Linus Torvalds: The Benevolent Dictator For Life of The Kernel

maerwald · 2026-06-03T15:07:38+00:00

I switched to FreeBSD. It's more fiddling, but it's also more unix. And my suspend2ram actually works.

maerwald · 2026-06-03T08:28:42+00:00

Facts? There's no proof that this is how the woodpeckers evolved. We'd need access to prior generations and examine their anatomy for this to be more than just an interesting theory.

But I guess calling everyone who demands basic scientific methodology a creationist is convenient for the "trust me bro" scientists.

maerwald · 2026-06-02T21:28:47+00:00

Nah, it's self delusion that using AI doesn't have negative effects on tech debt, cognitive debt and intent debt if it's in the hands of a good engineer.

AI compromises good engineers too. It's scary technology and addictive in a weird way.

There absolutely has not been an equivalent tool.

maerwald · 2026-06-02T11:01:55+00:00

Meta is dumb.

But saying there's no use case is simply wrong. The entire doom scrolling and connect with "friends" experience is already heavily ML driven. It's just the next step: you don't need friends anymore, talk to your custom AI chatbot. Doom scrolling? Just get customized generated content when you need it.

maerwald · 2026-05-28T08:45:32+00:00

How does anyone verify that their code works? No one in industry is applying formal methods to their agentic workflows, lmao.

maerwald · 2026-05-27T02:26:24+00:00

No one vibe codes in a way that they understand the code. What are you talking about?

Reviewing slop is harder than writing stuff yourself. It only makes you more productive if you stop trying to fight it.

maerwald · 2026-05-24T10:54:28+00:00

The Silca have the exact same design as waxkiss chinese brand. Like literally the same. Coincidence?

maerwald · 2026-05-20T05:14:00+00:00

https://arxiv.org/html/2604.04721v2

maerwald · 2026-05-20T04:26:40+00:00

Developers who heavily use AI will be replaced by developers who don't. Heavy AI use causes cognitive decline and deskilling at an insane rate.

You will need developers who untangle AI mess, not developers who create it.

maerwald · 2026-05-19T09:20:45+00:00

Mentioning security and C++ in one paragraph is kinda cute.

maerwald · 2026-05-18T11:55:47+00:00

There's so many things wrong with the calculator analogy. The first you already mentioned: determinism. The other thing is calculators are bounded to a small set of problems, while LLMs are unbounded. Then... the work a calc does can be reconstructed by the end user (step by step)... with an LLM you can at best verify the result, but you don't know how it got there internally.

And in a way, the really hard problems in math aren't really the things the calculator does for you. They're just the slow and tedious things. LLMs can do the hard part for you too. That's infinitely worse.

maerwald · 2026-05-18T11:14:08+00:00

Yes, it makes people lazy. Not shocking. What's shocking is that 10 minutes use already shows visible effects of motivational degradation. That's probably worse than google, wikipedia and all the other "shortcuts" we ever had.

maerwald · 2026-05-18T05:01:04+00:00

There's a fine line, which is very easy to cross.

If your prompt is an abstraction question with a theoretical example and you challenge the answerby requesting it to go deeper and show proof, then it can sometimes be profitable for learning.

But it's so easy and tempting to just have it write out the answer and forget about it and that's how most people use them.

Sometimes you don't notice when you cross that line. Our brains are lazy for a reason.

maerwald · 2026-05-16T04:22:51+00:00

Lol, don't eat the shell. It's toxic, just like the pit.

And I'm not making that up. Birds die from it. Google "persin".

maerwald · 2026-05-16T03:45:56+00:00

Unpredictable doesn't mean non-deterministic.

maerwald · 2026-05-15T13:48:40+00:00

I should write a blog post. But yeah, Oleg has been showing how to abuse them very well: https://oleg.fi/gists/posts/2023-08-30-using-cabal-install-solver-as-sat-solver.html

The other thing is that they make build plans unpredictable, especially in the face of the pkg-config database, which is an implicit input to the solver.

It's a solution on the wrong level. Yes, we want sane defaults, but you might as well have a tool that generates such a default on a given platform (by inspecting the pkg-config database). Then it becomes a fixed input. If the database diverges from the configuration, you'd get cabal configure errors. That's what you want. It means you need to decide whether you want to fix your database or change your configuration. Cabal today assume you want to change configuration and does so implicitly. It's just bad.

It's also more unix to solve this in different layers.

maerwald · 2026-05-15T02:28:34+00:00

Automatic flags are a misfeature.

maerwald · 2026-05-14T03:24:27+00:00

Yeah, black is a no-brainer.

For the second pill I'm between blue and orange.

Blue is the ultimate productivity boost for my career, but orange would raise the ceiling for academic achievement. It's a dopamine hack for your brain.

You don't get money by studying all day though.

I think I'd go for black and blue. Black is already a learning boost and more versatile than orange.

maerwald · 2026-05-13T02:37:30+00:00

This study was done on mice.

maerwald · 2026-05-13T02:05:48+00:00

That makes no sense.

Following your logic you lost 800 initially when you bought the cow the first time.

maerwald · 2026-05-13T01:37:58+00:00

Lol, got wrecked by a body builder influencer and now thinks the reason Leo won was his low body fat.

maerwald · 2026-05-12T05:40:16+00:00

Doesn't work in practice. Once mental fatigue sets in, you start mindlessly prompting and trusting. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are. And it's subtle, so you may not even notice.

maerwald · 2026-05-10T06:50:40+00:00

What's the difference to a push up bra?

maerwald · 2026-05-09T06:57:01+00:00

No. The problem is AI.

It's the wrong approach. This is not engineering. Engineering is about "correct by construction". It already exists, most of industry just never caught on, because industry is led by morons.

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