cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51749088
GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
It’s unclear what would be accomplished by banning AI for a tiny portion of the code while continuing to use Linux, AOSP, Chromium and hundreds of other projects heavily using it.
AI or not, this is such shit attitude. Call it peer pressure, or appeal to authority, or whatever, but think for yourself. Especially for a project like GrapheneOS.
Sounds like the people that respond with “well you have a cellphone” when mass surveillance is the topic.
They’re describing the idea that the projects that Graphene is built atop and alongside of all use AI. That even if tomorrow it was decided to not allow any AI-generated code, due to the nature of being downstream, avoiding its inclusion in all capacities is actually impossible.
There is not a hint of peer pressure in this snippet. And if you knew Graphene’s history, you’d realize how absurd of a statement it is to accuse them of being peer pressured. They regularly do random shit and tell critics to get bent.
With that said, I would of course prefer they don’t accept any AI-generated code at all, but quite frankly it’s a bit bizarre of an ask in 2026 given the game Graphene plays with cutting edge development’s intersection with privacy tools.
It is not okay to exacerbate the problem if you have to use anything that had been affected by it or because of its prevalence.
If you cut a finger, you don’t chop it off.
Wasn’t prepared for Graphene to break my heart this morning. That’s what I get for having a feeling I guess.
It’s GrapheneOS. They always sail their own path regardless of flak.
Good
Why are coders so desperate to replace themselves with ai? Like you rarely hear of actual artists or writers using ai in such large waves as coders do. Sure you’ll get lots of people who have an idea for a story just have an llm do the work for them, but its less common to hear about established authors doing that. Just like how people who have an idea for a game will just have an llm write the code. Meanwhile professional coders seem thrilled to outsource their work to ai. Why???
Edit: is it bc they don’t see their work as art like artists and writers do? Bc it is a form of art just like how mathematical formulas and stuff can be art
(Obligatory not all coders. I know there are many that hate ai and hate being required to use it at work, but its really starting to feel like they’re in the minority)
There are different attitudes of engineers. Some are more results-oriented and see the code as just a means to an end. It’s difficult to get good at programming and AI makes it so you don’t really have to, so they gladly accept it as a way to build things faster.
And then there’s me on the exact opposite end of that spectrum. I don’t care much at all for the end result except that it’s what allows me to get to do programming. I like the puzzle and figuring out how to make it all work line-by-line. AI takes away all of the fun part and it does it so terribly.
Up til now both types of programmers got along decently well because building things correctly and quickly have usually taken similar paths. But with the advent of AI we’re now quite at odds with each other, and it’s been quite a pain for me.
Ugh that sounds like such a pain. Stay strong! Once they’ve smoothed out their brain using ai your skills will be in high demand to fix all the mistakes the ai makes, and then hopefully people will understand that you can’t be replaced by an ai
Up til now both types of programmers got along decently well because building things correctly and quickly have usually taken similar paths.
IMO those paths diverged in web development somewhere around 10 years ago. While you could write efficient websites using standard HTML features and minimum of JavaScript (the good-efficient path), companies and developers started going towards various frameworks, which were “faster” for developers to use, but usually at expense of performance on users’ side, numerous dependencies, and security. Each framework trying to do its own thing, and some are conceptually entirely different from bare HTML+JS.
How many AI driven cyber attacks are artists dealing with? Because they are here, cheaper to make, and much more potent than they used to be.
In a work environment there’s always been pressure to ship software faster. The industry has never been good at measuring individual or team effectiveness, which has resulted in all kinds of dumb metrics (lines of code, ticket count, etc). I see AI as just another amplifier bad behavior. Don’t use it? Odds are a teammate will and they’ll be viewed as more productive than you. In today’s world of tech layoffs that’s not a good position to find yourself in.
There’s a second angle to this too: there are two cohorts of AI users. Those who follow what I would call the YOLO path and those who spend the time iterate on the output. In my case, layers of management are blissfully unaware of this distinction, but they sure like the “line go up fast” nature of the YOLO crowd.
as a coder myself, I admit that sometimes coders are the dumbest people in the world because they live in their own bubble. they only see LLM as mere tools that would greatly help with development.
do they know how many resources are wasted by data centers? do they care when the people suffer from data center pollution? or do they realised LLM trained by stealing people works? etc
A lot more software developer are only there for as a career than artists in the art world, so you’re immediately surrounded by people who see stuff like code performance and readability as “something nerdy”, while you can push out more lines of code instead of optimizing. Not more features, more lines of code, as coding got taken over by the careerists.
That mixed with:
- most tech criticism used to come from out-of-touch parents, thinking you’re from one Quake match away from getting a machine gun to “play it in real life” (was even prevalent in non-US countries due to all kinds of moral panics);
- seeing unsupportative parents utterly devastating their kids’ careers in tech due to weird beliefs and expectations,
- seeing at least some tech fad eventually working out after the toxic hype cycle (Jack Tramiel wanted you to use your C64 for food recipes),
- forgetting that many hyped tech did actually die off (remember Kinect and NFTs?)
lead to people to think LLMs are the next big thing even if AGI won’t come.
There’s also the issue of how society frames AI “extremism”. People like to think in horseshoe theories, and that extremists are necessarily annoying. The tech industry likes to frame “vibe coders with AI psychosis” and “people really not wanting to engage with AI” as the extremes to avoid. In reality, the two extremes are TESCREALists, and anti-tech extremists. Also seen many “totally not vibe coders” using AI to generate a general understanding for the code to avoid scrutiny, while seen “AI assisted” coding going just as off the rails as vibe coding due to overly trusting the chatbot, with many still going down the AI psychosis route.
That’s a very good breakdown of the problem! Hopefully the tech industry moves onto the next fad before they do irreversible climate and brain damage
I think the anger is justified as there is a precedent for LLMs being used badly and how unethically the training data is collected (open source has been hurt deeply by scraping attacks for years). How quickly people can be driven off the deep end and form deranged relationships with chatbot style LLM assistants. The fear and anger are very valid, if they couldn’t foresee a hostile reaction to a beloved project starting to utilize the same tech that has caused harm in huge ways…Well, that’s called not reading the room, hun. I wasn’t going to fly off the handle about it. But I am deeply disappointed about it. I don’t really trust the usage of LLMs in any project as by design these are things constructed to channel skill into the hands of those with wealth, while denying those with skill access to wealth. It is mighty hard to trust anyone to use these things that are built on outright manipulation, theft, and a multitude of harms.
I have been dropping projects left and right for it, it insures that I will never touch GrapheneOS. Begrudgingly, I am still using Linux (despite the LLM usage on the Kernel). There is no real safety hatch to escape into yet. Unless, I just want to retreat into the woods and never interact with modern society ever again. Which I am mighty tempted to do, despite it meaning a gradual and uncomfortable death.
how can it be secure if there’s code that nobody wrote?
Human review and deterministic code analysis, just like with code of any other provenance
so as long as there’s proper human oversight, ai code doesn’t actually compromise the mission of graphene?
unless they let the slop sit and release it as is,
Are you asking rhetorically with a specific mission statement in mind that you believe AI code violates? I’m not aware of Graphene’s mission specifically; I am making a general statement about how AI code can be used responsibly.
just rhetorically/hypothetically for my own understanding
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While I agree with you, a counterpoint would be that it further normalizes AI usage in general, which is a large negative as long as corporate AI is still the dominant force/incarnation of it.
Yep, the more there’s cases of using AI “ethically”, the more the AI wins and takes. Maybe it’ll be a slow boil of the proverbial frog or a landslide of massive layoffs triggering crises in bursts and causing some immediately visible and tangible damage - either is terrible and neither should happen.
Using AI “just a little” or “where it makes sense” only makes things worse down the line, for everyone.
I wonder if the AI companies gonna start claiming that whatever their slop machines have generated is their intellectual property and they should get roalties on that, becoming real pain for the coding teams that heavily used them. Although I don’t know how to pull it off legally, but they got all the money for all the best lawyers and senile morons in governments that listen to them mouth agape while not being able to figure out WiFi for 20 years.
I already had my doubts in the capabilities of the GrapheneOS leadership and these doubts where renewed after the recent kerfuffle about hardware memory tagging on the Pixel 11. With these new revelations it might be time to start to look out for an alternative. Maybe its for the better. They never where able to handle criticism gracefully no matter how carefully formulated.
What abiut the hardware memory tagging issue brought up doubts? I think it was a reasonable stance for a group focused on pirvacy/security
They had to retract their statements because the Pixel 11 still supports memory tagging.
Yes, but the first builds from Google made no reference to it, so it was reasonable to prepare for a situation where Pixel 11 wasn’t supported.
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