Post by @geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml

2026-10-15 23:26 UTC

Linus going beastmmode " Linus Torvalds responded with an emphatic rejection of tool usage declarations. He wrote: What you are about is something entirely different. It has nothing to do with “expectations”, and it has everything to do with your hangups. I don’t understand this whole idiotic concept of “don’t use AI for X”. Here’s a new rule just for you: don’t use compilers for any of your kernel submissions. Because if you can’t show that you really understand what the machine is actually doing by writing your code in assembler, then I don’t want to see your code contribution. You clearly aren’t competent if you can’t write it that way. And btw, you had better not use an editor to write that commit message either. Because I need you to show me that you can actually write a good commit message without using tools that make it easy to backspace and hide the mistakes you made while typing. Ok? Because otherwise those tool-assisted commits of yours clearly aren’t showing that you know what you are doing. Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be? So no. We’re not going to make stupid rules that say “you can’t use tools for X”. The kind of expectations I have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing. But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use. And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools. ® "

Replies (5)

@mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2026-10-15 23:38

That’s not really beast mode. That’s a guy with a god complex not understanding the problem after refusing to acknowledge he’s not the only one who cares about Linux for the past twenty years. the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools. You know who else isn’t shying away from the new tools? Trump and his cronies. Like this argument means literally nothing. People like Peter Thiel have said they want the world to end, these are the lines of people not shying away from the tools that Torvalds is aligning himself with. Dude needs to fuck off and stop being a single point of failure.

Open ##5053853
@usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 2026-10-16 00:09

The open source software movement was very much founded on the idea of being concerned about what kinds of tools we use as a society. Software that’s “just a tool” can locks you down and out of what you can do with it. Same argument can just as well be made that people were “shying away from using new and interesting tools” by running free software instead of Microsoft’s new priority stuff that locks you in AI similarly gives massive control to a handful of companies. They have already used that leverage to intentionally sandbag tasks without telling you, when they think it’s against their economic interests (model distillation and AI research). Is it not possible to imagine that goes further, they would use that leverage to slip in backdoor, not report classes of bugs, etc.?

Open ##5054105
@Solumbran@lemmy.world 2026-10-16 00:21

Wow, that’s an incredibly stupid take. Like, the kind that you generally expect from brainwashed dumbasses that don’t even know what is the difference between a screen and a computer. That’s scary that people would listen to a guy that completely lost his understanding of reality.

Open ##5054176
@gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 2026-10-16 00:28

based linus

Open ##5054204
@strawberry_enjoyer42@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-10-16 05:13

Wow, he’s such an asshole.

Open ##5056502