GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
I’d argue that this news is over-blown. The project has more than a solid and honorable track record with insanely talented engineers behind it. AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions. If GOS team, who again would be at the top % in the field, feel that this can elevate the project, should we not give them the benefit of the doubt?
AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
Aaaand just like that you disqualified yourself from having an opinion worth listening to on what “insanely talented engineers” are.
AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere.
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
You cannot put the evils back into Pandora’s Box when it was already open.
Even if these companies sink, individuals can still use their own hardware for AI. Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
Sure you can. Because in this case Pandora’s box is something which exists solely through a sustained, inconceivable amount of money being continuously funneled into it without any guaranteed long term benefit to the people who do so. It’s a technology which isn’t sold as a product as it exists in its current form, but a theoretical future form.
If the bottom were to fall out from under it tomorrow, it couldn’t even continue to exist as it is now, it would disappear entirely as there would be no financial incentive to keep it running. Individuals could still run what we have now offline, but its value and usefulness would degrade rapidly as time went on, because it relies on mass-scale power consumption and data theft to remain up to date, much less improve.
Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
stop. calling. slop. ai. It’s a shitty subcategory of it. Just like actual dog poo is a subcategory of organic chemical compounds.
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
It exclusively comes from either snake oil vendors or people who are less smart than they think they are. Where the former are typically part of the latter group.
At the very least, you’d have to convince both the US and China to stomp it out. And then there are other countries that would be willing to pick up the slack.
AI is not something self sustaining enough to necessarily require stomping out, at least that we know of at this point. Right now AI’s future relies on its operators continuing to convince people of a theoretical future scenario.
GOS is not part of a theoretical future.
It’s not going anywhere because it’s already been here for a very long time, you just didn’t know about it
What people call “AI” is just Machine Learning.
Chatbots, OCR, Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, Computer Vision, Web Search, Spam filtering or Fraud detection, Personalized ADs, even your phone’s camera processing algorithm.
It’s all Machine Learning, but now under new and fancy “AI” name. And it’s been here for decades.
The reason it blew up this much only now is because people realized that the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes. And so they started exploring it more, to the extent of causing valid ethical concerns.
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere. But it’s clear from the context here what we’re referring to when we say AI in this conversation.
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere.
As someone who despises the current slop hype with a passion, you’re correct on this. But only when you exclude LLMs. Because they are garbage with a net negative for mankind. Machine learning as a field however has very useful applications. Typically such that complement human assessment of data, e.g. re-viewing radiology images to flag potentially anomalous images for a second doctor to look at - not in place of the first doctor.
Finally, someone gets it!
Instead of going away, the AI will transform. It’s sort of in a bubble state rn. Once it pops, the fields where it’s useful will keep on using it, whilst those applications that have no real grounds for existing will either have their plugs pulled or resources cut.
Apparently, not to me. Explain.
Edit: Downvoting a person for asking clarification? Shame on you lot.
Here’s a starting-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Pointing to a wiki page instead of actually explaining stuff isn’t going to change my mind.
Now, if you’re talking specifically about LLMs, however (which you could’ve just said so, ffs). I think their scope of application and resources wasted on them will be significantly reduced. Look at what happened to blockchains and NFT. Basically, I expect the same to happen here.
Nobody is trying to change your mind. You’re just immune to context clues lol
the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes.
And that’s bullshit. The slop machines have already peaked. More input will not improve the results.
Not compared to models from 00s or 10s…
What’s with the reading comprehension, people? I was talking about pre-AI boom vs. now, not now vs. 1-2 years ago, c’mon.
LLMs use a new way of data processing (focused on language rules) which is what brought the boost. Not more training data. More training data is needed for an LLM to reach “maturity” but it also increases cost due to resource usage. And current LLMs have already absorbed basically all of the internet and most books, and since the internet is now full of slop, more unpoisoned training data does not exist. That’s why more does not help anymore.
Touché
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That’s the communication problem in these conversations. Whether it’s a useful tool and whether it’s an ethical tool are two different questions. People come in and attack the developers for generating slop, and they respond that they are experienced developers who can use the tool properly to increase the security of the code or whatever. And the conversation here is about that.
And then someone like you comes in talking about ethics, which is what we should be talking about, but we are talking past each other.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions.
I don’t need to be skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions.
You are both correct. But the former is about the engineering, the latter is about ethics. You do need to technically skilled to evaluate whether AI is a useful tool for Graphene. You don’t need to in order to critique it on ethical grounds. These are completely different topics that have nothing to do with each other.
the only people getting a net use out of LLM garbage are sub-par programmers. and I say that partially as a self burn because I have consulted slop chatbots to get some keywords / usage examples for functions I didn’t know yet. Even though I never used any drop-in code, and verified the usage of all that I “learned” from such conversations, the output was incredibly shitty and had to many holes in it that most people wouldn’t even spot because “it just works”. Using slop bots in coding / vibe-coding is offloading your incompetence as work onto future programmers.
no, we are not talking about two different things.
We are talking about one single thing.
the theft of human potential for profit, and the sacrifice of the world for the enrichment of the few due to exploiting that theft.
You are just trying to play word games and split the discussion to defend the indefensible.
Lol you are so argumentative that this is how you respond to someone agreeing with you? Forcibly putting me into the “opposing camp” against my will. All right then, live your delusion while we fight AI without you.
Calling for the murder of other people in a public forum is never wise. At best, you could (should) be permanently banned. At worst, police could show up at your house and lock you away forever (the world would be better place for it!).
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There really is a difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and I don’t know enough about actually coding to look at their repos and tell you what’s happening.
The issue is, there’s also difference between how people cram “AI-assistance” into their previously well-refined workflows. Did see the odd person ending up with the same issues as straight-out vibe coding but without the speed, including the eventual (mild) AI psychosis and later switching to vibe coding after the chatbot convincing him.
Also I think it would be pretty trivial to generate an “understanding” of the code, yet AI boosters never bring up it as a concern.
A bit unrelated, but I wonder if I’m the only one left that is:
- Using small, open-weight models
- Asking it to only write small snippets that I can easily go through, check and understand.
- Copying pasting from good old web frontends instead of integrating it into my editor or whatever else people do with agents nowadays.
I feel like when we’re talking about AI this sort of usage gets lumped into the same pile as agentic vibe coding and it’s not helpful for discussion. Surely most people wouldn’t find this problematic?
Probably.
My company is currently pushing “loop engineering” on us… They are in love with Claude and keeps referring to it as “him”. Very proudly announce that “I set ut a loop, and he closed 40 PRs while I slept!” (without review, of course). Based on vibe written tickets as well, which contains many hallucinations.
The poor QA department (2 people) is now trying to figure out how to test all the slop.
Things like this radicalize people against all AI.
The poor QA department (2 people) is now trying to figure out how to test all the slop.
I’d hand in my resignation…
I’m actively looking for another job, had an interview yesterday, crossing my fingers!
Best of luck!
Thank you! 😁
We usually say “the other guy”, or sometimes we say “I & AI” (a poor twst on a Rastafarian saying)
I have occasionally used anonymous browser sessions in the way you describe, and I still feel dirty for it and think it’s problematic. It did not affect the quality of my code because I never did the 2nd bullet, I never asked for drop-in code or used any, but the ethical implications suck donkeyballs so I hate that I do this occasionally - I blame really bad documentation of some build environments.
As long as you have an understanding of what you’re copying and pasting, your fine IMO.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all. Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn’t ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code. LLMs are SO on steroids (actually trained on SO topics). So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it’s results blindly is silly and dangerous.
There’s a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source. Also: if OSS community did not use AI it would hardly stop it from continuing it’s growth in Enterprise. So there’s not much of a winning strategy there either.
Which brings us to GrapheneOS decision and given above reasons I think it’s a well-balanced decision.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all.
This tool is however not neutral but has a lot of steering and bias built in. Like an advisor who optimizes heavily for personal gain. For example, it constantly tells you that it knows it all and also that your ideas are the best thing since sliced bread. A lot of stuff around them is engineered to increase engagement and make you dependent on them. Precisely like social media which is full of “brain hacks” - no, this isn’t hyperbole, this is the name that engineers at Facebook gave to their creations. As social media, commercial LLMs are “addictive by design”.
Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn’t ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code.
Stack Overflow is a really good example. I am programming over 40 years, since 35 years as hired programmer, since 25 years on PhD level and I used Stack Overflow a lot to find interesting new angles on issues with seemingly obvious answers. Like “what is the most portable, clearest way to efficiently serialize message data in a C struct, given that type punning is only defined for some compilers and can lead to undefined behaviour”.
Stack overflow has typically various opinionated commented answers here, which gives you different angles and you can decide what is best in your case. This is crucial since a lot - one could say, almost all - of software engineering is about trade-offs.
ChatGPT is the know-all of stack overflow responders: It gives you a single smart-allecky answer and is purposefully built so it tries to take decisions out of your hands. It currently also makes a ton of suggestions of which some have a point, some might apply in other cases but not yours, and some are bullshit. If you let it run free you will easily get ten times more code than needed. And ten times more code means ten times more bugs - this is well-established.
So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it’s results blindly is silly and dangerous.
The thing is that commercial LLMs in practice are engineered to short-circuit your judgment and decision-making.
There’s a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source.
First: These companies will siphon off open source code anyway, be it legal or not. That is outside of the influence of single open source developers or projects. Maybe a matter of high courts and civil society lawsuits to decide. And these will have to fight an uphill battle against the current political climate around favouring large companies in general and that kind of exploitative AI in particular.
But what projects do have influence over is the quality of their code base and what ingresses into it.
Further, it is to expected that the quality of commercial code bases continues to degrade at a rapid pace and also that companies will depend even more on open source infrastructure and libraries - and FOSS developers training the LLMs they use on anything that is new. Because the average commercial project or github project just will turn to shit. Companies will soon wistfully remember old times where Sturgeon’s law was a thing and when only 90% of all public code was shit, and not 99.999% . (Congratulations to that future five nines!).
There is an asymmetry between open source code and proprietary software: Open source code is protected by copyright law. Which GenAI vendor companies practically do ignore. Proprietary software is usually protected by copyright law, and also obfuscation by it being binary or behind server APIs. Currently, this works in favour of companies: They get to use GPL-proteced public code, but are not exposing their own, uh, creations. (And of course, LLM vendors will make the solemn pinky promise that they never ever will publish commercial code their customers are working on as LLM output (ask top-notch mathematicians how that worked out).)
But will this stay like this? Because another issue is that the same methods can be used to decompile binary code, and LLMs can also be trained on decompiled proprietary code. Which will, for example, make its many hidden security issues much more acute.
a lot of communities are aggressively clamping down on AI contributions. i think leaving the floodgates open really hasnt worked out. People touting “the kernel does it so get over it” gloss over the contributions being small and strict “your ai code reflects you and you own the consequences” policy.
additionally i dont buy the enterprise does it so get on board argument. the floss movement is literally built around pushing back on corporate norms. i dont know why anyone would take thay argument at face value.
for a lot of FLOSS communities, the ethics of the software is as important as the quality. which is why so many Debian community members felt betrayed by milquetoast ai policy adoption.
Graphene made a similar “look they’re all doing it too” argument on Mastadon which I feel just really undermines their image as the alternative.
“we dont police our developers usage as long as the quality meets out high standards. all code is at the end of the day ownedand reviewed by the humans in our teams” or some other equally silly statement would still have had critics but at least they wouldn’t sound like a grade schooler wining about how infair life is.
Is it just a tool really?
Using a hammer doesn’t atrophy the muscle in your arms as you use it.
However using AI has already been shown to atrophy the brain.
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
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You can achieve wealth and happiness way faster if you rob all other countries of their resources. But if it is feasible, must it still be done ?
Kind of the same thing with LLM. It’s not because you can that you should.
As you said, LLM is killing OS communities. It’s preventing people from working together, now they are all “I don’t need you, I can do it my way all alone”, and you get 50 clones or similar softwares, which aren’t finely tuned since it’s all LLM.
As you didn’t say, LLM has a huge impact on the planet, it costs a lot of electricity, it uses clean water which it evaporates in data center, but we don’t care because guess what, we have it in our hands and it’s so much fun to use ! And well, we ourselves are not responsible for the planet’s state, it’s the big bad company that create LLM, I’m just using it because otherwise, the other will do so !
What’s next ? After coding our own little games and softwares alone and ultra-quickly I mean.
Who pays the bills ? Who will pay the next one, and where is humanity going ? Not sure I want to know.
AI Searchers are quitting their jobs being scared of what they enabled Companies are being hacked by LLM without control People are losing their jobs because of LLM (and I think those are not the ones using LLM in the OS Community, because oh, the irony it would be)
Society clearly isn’t ready for any of this, and saying “don’t care” doesn’t make it fine.
Edit : this is cleary not on or against you, I’m simply expressing my frustration on this subject with arguments and examples I hope should make people realize things x)
People still seem to think AI is a fad that will go away. I don’t see this happening (for code) at all. Not ever
People don’t really understand this yet. There are LLMs that can do useful work running locally on 5 year old laptops (ok, only if it’s a Macbook Pro, but still). Qwen on consumer hardware isn’t close to Claude Code using cloud models, but it can do real work and this is the floor, the absolute minimum of AI we will have going forward. No matter what happens to the industry and the bubble, it will not go away. With any other outcome other than a total collapse of the bubble, AI will be more powerful than that.
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Reading the comments, wow AI is polarizing. Neither side will budge.
I guess only time will tell, to see if all the AI code will actually come crashing down.
Cool well I’ll keep using Lineage until they become massive piles of steaming crap as well.
Fuck AI and all you silicon ball lickers.
A large number of people are using it as an opportunity to promote using operating systems which are the direct opposite of hardened and are much more heavily using AI models including for a lot of code generation.
LineageOS is certainly using it. CalyxOS, /e/ and iodéOS are based on it. CalyxOS is developed by LineageOS core developers.
Since LLMs are essentially built from code, I have an easier time believing that coders can get a benefit, especially at the Individual level, within the frame of having a coding background and being able to audit, directly, the code that the machine spits out. But basically everything else happening with, and surrounding, these fucking things is atrocious.
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I feel ya dude
Fan-fucking-tastic. Everything I love is ruined by slop users.
@bekkaboo@girlcock.club Linux itself is heavily using AI models.
For security analysis and uncovering bugs.
I guess many people don’t know how much programming has changed over the last year. GrapheneOS is doing a good job telling it like it is.
… telling it like it is.
I know only one type of person that uses that phrase unironically.
The thing about tools is they do what you expect. A fork picks up food. A hammer’s head doesn’t suddenly change shape or fly off. I don’t have to worry about my shoes suddenly falling apart.
AI cannot do these things, but encourages you to use them in such a way that you don’t have to oversee the output.
It is so much more work to rewrite something that has already been written poorly. It takes more time and effort than to just rewrite it from scratch. It’s not a tool as it cannot do its job. On top of that it’s just a glorified collage machine pulling code or whatever it wants from its database and smashing it together. The code is not novel or genuine.
All of that rework and it still destroys the environment and communities wherever their data centers are housed. Loud noise and now Americans don’t have the right to clean water. They’re pissing in your yard and telling you to drink it up.
Please have a spine. Or just some pride.
They’re using AI models to find vulnerabilities. I assume the fixes are human written.
Sooner than later most things the average person does will sort of be vibe coded like compiling to an intermediate language. The idea of apps and walled gardens will not be as important. Instead of approved apps, it will be approved models and agents. Even the idea of an operating system is going to change. Linux is a great space for integrating the computing environment with AI coding. The full source is available to the model and any change you ask it to make can just be done for you. The idea of running a “Linux” or “Windows” could be limited to certain software and domains.
