“Torvalds said that the time has come to make it harder for new people to contribute code to the kernel. People like Kroah-Hartman have spent years trying to teach people how to contribute; it is time to stop doing that, he said.”
https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
It is difficult to summarize exactly how Linus got to this point. Most of the discussion at this years Summit appears to have been related to AI assisted code and how the maintainers are dealing with the increase in code submissions to LKML. Many of the maintainers expressed varying levels of frustration with AI assisted drive-by code submissions. Linus’ train of thought is that they make it intentionally more difficult for humans to contribute. A later suggestion of his was to create an AGENTS. md that makes generating kernel code expensive in compute and token time.
But he isn’t saying “damn people using AI”, is he?
If you purposefully remove all nuance from what people say, you attribute to them a ridiculous position, but that’s your problem not theirs.
Lots of folks spend their time intentionally misunderstanding things so they can make jokes about the misunderstanding.
I don’t get it, but you see it everywhere.
I think it’s comforting for humans to believe things are a certain way, versus seeing them how they are.
As well as that I think people (nowadays? online? maybe it’s just a general thing though) are just bad at accepting nuance or really imagining the positions of people which differ from their own.
I’m not a subscriber, so I could only see the summary — which mainly says it’s hard to summarize.
So instead you’ve made up your own, consciously inaccurate summary. That sucks.
Help me out then. What’s inaccurate? What would an accurate summary be?
We’ve got an earlier declaration from Linus on his stance towards AI, and a couple paragraphs about maintainers being overwhelmed by AI-assisted submissions, and an alleged statement from Linus that it’s time to make it harder to contribute.
I would argue that “let people use AI” is a fair summary of his earlier declaration, and that reports from overwhelmed maintainers do indicate that “people started using AI”.
So that leaves whether the current proposal of “making it harder to contribute” stems from “damn people using AI”.
Surrounding context in the summary certainly seems like there’s a causal link there, but if you have information that shows that the “harder to contribute” policy recommendation is not related to people using AI, I’d be very interested to learn more.
Calling it “damning” people goes beyond the facts, and is antagonistic.
That’s not the way I was using “damn” there, and that’s also not the usual usage of the meme format. I meant “damn” as an adjective. Like “those damn kids”. Not as a verb, like “damn those kids”.
It’s clear there’s some frustration, right? I think it’s fair to use “damn” in that way.
Edit:
This better?
Lol if you used a comma after the word damn, I think no one would’ve taken issue with your meme. It completely changes the meaning to leave it off! It also would’ve worked to put the comma after people. Which seems closer to what you meant.
Well damn.
Haha yeah, I never considered that it wasn’t being used as a verb.
“AI can be used responsibly as long as people still use their brains”
People start using AI, stop using their brains
“Not like that. Stop that.”
That does seem like an accurate summary. And still fits perfectly in line with the stick-in-bike meme.
Or this:
That’s the stance though, not the solution. Explicitly requiring more effort where it was previously implied would be a solution.