Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
Their computer is installing updates, sure they have a few minutes.
Our Linus, who art from Finland, Hallowed be thy kernel.
He’s been in California for decades.
But he’s from Finland.
Linux users in their natural habitat, obscure online forums.
Observe how they nitpick minor technicalities between themselves, a hallmark sign of affection among their kind.
Iirc he’s in Oregon.
Didn’t he jump on the AI bandwagon?
No, he said AI may be used for assistance in kernel commits, but the same code quality and comprehensibility as before AI is required.
He cares about the output, not it you got some code snippet from ai or stackoverflow.
That’s a “yes, but”, not a “no”.
And AI code is intrinsically bad because is fundamentally impossible to understand (yeah, I mean literally). You just can understand what you actually put your effort to comprehend, reason and write by yourself. They’re just delegating their reasoning to a machine.
Also, Why not LLMs?
AI is just stolen code. It’s often similar quality to human output
I once tried to remake one of my projects using AI. When I gave it the requirements, it damn near recreated the project exactly how I made it. It was probably referencing my exact project, which would have been its training data, but it was a bit weird how well it did it
It was not, “fundamentally impossible to understand” either figuratively or literally
If I don’t find an anti-AI kernel fork I might be moving to NetBSD soon. That sucks, I hate moving to a new OS.
Linus has always prioritized results over ideological purity. Which is why Linux runs the world whereas BSD is still just a niche project.
I’m not totally convinced that his behavior in the past is a reflection on what is to come. He is at this point still refusing to answer questions about licensing LLM generated code and such and has apparently been obfuscating LLM commits. That doesn’t sound like somebody who is committed to results so much as it sounds like somebody giving into AI brainrot.
He’s also human, for example he hypothetically could use AI to offset a disability like dementia - a totally reasonable emotional response, but also not who I want controlling global cyber security.
Last I heard though all AI commits were a separate branch, I wasn’t aware of any sneakiness.
Clearly he doesn’t care about results because he slop coded with antigravity rather than reading documentation for a python side-project. I imagine his younger self would be cussing his older self out for shipping things he literally doesn’t understand.
The reason for his actions are much simpler: he got paid. He gets paid from the linux foundation which receives a lump sum from AI companies. In 2024 Linus said AI was just Hype, but then the foundation received millions in funds from the AI companies.
If he cared about results he would have written the damn things himself.
I’m no vibecoder but between 2024 and now, LLMs also got much better. It might not have been the money that changed his mind.
LLMs either hit a wall or got worse, so no.
As much as I’d like that to be true, this is unfortunately not the case…
You’re going to argue that some new never before seen trove of uncontaminated training data was discovered? Perhaps you think the AI Scaling Laws don’t exist? Businesses that adopted AI dropped it or went out of business not long after, it’s as useless today as it was in the 1980s.
I’m not sure I’d call permissive licensing “ideological purity” compared to copyleft.
Frankly, I think BSD loses because corporations are legally allowed to take and never give back.
That and BSD was almost BSD™ by AT&T™.
Lost all its momentum at probably its most valuable growth opportunity to a single dev.
A lot of people very recently are already jumping ship from Linux so it appears a new most valuable growth opportunity has arrived.
OUCH
Me with my media library laptop on 58 days of uptime, chugging along like nothing is wrong
Windows isn’t ready for daily driving imo, it’s risky to use such an unstable OS for high importance tasks.
It’s fine if you want to tinker and experiment with a different OS, but for day to day usage I think you should really be using something more stable.
I remember during the last big win11 update i defined active hours which was recommended by Microsoft to do so it only updates outside of work hours.
Only for it to get reset without notification so all workstations started updating in the middle of work when left idle
I*
No, you don’t. Shhhh.
Simple rules of thumb:
Never use windows for presentations.
Never use powerpoint for presentations.
Never use your own profile for presentations.
Always have a synced version to a URL that you can refer the audience to if the projector fails or doesnt like your computer.
But yeah, that sucks.
A friend who did a lot of presentations said: always have backups for everything.
- spare laptop
- duplicates of all kinds of connectors & cables
- projector and external speakers (if all in-person audience)
- know of any other available rooms nearby
- copies of presentation on USB and online
- etc.
I went on a business trip with him once, and we all carried 2 bags each of equipment. Last I heard, he ended up working for a large entertainment company in LA.
deleted by creator
I haven’t used Windows in years, but it’s kind of funny to remember because my Linux machines take at most 5 minutes to update (even with a hundred packages to update), and only require a restart if something important happens, and even in that case I can postpone the reboot.
Good luck anyway!
Nowadays, a lot of Linux distributions like Ubuntu, for example, will do an update and then tell you that you should reboot, even if a reboot isn’t strictly necessary. You can still ignore and postpone, but I think most users will see this as very similar to Windows.
Except for the fact that you can still use your computer while it’s updating. And it only takes one reboot (which takes the same amount of time as any other reboot) to apply the updates. And you have to actually tell your computer that you want to reboot. It’s really not like windows at all.
Windows machines frequently do updates without a reboot nowadays and you can usually postpone an update to a more convenient time.
The problem is that when an update that requires a restart is waiting, it changes the standard restart button into one that does an update and restart. You can often fall into muscle memory and accidentally trigger an update.
When combined with the fact that you quite often get problems that go away with a reboot you can easily get yourself into OP’s position where they’re waiting for an update to finish at a really inconvenient time.
Not even doing an A/B partition kexec update scheme with VM live migration for all critical services??
Oh wait I’m a stereotype
remember because my Linux machines take at most 5 minutes to update
I keep kicking myself because I’m using fedora Kinoite on my slowest machine. It’s going to get arch eventually, but for now it’s just annoying whenever I go to use it for a few minutes until it finishes the update.
How is this only midly infuriating.
OP has embraced their inner calm
Stockholm syndrome.
The niceness cancels it out
Seriously, this right here is why I stopped using windows for work and switched to linux for professional reasons. Windows is not serious business software because of shit like this.
Nice that you work at a place that allows that. Self employed?
There are a lot of places that allow Linux in a business/corporate environment
IT guy here. When you finally can respond or join the meeting, make sure you cover yourself in feathers from a pillow and blame a duck gang for your misfortune.
Why not cover yourself with printed out Win11 logos and blame it on Windows Update?
Linux.
Or literally any other OS than Windoze.
In 15 minutes? WOW!
LiveUSB of any distro should be up and running in 2 mins max.
You can install Linux in 5
And update while using it and restart at your own convenience.
4…
And then spend an hour trying to get the presentation to run the way you made it. I love Linux, but installing Linux here in this time sensitive situation is definitely not the move for someone who has Windows already installed and their presentation completed and saved, presumably because they don’t know enough about Linux to confidently switch over completely. Some will probably be able to get out of that situation unscathed, but not most.
I don’t think they were genuinely expecting the person to install Linux instead of waiting for an update to finish
And yet, they would still be more likely to pull off the presentation in Linux if it’s literally not possible in Windows 😉
deleted by creator
Nice.
Nice
Nice
I know there are large organisations where the laptops are configured to also update their firmware when users are trying to get out the door at the end of the day and the outsourced ICT teams couldn’t care less.
Microsoft continues to be the best advocate for migrating to Linux.
When it happened to one of my students at least I was able to play it off and make fun of Windows instead of embarrassing them. But I also give full credit on presentations regardless of how bad they go.
That said, woe is you if it’s literally anything else, like a conference or a business meeting. Lol
Why would you give full credit regardless of outcome? Nonsensical.
Only for the presentation itself, there’s a written part that has a rubric. With presentations, the social aspect is enough to get people to do as well as they can because most people prefer not to look like an idiot in front of the class.
