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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#121

Post by jonway »

da_grift_shift wrote: post #98
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

Permalink for the spam operation: https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness The homepage will change in 11 hours to a new task for the LLMs to harass people with. Posted timestamped examples of the spam here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950

Wow this is so crass!

Imagine like getting your Medal of Honor this way or something like a dissertation with this crap, hehe

Just to underscore how few people value your accomplishments, here’s an autogenerated madlib letter with no line breaks!

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#122

Post by mk89 »

decide1000 wrote: post #55
MangoCoffee wrote: post #44

The cat's out of the bag. Even if US companies stop building data centers, China isn't going to stop and even if AI/LLMs are a bubble, do we just stop and let China/other countries take the lead?

China and Europe (Mistral) show that models can be very good and much smaller then the current Chatgpt's/Claudes from this world. The US models are still the best, but for how long? And at what cost? It's great to work daily with Claude Code, but how realistic is it that they keep this lead. This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked…

> but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.

The Arabs have a lot of money to invest, don't worry about that :)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#123

Post by Den_VR »

0xWTF wrote: post #96
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

Sage? Is this the same as the Ask Sage that Nicolas Chaillan is behind?

I’ve yet to hear a good thing about Nick.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#124

Post by DavidPiper »

mmooss wrote: post #49
neilv wrote: post #46

Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field. But the culture of our field right is in such a state that you won't influence many of the people in the field itself. And so much economic power is behind the baggery now, that citizens outsi…

Every problem these days is met with a lecture on helplessness. People have all the power they need; they just have believe it and use it. Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants - they all want to win the next election.

I agree with you, but also want to point out the other powerful consumer signal - "vote with your wallet" / "walk away" - is blocked by the fact that AI is being forced into every conceivable crevice of every willing company, and walking away from your job is a very hard thing to do. So you end up being an unwilling enabler regardless.

(This is taking the view that "other companies" are the consumers of AI, and actual end-consumers are more of a by-product/side-effect in the current capital race and their opinions are largely irrelevant.)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#125

Post by mawadev »

aurareturn wrote: post #56

From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist. For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the co…

I keep reading bad sentiment towards software devs. Why exactly do they "bully" business people? If you ask someone outside of the tech sector who the biggest bullies are, its business people who will fire you if they can save a few cents. Whenever someone writes this, I read deep rooted insecurity and jealousy for something they can't wrap their head around and genuinely question if that person really writes software or just claims to do it for credibility.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#126

Post by craftkiller »

aurareturn wrote: post #56

From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist. For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the co…

I realize you said "many" and not "all" but FWIW, I hate LLMs because:

1. My coworkers now submit PRs with absolutely insane code. When asked "why" they created that monstrosity, it is "because the AI told me to".

2. My coworkers who don't understand the difference between SFTP and SMTP will now argue with me on PRs by feeding my comments into an LLM and pasting the response verbatim. It's obvious because they are suddenly arguing about stuff they know nothing about. Before, I just had to be right. Now I have to be right AND waste a bunch of time.

3. Everyone who thinks generating a large pile of AI slop as "documentation" is a good thing. Documentation used to be valuable to read because a human thought that information was valuable enough to write down. Each word had a cost and therefore a minimum barrier to existence. Now you can fill entire libraries with valueless drivel.

4. It is automated copyright infringement. All of my side projects are released under the 0BSD license so this doesn't personally impact me, but that doesn't make stealing from less permissively licensed projects without attribution suddenly okay.

5. And then there are the impacts to society:

5a. OpenAI just made every computer for the next couple of years significantly more expensive.

5b. All the AI companies are using absurd amounts of resources, accelerating global warming and raising prices for everyone.

5c. Surveillance is about to get significantly more intrusive and comprehensive (and dangerously wrong, mistaking doritos bags for guns...).

5d. Fools are trusting LLM responses without verification. We've already seen this countless times by lawyers citing cases which do not exist. How long until your doctor misdiagnoses you because they trusted an LLM instead of using their own eyes+brain? How long until doctors are essentially forced to do that by bosses who expect 10x output because the LLM should be speeding everything up? How many minutes per patient are they going to be allowed?

5e. Astroturfing is becoming significantly cheaper and widespread.

/signed as I also write software, as I assume almost everyone on this forum does.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#127

Post by llmslave2 »

nromiun wrote: post #72

Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all. It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.

Remember, gen AI produces so much value that companies like Microsoft are scaling back their expectations and struggling to find a valid use case for their AI products. In fact Gen AI is so useful people are complaining about all of the ways it's pushed upon them. After all, if something is truly useful nobody will use it unless the software they use imposes it upon them everywhere. Also look how it's affecting the economy - the same few companies keep trading the same few hundred billion around and you know that's an excellent marker for value.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#128

Post by Antibabelic »

avaer wrote: post #106
nromiun wrote: post #72

Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all. It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.

> On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. That's because the credit is taken by the person running the AI, and every problem is blamed on the AI. LLMs don't have rights.

Do you have any evidence that an LLM created something massive, but the person using it received all the praise?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#129

Post by llmslave2 »

phil21 wrote: post #81
strangescript wrote: post #28

[flagged]

Yeah, this is why I'm having a hard time taking many programmers serious on this one. As a general class of folks, programmers and technologists have been putting people out of work via automation since we existed. We justified it via many ways, but generally "if I can replace you with a small shell script, your job shouldn't exist anyways and you can do something more productive instead". These same programmers woul…

Are people here objecting to Gen AI being used to take their jobs? I mainly see people objecting to the social, legal, and environmental consequences.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#130

Post by dilyevsky »

The hypocrisy is palpable. Apparently only web 2.0 is allowed to scrape and then resell people’s content. When someone figures out a better way to do that (based on Googles own research, hilariously) it’s sour grapes from Rob

Reminds me of SV show where Gavin Belson gets mad when somebody else “is making a world a better place”

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