In that case, what are they doing to college for?

But also the problem is that they cheat.

Using AI is easy, as you note. You don't need to go to college to learn to do that.

College can give you many useful skills, mostly related to gathering and processing information, and applying it to solve various issues. If you just copy-paste every question into AI and then copy-paste the answer back, you will learn absolutely nothing.

LLMs hallucinate and there's nothing we can do to stop them. No amount of QA will fix that fundamental issue of "the LLM is somewhat likely to confidently produce incorrect information", if you need the answer to be correct you have to do the research yourself, maybe based on the sources the LLM provided, not just sanity-check the output. This is a very useful skill to have for many jobs involving thinking or finding stuff out.

And even if we fix the hallucinations at some point by switching to a different tech (LOL), I do think it's useful for people to keep some mental skills. Otherwise we will end up with a stupidity and/or dementia epidemics, similar to cars causing an obesity epidemic.

It is easy to see which countries have poetic mindsets and which have been shaped by sloppy drunks.

I think most countries out there are firmly in both categories...

Since there's surprisingly no Russian here yet, here are a few I know (some are probably regional):

• Где раки зимуют [Gde raki zimuyut] - "where crayfish spend their winter"
• У чёрта на куличиках [U chyorta na kulichikah] - "on the devil's little Easter breads" (there's also a version "on the devil's horns")
• За тридевять земель [Za tridevyat zemel] - "beyond threenine (i.e. 27) lands" feels somewhat fairytale/archaic, haven't heard anyone use it unironically
• В жопе мира [V zhope mira] - "in the ass of the world"
• Зажопье [Zazhopye] - a made up placename roughly meaning "beyond ass", evocative of many toponyms which start with the same prefix (e.g. Замосковоречье [Zamoskvorechye] - "beyond river Moscow")
• Мухосранск [Mukhosransk] - made-up town name, roughly translatable as "where flies shit"
• Ухрюпинск [Ukhryupinsk] - corrupted name of the town of Uryupinsk, probably on account of it being far away from my birthplace
• Подзатворожинск [Podzatvorozhinsk] - made-up town name, roughly "[place which] started to turn into cottage cheese" or "under the [place] beyond cottage cheese" or some combination of the two

But honestly the most likely phrase I'd use in an informal context is a boring чёрт знает где [chyort znayet gde] - "devil knows where"

There are currently other problems with AI but they are much easier to solve when those profiting from them don't own the government. See: China's regulation on AI chatbots

I'd like to add my perspective.

I'm not very anti-AI, I use a locally run model to help me write code (especially boring stuff).

For me it's mostly about "is it worth the time to package this thing in Nixpkgs, add it to my config, and get used to how it works?"

And for vibecoded projects, even if they work now, the answer is "probably not"; more specifically it's "let's look if it's alive in a year, if I'm still interested".

As such, I really appreciate when people add a disclaimer so that I don't have to go look at the code only to be disappointed - I also appreciated it back in the day when someone said "this is my first real project" or something, for similar reasons.

And secondly it's a question of trust. If the author doesn't disclose such basic things about the way the project has been developed, and in fact avoids answering when asked directly, what other potential problems could there be semi-hidden in the codebase?

At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like everyone to know that https://www.shellcheck.net/ exists. Unless you are a bash wizard: if your bash script doesn't pass shellcheck, it is very likely to have bugs.

I think the key point with Linux is that at least no single corporation has enough control over it to dictate the direction of the project on its own. Sure, modern Linux is fairly corporate and somewhat beholden to capitalist interests in general, but there's a lot of different actors pulling things in different directions, and the community (by that I mean non-corpo interests) still plays a role in decision making.

I didn't vote to put Linux in AI servers, defense projects, Teslas

The definition of FLOSS mandates that software authors relinquish control over how and by whom their software is used, see for example the JSON licensing controversy. But I agree that we should rethink this somewhat libertarian approach and at least try to prevent our software being used for evil.

I didn't choose to ban devs based on their nationalities

Yeah that one was a yikes. Especially given it wasn't even prompted by any legal threats, it was just the Linux devs complying with an unjust law prematurely.

I'd be pretty wary of allowing MIT kernel modules.

Wait, is that a thing?? Unless you mean the out of tree modules, in which case the MIT ones are not the worst offenders (looking at you NVidia)

Ok, so there's no statistically rigorous review yet, but 73% of LLM-generated apps submitted to FlatHub were abandoned within 6 months. This is about the abandonment rate you should expect to see on any newly announced LLM-written project, and this figure appears to be much higher than hand-written projects (e.g. this study, while not directly comparable, shows a 16% abandonment rate).

The reason for this is sort of obvious to me: an LLM makes it really easy to write code that makes an app work, therefore the threshold of involvement/interest needed to "make an app" is much lower. This in turn removes the selection force that makes software authors likely to be interested in, and thus put in the effort (or tokens) to maintain their software going forward. (this is putting aside the fact that LLMs are still horrible at software architecture and quite bad at infrastructure, making the long-term maintenance more difficult).

I don't doubt that some people will have a lot of passion for their vibecoded thing, and will keep it going for a while. This might even be the case here given the author went out of their way to post about it on Lemmy and respond to comments, seemingly without an LLM in the loop at that stage of the process. But it's also important to disclose your LLM use so others can adjust their statistical expectations.

anecdotally, I’ve built a lot of projects and abandoned them because I ran out of time. With an LLM to reduce the input effort I actually think I would’ve maintained them longer.

Likely you would have also built more projects if you had access to an LLM, thus giving you less time to spend maintaining each individual one. Which is kind of the problem here...

They are here to stay, but stuff built with an LLM is statistically way less likely to be maintained for more than a couple months compared to a hand-written thing. Anecdotally I also feel it's way more likely to have security issues. So I think it's important to disclose so people have their expectations set correctly.

Eh, for sure corporations do contribute a lot to every major FOSS project out there. I don't expect huge, versatile codebases to be maintained by volunteers lemmy-style, and corpos are the dominant organization kind under the capitalist mode of production, so of course they will have the resources to have a foot in every door.

But the key differentiator is how much control any single entity has over the project's code, maintenance and infrastructure. On one side of the spectrum there's stuff like Rust or ffmpeg or GNU which are being pulled in various directions by various corpos and the community, on the other there's stuff like Chromium and AOSP where Google unilaterally controls everything. Projects like Linux or Firefox fall somewhere in the middle. We desperately need more projects to be of the first kind, and I feel like to achieve this projects should go as far as to ban donations over a certain amount and limit the number of contributors affiliated with a single organization. "Avoid success at all costs" is my single favorite rule of FOSS building, and it should be applied to technical, financial and organizational decisions all the same.

Look into hibernation/suspend-to-disk. It's not too difficult to set up, and the power drain there would be basically 0 because the computer powers off completely. The only downside is that it takes slightly longer to resume, but on modern SSDs it's honestly not that noticeable.