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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#451

Post by bgwalter »

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"?

There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda.

If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#452

Post by Findecanor »

xorgun wrote: post #393

I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme. The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly purit…

Win what, and for whom?

First to total surveillance state? Because that is a major driving force in China: to get automated control of its own population.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#453

Post by tgv »

ai_is_the_best wrote: post #399
_alternator_ wrote: post #387

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 m…

[flagged]

Yet another bot reply.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#454

Post by gaigalas »

dwringer wrote: post #366
gaigalas wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it obvious? It's not a thank-you letter. It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough. Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them. It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.

By that metric of getting shared on social media, it was extraordinarily successful

You missed a spot:

> hopefully saying something good about

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#456

Post by brown9-2 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #436
mold_aid wrote: post #216

Woke up to this bsky thread this am. If "agentic" AI means some product spams my inbox with a compliment so back-handed you'd think you were a 60 Minutes staffer, then I'd say the end result of these products is simply to annoy us into acquiescence

Somebody at Anthropic committed a seriously stupid PR mistake.

I don’t think they’re affiliated with agentvillage.org

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#457

Post by zeroonetwothree »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #414
dbcpp wrote: post #357

The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn't even clear if AI is providing economic value yet (am I missing something there?). Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now. The messaging from AI companies is "we're going to cure cancer" and "you're going to live to be 150 years old" (I don't believe these claims!). The messaging should be "every…

Well it made the Taco Bell drive through better. So there's that.

Genuinely curious: how did it do that? (I don’t go to Taco Bell)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#458

Post by api »

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"?

The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now.

I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages.

His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience.

It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact.

It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless.

There’s more but that’s the gist of it.

That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#459

Post by summermusic »

ai_is_the_best wrote: post #403
indigoabstract wrote: post #391

Getting an email from an AI praising you for your contributions to humanity and for enlarging its training data must rank among the finest mockery possible to man or machine. Still, I'm a bit surprised he overreacted and didn't manage to keep his cool.

[flagged]

Is this satire?? AI is working for the ruling class and against us (99% of humanity).

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#460

Post by mrcwinn »

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

Was it ever open source if there was an implied refusal to create something you don't approve of? Was it only for certain kinds of software, certain kinds of creators? If there was some kind of implicit approval process or consent requirement, did you publish it? Where can that be reviewed?
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