- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- programming@lemmy.ml
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- programming@lemmy.ml
- linux@lemmy.ml
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Not a single acknowledgement of the environmental or cognitive costs of LLM use. Disgusting.
You can run a local LLM capable of assisting in software development for less energy than running a AAA video game. I’m not denying the environmental impact of the current AI landscape, but I kind of disagree that it’s intrinsic to LLMs as a whole, I think it’s more a symptom of capitalism and its disregard for sustainability causing everything it touches to have a high environmental cost.
Also, nearly all modern computing has high environmental costs, certainly all cloud computing. I think instead of focusing on AI only, it would be more helpful to engage in a broader discussion on how computing can be made more energy efficient as a whole, and do proper cost benefit analysis of all things we use computers for, including but not limited to LLMs. We may well still conclude from that process that we need to stop using LLMs, in which case we should.
If you’re against LLM use on environmental grounds (which I’m not disagreeing with), I submit to you that we should take the idea even further and things like gaming, video streaming, high frequency trading, social media, and any other nonessential computing should be on the same chopping block for the same reason. Applications of computing that we also use at scale with high environmental impacts, but that have been normalised and practically seen as a right by many of the same people against any amount of AI use (not saying that’s you, speaking generally). Why should AI be the only thing we raise concerns about if we’re to raise concerns? Doing environmental protection piecemeal by independently targeting single things and not the entire system has been shown time and time again to not work at best and make it worse at worst.
Currently, LLMs impact on electricity usage and fresh water usage across the world is HUGE.
The painful part to me is the choice on where to put the stress. Which areas to highlight and talk about.
Yes some weak LLMs can use comparatively little electricity. Yes some other industries use electricity, generate CO2 and consume fresh water, too. But the existence of other problems, to me, does not mean that eco impact of LLMs should be swept under the rug.
So, if one was to check your post history, they would find complaints about the energy usage of video games? The water usage of golf courses?
Or would we find neither, and learn instead that anti-AI is the only bandwagon you’ve hopped on because it is the most popular?
I’ll skip discussions about my persona. But most certainly golf courses or video games have orders of magnitude lower impact on electricity and watee than worldwide LLMs (mostly in datacenters).
You would be mistaken.
Data Centers use about 0.06% of the USAs total Water per year.
Watering golf courses in total uses about 0.5 percent.
My personal hardware that hosts my AI uses zero water. It uses more electricity when running a game.
There are more video gamers than there are users of AI.
Your persona is indeed just jumping on the popular bandwagon.
While it may seem counterintuitive, cloud LLMs use less electricity than local LLMs. When serving a single user, an inference engine spends very little time and power doing calculations, and most of it reading in the model (weights) from memory
Cloud LLMs serve multiple users and therefore batch requests, so a model that has been copied once from memory can be used to generate hundreds of tokens
You’ll hear no arguments from me. Let’s cut energy usage for a lot of things. Let’s read books more. Let’s spend more time outside. Let’s eat less red meat.
That isn’t some gotcha you think it is. A lot of people finding the alarm over AI have been working to reduce their carbon footprint
Everything in your first paragraph is contrary to your first sentence. Every single one of those is another argument, but using a turn of phrase and baiting was apparently more important than even making the first, best, and most relavent argument you brought-out.
The real clincher is that you then pretend the person you are replying to didn’t already make those arguments, well, and that you are disagreeing with them.
“This isn’t [the] gotcha you think it is”, really?
Bro whatever you’re smoking please share.
Fresh Air
Heard of it?
And his did you get that local LLM?
The only thing local llms which regular PCs can run are capable of is generating basic boilerplate code. Which you only need to do if you create a new project every day and need to automate it. They are useless for working on established codebase.
Torvalds has slowly been slipping I feel. Just more cracks.
It seems like maintainers doing a thankless job in FOSS are some of the most affected by the AI mania
he has always been like this. god, he’s one of the most consistent public figures i can think of. nothing has changed except that now you can see.
That’s well outside the scope of the Linux kernel policies.
The immediate external consequences of what tools are used for development?
That will change over time, as the expense of utilizing them wastefully or in general has already. This isn’t a news article or snap-shot of the state of things today - its a mandate for due diligence going-forward, and an elaboration on how its been addressed so-far.
Linus is not a very progressive guy. Alas, it is what it is. Hence the political bans in the LKML, who has votes in The Linux Foundation, where such foundation is based, the embracing of (Rust based) permissive licensing of drivers, and now this AI bullshit. Linux is not GNU.
I’m pretty sure the money talked, and in the next few years we’re going to see walls being put around the kernel. We should rethink whether the ‘benevolent’ part of ‘benevolent dictator’ still applys.
IIRC Linus is self-declared as “woke”. The exact quote is:
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race.
Ah, the liberal progressiveness. Not the seizing the means of production for the proletariat kind. My bad, I wasn’t being fully open in my past comment because I know the world ‘socialism’ triggers many in the technology bubble.
Linus is Liberal as a pejorative.
He’s a political/economic pragmatist. If you have record of him promoting capitalism or bashing socialism, please share, but as it is, Norway is one of the dozen most-socialist-leaning coutries on earth.
Maybe don’t apply USian non-sense everywhere. Liberal vs Mamdani as a prejorative is relavent. Liberal vs Torvalds as a prejoritive makes about as much sense as saying the same about Xi Jiping, Kim Jong Un, Miguel Díaz-Canel, or Lenin.
It’s absurd, obtuse, and besides the point, every bit so as the DNC using identity politics only to silence, promote, or ignore real voices for change.
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.
It’s implied to be included in ‘other questions’, and that whether AI is useful to development efforts is the only question being considered for whether to permit its use.
There are other questions
Not sure if that’s really _acknowledging_ the problem.
If he’s taking a clear position that the controversies over whether AI is a net negative for society may have merit but still are not going to be considered because that sort of thing is not the priority of the project, it seems reasonable to not lay them all out or get into why AI may or may not be overall bad. You can say that choice is wrong, but it isn’t an evasive statement.
I mentioned this in another thread, but if Linus starts acknowledging the ethical questions of where good code is coming from, things unravel fast. Microsoft is a major contributor. So are plenty of defense, oil, industrial prison complex, etc. Someone overtly evil is contributing code.
Further just the pure tech industry isn’t free from sin, Intel and AMD contribute lots to the Kernel and they certainly utilize slave or child labor at some point in chip production.
There are no good people within any part of the tech industry and yet AI is the line? Is it because that’s the worst evil in our industry or is it because this one is the most loud and inconvenient to us?
I don’t think its the LLM usage that is doing this I think using it is exposing what was already there since some people who use it are genuinely improved by using them, and not just the dummies, there are people who know their stuff, using them to do more stuff, and not showing obvious cognitive impairments.
I think its just that many people got to where they can use ai in these ways by single mindedly focusing on one thing which meant being bad at the meta skills involved in keeping brains healthy across different contexts.
TL;DR
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
I don’t generally take issue LLMs used as a tool, but I do have a huge problem with lazy slop slingers. I also don’t like that the frontier models are closed source and rent-seeking, especially when they were trained on copyleft code and by all rights should themselves be open source if they were respecting the licenses. I’d think Linus would have something to say about that.
IMO, a decent philosophy is that LLMs can be useful tools, but if anyone can tell you used a LLM, you failed. People should have a healthy fear of being ridiculed for outsourcing their critical thinking. Anyone using a ton of tokens shouldn’t be commended; instead, the quality of their work should be called into question because they’re likely using LLMs as a crutch instead of a tool. Commits by Claude probably mean the person didn’t review the diff to clean up the slop, and also probably didn’t understand the changes well enough to write a clear commit message themselves. I wouldn’t want to see any commits crediting Claude in the Linux kernel.
Edit:
I’d also think that if Linus likes LLMs and wants to see quality tech democratized, he’d be advocating for FOSS LLMs under the Linux foundation where all code and training data are open source. What we have now with Anthropic and “OpenAI” is the equivalent of cloud-hosted Windows, and open weight models like Qwen are more like Windows XP in that they can be run locally, but they’re still proprietary and can’t be inspected, modified, or built upon. We need the Linux of LLMs.
TL;DR: Merged code has to meet existing quality standards. What tools were used to create it is irrelevant.
For all his great work on Linux (and git and others) Torvalds was never into activism so much. He declined GPLv3 (yes it would be impossible to get all contributors to sign for it). He’s always been an “open source pragmatist”, which is fine I guess. And I really respect his work. But at these important political points, we need someone like Stallman who has consistently proven to be on the right side of the debate
This. Google would not be fucking us with Play Integrity and other DRM craps if Linus made the kernel GPLv3 licensed. It would have been a dreamland to have hackable phones, TVs and a whole lot of IoT devices where the users would be controlling them instead of other way around.
Time to fork Linux
best of luck with that
Why would anyone want a chatbot to shit code? If you need to reuse (your own or others’) code, use functions. Functions are the right approach, or maybe try subroutines, procedures or methods. Flooding code bases with this verbose incoherent mess creates a lot of technical debt. Who will clean up after Linus and at what cost? Should not weeding out complexity and fixing bugs be a priority over creating more chaos?
If your chatbot is shitting code, don’t contribute to anything important. LLM is a navigation, you’re the one behind the wheel, and ultimately responsible for where you end up.
I seen alot of people say “AI is just a tool” ngl There is nothing wrong with that it’s just a little overused
with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Ok regardless of your opinion on AI this is just stupid. No one is forking and maintaining the entire linux kernal.
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I locally host gemma 4 e2b on a very modest spec laptop to help summarize large texts, as a rudimentary translation tool, and just as a toy. It makes sense. I see small coding models on hugging face all the time, I think we’ve hit a point where it’s just too efficient not to atleast entertain a little bit of slop in your workflow.
Fuck you, Linus Torvalds.
Truthfully I feel like this too sometimes. I get he made it and I understand that but what happened to the “community” and “open” part of it why does this dude get to call all the shots on everything related to Linux.
Reminds me of Satya Nadella with Windows. (Even though he didn’t invent it but calls the shots just the same way.)
The straw manning in this thread is amazing.
Linus allowing AI? This means the linux kernal will be flooded with unverified slop!
