Linus Torvalds uses AI to debug an Intel GPU driver bug


in reply to Carlos Solís
I agree, the difference is when we stop using them as tools and rely on them to think, which as IT professionals we should know that they don't do. I'm not a developer, tbf, but I use LLMs regularly, practically daily, for all sorts of crazy projects, sometimes even using them as sounding boards, using my corrections of the model's errors to straighten out my own reasoning process. I use them for sifting and crunching, and misuse them for their flaws. Still as a tool, not a thinker.
in reply to Carlos Solís

Sorry but no. Contrary to what some activist types want you to believe it's not about actual ethical use when we are talking about software.

It's about LLMs being a tool that should be used where it's the proper and efficient tool for the job (see: here) and that should definitely not be used where it isn't the proper tool (vibe coded bullshit) just because some PR guy told you that this tool is your shiny new hammer and everything is a nail now.

When LLMs can produce proper reviewable code use them ffs... alas, they can't in any case complex enough to actually justify their use.

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 15:04)
in reply to Ooops
And I expected the comment and the discussion to be controversial. I am on the team that avoids AI as much as humanly possible, and I still write code the old-fashioned way (maybe with some LLM-free macros via Bash, but otherwise AI-less unless Google has inadvertently slipped something of the sort in my search results). This is because I'm well aware of the widespread dismissal of copyright law for training data, the obscene costs of training itself, the hallucinations and the sycophancy intrinsic in the way a neural network is trained. But unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag, and plenty of developers now use it routinely, and those same developers are effectively trying to toe the line to see how much are they allowed to use the cheat engine before being demanded to stop.

Linux reshared this.

in reply to Ooops
it’s not about actual ethical use when we are talking about software


This deeply misunderstands ethics. All actions are moral choices. Do I understand you correctly that you propose the polar opposite, that no actions are moral choices, with regards to software? I don't expect you'd say it's ethically fine to write software to orchestrate a genocide.

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 18:45)
in reply to staircase
Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 20:44)
in reply to Carlos Solís

Not really. It's still not ethical to exploit the labor of others, even when our favorite computer nerd does it.

Ultimately the working people who created the data that was used to train the AI have not given consent and were not compensated for their work. Instead, Linus is paying money (probably the Linux Foundations' money?) to a large corporation that is exploiting the unpaid work, skills and culture of human beings.

In ethics the ends don't often justify the means.

Not to mention it's unclear what the LLM even did to help debug this issue, because he seems to suggest it lead him him astray multiple times claiming that it was impossible to fix.

in reply to cm0002
I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.


So the AI was wrong multiple times but it is being given credit because the human powered through the process.

If a human had done it I assume they would be called lazy for not trying hard enough. Meh.

in reply to cm0002
And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

in reply to cm0002

I believe it takes a deep knowledge of programming and LLMs in general, to know when they could be useful and how to use them in those cases.
You first need to know they are not a magic genie, they are a machine learning thing, trained on tokens, that will output the more likely next token. And understand how the training process, the weights and the whole thing works inside to know how its going to react under certain inputs.

Then you must deeply know the problem you are dealing with. You need to know what's good, what's bad, when a solution actually works and when it does not.

If those factors are meet I don't see much issue in using them for programming.