They got to him
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Middle aged men dementia, induced by money and being surrounded with tech bros and having corporations whisper into your ears…
Removed by mod
i swear to god AI obsession is like some kind of weird contagious mental illness
What… Lmao what even is that picture? Why…
You know what. It doesn’t matter. Lmao
I think people who use and defend ai use as professionals are pick-mes and have shitty/broken moral compasses.
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…
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 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.
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.
And what has AI introduced into the Linux kernel that poses a risk to any nation depending on it?
That’s what code review is for lol.
Where is the story here?
the llm should have done it in rust. race impossible
this is the story :)
„Claude, rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust. Make no mistakes.“
From my experience reviewing LLM generated code is many times higher.
LLMs make slop code faster than humans can meaningfully review. If you make LLMs the only review layer, then slop gets through because they have similar biases. Stop making slop.
You had to lean on that assumption that there’s a massive amount being produced to make this point though.
The actual operating point is that the slop is made faster than humans can WRITE it.
Reviewing 100 lines of code thats 90% there and took 3 minutes to produce is faster than writing it from scratch, there’s no getting around that.
For me the issue with it is that all (hyperbole) work is about to become reading instead of creating, dull.
You might save time in writing the code, but you lose time from the code doing things that aren’t in your mental model of the program
Cool assumption. But pretty sure it’s not how things work at all but sounds great…
What actually happens is that you have a long list of multiple maintainers reviewing , and multiple branches for testing, and multiple layers of review too.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/process/maintainers.html . See that long list of maintainers for a start.
The actual policy is that everything ends up getting reviewed by a human. If I post a patch, it doesn’t go straight to master
If it’s not being properly tested and maintained, it gets dropped irrespective of what it is (remember devfs?)
Also, I’m not sure about the kernel specifically, but on projects I submitted code to, they often wanted complex patches broken down if possible.
Yes this means the review process is working. What is important to track is if LLM code causes a disproportionately large number of reviews or reviews that take longer because whoever generated the code doesn’t actually know what it is doing. Hopefully not the case here but it does happen a lot with LLM coding.
Hopefully not the case here but it does happen a lot with LLM coding.
Linus secretly understands nothing about the Linux kernel
XZ Utils made it past all those checks with malicious code from a human.
If they’d been more careful with their tarball commits it probably would have made it into the final and commercial distros.
It made into Homebrew for instance.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s not the kernel…
You are correct, also has nothing to do with AI, just malicious actors.
Yep. And the kernel did actually have a backdoor attempt at some point. And it was noticed too https://www.infoq.com/news/2013/10/Linux-Backdoor/
Where is the story here?
“AI bad. AI do bad thing. Let’s point and laugh at AI doing bad thing to delegitimize the technology in the public’s eyes.”
Meanwhile, at work, I interact with coding agents on a regular basis, and the results are pretty good. Then it goes through a local blind review by a more powerful agent, get pushed out to the company’s code review agent, which is designed to be as critical as possible, check the ticket details, make sure everything matches what the design plan says. Depending on the repo, it might even go through an extra security review.
Then, because we aren’t fucking stupid, it goes through the standard code review process by real developers. Sometimes they still find something, sometimes the agent code reviews found way more than a human can. Overall, I trust the current process over our previous one, where some guy spends barely two minutes looking at the code, rubberstamps it, and then QA discovers a few bugs that need fixing, because the damn code review wasn’t as through and critical as it should have been.
This is key. Don’t use AI to replace people, but as an extra layer to ensure quality. You still need the human code review, but there are things that the AI might catch faster than a human would. There are things that AI might catch that a human might miss. But keep the human in the loop.
Thank you. This is a tool just like everything else. Garbage in equals garbage out. Generative coding in the right hands is an extremely powerful tool.
It’s a difference between kids playing with fireworks. (Vibe coders that know nothing about software development) And rocket scientists at NASA building a new shuttle. (Real developers with controlled thoughtful AI workflows)
Real developer who has done programming every day for over a decade now. AI is shit. It’s bad.
You can dev as long as you like, doesnt make you good at using a new tool by default. Its a tool, it works for millions of people. Why do you think you’re special.
I’m self taught. Didn’t go to uni. I can learn anything. That’s what makes me special. These ai people need it and literally cry when it’s gone. They’re pathetic.
I have to do the PRs for the rest of my team in india who are just using claude all day. That’s what my job turned into. A month ago I was writing code for features, today i’m watching the offshore team produce shit ai. Every person on my team left or was let go, and no replacements. Management literally told us no one is writing code anymore, and if they do, it will be tweaking claude output.
“Real developer who has done assembly every day for ten years now. Compilers are shit. It’s bad”
?? AI is nothing like a compiler 😂 Its just autocomplete. Compilers are deterministic btw. All good tools are. I dont want to play whack a mole with autocomplete.
Exactly. I’ve done “real programming” for four decades; early in my career I was writing assembler and regularly having to review compilers’ output because it was shit.
I do not still do that. You adapt and move with the times, or you find a new career.
The ones complaining now are mainly the people who thought “cutting and pasting stuff from Stack Overflow without ever understanding it” was skilled labour.
Real developer who has been programming daily since the 80s. The quality of the models used to vary pretty wildly, but here in the past year or two, everything has gotten way better and most models are pretty capable. Claude, Gemini, GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek. The prices haven’t, but my advice is to ignore the bullshit and just pick the models that work for you. Claude isn’t 25x better than DeepSeek, so it doesn’t deserve to be 25x the cost.
I think Claude and OpenAI have started to realize that nobody’s buying their overpriced token costs. Although, frankly, none of these prices even make sense compared the cost of compute for an average cloud-based GPU cluster. I can’t see how any of these companies are making a profit, just riding the private equality wave until the money runs out. Maybe Amazon, Microsoft, Google, since they own their own hardware, but not OpenAI or Anthropic. China’s going to run them out of business in a few years, anyway.
And of course, if you have the option, use local models. VRAM size is still a bit of a problem, but quantization techniques have gone a long way. You can run a decent model on a personal PC with a bit of tweaking, for home programming tasks, or just a personal model that doesn’t immediately sell your data to Peter Thiel.
Claude at $20 per month is a pretty good deal. But paying per token is a rip-off. Either way, we need open models so we won’t be dependent on a big tech trying to monopolise this.
My boss has been in it since like the early 80s, programming with basic and assembly. The turning point for him was a month or so ago when Claude found a bug in our mesh firmware that he had been trying to figure out for months. Edge case in hub mode when a message was in route to a device that momentarily dropped from the mesh. Flag gets cleared but no timer set to clear the buffer if the device doesn’t show back up in time. Super fun async RF problems, intermittent and ridiculously hard to find proxy buffer issue that was nearly impossible to reproduce. Old devs made code to lie and say the device was offline when it was still send it’s UID over RDM. So they knew the bug was there for YEARS. With a ton of logs and access to the specific files, Claude found the bug in like 45 mins. It was kind of crazy.
As an electrical engineer who has been doing full stack dev, firmware all the way up to board design and layout for about 16 years now, it’s getting better every single day. My boss is finally coming around after being the biggest shit talker for the last year and half. Is the code perfect? No. Does anyone write perfect code… NO! It is a tool that needs to be driven correctly. If you don’t like it, don’t use it! Is it going away? No! And it doesn’t look like anything we say is going to change that. Live with it, it’s the only option.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Everyone has their own experiences too. Be fucking nice tho, why is everyone so hostile. Go back to reddit if you want to be an asshole. Not you dread beef, just in general.
the level of smugness in this reply, to compare AI slopists with NASA rocket scientists, its fucking astounding
The smugness in assuming that ‘anyone who uses x tool is stupid.’
Self awareness at critical low.
I was making a point about people who are experts in their field, and people who know nothing about said field.
Username checks out.
Username checks out.
the last refuge for people who cant mount a proper retort. As expected of someone like you. You grab the low hanging fruit, blind to the trap, then think you’re a world leading genius for going directly where you’re directed.
You okay man? You read so much into my comment it makes me worry a little for ya. Hope you have a better day man.
replies to the same comment twice youre reading too much into this
Slop, not even once
Wow! Says the person who started off throwing insults by calling me smug. I only agreed with your own assement of yourself via your username, if you took that as insult, it’s a you problem. But, at least you know that insulting people is disrespectful. Maybe try heeding your own advice before you start talking shit to strangers on the Internet. How “astoundingly” oblivious of you to make that comment.
AI bad. Bugs never occurred when human built code. We had to come up with a completely new term, unknown in programming before, called “race condition”.
His very first bug. Until this point, he had 100% error-free code. /s
Linus probably uses AI effectively, but the question is how long until his skill deteriorate because of it.
Linus hasn’t programmed much for years. He is a manager. I imagine lots of managers are seduced by vibe coding. Programming can be a real slog and takes so much time. Why walk when you can drive?
The problem isn’t with Linus losing his skills but sustainability of the entire FOSS space. I don’t think many young programmers are ever going to learn the lessons Linus did as a young person and those lessons are still very relevant for low level code working closely with hardware. When the pre-LLM programmers age out I think we are going to be treading water for years with LLM regurgitating variations on the same old human code without much direction or innovation.
It is arguably a different situation for something like webdev which is mostly paint by numbers or enterprise software that is solving the same problems over and over.
Why walk when you can drive?
Depends on how much you drive. If you do it long enough that you forget how to walk, you’ll be stuck when the car runs out of gas. And it’s running out of gas.
Also, are we forgetting how AI was trained? It’s a stealing machine.
This ^^^
It’s a, err, medium term problem. There’s going to be a serious deficit of attentive human problem solvers before anything can “automate” that away.
I’d be more concerned with him and people of that generation aging out maintaining the project first, and newer generations not having the skills to begin with to carry it forward.
Yeah. Linux maintenace becomes a paid subscription through the ai providers
of that generation
Ouch.
I think ‘we’ have about 20 years left in us. That’s long enough for an entire new pet language to be born, surge, wane, and then die. …or 27 entirely new web frameworks.
Linus is 56. You think he’ll still be actively maintaining Linux into his mid-70s?
Code monkeys of a certain age
It’s hard to believe he’s not also thinking about succession and actively mentoring younger folks. The Linux kernel is his baby and he seems enmeshed enough on the community level. He’s smart enough to not simply leave it to chance.
Tarvads successor has been named a long time ago, although I don’t believe he’s “young” but succession has been arranged for the Linux kernel.
I don’t know. People are creative. They’ll get burned and learn from their mistakes. At least, the ones who do will survive in their careers — then pass on the knowledge, repeat. So I imagine Linus will be replaced just fine when he retires. Wait until we’re 2 or 3 generations into using AI for development. It’s not like people are rocks; people don’t tend to just keep sinking.
Skill of what? If anything his skill of how not to fuck up will improve.
Amanda Caswell
Amanda Caswell is an AI journalist, certified prompt engineer, and technology commentator whose work and expertise have been featured on Fox News and CBS News.
certified prompt engineer 🙄
lol “certified prompt engineer” is a thing?
certified prompt engineer 🤣
She gipity… If not she mine as well be. We are yammering over a techno fart.
Amanda Caswell is an AI journalisturd, certified prompturd engineer, and turdnology commentaturder whose slop and nonsense has been featured on Fox News and CBS News.
