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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#381

Post by [deleted] »

maplethorpe wrote: post #292
blibble wrote: post #241

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more

What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

[deleted]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#384

Post by JohnnyMarcone »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #33
strangescript wrote: post #28

[flagged]

[flagged]

I always wonder if the general sentiment toward genai would be positive if we had wealth redistribution mechanisms in place, so everyone would benefit. Obviously that's not the case, but if you consider the theoretical, do you think your view would be different?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#385

Post by DiscourseFan »

mold_aid wrote: post #362
DiscourseFan wrote: post #314

Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...…

So you would say it is not "trendy" to be pro-AI right now, is that it? That it's not trendy to say things like "it's not going away" or "AI isn't a fad" or "AI needs better critics" - one reaction is reasonable, well thought-out, the other is a bandwagon?

At the very least there is an ideological conflict brewing in tech, and this post is a flashpoint. But just like the recent war between Israel and Hamas, no amount of reaction can defeat technological dominance--at least not in the long term. And the pro-AI side, whether you think its good or evil, certainly exceeds the other in terms of sheer force through their embrace of technology.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#386

Post by cm2012 »

hurfdurf wrote: post #328

Dupe from just a couple of hours ago, which quickly fell off the frontpage? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444 397 points 9 hours ago | 349 comments

Interestingly there was no push back in the prior thread on Rob's environmental claims. This leads me to believe most HNers took them at face value.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#387

Post by _alternator_ »

Rob Pike is definitely not the only person going to be pissed off by this ill-considered “agentic village” random acts of kindness. While Claude Opus decided to send thank you notes to influential computer scientists including this one to Rob Pike (fairly innocuous but clearly missing the mark), Gemini is making PRs to random github issues (“fixed a Java concurrency bug” on some random project). Now THAT would piss me off, but fortunately it seems to be hallucinating its PR submissions.

Meanwhile, GPT5.1 is trying to contact people at K-5 after school programs in Colorado for some reason I can’t discern. Welp, 2026 is going to be a weird year.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#388

Post by luke5441 »

nkohari wrote: post #308
jabedude wrote: post #252

Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?

Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist. (NB: I am currently working in AI, a…

Google's official mission was "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", not to maximize advertising sales.

Obviously now it is mostly the latter and minimally the former. What capitalism giveth, it taketh away. (Or: Capitalism without good market design that causes multiple competitors in every market doesn't work.)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#389

Post by hahahacorn »

rundev wrote: post #341
hahahacorn wrote: post #222

If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying). GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse. Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear ov…

"The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me." Just because two problems cause harms at different proportion, doesn't mean the lesser problem should be dismissed. Especially when the "fix" to the lesser problem can be a "stop doing that". And about water usage:…

> The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me.

This is a very irrelevant analogy and an absolutely false dichotomy. The resource constraint (Police officers vs policy making to reduce traffic deaths vs criminals) is completely different and not in contention with each other. In fact they're actually complementary.

Nobody is saying the lesser problem should be dismissed. But the lesser problem also enables cancer researchers to be more productive while doing cancer research, obtaining grants, etc. It's at least nuanced. That is far more valuable than Alfalfa.

Farms also use municipal water (sometimes). The cost of converting more ground or surface water to municipal water is less than the relative cost of ~40-150x the water usage of the municipal water being used...

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#390

Post by odiroot »

jabedude wrote: post #252

Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?

Pecunia non olet.
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