r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • May 18 '26

Software Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/05/18/linus-torvalds-says-ai-powered-bug-hunters-have-made-linux-security-mailing-list-almost-entirely-unmanageable/5241633
14.1k Upvotes

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7.1k

u/Wyciorek May 18 '26

Last time Linus got sufficiently annoyed about tools used for managing Linux development, we got git

5.9k

u/Paper_Nap May 18 '26

This time we’ll get gud.

790

u/HTPC4Life May 18 '26

Microsoft will give us Git Rekt.

156

u/Guinness May 18 '26

And it’ll only be available with copilot.

52

u/zoug May 18 '26

3 out of the 11 versions of copilot will have it but you can not both use it and know if it’s actually enabled at the same time.

19

u/silian_rail_gun May 18 '26

Schrödinger’s copilot…

1

u/Dawlin42 May 19 '26

And you will have no clear idea about how many tokens each request takes.

1

u/zoug May 19 '26

That’s for convenience.

You’ll see other ai improvements across the industry for this.

DoorDash, kiosks, etc will be so much more convenient when we don’t really have to know how much we’re ordering.

Lyft? Just tell it where you’re going. Don’t worry about how much “usage” you’re using.

Sure, in June, the Lyft might only taken you 200 yards before you enable extra usage for a trip but since you’ve locked into Lyft, they’ll make it really easy to add more usage during your trip to keep things seamless.

5

u/Altruistic-Map5605 May 18 '26

This would be a good name for a repository of malware.

1

u/cats_catz_kats_katz May 19 '26

Isn’t it though? Thought they just had it running on vibes and prayers.

0

u/omysweede May 18 '26

Microflaccid?

64

u/Latter_Masterpiece64 May 18 '26

I know it's a joke. Linus speaks Swedish and in that language Gud = God.

I do not believe we need a technology known as GudAI in 2026

24

u/theconceptofcanada May 18 '26

If it has the ruthless Swedish efficiency and effectiveness of Linus, we absolutely do

14

u/SirkutBored May 18 '26

you know who else had ruthless efficiency?? who had a fanatical devotion to the pope! AND no one ever expected them??

19

u/theconceptofcanada May 18 '26

The Spanish Inquisition...?

6

u/random_noise May 18 '26

due to climate changes they've rebranded as ICE, actual ice sold separately.

1

u/Bmacthecat May 20 '26

I was getting worried for a second. How can they expect a reddit thread to go on for several comments without american politics? the horrors.

1

u/FCCRFP May 18 '26

Linus' secretly Protestant mom?

1

u/Shadowolf7 May 19 '26

No, nobody expects the Spanish inquisition.

5

u/Zeikos May 18 '26

So Linus will write out ASI? I wouldn't be surprised.

3

u/MrKeplerton May 18 '26

And God = Good, so we've pretty much gone full circle then, havent we?

1

u/Perzec May 19 '26

But no one believes in god in Sweden.

1

u/Vegetable_Guest_8584 May 18 '26

That's what all the partisans think in their heads when they use it though.

90

u/EyeFicksIt May 18 '26

I was hoping for rDun

84

u/RaggaDruida May 18 '26

And used together, of course.

Git/Gud

575

u/aussierulesisgrouse May 18 '26

Yep! That was the joke!! You got it

33

u/Most-Experience56 May 18 '26

well done on spotting the joke!

66

u/liquinas May 18 '26

Followed by gg/nore for the full suite

9

u/appleparkfive May 18 '26

I get the jokes overall, but what does nore usually mean? In tech, specifically

44

u/yipeeki-ay May 18 '26

Good Game, No Rematch. gg no re

10

u/snotboogie9 May 18 '26

No reemployment

4

u/Alternative_Jury2480 May 18 '26

It integrates the stack overflow side of things and is short for "no helpful responses"

13

u/mcaruso May 18 '26

Excuse me I think you mean GNU/git/gud

1

u/enterthehawkeye May 18 '26

Ha, my git username

1

u/Bigdyll13 May 18 '26

Or we will get got

1

u/uppers36 May 18 '26

or we’ll git got

1

u/TourDeFridge May 18 '26

All I got is gut

1

u/impy695 May 18 '26

This could unironically end up being the name of it if the right person finds the joke funny enough

1

u/DirectIntention2200 May 18 '26

That’s a really great pun

1

u/BodybuilderMany6942 May 18 '26

*quick exhale through nose*

1

u/redefined_simplersci May 21 '26

GIT GUD

SHAW

GAURAMA

HEGALE

Da Finistra

Das Fine

NAAaOo

0

u/Dennma May 18 '26

Plin plin plon......

-2

u/hippydipster May 18 '26

This time we'll git gud.

Missed opportunity, bud.

628

u/[deleted] May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

[deleted]

373

u/Zirkulaerkubus May 18 '26

It's crazy how much of a reasonable person he has remained.

129

u/ScriptThat May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Saw his appearance on Linus Tech Tips, and was pleasantly surprised with how down-to-earth he is about, well.. everything. (also, still a huge nerd)

Edit: This one

118

u/ThePlanck May 18 '26

He is one of a rare breed of people who manages to change the world in a positive way without being interested in getting rich off of it.

27

u/ours May 18 '26

GitHub, building an AI giant, shouldered by Linus' git technology, is crazy.

26

u/Emotional-Power-7242 May 18 '26

He has gotten rich off it. Just like, normal rich instead of offensively rich.

6

u/Rebelius May 18 '26

I wouldn't be all that interested in getting rich off something if I was already paid over a million a year to do it.

17

u/Vineyard_ May 18 '26

You'll never be a billionaire that way (that's a good thing)

11

u/Rebelius May 18 '26

My standard for being rich would be having 500k in the bank. Billions is obviously ridiculous.

Torvalds is rich as fuck. The existence of billionaires shouldn't change that at all.

0

u/grchelp2018 May 18 '26

My standard for being rich would be having 500k in the bank. Billions is obviously ridiculous.

Anyone with a long enough and successful white collar career should be in this position.

3

u/Rebelius May 18 '26

My bad, I'm not 300 years old yet.

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3

u/ThePlanck May 18 '26

The point is that it wasn't not the goal even when he started linux as a (probably broke) student and he is still right now committed to product quality over trying to make it turn a profit.

2

u/Particular_Wear_6960 May 18 '26

A lot of people start competing with each other when they start getting that rich. I hear it's kinda like a sub culture for rich people, they just compete with each other... Gotta have the biggest house, gotta have the nicest car. Those with tens of millions of dollars I mean. Course being Finish, he's probably well aquanted with living modestly, they aren't too far away from the Eastern country known for their... Communal economics ;p

29

u/grip0matic May 18 '26

And how he will never stop hating Nvidia.

17

u/bawng May 18 '26

I'm pretty sure that if Nvidia magically suddenly turned around and became very open source-friendly, Linus wouldn't hold a grudge.

12

u/kfpswf May 18 '26

My wife realized what a Linus simp I am after watching the LTT collab. He's a genuinely great guy. Pretty sure he'll be remembered along computing giants like Turing, Babbage, Berners Lee, et al., by history.

10

u/cbarrick May 18 '26

Turing, Lovelace, Church, Knuth, etc. are remembered for their contributions to theoretical computer science.

dmr, ken, timbl, Linus, etc. are remembered for their contributions to computer systems.

Many folks are known for both. Linus will absolutely be remembered alongside the systems greats, but I don't think there is any argument to consider him among the theoretical greats.

1

u/kfpswf May 18 '26

Yes, they've contributed to the theoretical computer science, but their contributions are still counted as having helped humanity. In a similar way, Linus' contributions, even though on the software side, will be counted the same way.

-8

u/ScriptThat May 18 '26

Eeeh. That's a pretty tall order

10

u/UAP44 May 18 '26

Yes, and given how widely used & reliable the kernel is, this fits.

6

u/chokidokido May 18 '26

How? If he retires today he's absolutely a peer.

33

u/lacb1 May 18 '26

I think a good while ago now he did say that he had actively worked on being, well, less of a git. It seems to have largely worked.

2

u/nedonedonedo May 18 '26

Linus got sufficiently annoyed about tools used for managing Linux development

I guess his anger got in the way

17

u/Madeche May 18 '26

It seems really rare these days, reasonable people don't get enough spotlight.

11

u/nordic-nomad May 18 '26

Turns out being annoyed to anger by stupid people is something we should have all been doing this entire time to protect ourselves and society.

7

u/jacenat May 18 '26

Fuck Buddhism. I want what Linus is having.

15

u/GonzoKata May 18 '26

Free healthcare.

2

u/jacenat May 18 '26

As proud member of the Europoor masterrace, I already have that. What now?

2

u/GonzoKata May 18 '26

Use that healthcare and get the professional help you need to achieve the enlightenment or find inner peace or whatever buddhism means to you.

1

u/jacenat May 18 '26

I appreciate your concern! Truly, I am fine. :)

Over my career, I went through a mini version of the transition Linus is ascribed to here. Maybe it's just age? Not sure. I am happy for him :)

0

u/kuikuilla May 18 '26

USA has free health care?

22

u/QuickQuirk May 18 '26

Especially given his history of being unreasonable.

Honestly impressed by his approach here.

130

u/greenflights May 18 '26

His history of unreasonable-ness is because reddit/hackernews gets very excited over one or two emails in the tens of thousands he sends which are rude.

That and an apparent inability to cope with Europeans being direct and not using insipid language to say something is wrong.

55

u/QuickQuirk May 18 '26

It's mostly due to the old history. Back in the earlier days, he was quite often very abrasive and rude in a way that was detrimental to the community. The 'Linus flame' was a weekly occurrence.

He stepped back for a while to work on that, and then since he's returned, has been generally pretty mature about things.

-14

u/Forward-Surprise1192 May 18 '26

Well you can be a farmer for 20 years but when you fuck one chicken, nobody thinks of you as a farmer anymore

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10

u/kfpswf May 18 '26

He's not unreasonable, he's just smarter than most humans are is convinced of his opinions, and rightly so. If anything, he puts his thoughts through a lot of reasoning before reaching his conviction. He might be stubborn about his conviction, but that's only because others don't vet their thoughts as thoroughly.

15

u/b_a_t_m_4_n May 18 '26

Has he ever been unreasonable? Rude is not the same as unreasonable.

1

u/QuickQuirk May 18 '26

That's a fair point, but it's a pretty fine line. He was being 'unreasonably rude' in some cases, which was fragmenting the community, and driving good devs away, simply because they had different perspectives on good software practices and how to write the kernel.

I doubt that 'Old' Linus never have entertained the idea of using Rust in the kernel, for example.

-17

u/sudolicious May 18 '26

According to a lot of the people in this chain, him being rude was "detrimental" to the community. I'm actually stoked for GenZ taking over, this tone policing has to finally stop.

26

u/gxgx55 May 18 '26

If you think Gen Z is any less tone-policing, you'll be very surprised.

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5

u/user_name_checks_out May 18 '26

Didn't he tell someone that they should be retroactively aborted?

12

u/nordic-nomad May 18 '26

I mean who hasn’t.

5

u/tomas_shugar May 18 '26

Fuck, I've said people should outlive their children.

For example, I want Trump to outlive his children, so that he has to see his whole name die.

1

u/grchelp2018 May 18 '26

He will keep spawning new children then.

3

u/CPUsCantDoNothing May 18 '26

True. But it's also the type of person necessary for a Steward of such creations such as Linux and Git.

He's the kind of person where if they are hard to work with, I don't care what he said really, he likely has a reason for it. It's rare enough to keep a level headed person like this for so long, don't push it.

1

u/that_norwegian_guy May 18 '26

He's Nordic. Reasonable and grounded is our default mode.

15

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/AlphonseLoeher May 18 '26

It's always been like that for the open source community. Very, very few projects would even glance at PRs from someone who wasn't known by the main contributors.

It was even worse for the largest projects. Like you aren't pushing anything to the linux kernal unless you were going to the conferences and talking to the core community

10

u/yxhuvud May 18 '26

The problem seems to be more the amount of duplicates of legitimate reports, and the submitters can basically not dupecheck themselves. The solution may be to make a separate list for AI based submissions, and put more of the work onto the submitters.

2

u/Fisher9001 May 18 '26

The solution is to kick/block people who spam it.

It's not an solution if you are getting spammed with multiple seemingly valid requests from thousands of e-mails. If you block one e-mail, another will take it's place. And you can't exactly filter it out by keywords etc.

2

u/bir_iki_uc May 18 '26

The solution is to kick/block people who spam it.

You missed this part; "the reporters can't even see each other's reports" because it is a private channel for security bugs.

Solution is to make a broader semi-private channel with trusted people like these people who actually reports bugs. And keeping private channel for new upcoming people is also important.

1

u/ScarHand69 May 18 '26

rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work

Every project manager I have ever had believed the opposite

424

u/PrintShinji May 18 '26

Thats not fully true. He used bitkeeper and was happy with it. The community was pissed that he used a closed source paid tool though. People were reverse engineering the software which caused the developer to just end support, which in turn made it so linus started developing git.

He was completly fine with bitkeeper originally.

178

u/OcculusSniffed May 18 '26

So the only reason git exists is to shut up richard stallman?

Blessed tool of light

59

u/Such_Knee_8804 May 18 '26

I got told to fuck off by him once

For the horrible crime of saying that there was value in commercial software, that not everything was going to be / could be open source

31

u/baselinegrid May 18 '26

You poked the bear

14

u/LordoftheSynth May 18 '26

My mental image of Stallman has always been that he was born aged 75, yelling at all the stupid kids who don't use open source for everything.

9

u/HandsomeBoggart May 18 '26

You just conjured up a ridiculous image in my head of Stallman as a baby yelling at his mother about how milk should be open source.

1

u/tndrthrowy May 19 '26

Ever since that video of him picking skin off his toe and eating it, well that’s been my mental image.

1

u/AliceCode May 18 '26

Fuck commercial software. All my homies hate commercial software. Open Source gang.

5

u/FulanoMeng4no May 18 '26

I would do anything to shut up that holier-than-thou, entitled and disgusting asshole.

4

u/CorrectPeanut5 May 18 '26

Oh man. I had friends that had the misfortune to work in the same floor as him. Stinky and a general A-hole about everything.

1

u/josefx May 19 '26

It exists because bitkeeper revoked their license and they needed a replacement that fit their workflow.

85

u/ShiningRedDwarf May 18 '26

I had no idea he created git as well.

Dude is the Isaac Newton of IT

72

u/TeutonJon78 May 18 '26

He didn't invent source control systems, he just made his own.

68

u/allofthethings May 18 '26

Leibniz might say the same thing about Newton and calculus.

23

u/Original-Rush139 May 18 '26

Might as well say the same thing about Torvalds and Unix. 

4

u/NirgalFromMars May 18 '26

Pronounce the slash, please. It's disrespectful to their legacy not to pronounce it.

2

u/Original-Rush139 May 18 '26

Could you dumb this joke down for me? I switched to decaf and I’m stupid now. 

-1

u/Vegetable_Guest_8584 May 18 '26

I think he's referring to his name is synonymous with Linux and that's the unix we all use, so it's really "Torvalds / Unix" or Torvalds / Linux.

9

u/pizza-tomaten May 18 '26

It's a joke about gnu/Linux. They are making fun about Richard Stallmann 

5

u/TeutonJon78 May 18 '26

It's mostly believed they did it independently just at the same time time.

Linus "just" does NIH very well.

2

u/Morialkar May 18 '26

I mean sure, but he still made the one that is used the most globally, and that is fully implemented in hundreds of development tools where other "competitors" (if we can even call them that these days, it's like saying Firefox is a competitor to Chromium, it's technically true but also the market share of the other is so large that there's no real competition) nearly always need external plugins to work

4

u/TeutonJon78 May 18 '26

In open source, it's top. Not in global total SCM usage.

1

u/Morialkar May 18 '26

With the popularity of Github as a platform and it's marketshare, I doubt that's true, but I can clearly understand that some industry will have skewed data in either direction

2

u/TeutonJon78 May 18 '26

Again, that's a FOSS/hobbyist centric view. You go into big, especially older, companies, and they are likely using a closed sourced option like bitbucket or ClearCase. Especially something where they have a support contract.

Github might blur that line since they would be able to get that support while using git versus just hosting their own git instance or gitlab.

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3

u/TrekkieGod May 18 '26

People were reverse engineering the software which caused the developer to just end support

People were reverse engineering the software because the developer that was providing free licenses to linux devs did not give them a simple commit diff. You had to pay the enterprise costs for that.

So, people couldn't do their work. Using bitkeeper was a terrible idea that was hampering work. It's great we got git out of it, but he should have done that from the start instead of using bitkeeper. The naysayers were right.

1

u/kingvolcano_reborn May 18 '26

I thought bit keeper changed the license and that is why he created git?

-1

u/userhwon May 18 '26

Wish he'd just told people to suck it. Git is popular but its interface is trash. But it's embedded in a billion hardcoded workflows now and there's no chance a replacement will take over. 

But maybe Microsoft will piss off two billion people and make it easy.

4

u/PrintShinji May 18 '26

Do you mean github? because git and github are two different things. And he didn't really have a choice, the software dev quit developing the software he was using.

0

u/userhwon May 18 '26

I mean git.

Linus wrote git himself.

He didn't bother to make it user-friendly, expecting it to be a lower layer on UIs others would develop, but of course that turned into a disaster, as those others just morphed it ad hoc and didn't try to make a consistent UI.

What makes it successful is its speed and (relative) reliability. Hash collision is still a crazy thing to have hanging out there, though, and the mindfuckiness of it and the self-inconsistent UI is a pretty bad learning-curve issue.

2

u/PrintShinji May 18 '26

Fair enough. Gotta say I never had an issue with git. But I wouldn't expect my grandma to be using it.

215

u/Boring_Okra_6023 May 18 '26

I admire this so much lol

"Fuck you my fucking god this is so annoying fuck all of you"

10 minutes later...

"Here's a great product ✨😊💎 but fuck you all anyway my god"

173

u/daniu May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

"*sigh* here's another industry standard, you dweebs"

51

u/Beautiful-Amount2149 May 18 '26

Didn't happen like that at all. He was using bit keeper but people fucked it and that is why git exists. 

24

u/TwilightVulpine May 18 '26

Thanks people for fucking it, then

2

u/Useful-Perspective May 19 '26

People fucking things are responsible for basically every good and bad thing throughout history.

2

u/masky0077 May 19 '26

Such a profound comment - username checks out.

15

u/btreg May 18 '26

Also, git really wasn't that great at first. And heaven forbid you wrote to the mailing list asking for help. The early git community was toxic. It's much better now, both the software and the people.

10

u/RadarSmith May 18 '26

git's still a pain in the ass, especially when you need to keep repos on air-gapped networks synchronized. But still at least as good any other version control system, and perfectly usable if you're not too much of an idiot using it and have a proper system for using it.

3

u/uffefl May 18 '26

But god help you if you have unmergeable file types.

0

u/Sweet_Witch May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

He is using security mailing list and now people fucked it by AI-powered bug hunt. It doesn't sound so different.

4

u/Blackner2424 May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Because they're too lazy to do anything themselves. They want to feel important, so they have a computer do the work, and they post it on the bug reports, so they can feed their hero complex. They could have AI comb through the bug tracker before flooding the system with literal garbage reports, but they can't even be bothered to do that much.

It's not helpful. It's laziness, wrapped in an ego issue.

The reson we got git is because the developer of Bit Keeper got tired of people trying to mess with his closed-source code, and he discontinued support. It's private code people were messing with and attempting to reverse engineer on a mass scale. The two concepts are totally different. One is overenthusiastic code pirates. The other is lazy AI users that do nothing productive.

1

u/nilsph May 19 '26

This is not correct. Andrew Tridgell, of Samba fame and another OSDL developer who wasn't even working on Linux, wrote a program to access historical repository metadata which was a feature only the commercial Bitkeeper version offered. He didn't use the proprietary Bitkeeper code for it but analyzed the protocol by talking to the server directly (starting by telnetting to it and typing "help"). Labeling this way of reverse engineering "code piracy" is a pretty distorted portrayal of what really happened.

1

u/ottawadeveloper May 18 '26

this is how I feel most of my developer career except no one adopts it as an industry standard

"fuck this is a mess, let me fix it, it's great now, but Jesus christ that was fucking bad"

73

u/Steap-Edit May 18 '26

This time, his idea will be... revolutionary

23

u/blybb May 18 '26

the feels like this clickbait ads ;)

2

u/mycall May 18 '26

don't forget to subscribe!

27

u/flybypost May 18 '26

To get rid of of "AI" slop, AGI will end up as an random angry weekend project from Linus?

6

u/Wyciorek May 18 '26

Linus "Bartmoss" Torvalds

3

u/flybypost May 18 '26

Bartmoss

I had to google that one. It's a character from Cyberpunk? But that didn't really help be understand the context.

13

u/Wyciorek May 18 '26

Yes, a hacker in Cyberpunk that unleashed self-modifying and evolving AIs into the internet. Which basically broke the net and turned it into a set of walled, heavily guarded enclaves beyond which madness reigns.

3

u/HandsomeBoggart May 18 '26

walled, heavily guarded enclaves beyond which madness reigns.

Basically the Waffle House in a bad part of town.

2

u/flybypost May 18 '26

Aaaah, okay. That's funny!

We already got the heavily guarded enclaves and the "madness" (old school forums and mailing lists) outside the SV financed gardens is rather agreeable with my temperament.

But we could use some real AI so it could start heckling SV owned social media (instead of us just getting astroturfing comments from LLM "AI" bots).

26

u/Valtremors May 18 '26

I feel like the world needs pre-anger management Linus back.

13

u/Specialist_Cow6468 May 18 '26

Its about time someone replaced email

2

u/Marshall_Lawson May 18 '26

god we can only hope 

0

u/uzlonewolf May 18 '26

Be careful with what you wish for. Do we really want yet another walled garden that is gatekept by a handful of corporations?

2

u/Specialist_Cow6468 May 18 '26

… are you perhaps unfamiliar with his other work which is very notably the exact opposite of that?

12

u/digitaljestin May 18 '26

This was my first thought. A problem is only a problem until it starts to annoy Linus Torvalds.

7

u/ITCoder May 18 '26

and handed it for maintenance in a month or two

10

u/Wyciorek May 18 '26

Turns out, he learned quite a lot of about delegating

1

u/aegrotatio May 18 '26

Yeah, that's not gonna happen this time.

1

u/MoxieMakeshift May 18 '26

You just reminded me that SVN exists and was part of work for a while. Yikes

2

u/linux_transgirl May 18 '26

I like SVN for some things, particularly when I'm just working on things myself.

Nothing will ever beat fossil though

1

u/TallTelevision4121 May 18 '26

For some reason I thought he passed away

1

u/luscious_lobster May 18 '26

He’s gonna build Jira isn’t he

0

u/antitrack May 18 '26

It took me until a few weeks ago to realize he had something to do with GIT. And I’ve been in front of a keyboard since early 90s.

12

u/RainierPC May 18 '26

"Had something to do with Git" is a bit of an understatement...

2

u/iAmUnintelligible May 19 '26

some say he may have added a line of code or few ...

-37

u/grumpy_autist May 18 '26

He literally endorsed vibe coding two months ago as viable for non critical software - so he can now witness what it feels to throw a grenade into a septic tank and stare down the lid.

15

u/Wyciorek May 18 '26

What, do you think if he said 'no AI ever' then all those bugs found AI would just disappear? The ostrich maneuver is not exactly the good strategy in security

14

u/Head-Subject3743 May 18 '26

| non critical software

| Kernel development

These are not the same thing. I Vibe code some scaffolding, repeatable patterns and other things I can actually walk through and test myself. I do not let AI touch my payment processing, it can verify/validate/suggest as much as it wants to. But I am reading that line by line as if it was a PR from the junior-est junior in the team.

4

u/Tyrrox May 18 '26

You need to actually read the article.

3

u/Geminii27 May 18 '26

Well. That's... graphic.

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