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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#841

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…

Calling your own highly creative spin on history "empirical" is many things, but persuasive isn't one of them.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#842

I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too. This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like m…

I guess we're in the minority. I absolutely hate iPhotos, Google Photos, Facebook suggesting "memories". Apple, Google, Meta are not my friend or family and I don't want them behaving like they are. Even if they didn't fuck up and sent me memory of people or situation I don't want to remember.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#843

I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too. This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like m…

Causes zero harm to anyone, less bad than normal spam. Silly thing to get angry about

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#844
Could somebody steelman the argument. Why is this bad? What harm is caused by receiving an email like this? Seems completely harmless to me, uses much less water/energy/co2 than the car ride I just took which nobody is yelling at me for

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#845

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 can copy, can it create anything new?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#847

I like Claude but this is an absolutely tone deaf thing on Anthropic's part. I've been pondering that given what the inputs are, llms should really be public domain. I don't necessarily mean legally, I know about transformative works and all that stuff. I'm thinking more on an ethical level.

Socialized training. Socialized profits.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#848

Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation

Fortunately, the PR situation will handle itself. Someone will create a superhuman persuasion engine, AGI will handle it itself, and/or those who don't adapt will fade away into irrelevance. You either surf this wave or get drowned by it, and a whole lot of people seem to think throwing tantrums is the appropriate response. Figure out how to surf, and fast. You don't even need to be good, you just have to stay on the…

Inevitably is such a tired argument. Everything is a choice, belief in inevitability is for the weak.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#849
post #781

Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore. I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's a…

Kant's categorical imperative is bullshit. Everyone can't sleep in my bed.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#850

Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good. Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the…

I find a lot of folks share this sentiment but from where I sit it just sounds so much like the “kids these days” crap that spawned all of YOU folks when you were younger. I grew up so inspired by the internet culture of the nineties, people that understood a technology and had a passion for wrangling it to do great things. We had a mixed run and the internet today has simultaneously exceeded these early dreams by orders of magnitude in some ways and has become absolutely Orwellian and backwards in others. Same thing is happening here. It’s just so interesting seeing the same peers have such an identical take on this generations paradigm shift as the folks that we all ridiculed in the 90s. Those hilarious badly aged takes on the internet being a fad or not user friendly enough etc etc, I guess my naivite was to expect this time around we would be able to better recognize it in ourselves
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