Beej Jorgensen

I want to know if it’s AI that’s the real problem here or the world in which we’re forcing kids to live.

My money’s on “both”.

Ok, but people are mad that LLM-assisted code, tons of it, is now getting into the kernel and Linus is no longer slamming the brakes…

I also think this is a bad idea unless we want less stability in the kernel. I’ve seen Torvalds call people all kinds of names for trying to add things to the kernel that he feels are subpar. He’s legendary for it. So I’d probably trust him more than any human alive to avoid slop.

But I also don’t think he has the power to effectively defend against it. Some badness will get through.

As always, we’ll choose the least-crappy OS to run.

deleted by creator

I like to compare them to meth. Sends velocity through the roof…with just a few minor drawbacks… 😅

5 years ago things were bad, therefore there’s no way LLMs can be bad. Is that the argument?

We’re harmmaxxing!

Here’s mine: the world would be a much, much better place if LLMs did not exist. Also, it would be stupid–today–to not use LLMs to find flaws in the Linux kernel. The only other option is to get your machines compromised.

Is it therefore smarter than you, Sam?

I ended up writing a wrapper shell script that added a fudge value onto the x and y so I wouldn’t have to do it myself every time. :)

You promise?

This is true. But you have to balance out how much you care about following specific people. My friend was dying of cancer, and she posted to FaceBook and I wanted to keep up. It was her preferred way of maintaining contact. Would you have told her to switch to something else?

She passed away a couple months ago. So maybe you’re right that now would be a good time to cancel the account.

If I want to scan a 100mm wide by 50mm tall area at 300 DPI, I use:

scanimage -x 100 -y 150 --resolution 300 --output-file foo.jpg

I don’t use the platform but still have a presence so I can be contacted there. But half the messages I receive are unsolicited porn spam. Kids are getting that shit pushed to them!

I was about to move all my photos to Proton, and then… I guess it’s a vps and Immich after all that. Sheesh.

I’m waiting to see if I’ll start using it.

Got mine in '92, I think. Still on my shelf.

Make still bests the author’s examples in certain use cases. I use it all the time in those cases and it’s fast and simple. Use the right tool for the job.

I don’t disagree. There’s a lot of pretty poor material out there. 😅

The problem is that the bot doesn’t know what people tend to be confused by, so I don’t think it’s a matter of the prompt. The verbosity itself isn’t even really the issue; the clarity is the issue.

I, too, use LLMs all the time to explore spaces. I just strive to help people explore particular spaces more efficiently than they can with LLMs.

And another thing. I had to write some C++ material recently. Conversations with Claude went something like this:

“I’m a senior dev who hasn’t used C++ in 20 years. What’s new?”

[pages of output]

“Tell me more about the rule of zero”

[pages of output]

“[More questions]”

[pages of output]

“[More questions]”

[pages of output]

Then, once I understand it (and have written some sample code to mess with) I write a concise, direct, effective paragraph or two. You could read all AI output if you want. But I think I did it better.

You know when you finally see the answer, and you think, “Why didn’t anyone just say that in the first place?” When I write, I look for that thing to say. LLMs are pretty crap at it.