"In a burning world we need to hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard. “Useful” is far, far from being good enough."
@tante I assume the discussion spun up around whether the Linux kernel should accept AI generated contributions. How would one practically avoid that? In your analogy of child labor the Kernel community would have to put out a statement that code written by means of child labor is not accepted in the Kernel. Reasonable. And the industries way of "ensuring" that is my having the contributor sign a piece of paper saying they don't use child labor. Would that be the same for AI generated code if the decision would be to not accept AI generated code? The code itself wouldn't be distinguishable from human written code. You'd just have to trust the person that they stand by their signature to not use AI tools for code generation.
@tante I make no claim to know how the man thinks, but I suspect no small part of this is a bit of FOSS realpolitik.
Let's say Linus were to stand firm against use of AI use in the kernel. Commendable.
But then the rate of commits remains stagnant. meanwhile some big institutional downstream kernel (say a consortium of Ubuntu and other for-profit distros) user goes and forks the kernel. Now there's the Linux Foundation kernel (kernel0) and several "AI friendly" kernels (kernelPrime) that get features added in more rapidly, customizable branches (kernel Lite, kernel Plus etc.) all enabled by rapid AI development. Complete with Ai induced sec vulns and just... bloat and shit.
I'm not entirely sure that landscape is better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in no way excusing it. But I can sortof understand it. The "Adapt or die" mentality.
(Sorry, just a quick note, I'd love to write a longer piece on "useful" because it's such a harmful narrative)
@tante "useful" is only a necessary requirement, because if it was useless of course nobody would use it.
The question is what the sufficient requirement is. That should to my mind always include "do no harm".
@tante they key point, "fork it", was not addressed.
