Linux Foundation [LWN.net]

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 13, 2025 20:56 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Linux Foundation by mb
Parent article: Toward a policy for machine-learning tools in kernel development

As I wrote before, quality is not my primary concern about AI; these are my concerns.

Also... I suspect AI is over-hyped and overblown, and in the end won't make all that much difference to software development.

to post comments

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 13, 2025 21:06 UTC (Sat) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (21 responses)

I read your link before already and I still disagree.

I think machine learning tools make a huge difference to software development.

I'm sorry, but just saying that these tools are "fraudulent" or similar is just nonsense.
It is as fraudulent as me learning from a proprietary text book or proprietary job assignment.

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 13, 2025 21:26 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (20 responses)

The tools are not fraudulent.

The industry is fraudulent, seeing as it's based on theft of humans' works, it makes wildly unsubstantiated claims, and it is borrowing money at a completely reckless pace that is pretty sure to wreck our economy within the next few years.

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 13, 2025 22:39 UTC (Sat) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link] (12 responses)

FWIW, I've banned AI tools (including for review) in a non-hobby project:

<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.g...>

And I've had to enforce the policy already:

<https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220726#c7>

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 15, 2025 6:05 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (11 responses)

> including for review

That's stupid. AI reviewers routinely find real issues. What next, banning "-Wall" because real humans should find bugs, not some stinking compilers?

Banning warnings

Posted Dec 15, 2025 9:38 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (6 responses)

That's basically the attitude of the group of people who say that we don't need any new programming languages, we just need people to Get Good at writing bug-free C.

Banning warnings

Posted Dec 15, 2025 10:54 UTC (Mon) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link] (5 responses)

That's basically the attitude of the group of people that care about how much destruction of Nature is happening because of AI, among other issues.

It seems a different group of people, which presumably includes you, don't care about that, and instead make fun of us. Please rethink the group of people in which you want to be.

Banning warnings

Posted Dec 15, 2025 11:03 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

I am only talking about the group of people who assert that there is no need for any changes after ANSI C89, since the only remaining issue is that people don't write bug-free code. If you dare to try to improve C above the baseline set by C89 and C89 era compilers, you are also in the group that you've just insulted.

Banning warnings

Posted Dec 15, 2025 11:21 UTC (Mon) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link] (3 responses)

> I am only talking about the group of people who assert that there is no need for any changes after ANSI C89,

Maybe I misunderstood something, but we were talking about banning AI for reviews, which I've done. Per my understanding you put me in some group that allegedly do two things:

- Ban AI reviews.
- Assert that there is no need for any changes after ANSI C89.

> If you dare to try to improve C above the baseline set by C89 and C89 era compilers,

I do.

Banning warnings

Posted Dec 15, 2025 11:28 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

No - I was responding to Cyberax saying "why would anyone reject a tool that finds bugs?" by pointing out that there is an existing group that's been around for decades that says that people should upskill to the point where they don't write bugs, and therefore there's no need for language changes that make it easier to find bugs, let alone tools that make it easier.

You then went off on me about how I must hate nature for daring to notice that there are people who will reject tools that find bugs on the basis that you should just get good at coding.

Banning warnings

Posted Dec 15, 2025 11:36 UTC (Mon) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link] (1 responses)

> I was responding to Cyberax saying "why would anyone reject a tool that finds bugs?"

Cyberax was replying to me saying I've banned AI tools for review in projects I maintain.

I think it is compatible to want to improve the language and static analysis tools, and still reject AI tools.

Banning warnings

Posted Dec 15, 2025 11:38 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

You replied to me, and not to Cyberax, though.

If you were replying to Cyberax, why not reply to him, and not me? The only reasonable read of your previous comment is that anyone who says that "just get better at coding - the language and tools are perfect" hates nature.

Real issues

Posted Dec 16, 2025 16:17 UTC (Tue) by adobriyan (guest, #30858) [Link] (3 responses)

> AI reviewers routinely find real issues.

This is not an issue. What's the false positive rate?

We use PVS at work which is painting CI in red every once in a while.

One day it has found "missing unlock on error path". That's after like 5 false positives.

I thought, hey maybe it is not complete garbage. But some time later it did _not_ find
"unlock-unlock" bug (which should have been regular lock-unlock pair) — lockdep did.

> What next, banning "-Wall" because real humans should find bugs, not some stinking compilers?

-Wsign-compare also find real bugs but for some (explicable!) reason it is turned off in top-level Linux Makefile.

Real issues

Posted Dec 16, 2025 19:45 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> This is not an issue. What's the false positive rate?

In my experience, about 0-50% depending on the code.

> We use PVS at work which is painting CI in red every once in a while.

PVS? We're using Claude for reviews, and it is pretty reasonable. It definitely saved me many hours (if not days) of debugging by pointing out issues in the code.

E.g. something like: "const filteredPoints = filterPoints(points); const distance = distanceBetween(filteredPoints[0], points[filteredPoints.length-1]);". A stupid mistake, but one that can take hours to debug in math-heavy 3D code.

And since it's just _reviews_, it's not affecting the actual code quality.

Real issues

Posted Dec 16, 2025 20:42 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Given that they say text recognition needs to be 95% correct in order to be worth having, that doesn't look a good success rate ...

Cheers,
Wol

Real issues

Posted Dec 17, 2025 2:47 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

> lockdep did

Was this locking bug in the Linux kernel or in userspace? I got the impression that lockdep is dead for userspace usage.

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 13, 2025 22:44 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

Hmmm...

While I may not agree with the detail (for example, training AIs is just the same as training people, they hoover up large amounts of copyrighted work, often with little recompense to the authors - how many textbooks are passed down from one generation to the next of students ...) the basic thrust of Diane's concerns are - imho - fully justified.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is there is very little feedback to tell an AI whether its reasoning is correct. I'd be quite happy with an SLM, where I knew the training data was "clean". But where the default AI I see (in Google search) pretty much *always* can't even understand the question, (fortunately it almost always paraphrases and tells me the question it is actually answering,) you can see why I'm extremely cynical. Yes I'm aware other AIs are apparently better, but if your showcase AI is crap ...

In the real world, "Meat Intelligence" can be a matter of life and death - get it wrong and *you* are dead. If you can't accurately recognise the clues to eg a hungry lion ... In the AI world, as Diane points out, it's usually someone else who dies ...

And given the human tendency to ignore "inconvenient facts", there's a not insignificant chance that "someone else" is going to be most of us, in the next ten years or so ...

Cheers,
Wol

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 13, 2025 23:49 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

training AIs is just the same as training people

To be honest, I've struggled to respond to this, even though I think it's different. After some thinking, I have come up with a couple of differences:

Textbook authors write books with the intent to train people. They know that's how their works will be used. People who create art don't do so primarily to train other people, even though of course everyone learns from every life experience. But I think artists and others never expected industrial-scale ingestion of their works by massive for-profit companies in order to machine-produce other works (I would write "derived works" but apparently the courts disagree.)

Second is that the average person can, over a career of lets say 40 years, ingest maybe 500-1000 textbooks. Maybe 2000 if they're a prodigious reader. AI can ingest vastly higher quantities of information and what's more, remember it all. So this gives AIs a huge (and I'd say unfair) advantage over humans.

I know I'll be accused of Luddism---machines in a factory have a huge advantage over humans when producing things---but I think AI is qualitatively different. It's trying to compete with us in the very fields that make us human: Art, science, reasoning, etc. and I think it is very dangerous. It's not as if the AI oligarchs are going to support universal basic income for everyone they make redundant.

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 14, 2025 0:11 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Second is that the average person can, over a career of lets say 40 years, ingest maybe 500-1000 textbooks. Maybe 2000 if they're a prodigious reader. AI can ingest vastly higher quantities of information and what's more, remember it all. So this gives AIs a huge (and I'd say unfair) advantage over humans.

This, I think, is actually Artificial Idiocy's achilles heel. It has no clue whatsoever about the QUALITY of what it's ingesting. And it has no way of learning. Which is why LLMs tend to go off the rails pretty quickly. Yes I'm seriously concerned about the damage they are capable of doing (including accidentally destroying civilisation, which I seriously think is on the cards), but their ability to replace human intelligence? Nah, on that score, they're just a huge con. Their ability to dumb down the masses, on the other hand ...

I think the biggest threat from AI (and it's a real threat) is best summed up in the comment "To err is human, but to really screw things up you need a computer".

Cheers,
Wol

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 14, 2025 3:43 UTC (Sun) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

Humans learn. LLM AIs parrot.

The fictional Marvin had a brain the size of a planet. A real world LLM AI has a memory the size of a planet, but less intelligence than an ant.

Training LLM AIs is not akin to training humans. It is akin to allowing anyone wealthy enough to illegally copy your work with no legal consequences.

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 14, 2025 18:18 UTC (Sun) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

> Textbook authors write books with the intent to train people. They know that's how their works will be used. People who create art don't do so primarily to train other people, even though of course everyone learns from every life experience. But I think artists and others never expected industrial-scale ingestion of their works by massive for-profit companies in order to machine-produce other works (I would write "derived works" but apparently the courts disagree.)

This is true, but I'd argue it's irrelevant. People who make their works available on the Internet have, and as a policy matter should have, no inherent right to control who reads it. Someone might want to educate a certain class of people, but if others read it, and maybe even use the information in a way that the author not prefer... *good*. That's supposed to happen. Copyright should not be extended to anything like total control of use. Copyright is quite narrow in a sense; you only get to control certain things. And I think the world is much better that way.

And it's not like the LLMs are the actors here. Humans train LLMs. Yes, they found a way to use your contribution to public knowledge in a way you don't like. Tough, but I'm happy to think that few societies would stop useful progress because some people didn't want their posts read by *that thing*.

This, on the other hand, I don't think is really true. An LLM has a limited size of weights. It doesn't remember everything it read, just like a human doesn't remember everything they ever experienced. It's only the gist that remains, when important enough. Just like when humans learn to program by reading code and books...

Also, I think the "unfair" part is weird. These are tools, by humans, for humans. They don't *want* to compete with you. Sure, those who have trained maybe want. So if they really provide a way to outcompete programmers, what is the big issue?

Does a tractor also have an unfair advantage in agriculture? It did transform the society so that the need of agricultural labor fell from 90% of humans to 10% of humans. And, yes, a lot of grief ensued. The society has always been bad at distributing the benefits of net positive developments so that nobody is worse off.

I think the only difference this time is that it's educated people who are threatened for the first time in history. But if the argument is that LLMs doing programming, even if they work well (which I understand is contested), are harmful for the humankind? I absolutely love the fact that there are tractors.

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 14, 2025 18:01 UTC (Sun) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

> But where the default AI I see (in Google search)

I think this is your major problem. Stop thinking you are interacting with something akin to a modern LLM when you are typing in Google search.

Linux Foundation

Posted Dec 15, 2025 12:37 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Indeed. There is an absolutely huge bubble being built. It is going to pop within 2 years. Even NVidia will be hurt once it does (it will keep lumbering on though - whether it gets holed as badly as Sun was by the Dot-com bubble we shall see, maybe it survives like Cisco did).

The only big AI investors making real money are those who already have huge consumer-data-mining-advertising operations, who can afford to subsidise their AI work off their existing operations. Those operations are also working hard on building their own silicon to ultimately completely replace NVidia.