Is that not the LLM guy? [LWN.net]

Is that not the LLM guy?

Posted May 11, 2026 1:09 UTC (Mon) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408)
In reply to: Is that not the LLM guy? by mirabilos
Parent article: killswitch for short-term emergency vulnerability mitigation

I hate vibe coded slop as much as the next guy, but this kind of patch seems simple enough that an LLM would do well at it and it wouldn't be a nightmare to review or maintain. I would never trust a filesystem driver or any complex parser in the kernel written by an LLM but this is the sort of things even I was able to do when I was completely new to kernel development (although in my case it was just support of dynamically disabling individual syscalls for hardening - this was before mode 2 seccomp), so I'm sure an LLM could do something equally simple too, if this patch was written with LLM assistance.

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Is that not the LLM guy?

Posted May 11, 2026 12:58 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (5 responses)

cypherpunks2 wrote:

“I hate the Torment Nexus as much as the next guy, but this kind of activity seems simple enough that a Torment Nexus would be suitable, and it would not be a nightmare for the person operating the Torment Nexus. I would never trust a Torment Nexus to be used on my important filesystems, but to operate a Torment Nexus is the sort of thing even I was able to do…”

Respect?

Posted May 11, 2026 16:31 UTC (Mon) by karath (subscriber, #19025) [Link] (3 responses)

When I read this kind of comment, I feel that the author is accusing me of being a torturer.

LLMs should not get a free pass just because they are new and shiny.
* Some of the LLM creators appear to have stolen copyrighted materials (by downloading torrents of copyrighted materials that were not freely available). I would love to see one or more of those culprits bankrupted after being found guilty.
* Many of the LLM creators or their agents have ignored robots.txt and brought the servers of freely available copyrighted materials to their knees (and non copyrighted material too). It seems that none of the culprits will face any noticeable consequences.
* Some LLM creators have fed so many duplicated copies of copyrighted materials into their training that, with careful prompting, the LLM can regurgitate derivative material. However some of that prompting likely would be considered entrapment if done by police authorities to a human.
* Many people believe that LLMs deprive us all of reasonably priced water and/or electricity and that they create massive pollution. Honestly, I’m sceptical of many of these claims. I believe that there is massive overbuilding of datacentres, however it’s not clear that these datacenters are all built for AI. Much of the overbuilding seems to be speculative by 3rd parties that hope to get AI or cloud customers.
* Many people worry that AI will take their job, and I think that some will. However the consensus in the thoughtful press seems to be that the current wave of redundancies is driven by the consequences of overhiring during the COVID period. Of course, CEOs would prefer to have it known that it was AI rather than their mismanagement,

On the other hand, the only case ruling on the copyright status of LLM output that I know about seems to have carefully crafted to state that the specific LLM was not capable being a copyright holder, while allowing that a future tool might be.

Governments and courts in Europe, China, and the USA, largely seem to support the concept that the output of an LLM should be held to the same burden of proof for copyright infringement as a human person. That is: can the output be shown to infringe the expression of a specific work rather than the concepts and ideas.

In summary, I’d request that the virulently anti-LLM commenters treat others with respect and specifically not tag me as a monster because I start from a different place than you.

LLMs don’t respect anything either

Posted May 14, 2026 0:18 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (2 responses)

Since you ride so much on the copyright part of this:

“whenever the legal status of LLM training data is brought up I can't help but think of Aaron Swartz and how he was treated like he did the heist of the decade for trying to release some academic papers to the public”
-- https://fedi.catto.garden/objects/4f4cb118-6231-485c-9d2d...

“I'm genuinely astonished how many defenses of LLM contributions are a flat "you can't enforce this and you can't actually stop us". Just completely steamrolling past consent and comfort and forcing themselves on people who don't want them. Feels like some serious masks-off kind of shit.”
-- https://social.treehouse.systems/@TheEntity/1164994313517...

***It’s stolen, Jim.***

That is, if the racism, land grabs, polluted water, higher power bills, creating an addicted population that can't think, pollution from building new power plants and data centres, water grabs (“Project Excalibur” et al.), exploitation of humans in the global south, etc. don’t already get to you.

LLMs don’t respect anything either

Posted May 14, 2026 9:23 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

A lot of people still hold that what happened to Aaron Swart was wrong. Even later Supreme Court rulings (van Buren vs US (2021)) agree that misusing legitimate access to resources should not be considered a federal crime.

But of course, Congress had their chance to deal with the problem and they didn't.

The world has changed, it isn't 2011 anymore.

LLMs don’t respect anything either

Posted May 15, 2026 17:54 UTC (Fri) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

If you presuppose that LLMs are evil, then of course you won't be able to understand why someone might reference "responsible use of LLMs" when after all there's no such thing as responsible use of evil. But they are not fundamentally evil, no more than the transistor is at least.

There is a lot wrong with the use of LLMs and the companies behind many popular LLMs that is valid to criticize but it seems like you're against the technology itself. There's no need to bring things like racism or exploitation (which one could say is associated with <i>any</i> computer technology) when there are valid criticisms of its use.

Neural networks (of which LLMs are a subset) have a great amount of good use. They can simulate protein confirmations with high accuracy and can be used for improving medication and curing disease. They can be used to detect cancer by analyzing medical images. They can scan PRs to find vulnerabilities before they get merged that would otherwise be exploited by genuinely evil state actors (NSA, GRU etc). They can assist people speaking underrepresented languages to communicate better with other cultures.

But they can also be used to trick people into forming parasocial relationships. They can be used to spread customized misinformation. They can be used to target people for military strikes or for surveillance. They can be used to flood art sites with regurgitated low-effort slop. And of course in their insatiable need for information, they can DDoS websites with their spiders as they try to find new training material. But "assist in generating a patch and review it" is not evil. It's responsible, depending on the quality (and ease of maintainability) of the patch itself.

Is that not the LLM guy?

Posted May 15, 2026 19:07 UTC (Fri) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

> but to operate a Torment Nexus is the sort of thing even I was able to do…

To be clear, I didn't mean that I used an LLM. I meant that it was something that I, at the time new to kernel development, could do on my own without "vibe coding". Thus if a newbie could do it without an LLM, surely an expert with an LLM could do it just fine without running into the usual slop problems that happen when you ask one "make a patch that does $ill_defined_vaguely_worded_thing kthx".

The nice thing about neural networks is that, once the hardware is built, the only continuous resource they require is power, and power can be supplied by renewable energy. After the AI bubble bursts, I suspect many of the surviving companies that were previously disregarding ethics in favor of aggressive competition will start switching to renewable energy in order to get contracts from companies that want "green" resources.