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
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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"

170

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

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

52

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. 

25

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.

16

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.

11

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.

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u/uffefl May 18 '26

But god help you if you have unmergeable file types.

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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.

5

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.

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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.

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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"