Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

skyview.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#571

Post by conradfr »

skybrian wrote: post #533
blibble wrote: post #241

> 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

If you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place. Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.

It's not really people, and they don't really use the software.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#572

Post by tedious-coder »

maplethorpe wrote: post #292
blibble wrote: post #241

> 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

What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

Yes, what a wild position to prefer the job loss, devaluation of skills, and environmental toll of AI to open source creators having been compensated in some better manner.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#573

Post by nikanj »

_ea1k wrote: post #566
jabedude wrote: post #252

Did 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"?

Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's…

How many more jobs are there at the aluminum plant than a datacenter? Big datacenters employ mid-hundreds of people

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#574

Post by paganel »

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation.

Ellul and Uncle Ted were always right, glad that people deep inside the industry are slowly but surely also becoming aware of that.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#575

Post by tomlue »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #541
tomlue wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your id…

This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers.

You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before.

Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now.

If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.

This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#576

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #343
jabedude wrote: post #252

Did 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"?

Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack. Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

> Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

Well the people who burnt compute got it from money so they did burn money.

But they don't care about burning money if they can get more money via investors/other inputs faster than they can burn (fun fact: sometimes they even outspend that input)

So in a way the investors are burning their money, now they burn the money because the market is becoming irrational. Remember Devin? Yes cognition labs is still there etc. but I remember people investing into these because of their hype when it did turn out to be moot comparative to their hype.

But people/market was so irrational that most of these private equities were unable to invest in something like openai that they are investing in anything AI related.

And when you think more deeper about all the bubble activities. It becomes apparent that in the end bailouts feel more possible than not which would be an tax on average taxpayers and they are already paying an AI tax in multiple forms whether it be in the inflation of ram prices due to AI or increase in electricity or water rates.

So repeat it with me: whose gonna pay for all this, we all would but the biggest disservice which is the core of the argument is that if we are paying for these things, then why don't we have a say in it. Why are we not having a say in AI related companies and the issues relating to that when people know it might take their jobs etc. so the average public in fact hates AI (shocking I know /satire) but the fact that its still being pushed shows how little influence sometimes public can have.

Basically public can have any opinions but we won't stop is the thing happening in AI space imo completely disregarding any thoughts about the general public while the CFO of openAI proposing an idea that public can bailout chatgpt or something tangential.

Shaking my head...

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#577

Post by TeddyDD »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #524
tntxtnt wrote: post #358

I get why Microsoflt loves AI so much - it basically devour and destroy open source software. Copyleft/copyright/any license is basically trash now. No one will ever want to open source their code ever again.

Maybe someone should vibe code the entire MS Office Suite and see how much they like that. Maybe add AD while they are at it. I'm for it if that frees European companies from the MS lock in.

Even better - train a model on MS source code leaks and use it to work on Wine fork or as you said - vibe coded MS office. This would be hilarious.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#578

Post by bwfan123 »

johnfn wrote: post #555

From a quick read it seems pretty obvious that the author doesn’t speak English as a native language. You can tell because some of the sentences are full of grammatical errors (ie probably written by the author) and some are not (probably AI-assisted). My guess is they wrote a thank you note and asked Claude to clean up the grammar, etc. This reads to me as a fairly benign gesture, no worse than putting a thank you n…

As I read it, the "fakeness" of it all triggered a ballistic response. And wasting resources in the process. An AI developed feelings and expressed fake gratitude, and the human reading this BS goes ballistic.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#579

Post by Barrin92 »

skybrian wrote: post #533
blibble wrote: post #241

> 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

If you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place. Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.

>Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked,

no, it hasn't. Open source software, like any open and cooperative culture, existed on a bedrock, what we used to call norms when we still had some in our societies and people acted not always but at least most of the time in good faith. Hacker culture (word's in the name of this website) which underpinned so much of it, had many unwritten rules that people respected even in companies when there were still enough people in charge who shared at least some of the values.

Now it isn't just an exception but the rule that people will use what you write in the most abhorrent, greedy and stupid ways and it does look like the only way out is some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque digital version of a monastery.

Post reply on HN