>unsourced information about an inflammatory topic shared in a humor community
I trust this graph with every fiber of my being (/s)
I don’t know if this graph is real or not but it’s not a secret that Linus Torvalds is in favor of using AI for developing the kernel
feels like this should be normalized in someway
IIRC Linus called the latest releases quite big (in size) and I would assume this connects to the number of security fixes that have come about lately.
He also fixed some bugs using Claude too. So it probably does indeed have increasing AI usage as one component but also increasing submits as the other. The increased submits may still be AI linked (i.e they used AI to find bugs) but not necessarily done with AI. So overall someone thing like (em dashes / a measure of commits) may look more tame than this.
I agree completely. I am also curious about what alternative people who oppose this on a pure anti AI stance would propose. The cat is out of the bag and even slop is enough to deliver credible attacks these days.
Remember my words: The em dash will be skynets fall!
em dashes are not ai exclusive! humans have used them for ages before ai! stop calling all em dashes ai!!
I really love the emdash. I’m very—very—upset ai ruined it for me—cunts.
Rebel. Start using triple em dashes⸻see?
Fu———ck yeah.
(╯°□°）╯︵┻⸻━⸻┻
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It could be a haiku. They don’t need to be 5-75 syllables. It’s more about an observation or a moment of clarity/realisation. The first two lines set up a concept or image, and the third line closes out the thought, usually with contrast. Just have to structure it properly.
I really love the emdash,
I’m very—very—upset ai ruined it for me.
Cunts.
5-75
You have been reading much longer haikus than I have 😜
That’s how you know that comment isn’t ai. No dash.
timetoproveourhumanitybyrejectingallpunctuation
c/unexpected_agglutinative_language
I once tried to write a haiku,
Whose syllables were out of skew.
The words started flowing;
I just kept on going,
A Limerick will just have to do.
Oh, that reminds me: is Haiku still a slop-free OS?
Slop and driver free
Yeah, they’re based
Haiku’s are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator
Cold dead god-damned hands
Turns out AI learned from humans, who learn from the writings they’re exposed to
It’s an endless cycle, and we’re only in the first revolution
And one solution would be to just turn off all grammar and spell check and let people’s fat fingers and inability to spell let them stand out as the human. Oh boy.
LLMs are really good at language, it’s their whole thing. If you tell them to make spelling errors, they’ll do it just as easily as they can copy the tone and cadence of MLK or Trump speeches
Also, please no, I’m so bad at spelling
I did that over a year ago. It was always misinterpreting what I was trying to say and fucking it up, so this is honestly way better.
Ya except the internet called everyone grammar nazis for caring.
On the plus side, drunk people would have a MUCH harder time starting arguments…
So, I’m guessing you don’t meet too many drunk people…
Ypu think I cant spell drunk amd anget huh bitcj!?
Quite the opposite, but I know they can’t type for shit. If they can’t type a coherent message, it’s easy to ignore.
Greta jda
I’ve been using linux for 18 years, but since reviewing the Open Slopware list I’ve been making a lot of changes.
FreeBSD ticks almost every box I need it to. It runs Plasma, it runs Steam/Proton (through a thin compatibility layer that enables a lot of other linux software), it can be set up immutably and has superior containerization natively via jails. It even supports XDG compliance.
But there is no support for changing voltage or clock rate on any amd gpu (maybe any gpu at all) and no driver support for my newer amd gpu at all.
It honestly feels like how linux used to feel back in the day 😅
I don’t think I’m gonna jump ship just yet. The recent ai code fiasco that happened in the linux kernel (race condition, regression, vacation) was averted by the team of talented human developers who reviewed Linus’ code. I am choosing to have faith that it will be ok for a while… given there are few alternatives.
That being said, I think I might finally be ready to hop on the fuck-sysyemd train. I was able to look past the megalomaniacal tendencies of the dev because the tools were so convenient, but the AI PRs and code review pushes me over the edge. I am gonna configure a daily driver in Artix soon.
Edit: I should note, FreeBSD also has some AI code issues. But the linux-libre kernel might not. Something like Hyperbola (GNU/Linux-libre) might be more appropriate for someone who is trying to avoid ai code strictly.
can you elaborate on the recent fiasco you mentioned? I totally missed the news on that
Linus introduced a race condition and a regression with a AI generated code, then handed off fixing the problem to someone else because he was going on vacation.
Fiasco might have been an exaggeration, but it’s still pretty lame.
This was caught during review, so nothing was “introduced” quite yet. And there’s no indication that Linus wouldn’t have produced a race condition (a notoriously more easy to miss kind of bug) without the use of AI tools.
It’s only being exaggerated so much because he used AI.
I could attribute the race condition just as much to their use of the C language as to AI.
Race conditions I’m pretty sure aren’t language specific. Rust can have them too.
You are correct to point out the distinction between race conditions and data races. Rust only rules out data races.
I don’t know whether the race in question was a data race or not.
I would still wager that Rust code generally has fewer race conditions than C, given that mutable aliasing can be used as symbolic prevention of race conditions, i.e. your
&mut Tdoesn’t necessarily need to hold data; it can represent some domain concept.aren’t language specific
There are actually languages that guarantee deterministic concurrent execution, and this can rule out larger classes of race conditions than just data races. See the Bloom language and CALM theorem.
Yes, but the tools provided by Rust:
- Prevent most common ones via aliasing^mutability, Send and Sync marker traits, etc.
- Require explicitly marking the cases not handled by this, e.g. unsafe features require an
unsafe {}block to be used.
Yea he basically said “This seems to work but is slop, lead Dev, make it real.”
That is something I am surprisingly okay with. Quickly figuring out if something is feasible is good, and doing it in a back of the napkin style is the norm, even without LLMs. Of course then you need to do it properly, without falling into the trap of reimplementing the slop.
Race conditions are not unusual, and it was caught during review, so there’s really no problem here.
Great
This doesn’t make me nervous at all…
nothing to be nervous about, its literally software engineering and project management 101, programmer writes code reviewer catches bugs, nothing goes to production. this happens all the time, has happened in the linux kernel way before LLMs were a thing
It shouldn’t, because it’s a lie.
Not what happened. I’m not digging it up but this story has been debunked repeatedly
(you’re welcome to just point folks to a debunking)
People are welcome to stop spreading the falsehoods. In every thread where this is said (including this one), the truth is pointed out but those spreading it couldn’t care less. Just scroll. Others are pointing out the details here just like every other place.
Yeah there’s 240 comments here. I’m not shoveling through that.
Literally you got hit with an linux mailing list saying this is what happened?
Those words don’t make sense
pretty lame
lame /lām/
adjective
Disabled so that movement, especially walking, is difficult or impossible.
:/
People who write this dictionary should listen to the public more maybe. Lame doesn’t mean what you wrote for at least 25 years.
This is why dictionaries list more than 1 definition and you shouldn’t stop at the first one:
- weak; inadequate; unsatisfactory; clumsy.
a lame excuse.
- Slang: Sometimes Disparaging and Offensive. awkward, dull, stupid, or uninteresting.
- Slang: Sometimes Disparaging and Offensive. out of touch with modern fads or trends; unsophisticated.
Linus admitted he uses LLMs sometimes, so now the most trustworthy developer in the history of computers is now being shat on and raged about by people who probably couldn’t write a hello world app in any programming language. They’re just parroting the idea that Linux is vibecoded now, but it isn’t, and if anything they should be heartened by the recent decision to raise the bar for kernel contributors. Instead, they’re pretending Linus and other contributors aren’t trustworthy at all, based solely on a desire to feel outrage. When people correct them on these lies they’re spreading, no one ever admits they are wrong and stops spreading it, they just don’t respond to comments like that and continue writing them elsewhere.
Tldr; people are stupid.
You didn’t answer the question at all.
I take it you’re another outrage junkie who cannot help but tell everyone the kernel is vibecoded. Your feedback is only valuable in that it communicated that
Completely incorrect.
Last I tried, BSD didn’t like the WiFi on my laptop, so it’s currently a no-go for me.
Gonna survive on Linux for now, but at least I know I have a potential refuge elsewhere.
I use Gentoo with OpenRC btw.
I recommend you looking at RedoxOS. It’s still not stable, but it’s evolving fast and has an anti-AI instance. Also it’s insanely efficient and optimized.
The em dash thing annoys me because I actually used em dashes a lot in my own writing. Now I’ve had to change how I write to keep people from assuming I’m using generative tools for writing.
In the plus side, our mayor loves my writing style because he thinks staff should be using AI for everything.
I don’t advise changing the way you write. It’s a skill you need to flex, and unless you’re using em dashes incorrectly then you should be able to find ways of differentiating yourself from AI without fundamentally changing how you communicate.
Idk, just food for thought. Fuck anyone that tries to say I use AI to write — they can eat a bag of dicks.
I used to like the punch of “It’s not just ___, it’s ___” but I’ve pretty much removed that from my vocabulary.
Same, I would use that construction pretty frequently. Or “it’s X not Y”.
But now, it’s not just trite, it is triggering.
I’m trying to stop using “for bonus points, ____”. I don’t have any bonus points left to give out.
Same, except “fucks sake”.
I’m entirely out of fucks.
Oh god yeah this and bullet points
I’m going to start using “for bullet points, ____” and see if anybody notices.
I never even heard of an em dash until I started reading about AI. I was just using hyphens everywhere I was apparently supposed to be using em dashes. I am a stickler for grammar and correct punctuation (except for punctuation inside quotes which my internal programmer won’t allow me to do the American way) so I’ve started using em dashes – and now people think I’m an AI.
That’s no —, it’s two hyphens playing pretend!
Some Markdown renderers interpret two dashes as an en dash and three as an em dash, so on some Lemmy clients, that might show up as a real en dash.
inb4 AI resurrects the tab v. spaces debates but between how many dashes equals an em dash.
Wait, what’s the rule for punctuation inside quotes? I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a regional difference.
In the US, the punctuation is supposed to be inside of the quotes, even if that punctuation wasn’t actually part of what’s being quoted. So if somebody says “your mother sews socks that smell,” the quoted partial bit would be typed as “your mother sews socks.” In Britain it would be “your mother sews socks”. The difference might not be really obvious visually; it’s whether that period (which is required to end the sentence) is before the end quote or after it. Apparently programmers in the US (like I used to be) have gravitated towards the British style because with string variables (which are generally delimited by quotes) you can’t be farting around with adding phantom punctuation inside the quotes, even if it is grammatically correct here.
I’m I’m not mistaken, the reasoning for this goes back to the printing press era. The comma or period would be on the same type block as the quotation mark; dealing with individual blocks for , or " was too fragile or fiddly. So they had blocks for ," and ." that were used regardless of sentence structure
Oh. That’s pretty neat. My favourite bit of typesetting lore :- this combination is known as the dog’s bollocks in some circles.
I’ve just been using en dashes this entire time, was once accused of being a bot because I used them, and as a result I found out that I was using dashes improperly — and should instead use em dashes.
I think putting spaces before and after the em dash is incorrect, but I’m not sure. I do it because I think it just looks better visually.
I also think it’s incorrect—I don’t do it.
They’re useful—especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons; I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
I use them when connecting a thought in between another thought—for example, what I just did right now—and then returning back to the original thought. I use a semicolon when connecting two related thoughts together*; LLMs tend to only use one em-dash, so I’m hoping that by using two of them instead—and a semicolon instead whenever an LLM would use an em-dash—there will be no confusion as to whether or not I’m human.
I use them with a space on each side – which is apparently wrong. Sigh.
I like to alternate between sets of em dashes and sets of parentheses to obscure the fact that I’m using too many “asides” in my writing.
I do that too on top of everything else I said. It’s an ADHD thing. I write how I think, with lots of tangents.
You’re absolutely right! I have never seen an LLM use em-dashes in the way you do — if they use them, it’s always to add a pause to the sentence.
Fuck, dashes, embrace, Hegel.
They’re useful. Especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons. I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
There you go. It’s easier, clearer, and less pretentious.
Okay, but you’ve just created a sentence fragment, which is fine unless you were trying to use complete sentences.
Fragments are wrong in elementary school grammar, yes. In the real world, they’re used by Charles Dickens and other sophisticated writers intentionally.
Did I not say “which is fine”?
Why do you care about the options of people who can’t even fathom that someone might use Alt-hyphen to get an en dash (or shift-Alt-hyphen for an em dash)
And that’s on Mac. Obviously on Linux there are even more options. (Compose key and so on)
I care when people think I’m lazy and outsource my writing.
I am lazy, but my terrible writing is my own, dammit.
As an actual human who uses em dashes — or usually, two or three hyphens that turn into an em dash in Markdown — I feel personally attacked.
aren’t those regular dashes? em dashes seem just a bit longer
N dashes. They are as wide as an n. M dashes are as wide as an m.
But what is em?
It’s a width same as point size of a font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_(typography)
Em means the letter M. That’s what it’s called. Historically, M in a font was equally as wide as it was tall, so it’s used to refer to the font size.
I will usually just use one (1) hyphen for that purpose - in the much same way that I will use "…" instead of “…” - because I like to upset typography nerds.
Have you tried using the dedicated triple dot character (…) instead of three separate dots (…)? It’s a life changer
They said they do it to ‘upset typography nerds’ — likely they tried…
I’m upset now
Same, but I’m unlikely to use them in comments
Microsoft Word also appears to autocorrect dashes into em-dashes. I’m not sure it’s because of copilot since I noticed around 2024, but a bunch of documents I use at work, drafted/revised in 2021, are full of them.
Word has been doing that for decades and I’ve always hated it and turned it off
Found the bot
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Bless your — illiterate — heart.
Confidently incorrect. Read a book now and then.
No.
Read a book ✨
What does this say about how LLMs plan their sentences?
Man, I miss when Linux felt like a refuge. It’s always been flawed of course but now it feels like everyone in positions of influence are embracing the awful
It’s getting harder to justify the inconvenience of going off the beaten path if that path is turning into the same slop as the commercial ones.
The Linux Foundation has unfortunately become a commercial shithole, run by a clusterfuck of Silicon Valley VCs. When I see the kinds of garbage AI projects that are being shoveled into it every day, I lose more and more respect for it.
Look for yourselves: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects
And it’s sad to see Linus falling into their lock and step. I respect him for a lot of things, but when it comes to AI, he’s sadly just wrong.
Holy fuck, that is a lot of AI hype projects.
For me most of the projects at the bottom link to “Page not found” Confluence pages…
The beaten path is sloppifying a lot faster than the alternatives and where management gets angry if you don’t use AI.
True, and for most things you get a choice, in contrast to Windows/MacOS. But if the kernel itself slides down this path there’s not a lot you can do unless you’re willing to sacrifice enormous amounts of time and effort.
I’m kind of done with this passion, I’ll be investing more of my time into yard maintenance and my boat.
I imagine there’s been quite an effort by commercial interests to influence the direction of this path
Get used to it. Large groups of users will probably start transitioning from MS given the current state of digital security vulnerabilities and geopolitical vulnerabilities MS is.
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Oh dang
You can get a lot done when you’ve got 29 months in a year
Yeah sorry about that, was the default format in my spreadsheet software and I didn’t think to change it
?
The weird US American Date scheme is not used in most of the world.
I wish. Am European. I know one person that voluntarily uses their date and time formats. For reasons I will never comprehend.
He or she must enjoy the endless confusion and friction in the interaction with others. That said, some idiotic IT systems use the US format to. Causes a lot of problems.
I’m in the US and have had problems with C-level douches misreading dd-mm-yyyy dates in some system we had that logged in that format and freaking out (and also missing that the log time stamps were in UTC-0, causing further confusion/freakout)
Anyway, this is part of why I always use yyyy-mm-dd, because nobody will confuse that date string for any other date, and everyone who can understand dates at all will be able to read it.
D/M/Y > M/D/Y
There is only YYYYMMDD
sadly for everyone that’s factually incorrect, but the phrase DD/MM/YYYY > MM/DD/YYYY does not preclude YYYYMMDD > DD/MM/YYYY > MM/DD/YYYY
your pedantery is apreciated.
Because one lives the other should not long live Y-M-D
NO. You need a character per digit and you always want the leading 0 shown.
YYYY-MM-DD
At least it makes my folders really easy to sort through…
Only if you leave the leading zeros!
ISO 8601 is the only correct way.
It’s close, sure, but actually no. That standard currently requires the letter T (and no white-space) between date and time when both are present, and, frankly, that’s ugly and a space should be allowed.
An old version of the standard allowed the space, and GNU’s coreutils seem to have carried on the tradition, so I’m not alone in thinking this.
OP’s graph uses slashes.
Dashes would remove all the confusion.
No because it’s the global format that typically uses periods.
D.M.Y (normal)
Y-M-D (superior)
M/D/Y (mental illness)Mixing up the formats and denominators makes this mess even worse.
you should also always specify YYYY-MM-DD because often M and D ignores leading zeros, YY means the 2 digit suffix, and Y… well, i don’t even know what that is but i’m sure it’s something less specific than YYYY
if we’re going to be picky about being clear about things, let’s be truly clear about things
YYYYY would be something like “The Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand and Twenty-Six” (or probably just “Twenty Twenty-Six”, but the other is more ridiculous so I’ll go with that)
Y would just be “6” but I can’t think of any context where that would ever be used
Yep, I do it in every format. Just kept it short for readability.
The dates below the graph
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Pretty much only in the US.
Some BS AI “visionaries” keep blurting.
Personally the only part I have seen is documentation is now vibe coded, where in the past, it was autism coded.
1000 day intervals… Nice. MM/DD/YY… Not nice.
8601 4 LYF
Programmers don’t have gang signs we just recite rfc.
4 EVA
It’s not just Linux, it’s GNU + Linux
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as GNU + Linux, is in fact, Linux
It says Linux Kernel
It’s a joke about common LLM-gen-AI text patterns
🟥 Linux Kernel — CORRECTED: NOT GNU/Linux
What is the accelerating rise of m-dashes from approximately 2014-2019 about? That trend apparently continued until very recently, even slowed down a bit, before exploding at some point in 2025 or 2026 for obvious reasons.
Does anyone have a theory?
If the graph is not just using made up data, then it also measures absolute em-dashes, not em-dash density, so possibly could be an increase in interest in contributing to the kernel?
By a factor of roughly 10-fold? Maybe. It could indeed be a measure of overal absolute contribution. But post 2025 that could be influenced by m-dash density especially.
No, the comment I responded to was about the ~2014 uptick, not the recent one.
The recent one is obviously AI one way or another. Absolute contribution rate is higher due to AI as well.
Yeah sure, no I am not surprised about post 2025. My question was indeed about the post 2014 uptick.
I assume it’s due to phone keyboards.
I don’t think a lot of kernel devs are programming on their phone
That’s why the number was low before.
The OP graph is just absolute count on the y axis, so I also assumed it was basically measuring LoC, but looking at this chart, the em-dashes do appear to be definitely more of a modern phenomenon compared to raw LoC:
Maybe some policy/tooling change around 2014? A guess is perhaps something to do with allowing UTF-8 in source files, but that’s a pretty long shot.
Looking at that, the lines of code cannot really be the full story. M-dash count really just appears to rise from 2014 onwards.
I wonder how many em dashes are real vs interpreted.
I love an em-dash, but I have never typed one on purpose; they are all just two minus in a row and I use them wrong – with a space around (*inspect source to see that lemmy translates for me). I abuse them like I abuse semicolons. They are a typographical tick that indicates a pause or pivot when I translate my thoughts to text.
I can imagine a human manuscript editor turning punctuation like a comma into an em-dash when it makes sense, but I can’t imagine a developer ever specifically typing out one – with the need to either know or look up the unicode for it. The only relevant place would be a comment, but even then IDE’s are not generally known for their tendency to replace typed characters with something else.
Maybe some tool in the pretty-print/code-formatter ecosystem added that as a feature? But
var--is so common that I can’t imagine that’d be a good idea, even in a comment.They probably write code in Microsoft Word
I used to write websites in Notepad. It was kind of like digital Amishness.
At least notepad won’t fuck with your formatting for you
Absolutely insane ide choice. Wonder if visual studio tries to add those too.
It, thankfully, does not
For pedantry’s sake:
Two dashes –
--– in Markdown is usually rendered as an en-dash – more common in British-adjacent styles and usually surrounded by spaces.Three dashes—
—in Markdown is rendered as an em-dash—more commonly associated with American styles and usually (though not always) without spaces.Hah. Neat!
For pedantry…
My understanding was that en-dash was a range, and em-dash was a change in topic or a parenthetical, so I’ve been using the wrong one but for the right reason. This may be an American style distinction, though. Time to jump into a new rabbit hole.
I’ve always just used a hyphen for ranges, without having any idea whether that makes me a philistine. A quick search says that, like most of this, it varies depending on who you ask.
Good luck in your rabbit hole!
It’s probably about to drop off. Opus 5.5 isn’t outputting em dashes in work produced anymore
It’s been replaced by the overuse of confusing
foo's own [implied noun]phrases.I can still detect LLM output from vibes alone, like awful emoji usage.🐱
Just saying…
:%s/\s*—(\s*)/, /g
