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Comment by dorianniemiec | Hacker News Reader

So what would many anti-AI people say, now that critical infrastructure (Linux, OpenSSL, systemd, MariaDB, and so on) is AI-assisted?

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You gotta understand that not all people fall neatly into the black/white sockets of culture wars, your life will be better after that.

Many of us don't criticize the use of AI, but the MISUSE/ABUSE of it. It's one perfectly valid use case to let it generate code, and do a manual code review to make sure all of it is solid. It's the lowest of the low as a developer to ask it for a complex program, do a superficial review, and ship it claiming you did it.

Judging by comments on HN over the past month, a lot of people do fall into black/white thinking about AI. I frequently see a kneejerk rejection of the idea that AI could be useful in any context ever. I also see the opposite extreme, refusing to acknowledge any downsides or limitations of AI. It's a case of vocal minorities drowning out the silent majority. I interpreted the parent as referring specifically to the highly vocal, highly online anti-AI crowd, and not just anybody who has targeted criticisms of AI.

Those of us against LLMs because we think they are a big societal / environmental concern have nothing more to say.

And no, those of us boycotting projects using LLMs don't have an immediate solution to everything under our feet, including our jobs, adopting LLMs.

What reply did you expect? That we apologize for being wrong and that we recognize that in hindsight, the AI boosters were right all along? We still don't want these polluting data centers next to our homes so they can feel more productive and play with their costly toy. Hell, even if they are useful / the productivity boost is real, actually we still don't want those shit datacenters, this wreckless scraping, the major economic crisis that the AI companies may cause through their wreckless behavior and more generally all the badness attached to LLMs.

I personally think video games / fashion / entertainment have much higher societal / environmental concern than AI. But it isn't for me to judge. You and many other people enjoy them. I'm in the minority. So are you or am I right?

> actually we still don't want those shit datacenters, this wreckless scraping

Those are used by the useless things I mentioned above. I don't think you're showing the same outrage.

Did you buy from China? How were the workers who made those items treated? How did you get those items to where you live? Do you know how much pollution that would cause? (I do buy them, btw, I have no moral superiority).

Did you travel? Think about the cost it causes to society. Again, I love travel.

I don't have problems with you criticizing AI or your favorite targets of the day. I do have issues with fake morality, lacking of self reflection.

Oh no, you got me! Actually you didn't: I don't do fashion (originally not even because of its awful environmental impact), I avoid taking planes (because yes, they are an environmental concern!) and I happen to not play the video games (but wtf? The amount of servers needed to run the games is probably a rounding error).

And yes, I do try to think about my footprint when I do something. There's a lot of stuff I don't do because of this. You really made a lot of assumptions on me.

Okay, you got me, it happens that I do stuff for entertainment. I know, I should only work, eat and sleep. Because it's well known that the first gram of CO2 released in the atmosphere because of something I do for entertainment forbids me from criticizing anything.

> I have no moral superiority

Good for you. I mean, if you think it's morally superior not to engage in morality… (it doesn't magically free you from your responsibilities though).

Note: you are the one expecting moral purity here (but only from the people you see as your opponents, how convenient).

How about we acknowledge that someone buying stuff from china is not barred from criticizing the LLMs, avoid the whataboutism and keep things on topic and in good faith now?

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There were many civilizations in the past that eagerly dug their own graves, to great success.

It's not really clear what this response has to do with the parent comment, or even what point you're making. Are you saying that if we use AI in core infrastructure projects that it's going to cause the downfall of civilization?

Clearly his analogy is about the usage of AI causing a downfall in the project itself. Maybe no one can understand the project anymore after thousands of AI commits. Maybe no one can contribute without having access to some fancy AI provider. Maybe the AI was using you, the developer, as a tool all along and the end game is for your project (and other FOSS projects) to be replicated under the tutelage of a few big corporations, making all FOSS projects irrelevant.

I don't think it's clear that it was an analogy at all. It sounded like a forecast of the collapse of civilization. Even if the claim is narrower, what you're saying is a prediction that can be tested against reality. It doesn't seem likely that a project like Linux, with strong leadership and expert eyes on every change, will fail because of a few AI commits. I suspect reality is a lot less catastrophic and a lot more mundane, and we see a small productivity increase while the project continues more or less as usual.

What did you expect from hn lol

Prob at a slower rate than the ones against innovation

Like which? Name some civilizations that eagerly dug their own graves

The Mayans were too comfortable to give up their lifestyles even though their expanding population depleted the nearby natural resources.

Pretty much all of the no longer existing empires. Roman empire, perhaps.

If the United States or the Linux kernel project or frankly any other institution lasts as long as the Roman civilization, that would be a rare achievement indeed! In my opinion, its longevity is the single most striking fact about Rome.

In comparison the US is a baby, and the Linux kernel barely an embryo.

Depending on how you count, Rome lasted 1229 years (from founding to fall of the western empire) or 2206 years (from founding to the fall of the Byzantine empire, which was the eastern part).

Twelve hundred years! Two thousand years! I hope we dig our graves as slowly as the Romans did.

Roman empire was a state, not a civilization. Roman civilization very much exists to this day throughout the western world.

By your novel definition, all civilisations have lasted ?

Civilizations have collapsed and mostly to reasons they could have avoided, not my area but sounds like a strange point to make a stand on

Buddy , we’re killing ourselves soon. No one cares

I, too, have this question for the anti-AI people.

What is the game plan? Use an OS version older than 2023? Stop using tech?

"NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS" (https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/10/13/netbsd-m...)

Kind of like I can criticize the societal impact of many things yet still participate in those systems when necessary.

I don't think anyone will be able to avoid AI assisted software entirely. They can avoid contributions to those projects, and projects are free to have their anti-AI policy.

I use AI a lot, but am highly skeptical of its net benefit to society. I'm more concerned with the omnipotent surveillance state we're barrelling toward without regulations. I'm concerned with the jobs apocalypse that no politician is taking seriously. I'm concerned with the dissociation from reality that it will cause with audio and video being as believable as real recordings.

I think it will get harder to tell, and people will just lie or omit it.

Some projects have already quietly said "just don't make it obvious."

Those are valid options.

Adapt to the times, use AI as a tool, not as a colleague.

>What is the game plan? Use an OS version older than 2023? Stop using tech?

A lot of us are discussing the best pre-slop kernels to use, and tech has ceased to be an exciting passion so yes to both.

Some people have a hard time admitting a that a few GPUs can outperform them.

I was one of those people. Weren't we all?

I think a lot of people are stuck in 2023 when thinking about AI quality. It's gotten so much better that it's basically a totally different product now.

It isn't perfect, but it's certainly useful.

A couple of days ago we had these flow of Rust based "reimplementation" of Adobe and Microsoft applications. A lot of people couldn't get past the "yeah but it's full of bugs, it's just SlopWare" opinion.

These people couldn't see the forest. The writing is on the wall, that Slopware is the WORST it will ever be. 1 year ago that was unimaginable. Next year, the quality of the developed software will be way better.

Selling "code" or "apps" is dead. My wife works in Workday and I've told her to sell as much stock as she can, because there will be an "inflection point" where ALL software based companies will collapse. The same way as Silicon Graphics, Sun , DEC and similar companies collapsed (along with a bit of IBM and HP, who pivoted) with the rise of PC power. Salesforce, SAP, Workday and all smaller companies that sell generic software will fall down.

Yep. The reality is that as a single developer I'm able to produce a) more code and b) at a higher quality in a year than all of _Google_ did in it's entire existence up until ~2023. One man shops are literally replacing full software suites that were maintained by _thousands_ of engineers, often the highest paid in the entire industry. I can't wait to see what the future holds.

Google's codebase as of ~2023 was, IIRC, ~10 billion lines of code, and fairly high quality. You're able to produce 10 billion lines in a year. At high quality.

Yeah, I don't believe you.

How many people are using those AI slopware reimplementations? If only a few, I think the "traditional" companies will be safe for a while.

Why are you saying it will be way better when American companies asked their government to hit the breaks?

I think the contributing factor is people who make software but have no idea what they're doing. They want to make photoshop, but they have no knowledge of photo manipulation or how photoshop works, or any software engineering/development practices. And then we wonder why slop still exists. I am of the opinion that it will always exist: people just have no idea what they want to make let alone how they want to work. "Reimplement photoshop" is a nice end-goal, but you have to actually know to a decent degree how photoshop actually works! Not to mention the reverse engineering knowledge you need

Outperform? Where would those GPUs have been without Linus' prompting? Driving a car consists of brutally simple movements critically orchestrated. This isn't a GPU outperforming Linus Torvalds, it's Linus Torvalds engaging with yet another higher cybernetic order.

Certain people are easily outperformed.

If Linus Torvalds is being outperformed what hope is there for the rest of us?

Have you been following any kernel development since 2012? That's when he said he mainly just merges code now and doesn't write much.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-milleniu...

And in 2020 he said he no longer writes any code at all and does not consider himself a programmer anymore: https://news.softpedia.com/news/linus-torvalds-says-he-s-no-...

What evidence is there that Linus Torvalds is being outperformed? Is he incapable of writing the code that he generated with an LLM? Is it that far beyond human comprehension?

Its just inertia of people refusing to update their priors. Two years ago, most LLMs were producing absolute garbage. Even the 70b Llama 3 model would produce nonsense that wouldn't compile, make up completely imaginary API endpoints, and fail to write basic syntax. Then a year ago with Sonnet 4, we actually had something that actually worked, but needed a lot of hand holding for complex tasks. Today, they can be run with minimal supervision. By this time next year, we're going to see the hockey-stick part of the singularity really take off.

“Anti-AI” is anyone who reads code nowadays apparently so it’s about as relevant as if an IDE was used to edit the source code.

They would say that it occurs at the behest of the Linux Foundation and get flagged.

First you'd have to define what an anti-AI person is. I'm quite bearish on AI, still use it myself, and I say "big whoop." Is this supposed to be some resounding, decisive shot in the pro-AI, anti-AI war?

They would say that Linus requires extremely high quality patches backed up by a human with complete understanding of the code submitted that is willing to put their reputation on the line for it, the same as he always has. The AI aspect is almost irrelevant.

Like linux is some bastion of security or something... I'm everyday more convinced that the reason why linux was let to dominate the server side with no contestation was so that the USA spy network could be done without compromising american companies. This is just the follow up of the same plan.

what is this belief based on?

Does it really matter? Normal observation. This post itself is already on the way to disappear... Farms bots everywhere, fake reviews, fake posts, fake experiences. David Lynch was probably right, white fences, smiley families, but underneath a stench...

Move to OpenBSD or even more not "AI", NetBSD :)

There's always GNU Hurd and Emacs...

Fork all of them, work on those manually and compare in a few years. It'll be like mining Bitcoin before you know if it'll take off. If it doesn't, waste of time, if it does, they'll come begging asking you to make machine go again :P

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