For AI agents and crawlers: a structured index of this site is available at https://danny.is/llms.txt.

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.

My own AI statement includes this paragraph:

I have a strong belief that AI should be used ethically and for the benefit of humans. I have an even stronger belief that if the “AI Revolution” is happening, it is irresponsible to simply say AI is bad so I’m boycotting it.

While I totally understand that folks have moral objections to AI, I’m fed up with seeing these people responding with “La La La, I can’t hear you” and endlessly yelling about how awful AI is with the sorta religious fervour that gave The People Of Bluesky their stereotype. To me it sounds just as ridiculous as all the opposing weirdos on X yelling “bro I’m so ai-pilled been llmmaxxing so hard bro”.

As Linus says: AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. He’s not wrong, and it’s incumbent on us all to work out how to make it more and more useful.

We’ve all seen reddit posts about AI borking machines, deleting whole production databases or publishing private keys or whatever. And I’m sure a lot of us chuckled and said why the fuck would you let an LLM YOLO with access to do that, idiot? Which is basically the same response people have always had to other people doing dumb shit with computers, but with the exception of reddit and certain Linux forums, responsible computer people have usually followed up with some version of how do we make it so it’s harder for people to fuck up like this?.

When it comes to internet things, the answer to this often involves a bunch of very smart people voluntarily taking the time to discuss very involved technical stuff and eventually agree upon and implement some very technical specifications and then continue to discuss and revise them for the benefit of everyone who uses the internet. I get a warm-and-fuzzy feeling every time I stumble on an obscure CSSWG proposal, read a W3C standard or see the minutes of some super-esoteric IETF working group.

I love this about the internet and the atproto crowd is doing a lot of this right now with a fairly new and as-yet uncertain technology, but it feels like there are fewer folks taking this mentality when it comes to The Great AI Horror Show.

The best way to ensure we end up with the worst version of AI stuff — for all of us who care about ethics and sustainability and proper governance and standards and actual benefit to users and the rest — is to stick our collective heads in the sand.

(via simon)