I know plenty of people sing praises of RSS as their favorite way to consume news. I've also been relying on the format for a long time. Let's be clear, if, like me, you like to review reams and reams of information, RSS is a godsend. There is no doubt about that. You can easily centralize many sources in a single spot. And you can also easily manage those feeds from there: subscribe or unsubscribe to new sources, review, delete, mark something to read later, add them to your favorites... Again, if you deal with a large amount of information, RSS comes in handy. However, I've also noticed a couple of downsides. They are not so bad that made me change my mind from using RSS, at least not yet. But they are something to consider and keep in mind, I think. First of all, good journalism goes beyond simply finding relevant news and writing well. It also entails selecting which ones are the most important news of the day. In that sense, whenever we go to a website, we should find the news that are deemed to be most relevant close to the top. Or, in the old days, when reading a daily newspaper, we should find the most relevant news of the day on the first page. We lose that with RSS and, instead, we get an amorphous blob in the form of a long list of headlines, all of them given equivalent weight. I suppose some people may see that as a good thing. You know, avoiding being influenced by the skewed opinions of journalists and making our own choices. That may very well be true. But it still carries a price in the form of an increased effort and work on our side. Second, although this may be only relevant to people like me with a partially obsessive personality (or a tendency to be very well organized, if you prefer to see it in a more favorable light), RSS has an effect similar to social media in the sense that one feels bad leaving news unread or knowing that news articles have been accumulating on the queue. Say what you may, but at least in my case I must acknowledge that is a minor cause of stress. It's like a different version of the infinite scrolling epidemic. {link to this entry}

Over the years, ever since I've been following Linux, I must say that something that always struck me was Linus Torvalds' pragmatism and uncanny ability to maintain a balanced view on most controversial topics. In this case, I must say I have to agree with his position on AI:

"[In response to a comment: It seems like [1] expresses a very anti-LLM position in general"]

Yes.

And no, that's not the position of the Linux kernel.

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs" standpoint.

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.

The solution is to make sure those LLM tools _help_ maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side.

We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.

And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.

Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.

The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.

Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a side benefit, not the _point_ of the project.

This is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been, and never will be.

In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.

And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.

Linus"

How I wish people involved in politics had a similar approach to things! Although I must (grudgingly) admit that strong views do also play a part in society's way forward, overall I tend to dislike the dogmatic approach to things. Instead, I favor a less ideologically driven, more balanced approach like the one Torvalds appears to take most of the times. {link to this entry}