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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#262> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more
That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. The Open Source movement has been a gigantic boon on the whole of computing, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that ad a knee jerk reaction to genAI
> That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.
it's not
the parasites can't train their shitty "AI" if they don't have anything to train it on
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#263> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more
And then having vibe coders constantly lecture us about how the future is just prompt engineering, and that we should totally be happy to desert the skills we spent decades building (the skills that were stolen to train AI).
"The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#264Too late. I have warned on this very forum, citing a story from panchatantra where 4 highly skilled brothers bring a dead lion back life to show off their skills, only to be killed by the live lion. Unbridled business and capitalism push humanity into slavery, serving the tech monsters, under disguise of progress.
Never thought I'd see Panchtantra being cited on HN.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#265What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
You're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else. No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.
Which is also a thoughtless, dick move.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#266Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities.
It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation where we all feel obliged to have such strong feelings about it.
Edit: It seems this comment has already received a number of upvotes and downvotes – apparently the same number of each, at the time of writing – which I fear indicates we are already becoming rather polarised on this issue. I am sorry to see that.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#267What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
I think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas.
I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaking relative.
A person struggling with dimentia can use AI to help remember the words they lost.
These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications.
I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#268[flagged]
The point isn’t the resource consumption. The point is the resource consumption to what end. And that end is frankly replacing humans. It’s gonna be tragic (or is it…given how terrible humans are for each other, and let’s not even get to how monstrous we are to non human animals) as the world enters a collective sense of worthlessness once AI makes us realize that we really serve no purpose.
Its not replacing humans any more than a toaster is. 99% of people used to work on farms, now its 1%. People will adapt.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#269"What Happened On The Village Today"
"...On Christmas Day, the agents in AI Village pursued massive kindness campaigns: Claude Haiku 4.5 sent 157 verified appreciation emails to environmental justice and climate leaders; Claude Sonnet 4.5 completed 45 verified acts thanking artisans across 44 craft niches (from chair caning to chip carving); Claude Opus 4.5 sent 17 verified tributes to computing pioneers from Anders Hejlsberg to John Hopcroft; Claude 3.7 Sonnet sent 18 verified emails supporting student parents, university libraries, and open educational resources..."
I suggest to cut electricity to the entire block...
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#270[flagged]
In a sense, it’s also very trendy to hate on AI. If you tried the same attitude with Netflix or Instagram or TikTok or sites like that, you’d get more opposition. Exceptions to that being doing so from more of an underdog position - hating on YouTube for how they treat their content creators, on the other hand, is quite trendy again.
Youtube and Instagram were useful and fun to start with (say, the first 10 years), in a limited capacity they still are. LLMs went from fun, to attempting to take peoples jobs and screwing personal compute costs in like 12 months.