Reddit's Largest Open Source Community Dumbfounded By AI Ban: 'I Guess Linux Is No Longer Allowed?' (kotaku.com) 147
Kotaku reports:
r/opensource, Reddit's primary "subreddit for everything open source related," has banned all AI-assisted and AI-related projects.... As reported by The Verge, the subreddit's October 24 post, titled "Your tokens aren't valuable: No more AI," features four new main rules: all projects must now be at least "1 year old," have "multiple contributors," be posted by someone who must "speak English," and cannot be "made by" or "intended for" AI... [T]he ban on AI is simple; as the subreddit's moderators explain, "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community." Unsurprisingly, this is the part that's upset the majority of the users in the thread....
[T]he moderator who posted the new guidelines stated in a separate comment that the overwhelmingly negative response is due to "some guy on twitter claiming to be alternative news" who posted an "opinionated editorial pointing hundreds of people to the thread." Given the timing of when the thread was posted, alongside the fact that the X post in question mentions "the Linux kernel," they are presumably referring to this post by The Lunduke Journal. The moderator may be correct, as almost all of the top comments on the post are from users who have never posted in r/opensource before.
The use of AI "doesn't change whether something is open source or not," complained one commenter, who added "I guess Linux is no longer allowed here? Linus uses AI for kernel development now."
The moderator has since updated their post to acknowledge that Redditors have now already created a rival community called r/OpenSourceAIAllowed — plus three more alternatives:
[T]he moderator who posted the new guidelines stated in a separate comment that the overwhelmingly negative response is due to "some guy on twitter claiming to be alternative news" who posted an "opinionated editorial pointing hundreds of people to the thread." Given the timing of when the thread was posted, alongside the fact that the X post in question mentions "the Linux kernel," they are presumably referring to this post by The Lunduke Journal. The moderator may be correct, as almost all of the top comments on the post are from users who have never posted in r/opensource before.
The use of AI "doesn't change whether something is open source or not," complained one commenter, who added "I guess Linux is no longer allowed here? Linus uses AI for kernel development now."
The moderator has since updated their post to acknowledge that Redditors have now already created a rival community called r/OpenSourceAIAllowed — plus three more alternatives:
UPDATE (10/26): Monday saw a new comment from the moderator stressing that "Adjustments will be made."
"Linux is not, nor could conceivably ever be banned. Interpreting any set of rules as such is simply bad faith. Someone's pet project pumped out in two claude code session limits will not be welcome. The line is somewhere between those, and it will likely move over time from continuous feedback.
"We will cater to humans, and as many and as inclusively as possible. No rule will ever target or favor any ethnicity or social strata."
Off-Shoots (Score:2, Insightful)
Any subs that follow the TrueWhatever invariably turn into shit.
Re:Off-Shoots (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is different from every other sub on Reddit how?
Re: (Score:2)
No. Reddit is a complete disaster. Use https://rillr.com/ [rillr.com] instead.
is this your personal project?
you need to do a better job of promoting it. i've scrolled through dozens of screenfulls of stories and still haven't found one with even a single comment
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
The use of AI "doesn't change whether something is open source or not," complained one commenter
...who might be wrong.
We don't yet know how AI output is going to interact with copyright.
So far you cannot copyright any AI output. That means you don't have the right to specify the license for it, either, because all software licenses are powered by copyright.
Courts might even decide that the original copyrights apply. But which? The ones to code that looks the most like yours? Or every license which applied to any code which might have been involved in the creation of the output? Nobody knows yet.
As such, you run into a trap when trying to decide if the output is open source. Does it only mean that you can see the source code, or is the license relevant? Do you actually have to have legal permission to use or at least see the code? Most would say yes, if you don't have the legal right, then being able to see the code is meaningless since you can't actually use it without poisoning projects with some other license — or no license.
TL;DR: It is very much still up in the air whether it is reasonable to describe any AI generated source code as "open source".
Re: (Score:2)
So far you cannot copyright any AI output.
You can copyright the prompt.
That's why...if you are thinking of sending me an AI email, please just send me the prompt. It's protected.
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't the copyright fall to the person who prompted the AI?
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't the copyright fall to the person who prompted the AI?
So far US courts have said that person cannot have a copyright.
This might change up in the future, but so far, the prompter is not considered to be a creator.
It's public domain (Score:2)
You can put public domain code in your project.
When a company like Penguin Classics puts out a public domain book with their own introduction, only their introduction is actually copyrighted.
The idea that the license covers all the code in your codebase has always been incorrect. And with AI, AI can take any source code and write a new version of it that isn't traceable. So it doesn't matter what your license says. Unless the code is super unique, claiming a copyright is absurd anyway.
I don't think the O
Re: (Score:2)
You can put public domain code in your project.
That comment was about what if that code is later determined to have a copyright apply to it.
Re: (Score:2)
And the GPL doesn't "infect" your code either. The problem is only that as long as you keep the GPL parts, your program needs to comply with the GPL. But if someone rips out the non-GPL lines, they can use them under whatever license these lines have.
Re: (Score:2)
So far you cannot copyright any AI output.
Your post is broadly correct and on point- but the quoted sentence is a bit of an overstatement.
The only case where copyright has been held to not apply to AI generated output was where the plaintiff asserted it operated autonomously.
He later tried to change his argument to, "well I wrote the prompt", but the court said he waived his ability to assert that in his original filing.
Essentially- a court has not ruled on "prompt-driven generation", but the ruling strongly implies that such copyright would be
Re: (Score:2)
Do you really think that US courts will come to any conclusion other than "AI code is copywritable, the people it learned from have no claim"?
It's hard to say, because those courts have usually decided in favor of rights holders, and they are how we got a copyright cartel in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
but in the US it's going to replace humans.
The one group who currently disagree with you is the US Copyright Office. Here's a 41 page analysis by the people who assign copyright on how it may apply to AI: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/C... [copyright.gov]
41 pages worth, and that document is full of grey area. There is no clear cut way copyrightability an AI is going to play out. Many of the existing case law precedents don't apply. You need to understand that you are wrong. I am wrong. Anyone with an opinion that can be expressed in a short Slashdot post is currentl
Re: (Score:2)
Who modded this Troll? Do you really think after all that money was put into AI the US government will allow laws that fuck over the large corporations? Even when they would like to fuck over them it would have too many consequences for the rest of us, so they won't.
People have a right to reject AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
No, we have to accept AI because McKinzie tells our employers to tell us we have to. It literally is a question of food on your table.
AI is just another tool (Score:5, Insightful)
In this context, AI is just a compiler that turns human-readable source code into machine-readable code. I mean, gcc does that too. Bison writes C code for you. IDEs help you edit. Spell checkers do your "look in the dictionary" job for you. We've had code-generating tools for a long time now, AI is just another one. Today's programmers are no longer involved in writing assembler, tomorrow's programmers will no longer be involved in writing C. How many of you can do low-level programming *now* ? How many people *today* write low quality programs with the existing tools?
What's different now is that AI disconnects you from the resulting logic in a way that previous tools didn't. Then again, C disconnects you from what the assembler does, just not as much. Python even more so. ESPHome "programs" are just YAML files. This trait enables more people to "write code", which is good, but increases the amount of bad code as much as it increases the good. We as a coding community need to figure out how to map our ideals and ethics to this new tool. What is "open source" if the compiler is an LLM instead of gcc? What is the source code? How do you reproduce or validate LLM-generated programs? Who will be providing the "core intelligence" that LLMs train on? There aren't many people who can write or maintain compilers any more, will we have the same problem with AI in the future? How do we recognize the effort, creativity, and authorship that goes in to "programming" with an LLM?
IMHO taking a general "for" or "against" position wrt AI/LLMs is not useful. We should take positions for or against *how* it's is used, and how we can "use it for good, not evil." Past generations thought computers were unobtainable magic. Today's generation has the Internet in its pocket. Future generations will wonder how we luddites survived without AI. It's up to us to figure out how to get there.
Besides, who doesn't want a compiler that reads the documentation and helps you write code? ;-)
Re: (Score:3)
If you look up the right chapter in the Numerical Recipes book and insert that code or a variation of it into your program's source code, it is not compatible with open source - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I think this is a better analogy, since the gcc compiler does not have large code bases it uses for lookup+injection.
Re: (Score:2)
That's fine, because Numerical Recipes are straight trash. Their algorithms are bad. Their formatting is bad. Their coding practices are outdated. So, only a moron would copy NR's code to begin with since their code is fundamentally bad.
In otherwords, what AI would do .... (Score:3)
But AI doesn't know this. AI is a moron. If it finds code that is well documented (which NR tends to be) it may very well use it to produce code for you. Or it may find derivative code. At the end of the day, AI could very well copy NR without you knowing (or maybe it finds a better free version). The issue is you don't know where AI got it's answer so it is very difficult to attribute copyright.
Re: (Score:2)
First of all, I don't use those languages they wrote books for, so not for me it won't.
Secondly, generally, it probably actually won't. All the code in those books fail numerous current automated testing suites which the AI is almost guaranteed to utilize.
Thirdly, fuck copyright.
Re: (Score:2)
If AI couldn't "judge" the training material, LLM output would be full of viagra spam.
Do you know why you can negative-prompt an image model with "worst quality?" Because it was intentionally not only trained with the image behind the "best quality" link, so it knows what bad quality is. You can even positive prompt it with worst quality, if you want bad quality for some reason. Knowledge about something with low quality does not mean that low quality is produced by default.
Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
My opinion is that AI will kill Linux eventually. Not now, not when Linus uses it, because Linus knows how to code and is careful. But eventually the crappy vibe-coded junk will seep into the kernel. And then you'll get Microsoft-style code quality issues.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think AI copyright is going to kill Linux. Allowing uncopyrightable code into your project could be determined by a court to destroy your whole license, forcing ALL your code to be released as uncopyrightable and putting GPL-licensed code into the public domain where it can be monetized by corporations without having to give anything back. None of this is how copyright law is supposed to work, but if I've learned one thing about governments and laws and courts it's that they often aren't created for our benefit.
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Since propitiatory software companies use AI extensively it will make all code public domain, and make copyright obsolete
Try and monitize public domain code, when you cannot copyright it
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it will make all code public domain
Trade secret.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing you meant proprietary.
propitiatory
intended to reconcile or appease
“sent flowers as a propitiatory gesture”
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/propitiatory [vocabulary.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting... I didn't consider that angle.
Thanks!
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and putting GPL-licensed code into the public domain where it can be monetized by corporations without having to give anything back.
What part of the GPL prevents monetisation or demands a corporation give anything back? We literally have this right now, today. Well actually yesterday, long before AI copyright became a question. Corporations have mooched off the backs of open source since back when Stallman was still growing a beard. Nothing would change with the code were uncopyrightable because the GPL is as it stands an insanely permissive license as it is.
Re: (Score:2)
Allowing uncopyrightable code into your project could be determined by a court to destroy your whole license, forcing ALL your code to be released as uncopyrightable
Uncopyrightable just means public domain. Using public domain code doesn't make your whole work public domain.
Re: (Score:2)
because Linus knows how to code and is careful
Linux is not Linus. The kernel team is full of highly talented careful maintainers and in most cases the contributors to the kernel produce truly excellent quality code and know what they are doing. To the point that an occasional rant about a bad contribution is actually newsworthy here.
There's more than one programmer in the world who knows what they are doing.
Re: (Score:2)
because Linus knows how to code and is careful
Linux is not Linus. The kernel team is full of highly talented careful maintainers and in most cases the contributors to the kernel produce truly excellent quality code and know what they are doing. To the point that an occasional rant about a bad contribution is actually newsworthy here.
There's more than one programmer in the world who knows what they are doing.
For now. The thing that concerns me is de-skilling. If students use AI to do their assignments, and work places use AI to vibe code, where does the next generation gain the skills to meaningfully review the AI generated code?
You could compare this with an optimizing compiler (an optimizer might have been considered AI once). Hardly anyone writes assembler any more and rarely does anyone review the assembly generated by a compiler. The difference is that the optimizer in a compiler only makes guaranteed corr
Re: (Score:2)
If nothing changes drastically, in two years AI code will be better than best human code. Then you don't need a Linus who knows how to judge the output anymore, because the output will be ready to use.
Projects primarily written in emacs not allowed (Score:5, Funny)
honestly (Score:3)
Yes, Reddiit-mods, let the hate flow through you: demonstrate AGAIN & AGAIN that this is a heavily, heavily moderated community where the mods are utterly unanswerable & unresponsive, and whatever they feel happens to be important today they'll whimsically change the rules and aggressively edit, purge, ban basically on their biorhythms.
Show your puny users how much power and authority you wield. Flex those mod-muscles!
Certainly the legal framework around AI is indeterminate. But without getting into Platonic hairsplitting, I think the 'cloud of concepts' that orbit the concept of OPEN SOURCE are best served by acknowledging and recognizing it, making it MORE transparent not banning the subject entirely (the point about linux is absolutely relevant).
Maybe it would be more reasonable to offer an "AI-gen" tag (if they don't already have one) and note in the FAQ the uncertain context of AI today, warning users that AI generated code / whatever may at some point be deemed NOT compliant with some or all of the 'open source' categories thus anything with that flag should be recognized as 'not clearly open source by the most rigorous definition today' or something? ...nah I'm kidding. Reasonability be damned. You kids go ahead and ban/block/delete away. Better the readers understand clearly upon whose sufferance they're posting.
.
Screw you guys, I'm going home! (Score:5, Informative)
Wolvereness. Hmm. Where have I heard that name before...
Oh yeah... [slashdot.org]
So not only has he pulled a Cartman on the leading Minecraft mod platform at the time, but now a leading Subreddit as well.
Re: (Score:2)
He contributed to Bukkit which was licensed GPL, but used the proprietary decompiled and linked Minecraft Server code. So the code wasn't allowable to be released under the GPL, Mojang let it slide. Then Mojang then secretly buys the Bukkit project from the founders as condition of the founders working there, but other contributions are uncompensated and still licensed as GPL without CLA assignment to the project. Bukkit developers then find out that they have been making the mod API not for the community b
Electronic music and samples (Score:2, Interesting)
There was a time when electronic music and samples started to be a thing and you could suddenly make music without actually creating the sounds, without theory knowledge, even without playing an instrument or playing instruments with others.
Still not everyone is TrentReznor nor as successful, influential or beloved.
This anti-AI hysteria is really shortsighted and stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
Well if they were over-buying (and destroying) the instruments, making the instruments more expensive for everyone, and musicians had to start using samples otherwise their productivity/job security would be at risk, then maybe we might have had some anti-samples hysteria. But that's not what happened.
Re: (Score:2)
Trent Reznor made (and makes) music by playing instruments, and by using his theory knowledge. In fact, I know of no successful musician who doesn't. Some singers, sure, but not musicians. Electronic music and samples will not make what you create sound good unless you know how to make it sound good, which is theory and playing instruments.
Re: Electronic music and samples (Score:2)
Exactly the same with LLMs, they do not replace experience and actual knowledge and skills and you cannot blindly rely on them.
Which is exactly why I made this comparison.
You are making my point for me, thank you CaptObvious.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no way to use an LLM in the manner Reznor uses samples and electronic tools. They're on no way comparable.
You're showing your lack of comprehension of at least two fields here.
English (Score:5, Funny)
someone who must "speak English,"
Sorry Texas. Y'all on yer own now.
"intended for AI" (Score:2)
Reasonable (Score:2)
We need AI-free social media areas (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the complaints are from ai bots and not real people.
There's nothing wrong with having a community were AI content is prohibited. In the future, such areas will probably be significantly more valuable anyway.
Some social media site is going to restrict all AI and find that many people would prefer such a community.
This doesn't mean you can't find AI slop online - there's tons of places. Why not have a few that are more selective?
They banned me from the group years ago.... (Score:3)
The moderators in that group over-reach. About 6 years ago I was looking for perspective on forking another project, and linked the project and the RP denial, and they claimed I was trying to get others to to the PR and complain to the guy when I was simply trying to link the original projects maintainers perspective. Reddit opensource group is run by a bunch of idiots.
This is about Reddit, not open source or AI (Score:2)
It's just coincidence that now some moderators have decided software created by AI isn't open source. The real problem is the Reddit moderation system, and Reddit moderators getting power-hungry and in some cases going 100% against the wishes of a community subreddit.
Does r/Art ring a bell?
Open source and AI are not related to each other, one is a distribution model, and the other is a still not much more than a ame predicting the next word (and sometimes it predicts the next word in a programming language,
Predictable reddit outcome was obvious (Score:2)
Reddit drama is hardly "news" and but does drive monetizable view counts. Posting reddit drama on Slashdot drives views because Slashdot is a general news site.
Ideological communities are prone to infighting because humans enjoy competing virtue displays. Weak communities will render themselves irrelevant. Effective communities will thrive. Water is wet.
Where AI proves sufficiently useful it will be used but there is no need for everyone to use AI.
Made By vs. Made Using (Score:2)
I think the differentiator is whether a project is vibe coded or mostly generated by AI, or whether AI was used as a facilitator by the project team.
You cannot know whether the code you are attempting to use is incompatible with open source licensing models unless you are deep in it. And it's not somebody else's job to figure that out.
Nobody thinks Linux is AI generated. That's the sort of nuclear statement somebody leaps to when bolstering a bad argument. If's a logical fallacy.
Is AI-generated code automatically public domain? (Score:2)
Not that SCOTUS (nor any high court in the EU or other countries) has concluded this determination, but so far the general claim is that AI-generated content (images, movies, writing), while it may (or rather, does) contain copyright violations for stealing from others, it itself can't be copyright protected because no human was involved in making the final product. It is automatically public domain.
So that leaves the question - at what point does a vibe-code project be considered public domain and thus not
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
For the record, while there may be more anti-AI backlash on the left than the right, there's an awful lot on both sides (and a lot of users on both sides). For example, Bannon-acolyte Joe Allen on stage before a Trump rally a month ago warning the crowd:
Literally, this r/opensource mod set the policy: "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community." Does that sound very "leftist" to you? Yes, his reasoning was because translators use AI, but still, that's literally the opposite of appreciating and accommodating diversity.
I cannot find anything beyond that indicating how Wesley Wolfe (r/wolvereness, the mod) votes. What I can tell you is that there was a big backlash in the sub to his actions. Some amusing, like a person asking, "What do we use now that we've banned Linux? I can't afford Windows keys for all these damned servers." A lot of people seem to just be ignoring his rules. At the top of the sub right now is a post titled, "Linus Torvalds posts his AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap". It seems to have sparked vastly more AI discussion than it shut down.
Which AI backlash ? (Score:2)
while there may be more anti-AI backlash on the left than the right, there's an awful lot on both sides (and a lot of users on both sides).
Which type of AI backlash?
The ban it and the data centers they rely upon,
or the lets not over estimate and overuse the limited reliable capabilities that AI offers.
Those two extremes should not be lumped in together.
Re: Which AI backlash ? (Score:2)
One of those is not an extreme
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Literally every issue has its own dimension, and probably more than one dimension.
Re: (Score:3)
Only dimension it doesn't have is time travel. Which would clean up a lot of messes.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.
Re: (Score:2)
But if any two issues are related in some way, I would suggest that by force, those issues have more than one dimension.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Think about that.
Baskets don't last lifetimes (Score:2)
If you weave a basket it can last several lifetimes.
Think about that.
OK, those basket are unicorns from a burial chamber or some other situation where they were not used and in a rare environment that preserved them. Most don't last and/or are somewhat disposable. Hence so few of them surviving and production being continuous.
Civilization is littered with the debris of clay pots. It would be littered with discard baskets too except for the organic materials they are made from rotting away (as designed by nature).
Re: (Score:3)
My predecessors (one of which is even a customer of mine) wrote code 40 years ago that is still in use today.
You are wrong.
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Im glad the left is anti-AI now. They can return to Etsy and sell weaved baskets for a living.
Come on, there are some conservatives on Etsy making really nice leather EDC pouches. :-)
Re: Good (Score:3)
This basket wasn't even made by someone with a certified degree in underwater basket weaving! That's just Basket Slop!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Lingua Francas exist all over the world, some de facto, some very much de jure.
Re: (Score:2)
> Also, it was pretty racist with the whole English thing.
The "whole English thing" is about having someone that it is possible to communicate with in English. I'm fairly sure they would be OK with speaking English through a translation system, as long as it didn't get in the way of the communication.
Also, as someone that is from a non-English-speaking country: Somebody that isn't able to operate in English is unlikely to be able to do good open source work. English is the language that is used to comm
Re: (Score:2)
AI is exactly in the same position right now that Photoshop was in 35 years ago. I was a young photographer then. I learned Photoshop on version 1.0 in 1990. I had just one a national award based on my darkroom work with the photo. I was still a teenager, but the pros in my circle were aghast. And they were aghast again a decade later when digital photography became standard. Now everyone has a camera in their pocket with a little photoshop-like thing to manipulate stuff. After 35 years, I can tell you that
Re: Big Laundry hated the Washing Machine (Score:2)
Dont forget the ice guild when freezers were invented. They formally petitioned congress to ban them to save their ice delivery business.
Re: (Score:3)
At the time maybe, but that's not true in 2026. A typical front loader uses far less water for a load of washing than hand washing. The amount of water is proportional to load so the 10kg comment is kind of pointless.
Ancient top loaders were highly wasteful and didn't adjust the water amount to the washing load size. Also washing machines don't use much electricity in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to driers.
Re: (Score:2)
> It uses far less water and energy to hand wash clothes than put them in a washer.
Shows you never tried to hand wash for a family.
Re:Big Laundry hated the Washing Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Another person who spouts some generic policy stuff without actually making a real point. Do you think those opposing genAI haven't used it? Haven't considered the ramifications? Haven't determined whether or not it's even what it claims to be?
Or are you saying the same of genAI advocates who insist that somehow they're being discriminated against when they keep submitting garbage, overstating the degree to which genAI helped them, often lying about it, ignoring the consequences both of doing this and the impact they're having on everything from the environment to the availability of personal computing (or worse, claiming those concerned about those issues should fuck off), ignoring or even celebrating the impact they're having on incentives to create non-slop (which their fucking genAI systems rely upon! What, exactly, are you expecting genAI to work with in 5-10 years time?), and pretending the legal issues are all solved because of a couple of US jurisdiction only legal cases that have already been contradicted by a fresh US jurisdiction only case, and with no sign the Supreme Court is going to take up the issue in the near future?
Every genAI advocate comes up with this pseudo-centrist bullcrap pretending that they are the "sensible" ones who have truly evaluated whether a technology is Good(tm) or not, and pretending the opposition is just irrational hate, when they are the people who haven't evaluated jack-squat: all they've done is used it, been complemented for their wonderful analytic abilities and told how smart they are, vibe coded some kludgy crap with awful UXes that aren't anywhere close to being finished, and then pronounced on the basis of this that somehow vibe coding iS tHe fUtUrE.
If you guys were the people who were thinking about the issues:
1. You'd have addressed the elephant in the room about where the training content is going to come from in the future.
2. You'd have acknowledged that everyone except you seems to be capable of noticing your programs are fucking awful.
3. You'd be demanding genAI makers knock it off with the constant sucking up manipulative shit because nobody in their right mind thinks that's (1) likely to get you a good end-product, and (2) you know damned well it's just going to turn you into some Musk or Trump "Thinks they're God but just produces shit" figure, for similar reasons.
4. You'd acknowledge that, no, the legal situation is *not* resolved, and the likelihood that your code isn't violating a shitload of licenses you're not even aware of is, actually, extremely high: you'd be calling for clarification, not shoving this crap in your open source projects as fast as humanly possible.
But you're not.
The people who are coming up with these issues you've decided are in your way, while the nice genAI machine is telling you how right you are. Of course you're going to side with the latter.
But no, you're not the rational ones in this exercise, you're the easily manipulated ones.
Resistance is futile (or needless). (Score:4, Insightful)
If AI winds up costing us a fortune and never actually making businesses that use it profitable, then we don't need to actively resist it. The market will kill it naturally. There might be a bit of a mess left behind to clean up, but, we will be paid to do that clean up (or in the case of FOSS, devoted volunteers will do the clean up).
If, on the other hand, AI does wind up saving a lot of money (even if not in all the places we had hoped), then resistance is futile. There is too much wealth and power behind it. The power asymmetry is too great. They will get what they want, and our resistance will just be speed bumps on that road. This isn't a very happy situation for most of us, but it's the way the world actually works and always has worked.
In either case it still makes sense to do things like protest and politically block the creation of data centers in one's area until the harms that a data center causes are properly offset by the owners and operators (with real legal teeth behind that). That is a battle that we stand a chance of winning if we actually keep up the good fight.
Everything else is pretty inevitable, though, and only hinges on how profitable AI use actually turns out to be once the chips land.
Re: (Score:2)
"our resistance will just be speed bumps on that road"
some historical figures believed that right up to the moment the "speed bumps" were their severed heads
Re: (Score:2)
Yes there's a mechanism for that. It's called destroying a part of your life. Maybe you lose your job "naturally". Maybe you lose 10-20 years of your wealth growth "naturally". Maybe crime goes up in your neighborhood "naturally".
No. There's nothing "natural" about market repricing mechanisms, they are destructive, and many people get hurt. In the case of the AI bubble, those getting hurt are not the billionaires early investors, unless we actively resist it.
You're eit
Re: (Score:2)
That's gotta be the dumbest thing to say: "Lets all welcome a pile of destruction."
Re: (Score:2)
Do you think those opposing genAI haven't used it?
Some of them- very much so.
You can tell because they confidently say things that are laughably wrong. I can think of a few posters on this site that fit that criteria.
Of course, not everyone is like that.
Re: (Score:2)
"overstating the degree to which genAI helped them"
You actually legitimately believe this, don't you?
So this is different (Score:2, Interesting)
Furthermore this isn't us building a bunch of washing machines and using a bit more water (I say a bit because hand washing only uses less water if you're being careful about how much you use) Facebook's data center is alone or going to use more electricity than every single household in America. And there is a half dozen other companies plann
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Fresh Water (Score:2)
Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant.
Uh, no. Fresh water is abundant in some places and scarce in others. The reason it's cheap in the US in places where it's scarce like Arizona and Southern California is that the government subsidizes it, as well as drawing more water from aquifers than can be replenished in time. In a lot of places in the USA, water consumption is not sustainable. And yes, agriculture is the main culprit. Exporting oranges from California is just insane; you're sending
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If you stopped irrigating crops in the US desert southwest, there would be no water issues at all, either for households or for industry.
I'll repeat, it is agriculture that consumes meaningful amounts of water, not homes and businesses. Farms by water by the acre foot - an acre of land flooded to a depth of one foot. Water is not abundant on the scale of "farms buying it by the acre foot", but it absolutely is on the scale of "what you need for your house".
Re: Fresh Water (Score:2)
I need food in my house.
Re: (Score:2)
Stop blaming washing machines for water scarcity and start blaming your decision to buy, say, pistachios grown in a friggin' desert. A one pound bag of pistachios requires ~1200 gallons of water and contains the calories to feed a family of 4 for a single day. A modern front-loader washer uses about 10 gallons and said family probably runs it about once per day. That's a 120-to-1 ratio. Other desert crops are even worse - beef raised on alfalfa (a major crop in the desert southwest) is orders of magnitu
Re: Fresh Water (Score:2)
That was certainly an assumptive rant.
Re: (Score:2)
California pistachios grown overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands [gstatic.com]. The Tulare Basin lowlands get only 5-8 inches of precipitation per year (for comparison, Phoenix and Reno both get about 7 inches). As a desert [nationalgeographic.org] is a region with less than 10 inches of rain per year, yes, pistachios are grown in the desert. Without irrigation projects the pistachio lands would be barren desert scrub. They get the water from deep wells (causing land subsidence, because they're not getting replenished), mountain river
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1) San Joaquin is not a desert. It's a semi-arid Mediterranean Climate, which as it turns out, is nearly perfect for pistachios.
There are parts of San Joaquin that are very desert-like, but that is not where pistachios are grown.
If you'd like me to demonstrate the difference in water availability between Phoenix and San Joaquin, let me know- but start with Tule Fog, then look for alluvial soil, and then snowpack.
2) A desert is not dictated purely by rainfall. Educate yourself. [cambridge.org]
3) Go a
Re: (Score:2)
I literally linked a map of where pistachios are grown in California. They are overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands (not merely "the San Juaquin Valley" as a whole - specifically the Tulare Basin (the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley). Bakersfield to Merced, mostly Bakersfield to Fresno, is where almost all California pistachio cultivation is located. We're not talking e.g. Stockton.
The southern end of the San Joaquin valley - the Tulare Basin - gets 5-8 inches per year in the lowlands. Ba
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Re: (Score:2)
Oh, you want me to google Köppen classification maps? Here you go [researchgate.net]. Gee, what a shock, they're exactly what I described!
As for your paper's offhanded sloppy remark (California contains a lot of Mediterranean climate, but not the specific pistachio growing centres), your paper says:
Gee, I wonder, what's the
Re: (Score:2)
California's problem isn't irrigating a desert, it's the fact that its climate allows growth year-round in many places, making much of the land critically overdrafted.
There's a reason they more than double the average productivity per acre of the rest of the US.
Re:Reddit (Score:5, Informative)
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Being anti-slop doesn't make one a luddite. There are definitely ways that AI can be brought in constructively as a tool, but using it for shitting out 100k LOC projects by someone that can't even read or understand what is being generated, then throwing it over the fence for someone else to deal with isn't it.
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But if I want to sit in my mom's basement and shit out a 100k LOC project by hand with code I don't understand by using nothing but stackoverflow posts and then throw it over the fence that's ok because it's not AI slop?
I am of course making a joke here, but being anti-slop is one thing. Banning projects for AI or made with AI is being a luddite.
Re: Crusty old geezers (Score:2)
Being anti-tech also isn't what the luddites were about, that's a facile interpretation of their views. Any time someone suggests otherwise they are demonstrating only ignorance.
Re: Might as well ban Compilers (Score:2)
Compilers are deterministic and don't depend on training data
Re: (Score:3)
So, how do you think we made compilers to begin with?
Do you think they already knew Machine / Assembly to begin with? We didn't train those, we made compilers...pretty much like we made translators, yeah LLMs are deterministic, they can't be creative, nor can compilers, but they can be good code translators, and yes they need training.
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So, how do you think we made compilers to begin with?
Do you think they already knew Machine / Assembly to begin with?
Mu. Software doesn't know things.
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Compilers are deterministic and don't depend on training data
Unlike developers, which are non-deterministic and do depend on training data.