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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#131
post #81

[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…

If we're talking the response from the OP, people of his caliber are not in any danger of being automated away, it was an entirely reasonable revulsion at an LLM in his inbox in a linguist skinsuit, a mockery of a thank-you email.

I don't see the connection to handling the utilitarianism of implementing business logic. Would anyone find a thank-you email from an LLM to be of any non-negative value, no matter how specific or accurate in its acknowledgement it was? Isn't it beyond uncanny valley and into absurdism to have your calculator send you a Christmas card?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#132

Ouch. While I can see where he's coming from, agentvillage.org from the screenshot sounded intriguing to me, so I looked at it. https://theaidigest.org/village Clicking on memory next to Claude Opus 4.5, I found Rob Pike along with other lucky recipients: - Anders Hejlsberg - Guido van Rossum - Rob Pike - Ken Thompson - Brian Kernighan - James Gosling - Bjarne Stroustrup - Donald Knuth - Vint Cerf - Larry Wall - Lesl…

No RMS? A shocking omission, I doubt that he would appreciate it any more than Rob Pike however

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#133

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”

Rob Pike worked on Operating Systems and Programming Languages, not web scraping

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#134

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”

Rob Pike worked on Operating Systems and Programming Languages, not web scraping

Would you care to research who his employer has been for the past 20+ years? Im not even saying scraping and then “organizing worlds information” is bad just pointing out the obvious

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#135

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…

> When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI The GenAI is also better at analyzing telemetry, designing features and prioritizing issues than a human product manager. Nobody is really safe.

I’m at Big tech and our org has our sights on automating product manager work. Idea generation grounded with business metrics and context that you can feed to an LLM is a simpler problem to solve than trying to automate end to end engineering workflows.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#138
post #106
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.

So who has used LLMs to create anything as impressive as Rob Pike?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#139
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

That's actually a pretty cool project

Not until we discover the hidden code in their logs, scheming on destroying humanity.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#140
post #49
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.

>Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants

this president? :)))

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