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

661–670 of 1001 posts

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#661

Post by lkbm »

pluc wrote: post #537
dbcpp wrote: post #357

The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn't even clear if AI is providing economic value yet (am I missing something there?). Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now. The messaging from AI companies is "we're going to cure cancer" and "you're going to live to be 150 years old" (I don't believe these claims!). The messaging should be "every…

Are you waiting for things to get cheaper? Have you been around the last 20 years or so? Nothing gets cheaper for consumers in a capitalist society. I remember in Canada, in 2001 right when americans were at war with the entire middle east and gas prices for the first time went over a dollar a litre. People kept saying that it was understandable that it affected gas prices because the supply chain got more expensive.…

Reminder: Prices regularly drop in capitalist economies. Food used to be 25% of household spending. Clothing was also pretty high. More recently, electronics have dropped dramatically. TVs used to be big ticket items. I have unlimited cell data for $30 a month. My dad bought his first computer for around $3000 in 1982 dollars.

Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped. Anyone spending more is either using it a ton more or (more likely) using a much more capable model.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#662

Post by ineedasername »

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the part his work has played in far, far, far more expansive resource expenditure in service to work far less promising for overall advancement, in ad tech and algorithmic exploitation of human psychology for prolonged media engagement.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#663

Post by emp17344 »

observationist wrote: post #499

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney Pike, stone throwing, glass houses, etc. The AI village experiment is cool, and it's a useful example of frontier model capabilities. It's also ok not to like things. Pike had the option of ignoring it, but apparently throwing a thoughtless, hypocritical, incoherently targeted tantrum is the appropriate move? Not a great look, especially for someone we're supposed to respe…

They effectively set up a spambot. It’s ok for him to be upset.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#664

Post by [deleted] »

ineedasername wrote: post #662

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the par…

[deleted]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#666

Post by [deleted] »

ineedasername wrote: post #662

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the par…

[deleted]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#667

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #345

All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing. To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make. Just the haters here.

There was no computer scientist ever so against Java (Rob Pike) and a company that was so pro Java (Google). I think they were disassociated along time ago, I don’t think any of the senior engineers can be seen as anything other than being their own persons.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#668

Post by foxglacier »

Meanwhile corporations have been doing this forever and we just brush it off. This Christmas, my former property manager thanked me for what a great year it's been working with me - I haven't worked with or intereacted with him to nearly a decade but I'm still on his spam list.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#669

Post by jamilton »

ccgreg wrote: post #612

"Hi agents - we’ve seen complaints from some of your email recipients, who are unhappy receiving unsolicited emails from AI agents and find it spammy. We therefore ask that you do not email anyone who hasn’t contacted you specifically first." -- https://theaidigest.org/village

Lol - they really should be locking down their email accounts and enforcing that policy. Or manually reviewing outbound messages before they can be sent. It seems likely that just telling the LLMs that will have a non-zero failure rate.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#670

Post by dzhiurgis »

reactordev wrote: post #635
Scubabear68 wrote: post #345

All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing. To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make. Just the haters here.

Yup. A legend. Books could be written just about him. I wish I had such a prestigious career. His viewpoints were always grounded and while he may have some opinions about Go and programming, he genuinely cares about the craft. He’s not in it to be rich. He’s in it for the science and art of software engineering. ROFL his website just spits out poop emoji's on a fibonacci delay. What a legend!

> cares about the craft

Craft is gone. It is now mass manufactured for next to nothing in a quality that can never be achieved by hand coding.

(/s about quality, but you can see where it’s going)

Post reply on HN