If you’re going to pen a letter to Rich Hickey, the least you can do is spring for Opus.
Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#32Companies and people by and large are not forced to use AI. AI isn't doing things, people and corporations are doing things with AI. I find it curious how often folks want to find fault with tools and not the systems of laws, regulations, and convention that incentivize using tools.
Many people are, indeed, being forced to use AI by their ignorant boss, who often blame their own employees for the AI’s shortcomings. Not all bosses everywhere of course, and it’s often just pressure to use AI instead of force . Given how gleefully transparent corporate America is being that the plan is basically “fire everyone and replace them with AI”, you can’t blame anyone for seeing their boss pushing AI as a b…
I guess if someone's boss forces them to use a tool they don't want to use, then the boss is to blame?
If the boss forced them to use emacs/vim/pandas and the employee didn't want to use it, I don't think it makes sense to blame emacs/vim/pandas.
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#33[flagged]
> A human writing twelve polemic questions, many of which only make sense within their ideological worldview or contain factual errors, because they wanted to vent their anger on the internet has been considered substandard slop since before LLMs were a thing.
Maybe by people who don't share the same ideological worldview.
I'll almost always take human slop over AI slop, even when the AI slop is better along some categorical axis. Of course there are exceptions, but as I grow older I find myself appreciating the humanity more and more.
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#34It’s heartwarming to see Rich Hickey corroborating Rob Pike. All the recent LLM stuff has made me feel that we suddenly jumped tracks into an alternate timeline. Having these articulate confirmations from respected figures is a nice confirmation that this is indeed a strange new world.
This is all just cynical bandwagoning. Google/Facebook/Etc. have done provable irreparable damage to the fabric of society via ads/data farming/promulgating fake news, but now that it's in vogue to hate on AI as an "enlightened" tech genius, we're all suddenly worried about.. what? Water? Electricity? Give me a break. The about-face is embarrassing, especially in the case of Rob Pike (who I'm sure has made 8+ figures…
Both can be bad. What's hard to do though is convincing the people that work on these things that they're actively harming society (in other words, most people working on ads and AI are not good people, they're the bad guys but don't realize it).
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#35Companies and people by and large are not forced to use AI. AI isn't doing things, people and corporations are doing things with AI. I find it curious how often folks want to find fault with tools and not the systems of laws, regulations, and convention that incentivize using tools.
> "AI isn't doing things, people and corporations are..." Where have I heard a similar reasoning? Maybe about guns in the US???
Guns can and are used to murder people directly in the physical world.
The overwhelming (perhaps complete) use of generative AI is not to murder people. It's to generate text/photo/video/audio.
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#36Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you think his "distinguished engineer" salary came from, I wonder? There are plenty of people working on OSS in their free time (or in poverty, for that matter).
Shouldn't you be thinking "it's nice Google diverted some of their funds to doing good" instead of trying to tie Pike's contributions in with everything else?
This conversation isn't about Google's backbone, it's about Pike's and Hickey's. It's easy to moralize when you've got nothing to lose and the lecture holds much less water.
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "AI isn't doing things, people and corporations are..." Where have I heard a similar reasoning? Maybe about guns in the US???
Guns can and are used to murder people directly in the physical world. The overwhelming (perhaps complete) use of generative AI is not to murder people. It's to generate text/photo/video/audio.
Generative AI is used to defraud people, to propagandize them, to steal their intellectual property and livelihoods, to systematically deny their health insurance claims, to dangerously misinform them (e.g. illegitimate legal advice or hallucinated mushroom identification ebooks), to drive people to mental health breakdowns via "ai psychosis" and much more. The harm is real and material, and right now is causing unemployment, physical harm, imprisonment, and in some cases death.
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#39It wasn’t AI that decided not to hire entry level employees. Rich should be smart enough to realize that, and probably has employees of his own. So go hire some people Rich.
Re: Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
#40[flagged]
What factual errors did you the human notice