Technology

This whole situation reminds me of people's distrust for Big Pharma. Forgetting the actual problem and just assuming everything it produces is evil and will kill you. The problem with big pharma isn't that modern medicine doesn't work, it's that pharmaceutical companies charge so much for it that poor people are condemned to die preventable deaths in the name of profit.

The problem with AI isn't that it can't produce good code, it's that it's capable of producing a shitload of bad code at volumes no human can possibly review. It doesn't surprise me at all that the guy who made Linux can wrangle an AI to produce exceptionally good outcomes. The problem is that there's a million Joe Normals who are gonna try to replicate it with no idea how to audit the output.

and in the process he introduced a race condition, a performance regression costing up to 9% when making reads of files around 1 MiB and dumped the responsibility of fixing his mess on co-maintainers and went on vacation.

What gets me is that this is roughly the best-case scenario for "capable hands" — Linus knows this codebase better than anyone alive — and a race condition plus a 9% read regression still slipped through on the first attempt. Reviews and testing caught it, which is the system working, but it moves the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing it. And review doesn't scale the way generation does; skimming a patch is quick, but actually proving an LLM-assisted one is correct takes real effort. I say that as someone who uses AI tooling daily — reading code you didn't write is genuinely more tiring than writing it, and that tax compounds the more you lean on generation. The maintainer-burnout angle might end up being the real story here, more than the AI one.

It’s funny how the “AI-assisted” in the headline turns into an “LLM-assisted” in the article.

The graphic with the magic “AI” hand is even funnier.

Clown “AI” journalism.

Assuming these updates are fully tested before they're deployed, by a human, it shouldn't be that impactful negatively that AI is being used. The problem comes when updates are moved into production without human oversight.

But it gives me the heebie jeebies, since AI is known to make and fuck shit up, and I'm stuck using MS Teams every day in my job so I see all the weird shit that vibe coding produces. I don't relish the thought of weird, stupid shit happening to my Linux installation.

The directive isn't pro AI. It is pro results. It emphasized responsibility.

Fucking tragic...

I started using Linux about 30 years ago. I wasn't a science major, but reading about the GPL and the GNU movement, it seemed to fit really well with my values. I was willing to put up with a lot (the first distro I used didn't come with a working XFree), but it was worth it, to me. I never really sat well having Linus at the head. He just seemed like a bit of a prat most of the time, but whatever. Then I got nnoyed enough that I spent a year or two going through alternatives. I had used BeOS before I found Linux, but at the time BeOS had gone away and Haiku didn't exist. Plan9 had a lot of cool things, but wasn't a daily driver. Spent time mostly with FreeBSD, but after being a GPL fan, the BSD licensing just kind of annoyed me. Lately I've been finding myself feeling the same way I felt about the BSD world. It would be nice to get away from Linux and Linus, but at this point I'm much older, less willing to jump through hoops to get shit working. I'm hoping some kernel alternative comes along that ticks the boxes for me. Maybe Hurd will get there (ha!). I sure wish something would come along. Although, like worrying about the climate, or US politics, the momentum towards comprehensive social shittery just feel completely inevitable and I should try not to worry about it. I guess.

Well no editorilorizing in that title. no sir. /s is this the change that also have produced articles that stress kinda the opposite.