The article is good, but the headline seems clickbaity:
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Debian is discussing requirements about hosting software with LLM generated code in their repos, and disclosure of that.
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“Ubuntu embraces AI” is talking about putting ML inference engines in their repos… which, ironically, are largely human written.
These are two completely seperate issues. And TBH its not clear how Debian is approaching inference engines or how Ubuntu is approaching disclosure.
As always, the actual story is in the comments. Thank you for the summary.
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Ubuntu: The Windows of Linux.
5-10 years from now they will pull their Windows 11-equivalent crash and burn move
With RAM prices what they are the push for snaps may already be this… On memory constrained systems snaps already have a huge performance penalty.
Canonical the Microsoft linux
No, that would be Azure Linux
I think technically that might have been Lindows.
I thought Ubuntu was the macOS of Linux and the Windows of Linux is Omarchy
Good. There will be choice.
I like this attitude. I think if the LLMs weren’t forced down everyone throats, there would be a lot less hostility towards them
It’s just so suspiciously and aggressively being shoved down our throats.
Yes, it’s not the technology I hate, it’s the people pushing it, demanding it, saying it will replace humans. Those people can fuck right off. Technology exists to serve humans, not the other way around. We are being sold a lie. The technology has some interesting aspects, but the pushers are pushing bullshit.
Alright. Hang the fuck on.
Class war.
Technology is incapable of doing anything. It literally can do nothing. It can be used as a tool for sure.
It’s currently being used to fuck you. It’s fucking me. It’s fucking us.
BUT ONLY AT THE DIRECTION OF BILLIONAIRES
Class War
You can say that again.
Class warfare.
What is good for?
Tools are labour made solid. They’re built by workers, and used by other workers in order to be more productive. Unlike a worker, a tool can be owned, which is why the owner class will always prefer more of the “skill” in production come from tools and processes, even at the cost of some craft or quality. Because they get more control.
Anyway LLMs are like a knowledge tool in this case. A truly devastating weapon in the class war, assuming workers agree to adopt it and help improve it.
assuming workers agree to adopt it and help improve it.
Or forced by their employer by threat of homelessness
I meant collectively, not individually.
Obviously as a solitary worker you’re probably going to have a hard time standing up to your employer.
Technology has always replaced humans though. That’s ultimately the point. The problem becomes when there aren’t alternatives for humans to do but we still live in a capitalistic and consumeristic society.
I think everyone want’s their lives to be easier, but they also want to be able to eat, survive and thrive.
They want to make everybody dependent upon AI for information that will then be used to misinform people in order to control them.
I’ve been saying this for years. Look at taxi’s. In my city in 2005 there were 8 major taxi companies. Each with hundreds of drivers on the road at any given time. Now we have 2 of those 8 remaining, and they’re essentially shell companies with 2-3 drivers on the road. The last 4 times I’ve tried ordering a cab the traditional way, I’ve been told there’s no drivers available. Now it’s all Uber. And Lyft. You can’t call them. You need a cell phone, and you need internet access.
All the major corporations are in agreement that we all need cell phones, and we all need to be tracked 24/7. And now with AI, they’re getting their data straight from the source. There are men out there who talk to an AI girlfriend. Not sexy stuff. I mean imagine sitting at the dinner table, and discussing your day…with your AI girlfriend. Meanwhile, ALL that data is going straight to the companies that host the AI.
Another side effect is that AI will make people dumber. In case you haven’t noticed since the 1970s, there has been a GOP push to make the citizens dumber and dumber. Easier to control. Easier to fool. Easier to get away with things.
So now you got ram being sold for computers that haven’t been built yet, to be put in data centers that haven’t been built yet, to run an AI system that isn’t functional yet, in order to steal the jobs of employees that can’t be replaced yet, all in an effort to chase profits that were never possible in the first place since everyone hates AI.
You wanna see some shit go down? Tell the companies we’ll use their AI if they get the unredacted epstein files released. See how fast they bribe the right people then.
Now tell the politicians we’ll stop caring about the epstein files if they forcibly ban all data centers in the country. See how fast they act on that.
Now we sit back, wait, and watch the fireworks. Oh, and by the way, we’re going back on our word either way. Whomever wins, fuck em.
I find it all very “people writing text/code by hand on a computer they own isn’t generating subscription revenue and can’t be data mined by advertisers and governments as it’s passing through a data center unencrypted”-type suspicious…
It insists upon itself.
If big tech corners the market, we have no choice but to come to them for compute. You can stifle speech, control markets, awareness of new developments before they’re public.
It’s a power grab.
For me, it’s first and foremost how they were/are trained and who gets all the profits/benefits.
Yup, of free and open self-hostable ones I am a lot more accepting, but I need big corpos to all crash and burn.
Yeah this goes for copyright protections too. I could give a fuck about some sloperater generating Tony Stark giving Mickey Mouse a handjob, but corpos saving even $0.01 from a model tuned by scraping deviantart, other amateur sources, I can’t abide.
Regardless, they have no control over upstream packages. Are they going to move away from the linux kernel 100%?
I’d assume that this deals with stuff that the Debian project maintains itself, like the package files. Like, it doesn’t mean that they won’t package code that has been written using AI.
They’re definitely going to be building it from source and delivering those packages though.
Im also certain they’re not going it catch it all in their own packages.
Canonical patronizingly forcing a tool/workflow onto users against their explicit and unequivocal rejection of it?
I hate ai as much as the next person, but I’d have a different mandate. I would require all code to be fully reviewed and understood by a human. Let’s call it quality control.
Agreed. It’s not sensible or practical to ban AI, and Linus is right. Why is Linus right? Take a look at the number of Linux CVEs being patched over time. In 2022-23, that was about 300 per year. Last year it was 5530. This is almost entirely as a result of AI scanning tools, including Copy Fail priv escalation that was there for 8 years. The security apocalypse is just about arrived, and the most recent round of cyber models coming out do this way better than before. The Hugging Face incident story was truly unbelievable if you read / watch the details, a historic event. Everything is about to get hacked. So it’ll be all about maintainers being reactive to this new reality and burden for some time to come
There is a difference between using AI scanning tools and generating code for production
Yes and no. The ability to “understand” code that makes AI capable of finding security bugs, is correlated with AI’s ability to write code. AI is just really good at code related tasks, and categorically banning all AI usage is shooting yourself in the foot.
And also have high readability standards, ideally higher than before LLMs.
Read the article, that is one of the two options they are voting on.
How would you enforce that?
How do you enforce code is not AI generated? I don’t see how one is more easily enforceable than the other.
Well it depends who you are. An employer could enforce it.
But it was serious question. If you’re going to have a rule then there should be a way to enforce it, otherwise it means nothing.
It’s a fair question. I think out of the two proposed rules: enforce no AI generated code, and enforce human reviews, enforcing human reviews is actually more feasible, and in fact most companies already do that. Pull requests need human reviewers to approve them.
It’s harder to enforce no AI generated code. A developer can always, at the very least, Google a problem they are having on their phone and retype the code from the AI answer into their work computer.
I mean how do you enforce someone doesn’t copy code from proprietary repos? You just try your best, and only come down on the cases where it’s obvious.
LLM users are lazy so they inevitably just copy+paste something asinine without reading it.
This is the way. Cat is out of the bag now so need to figure out responsible usage.
Fortunately we have a method for that for a long time now: PRs. If you approve it, you are responsible for that approval.
I remember when they wanted to unify mobile phones and desktop computers, with a singular online storage account and DE that changed when you plugged your phone into a monitor. That shit was crazy.
I still want that
The best vision for that was unironically Microsoft’s, but by that time they had started the enshittification with Windows 10
My parents are coming over today because their ZorinOS installation suddenly started acting up after an Ubuntu Kernel update. Thanks Ubuntu.
Does that mean Zorin’s a goner?
Arch users are forced to write their own AI?
AI powered by the Arch Wiki and AUR
AI - Archist Intelligence
(dude this is so cringe)
Ubuntu has a long and storied history of making bad decisions. Why should AI be any different?
There’s nothing about Ubuntu’s proposed use of AI that seems bad at all. Using it to improve accessibility is a good thing, especially when it’s open source, local-only, and sandboxed. I can’t see how having high quality speech-to-text would be a bad decision. Much of that stuff is probably not even considered “AI” by most people.
Damn. I think it’s time for me to finally try Mint. Currently using 98% Ubuntu and 2% Windows because unfortunately there’s always some sort of Windows-only software I need for one reason or another. Yes I’ve tried Wine, I haven’t gotten it to work.
your saying snap-packages arent enough of a cluster-fuck to turn you off of Ubuntu?
Do yourself a favor, do Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). It’s got all the slickness of Mint, but the core is based on Debian instead of Ubuntu.
Would installing KDE plasma on LMDE be beginner-friendly.?
For the most part, that’s literally no different than just running Debian with KDE. Not sure about beginner friendly, but incredibly awesome.
What Windows software do you find that isn’t working on Linux?
I can’t speak on behalf of him, but all my old CD-ROM games from the late 90’s and early 2000s don’t work on Linux, even with Wine. I’d love to get them working one day, so I’m watching this thread
Perhaps you could try bottles? I can’t speak on it’s usefulness or not, but something else to try. https://usebottles.com/
Thanks I’ll give it a go!
Primarily Solidworks, Fusion360, Altium, and Traktor Pro. Planning to start learning about video editing soon. Also games, though I’m planning to try Bazzite soon.
For me it’s Adobe. Stupid government and other forms I need for work. No available third party software will work on some of them, and I’ve tried them all. And for some dumb reason even having an Acrobat subscription won’t let me fill them out on their (extremely buggy, by the way) web app.
Was never able to get it working with wine.
That, and the compatibility between Libreoffice (or other Linux office software) and MS Word is still terrible. I’m quite sure that’s mostly due to shenanigans by MS. So if you have to swap documents back and forth between people (e.g. with track changes) it just doesn’t work as well. And, like Adobe, the web app version of Word seems to be kneecapped in a few key places.
Not him, but I almost never boot windows, but the other day I had to change a part of a a stupid powerpoint presentation that only could be done using Powerpoint desktop app. Wine has not done so well with it, Libreoffice wouldn’t do the thing right, and browser based office can’t touch ‘master slide’ content.
Mint is based off of Ubuntu
There is a Debian based version called LMDE.
People love it for some reason but I cannot recommend. Newer laptops are trapped between no support under X and a half baked version under Wayland. And I didn’t find the community supportive enough.
Depending on the software, Winboat might be what you need.
What’s the software? Maybe a simple VM would do the job?
Solidworks, Fusion360, Altium, and a few others
Fusion360 actively attempts to block wine usage so you have to use a VM (or a single application VM like Winboat) for it to play ball. I haven’t had experience with any of the others though.
How does winboat work?
Makes a container windows install.
Do you have to see if the application you want to host is supported, or is it pretty compatible?
There are some windows softwares i want to run, but they don’t work in wine.
Its a full VM so the main downside is that GPU acceleration is 0 but you have full CPU speeds.
Also expect the VM to eat the typical 60gb + the applications of storage
Could we find Open Source alternatives? I’ve gotten good use of blender for these but I don’t know your use cases
Blender is world class, but the CAD softwares are leagues behind, unfortunately.
Whilst FreeCAD certainly doesn’t have feature parity with things like Creo, I firmly believe it is good enough for most people. I switched to only using that for all my contract work and personal projects and it’s generally been fine
That’s awesome! Do you have any videos you’d recommend for someone getting into it?
I wish there were open source alternatives to Autocad, but freecad is doing its own thing and as someone who uses Autocad as part of her career it’s so much easier to keep a partition for when I need to throw something together than to learn how to make freecad work
Very different use case. I make parts to 3D print and CNC mill. Lots of brackets and other mechanical parts.
Solid Edge is what had me keeping a Win10 instance for a while, but finally gave up on it after the OS kept corrupting itself. Started learning Onshape instead, which is web based and works under Linux. It’s a passable replacement for doing basic 3d sketches.
Sony DSLR apps are all non Linux. Some folks like me are forced to use Windows or Mac.
May I recommend something fedora based? No dealing with Ubuntu or arch problems
I don’t see how a hat can fix that problem
What are they going to do about upstreams that use it? Like the Linux kernel for example.
Nothing, that’s out of scope.
seems like every consumer-friendly version of anything is shoehorning ai into it. stupid
Is ai code any worse than stackoverflow?
Except with stack overflow you can use your experience and pick the best code and onboard the comments discussing various aspects of the different answers. The LLMs don’t do that.
They can just spit out whatever the fuck they want and there’s no guidance or votes or comments. Just an averaging of everything.
I agree, human vetting from experience is essential. But with agenetic, tool calling LLMs, you can (and should IMO) require multiple solutions be explored and presented with the tradeoffs for each option clearly outlined, and wait for you guidance to proceed with the advisee approach.
LLM can definitely be used to churn out garbage code based on the averaging of everything, but can also be a super useful tool, if used effectively, to quickly see the most common ways a problem is solved, and then design and iterate a solution that works for your project.
Similar to how I used to use SO, but with reasoned reviews of all the posted solutions and the ability to prototype what might work best for what I need.
Based
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