Or you could just read the /. story from not that long ago: https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

No. Currently US universities are struggling. I do not see any of that where I teach in Europe. And I have no trouble convincing students that what I teach makes sense. You have a problem with your society, not with your universities.

I never felt any kinship for Musk and it was clear to me from the beginning that Thiel is an enemy of freedom and Science. These days I just think of them as the Space Nazi and the rich cultist. Not good people. And not smart people either. "Blundered into a bunch of money" describes it well.

Well, basically all of the 1st world has that figured out. One may even say all of it has that and the US only qualifies as 2nd world because it is so extremely behind in this important aspect.

Indeed. Instead the US depends on importing scientists and engineers and there only ones that basically agree with the system and ones that keep quiet will come. I guess that has not changed, but the numbers are going down drastically now. Well.

I not only have an idea, I am teaching it. Other engineering disciplines demonstrate it as well. The key is to teach the low-level tech to a level so that students understand it. Yes, that takes time. But since I teach things like secure coding, some things cannot even be explained without it and we take students though some assembler and C, for example. And unlike coding education, we get no complaints since they see that this level of understanding is needed.

Classical coding could do this as well. For example performance enhancements like cache-aware coding could do this just fine. There are opportunities in Real-Time, OS, secure crypto implementation, hardware interfacing, etc. Obviously, this is not "technician" level education, this is "engineering" level. We do have a massive number of code-writers that are not qualified and should not be writing production code at all. That is the second problem that needs to be addressed.

Given how stupid and deeply into magical thinking the industry is currently regarding "AI coding", I expect a rather larger number of the current giants will not be around anymore in 10-20 years or will be relegated to irrelevance. That may just be the shake-up to get this discipline a bit closer to being the actual mature engineering we need.

Seriously, what are these assholes smoking?

Hahaha, no. Risk management and virtue signaling are nothing alike. One is the smart thing to do, the other is dumb and needy.

The old German Auto industry is pretty much cooked, due to high arrogance, greed and stupidity. The Chinese competition is cheaper and at least as good. And that is with a long shipping path. And the Germans are currently trying to focus on the "premium" segment. Yep, that will fix things.

Seriously, why are these assholes endangering everybody? Everything for a buck and morality be damned?

It is not just the license, it is the ownership. For GCC or the kernel, that could mean the thing suddenly belongs to somebody and is not free anymore. Just remember the SCO and Java lawsuits and how they put a black cloud over things for a long, long time.

We will see how that turns out. I agree that consequences for Debian will probably less catastrophic technologically and may mainly mean they have to rip out packages or patches. Since anything contributed to Debian needs to meet the DFSG and hence Debian should likely be shielded against liability. The same works for the kernel where there are hard requirements that all contributions are GPL 2 and must be signed off by a human.

That said, the unclear legal status of AI generated code may place catastrophic liability on any contributor that was careless or lazy. GCC makes that quite clear, the kernel makes it less clear and Debian makes it somewhat hard to find out. Hence I think the main problem with this decision is that it endangers Debian contributors. Whether Debian has a moral responsibility here or not is up for debate. And I think that specific debate was mostly missing in Debian before the decision was taken.

That said, all technological advances carry risks and we just do not know. Obviously, it can still turn out that LLM code or LLM assisted code is bad enough that it will get thrown out almost anywhere and the legal question becomes moot. For example, there are some new results that it can make you code completely unmaintainable over a longer stretch.

This is not about knowing. This is about liability. If it turns out they have to rip out LLM generated code, they (a) are not liable for it being there, the contributor is and (b) the courts will give them time to do it. Obviously, whoever submitted LLM code could find themselves sued for massive amounts of money and hence this also serves as a clear warning.

That said, I think the kernel-team is pretty much doing the same thing, just less obviously so. They have very strong requirements on all contributed code being GPL 2.0 and on everything being contributed having been signed off by a human. This probably gives them the same protections as GCC has with its policy, it just gives a less clear warning to contributors.

One key difference is that GCC says flat-out "no", while the Kernel says "yes, but here are a few actually quite hard limitations".

No problem. The idea is still valid.

The problem with that is that most people writing code do not have a good idea what is all required on a more abstract level. And hence using coding assistants they will overlook stuff they would not have coding directly. This is, incidentally, not a new situation. When I did my CS studies some 35 years ago, the 5GL project had just completely failed. The idea was to have the coder only write a spec in constraint logic and have the code synthesized by software. Turns out, writing a spec for code is much harder and more effort than writing code. I suspect LLM coding assistants are subject to the same problem, with hallucinations added on top.

The GCC folks have obviously a far better understanding of the problem than the Debian leadership.