that people lose their jobs over AI, but you also have people saying AI is useless. They really don’t care.
Reality altering disinformation as fact, using a machine that is essentially plagiarism incarnate? You are pushing a false narrative OP
I am not a coder in any fashion but this is the make or break frontier for development, particularly FOSS and small scale projects.
AI is evil.
It is an ecological nightmare, socially and economically distructive, prompted on the theft of the knowledge and work of every creative endeavour any person as ever made and pointed at rendering pointless any future aspiration of individual creation someone may have.
The association has been made and it is not going away.
this is such an extremist position, i don’t know how anyone can take it seriously
Thank you.
AI in concept is not evil and could be a good thing .
Unfortunately, its implementation has been at the hands of rapacious, avaricious, and narcissistic über-capitalists, which has inextricably linked AI with the evils you enumerated.
In a different timeline, AI was developed slowly, using heavily-vetted and legally obtained data, and rolled out in an intelligent and safe way.
We are better off leaving the appeal to alternate time lines for another conversation, preferably around science fiction or comics.
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities.
And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it.
This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, as you very well put it, not done that way.
AI is a tool, like a hammer, and should be used as such. And like a tool should require training. The problem is people aren’t using it as a tool and rather look at the hammer and say “go build me a house”. That’s where the issue is. Does a hammer know how to build a house on its own? no. does AI excel at end to end builds? no. but people are using it for said end to end builds.
Devs, vibe coders, god knows who else still to this day fail to understand that AI doesn’t understand how to build things correctly. All the agents care about is getting to a solution as quickly as possible to retain a userbase. that’s it. will what ever it builds scale? no. will it be full of exploits? very likely. will it be able to refactor whatever it wrote? no because it will believe YOU wrote it. so upgrades/improvements to whatever are virtually impossible.
THEN you combine all that with the fact that EVERY AI’s training data, currently, is incredibly out of date. Tech moves too fast for it. So you have people building shit with libraries and what have you that are already out of date and they don’t know that.
Nuclear weapons are a tool, like any other
That’s a great example actually, you just have to differentiate between a nuclear weapon and a nuclear power plant. You can split atoms to build a bomb or heat water, the concept of splitting an atom itself isn’t evil.
Exactly
I think with OP’s analogy, a nuclear weapon is no longer a tool, because the actual tool (nuclear technology) was crafted into something (weapon) that does a specific thing (destroy). But I guess OP should’ve used LLM and machine learning instead of AI.
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Nuclear fission has been used in nuclear reactors for good, and was exceedingly efficient at that time, and has been a significant factor in the recent human history. Just as it’s been with the “evil” use in nuclear weapons.
I’m not aware of any breakthrough that has not been used for both good and evil.
A tool built through nefarious means and consuming resources it should never had chanelled into it.
Then, taking from your words, if the information these machines are working is by default outdated, why insist in feeding it with more and more and expect different outcomes?
Makes no sense to begin with.
So by your logic, a child produced through “nefarious means” is also inherently evil.
What?
It’s a tool like a gun, specifically purpose built to usher in a technofeudalist surveillance state. Not useful for anything else as is.
Guns are incredibly useful, just like LLMs and diffusion.
AI is not evil. It doesn’t have a consciousness. It doesn’t make decisions.
What is evil, are billionaire capitalists having full control over the technology.
What is evil, is the concept of closed-source.
What is evil, is stealing all creative works without attribution or compensation.
What is evil, is seizing essentially all the silicon to build these datacenters, then soak up all the electricity out of the grid and all the water out of the ground.
The problem isn’t the AI, itself. It’s the means that’s the problem…not the ends.
To summarize: something that is being created through highly destructive amd predatory means, by completely deranged people, is not evil.
I can’t disagree more. And to quote myself, again, today:
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.
I am not a coder in any fashion
You should use ai to learn 😁
I recommend https://chat.mistral.ai/chat as they use renewable power to train their models and are european 👍
Pass. Haven’t learn before, not interested in do it now. And if by some reason I wished to do it, I’d grab a few books on it.
“Ai” isn’t inherently evil. It’s just a tool. An incredibly interesting and marvelous tool, in theory.
What we make of it and how we use it matters. Noone needs stupid chatbots. People should only be allowed to use them after graduating an exam of what they actually are and how they work. In the current state they’re 90% bullshit and harmful.
But LLMs surely have great and reasonable applications. People often fear what they don’t really understand. And LLMs really are a topic that often even “techies” don’t get, so why should a layman.
Yes, they are environmental Desasters. But try to substract all the trillions of silly nonsensical queries millions of people hammer into chatbots, that once were simple search-engine - queries. And it’s not THAT bad anymore.
“AI is just a tool” - #1 thing said by tools.
Machine guns are tools. As are jets and bombs and missiles.
Exactly. Seems you understood the point. Also same as cars, planes, spoons and machetes.
“AI is just a tool” - #1 thing said by tools.
#1 thing said by arrogant turds with no clue.
My point proven :D
If that fills your clueless heart with joy, be my guest 🤷🏻
I’m just going to quote myself, as I’m satisfied enough with the answer I wrote to another reply.
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.
You are confusing capitalism and ai. AI is just a tool. Capitalist will use any tool it can to hurt labor. This is currently born out by history recent and ancient. The luddites attacked the looms not because they were evil. But because the bourgeoisie were using them to exclude and attack labor.
That is a false equivalence.
The looms, the automated treshers, the tractor, whatever machine designed to a fullfil a task that displaced human labour wasn’t designed with the objective to render humans useless. There were periods of transition when people hurt, needlessly, if I may say so, but new occupations emerged.
This is not the same.
For the first time, we are faced with a technology that feeds off human achievement to be built and next states it can dispense and completely replace what enabled it to be put together to start. While consuming resources we can not afford to waste and returning nothing of value.
No, it’s a literal analog. There will still be people operating AI. Even using your own terminology is literally the same.
And I don’t even know where you’re going with the last part. I suggest you familiarize yourself with what AI is actually capable of. The biggest danger of AI is not that it hallucinates more than someone tweaking on meth. But that people dumb and tweaking on meth with too much power will take what it says as gospel. Your liable to make the people in the marketing Departments of these AI companies cum with how badly misrepresenting what these AI are capable of. The same AI that some companies fire their workforces for and are now humiliatedly hiring them back. Because the AI wasn’t capable of what it was sold as.
It is not an analog, in any measurement.
We are talking about a technology that been prompted, since its inception, as the leap that would render human work unnecessary - which is false under many measurements.
When that failed, it was then repackaged as the technology that would enable any person to do anything: write a book, a song, create the new Mona Lisa, write any program they needed or wanted, etc. And again, it failed.
Any major development was always geared towards solving a concrete, tangible, problem. For AI, every proponent for it is trying to find problems to fix with it.
I don’t care about the promises of AI. I care about the cost of it, now and future. It’s not a hand full of niche applications that are going to impress me. Put it towards research, make it truly useful, in the hands of people capable of forcing it to produce results and audit and validate them. It is not a toy, it is not something that can replace human beings in any measurement, it is not something people should be relegating their autonomy and individuality to, which is happening as we are having this conversation.
No need to reply to this. I’m out. I don’t care for any arguments in defence of AI and it’s potential. I’ve made my choice. Keep to yours.
Have a great one. See you around.
It’s not a defense of AI. It’s a pushback on your hysterical flailing against all forms of it. And your inability to engage rationally on the subject. Case in point you hand wavingly deny my point while providing a list of evidence to support it.
If you are going to protest the current deployment of AI, the AI isn’t the problem. The actual issue is the grifting petit bourgeoisie looking to gate keep it as they continue to grift. Destroying everyone and everything in their path. You’ve shown that you know the generative AI isn’t what it’s sold as. But oddly you attack those that technically agree with you, simply because they won’t histrionically flip flop between that and all AI bad!!!1!!ONE!
people are not entitled to employment, and machines are a great way to reduse the labour requirements.
You have the right to express your opinion as you may please but you’re not entitled to have me respect it nor respect you for it, but I digress.
This isn’t Reddit, sadly, because otherwise I’d give you gold for that comment.
By that logic, when all human labour - and I do mean all of it, with no exception - is no longer necessary, thus no income can be earned by any part, how will people survive? I expect them to be, at least, entitled to move out of the way and silently and peacefully disappear.
“I’m just going to quote myself”
Yeah go on buddy, doesn’t make you right though.
AI is an item (as “tool” seems to trigger you people), saying it is “evil” is just stupid and makes you sound like an evangelist lol.
Is it bad? That is something people can actually discuss, but you’re not here for that it seems.
The AI is a consummer of resources we can not easily dispense that returns nothing of objective and equivalent value.
Fresh words, no quotes.
More palatable now?
Oh no we didn’t know that!! /s
Dude, we know the downsides of generative AI and the training of llms.
Is that so hard to understand?
It is. It really is. At any point on any other endeavour, someone said it was enough and the costs did not justify the results. Not with this. So, it really is hard to understand.
Just because it was a nicely worded statement, doesn’t make it universal.
I use a local LLM for our smart home. It wastes a Lil bit of energy, which is still faaaar below my 1500W while gaming. Is gaming evil now? It helps dramatically in ways that were never possible before like “turn on all lights at 40% in the color purple and also turn on music. My fav playlist” followed by a “no, use a warm color and close all windows”.
Not every LLM is a fucking chatbot that eats the planet to “create” a shitty cat-meme for Granny’s Facebook.
Don’t assume everyone uses silly chatbots. That is ONE application of LLMs, and it is indeed stupid and kills out environment for basically no benefit.
Congratulations. Enjoy it.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS Here you go, argue with GrapheneOS - it’s an open platform, go ahead and make a masto account and share your thoughts with them. Tell them what you think! The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
Yeaaaah like deleting their earlier posts to make themselves look better and claiming the “haters” are coming from K*wi Farms.
https://mas.to/@zzt/117246306723269935
Truly good rebuttals right here!
I’m not going to approach them in any fashion. I have already made my decision about their work/product and the GrapheneOS is not of my interest.
The project must have their reasons but I still insist on what I’ve stated regarding AI in general.
You’re right, but don’t encourage people to brigade GrapheneOS. That’s a donation-funded project.
I’m not brigading anyone. They have their reasons, I have my view regarding AI, that is it. I did not attack the GrapheneOS team in any way nor do I intend to.
My bad, I didn’t think of that. My only thought was “$20 says this chucklehead won’t do squat” because we know.
I don’t like GOS devs, they are not focused on usablity, but on security (which is completely valid, but it’s a shame that GOS is the most usable mobile OS), but holy based.
If you are disputing AI utility in coding: Recent Linux kernel versions fixed up to 3 times more CVEs in comparision to releases before AI. Also, much less of those CVEs are found in the newer versions, which means new kernel releases contain better code.
I think the gist here is making a distinction between AI coding and AI auditing.
To the best of my knowledge, AI coding is still significantly behind human coders in code quality and security. AI auditing, on the other hand, allows a lot of previously missed bugs to come to light, and actively helps in making code better.
People still seem to think AI is a fad that will go away. I don’t see this happening (for code) at all. Not ever
People don’t really understand this yet. There are LLMs that can do useful work running locally on 5 year old laptops (ok, only if it’s a Macbook Pro, but still). Qwen on consumer hardware isn’t close to Claude Code using cloud models, but it can do real work and this is the floor, the absolute minimum of AI we will have going forward. No matter what happens to the industry and the bubble, it will not go away. With any other outcome other than a total collapse of the bubble, AI will be more powerful than that.
Oof. Options for good software grows smaller and smaller each day.
hey feel free to fork it, call it amish os!
I’d fork a lot of software if I had the time and skills, an OS is a bit too much for me. I’ll happily donate to good projects that come around though, I’m just not feeding money to ones that are feeding that back to billionaires to build datacenters for fucking AI.
good to see smart developers posting reasonable takes, though sad they have to spend time doing it
Cool well I’ll keep using Lineage until they become massive piles of steaming crap as well.
Fuck AI and all you silicon ball lickers.
@BrickEater unfortunately LineageOS does allow AI contributions: https://github.com/LineageOS/charter/blob/main/ai-coding-assistants.md
if you are using a computer or phone, you are running AI-generated code. it is rather dire. the best you can do is limit your use of this fashtech in other areas.
FUCK. I can’t have fucking shit in this goddamn world.
A large number of people are using it as an opportunity to promote using operating systems which are the direct opposite of hardened and are much more heavily using AI models including for a lot of code generation.
LineageOS is certainly using it. CalyxOS, /e/ and iodéOS are based on it. CalyxOS is developed by LineageOS core developers.
Oh, so now they’re also infighting like hell on “holier than thou” grounds. Cool.
Fan-fucking-tastic. Everything I love is ruined by slop users.
Since LLMs are essentially built from code, I have an easier time believing that coders can get a benefit, especially at the Individual level, within the frame of having a coding background and being able to audit, directly, the code that the machine spits out. But basically everything else happening with, and surrounding, these fucking things is atrocious.
just curious, are you planning to stop using technology altogether, once there’s nowhere else to migrate to?
I mean, I assume you have thrown away your PC already, since all 3 major OSes use AI in their development
Well, I hardly use my PC and was just forced to get one for a job to do email bullshit, so in my day to day, yes. And Ive been exploring getting a basic ass flipphone and a atlas instead of relying on googles shit GPS system, I already use OSM instead but still.
I would sooner migrate to templeOS than use slopOS in gunna be real. There is always an archived iso
good luck
No they don’t.
Windows clearly does. Linux kernel does. MacOS has built-in AI features and XCode has support for AI agents, so one would assume they also use it in development. Do you have some other 3 major OSes I don’t know about? Are you on FreeBSD? Cause uhhh https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-ai-assisted-vulnerability-discovery-project-launch/
Linux, Windows, and MacOS devs definitely do use LLMs to help with coding.
In your defense NetBSD does not, but I would not consider NetBSD to be one of the big 3.
There is no making ai go away, it’s never going away. Now it’s a tool to divide us.
