Re: [PATCH] docs: remove Assisted-by references
From: Joshua Peisach
Date: Mon Oct 26 2026 - 15:54:42 EST
On Mon Oct 26, 2026 at 3:39 PM EDT, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Mon, 26 Oct 2026 at 09:04, <lyude@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:It's not idiotic. Would it be considered non-deterministic for a human
On Wed, 2026-10-21 at 16:07 +0000, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
>
> It *is* possible to make a deterministic LLM, and this is why I think
> it
> is critical to my personal future to have an LLM that can actually be
> understood by a human instead of a random number generator casino
> that
> sometimes puts "4" in your private key.
I hate to break it to you but that is literally not how large language
models work.
More importantly than that - the whole "deterministic" part is a total
red herring.
We shouldn't even reply to that idiotic argument.
to intentionally add a line of code causing a kernel panic for no
reason at all? Or an LLM telling me to jump off a bridge?
When it comes to human development, people *know* what they are putting
in. An LLM does not think about the words it is spitting out.
Why? Nobody is arguing that we should stop take human patches because
"they aren't deterministic".
Except humans want to actually contribute to the kernel, not make their
slavemaster happy.
So anybody who thinks we shouldn't use LLM as tools because of that
reason is just being dishonest. It's just a disguise for "I don't like
AI". It's not an argument, it's a complete strawman.
We have had non-deterministic tools in the past. One trivial example
of that is just different compiler versions that have slightly
different instruction weights or just different rules. Even when they
are individually deterministic the end result is effectively that
different people will get different results.
And not all tools have even been individually deterministic - actual
real non-deterministic behavior exists in non-LLM tools either becasue
they have timing issues or are explicitly using random numbers as a
way to get their results: Monte Carlo simulations is a very real
thing.
And yes, non-determinism adds a wrinkle to things and it's something
that needs to be taken into account (and people often add things like
explicit seeds to avoid it when they need explicit determinism from
otherwise non-deterministic algorithms). So non-determinism is
something that should be weighed as a factor against what else the
tools brings you.
But it's not actually an argument against LLM's.
Linus
Well said. But also, we won't be able to "submit bug reports to LLMs"
like for years people have submitted bug reports to compilers.
-Josh