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If only he behaved as they do on Twitter then we would be saved from his evil ways..
Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#362Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...…
So you would say it is not "trendy" to be pro-AI right now, is that it? That it's not trendy to say things like "it's not going away" or "AI isn't a fad" or "AI needs better critics" - one reaction is reasonable, well thought-out, the other is a bandwagon?
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#363strong emotioms, weak epistemics .. for someone with Pike’s engineering pedigree, this reads more like moral venting .. with little acknowledgment of the very real benefits AI is already delivering ..
It’s delivering 0 net benefits, only misery.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#364Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#365Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...…
It’s in our power to stop it. There’s no point in people like you promoting the interests of the super wealthy at the cost of the humanity of the common people. You should figure out how to positively contribute or not do so at all.
If you think it’s in your power to stop you are delusional.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#366What 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?
Isn't it obvious? It's not a thank-you letter. It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough. Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them. It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.
By that metric of getting shared on social media, it was extraordinarily successful
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#367Funny 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…
> If you think about economic value
I don't, and the fact you do hints to what's wrong with the world.
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#368Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?
Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure? The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal. You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).
Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)
Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#369Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
#370It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up prices for people who need to, ya know, heat their homes and eat