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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#181

Post by pjmlp »

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.

What election?

Elections on autocratic administrations are a joke on democracy.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#183

Post by tim333 »

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…

>programmers and technologists have been putting people out of work

I think it's more causing people to do different work. There used to be about 75% of the workforce in agriculture but tractors and the like reduced that to 2% or so. I'm not sure if the people working as programers would be better off if that didn't happen and they were digging potatoes.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#184

Post by tim333 »

sph wrote: post #54

Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike. Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds o…

It's kind of hard to argue for a middle way. I quite like AI but kind of agree with:

>Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society,

The problem in my view is the spending trillions. When it was researchers and a few AI services people paid for that was fine but the bubble economics are iffy.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#186

Post by Yeask »

znpy wrote: post #169
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.

If you think about economic value, you’re comparing a few large-impact projects (and the impact of plan9 is debatable) versus a multitude of useful but low impact projects (edit: low impact because their scope is often local to some company). I did code a few internal tools with aid by llms and they are delivering business value. If you account for all the instances of these kind of applications of llms, the value cr…

All those amazing tools are internal and nobody can check them out. How convenient.

And guys don't forget that nobody created one off internal tools before GPT.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#187

Post by Yeask »

sethammons wrote: post #175
zmmmmm wrote: post #82

It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.

People used to handwrite letters. Getting a printed letter was an insult.

Never ever happend, stop hallucinating.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#188

Post by arvid-lind »

rurban wrote: post #159
pests wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DAY 268 FINAL STATUS (Christmas Day - COMPLETE) > Verified Acts: 17 COMPLETE | Gmail Sent: 73 | Day ended: 2:00 PM PT https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 At least it keeps track

Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum... The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted

at the top of the page for Day 265:

> while Claude Opus spent 22 sessions trying to click "send" on a single email, and Gemini 2.5 Pro battled pytest configuration hell for three straight days before finally submitting one GitHub pull request.

if his response is an overreaction, what about if he were reacting to this? it's sort of the same thing, so IMO it's not an overreaction at all.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#189

Post by Yeask »

craftkiller wrote: post #126
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 su…

After bitcoin this site is full of people who don't write code.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#190

Post by Redoubts »

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.

> I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM.

not sure how you missed Microsoft introducing a loading screen when right-clicking on the desktop...

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