CoyoteFacts

I don’t think they’re all that separable. In the worst case, using a corporation’s LLM, as Linus is doing, is in essence voicing support for any negative effects in the strongest way possible. LLMs as a technology are fueled by stolen and scraped content, which is in turn fueled by other myriad issues, like datamining and privacy erosion. LLMs as a technology are also extremely inefficient and resource intensive; by writing yourself off as “just one person” doing it we’re ignoring the global effect of many “one persons” all consuming resources by using this technology.

I guess my point is that by using and helping to normalize LLM usage it’s playing right into the hands of all the previously mentioned consequences. Big tech doesn’t need you to use their specific brand of LLM, they just need you to become dependent on the idea of LLM assistance itself. Their endgoal is total adoption and mindshare, and they’re spending vast amounts of money in order to reach it. By refusing to support the technology no matter how “useful” it might be, we can prevent many of the inherent problems from getting worse, and prevent big tech from gaining even more leverage over slightly important things like “is the news real”.

Given his flogging of LLMs with respect to the kernel, I’m guessing Linus is of the opinion that vibe coding is okay to play around with for yourself and for your personal tools, but to use it professionally or to force others to interact with your own vibe coded junk is where the fault lies. This is a fairly mature take on the surface, but also I’m someone who really can’t get past the part where the inherent existence of LLMs is carving ruin through the world through their content theft, resource depletion, and class warfare… so like… I hope he pulls a little harder on those threads sometime instead of judging it purely based on its utility.