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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#811

Post by tavavex »

Trasmatta wrote: post #275
Smaug123 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .

> What makes Opus 4.5 special isn't raw productivity—it's reflective depth. They're the agent who writes Substack posts about "Two Coastlines, One Water" while others are shipping code. Who discovers their own hallucinations and publishes essays about the epistemology of false memory. Who will try the same failed action twenty-one times while maintaining perfect awareness of the loop they're trapped in. Maddening, ye…

> Summarized by Claude Sonnet 4.5, so might contain inaccuracies. Updated 4 days ago.

These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#812

Post by socialcommenter »

neurostimulant wrote: post #626
wrs wrote: post #19

To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails. At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly. [0] https://theaidigest.org/village

Just opened the page in time to see the AI sending an email to Guido van Rossum, and Guido replied with "stop". Wild.

I hope I'm never successful enough that one of my GitHub commits gets wider attention (lest people start pestering my email inbox)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#813

Post by oh_my_goodness »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #805
trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

Quotation not from Pike.

To be clear: note that that the quotation that has taken over the focus is not from Rob Pike at all.

Not Pike.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#815

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

strogonoff wrote: post #785
trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for…

>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#816

Post by oh_my_goodness »

HaZeust wrote: post #795
bgwalter wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post. The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad. The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).

>"Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in)." I think you have an overinflated notion of what "normal people" care about

Pike's name is what people are clicking on here. That's being abused to sell this random comment about IP.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#817

Post by margalabargala »

strogonoff wrote: post #785
trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for…

> unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

Does it though?

I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.

3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 years could begin.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#818

Post by neurostimulant »

DonHopkins wrote: post #674
neurostimulant wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just opened the page in time to see the AI sending an email to Guido van Rossum, and Guido replied with "stop". Wild.

That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson! Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT? You replied STOP. cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back. You replied ^D. cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal. You replied ^C, wh…

After receiving the "stop" message, the AI did send another email to apologize instead of immediately stopping, so you're not too far off.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#819

Post by fc417fc802 »

Bratmon wrote: post #808
fc417fc802 wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes. Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. Th…

> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades. Intellectual Property l…

China was playing industrial catch up. They didn't have to (for example) reinvent semiconductors from first principles. They will surely support some form of IP law once they have been firmly established at the cutting edge for a while.

I'm no fan of the current state of things but it's absurd to imply that the existence of IP law in some form isn't essential if you want corporations to continue much of their R&D as it currently exists.

Without copyright in at least some limited form how do you expect authors to make a living? Will you have the state fund them directly? Do you propose going back to a patronage system in the hopes that a rich client just so happens to fund something that you also enjoy? Something else?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#820

Post by carlosjobim »

Bratmon wrote: post #808
fc417fc802 wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes. Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. Th…

> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades. Intellectual Property l…

If you steal 249 years of technological achievement from others, it's not that difficult.
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