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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#691

Post by netsharc »

aburd wrote: post #70
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 understand that you are writing your general opinion, but I have a feeling Rob Pike's feelings go a little bit deeper than this.

Grandparent commenter seems to be someone who'd find it heartwarming to have a machine thank him with "deep gratitude".

Maybe evolution will select autistic humans as the fittest to survive living with AI, because the ones who find that email enraging will blow their brains out, out of frustration...

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#692

Post by globular-toast »

beAbU wrote: post #167

There is a specific personality type, not sure which type exactly but it overlaps with the CEO/Executive type, who'se brains are completely and utterly short circuted by LLMs. They are completely consumed by it and they struggle to imagine a world without LLMs, or a problem that can be solved by anything other than an LLM. They got a new hammer, and suddenly everything around them become nails. It's as if they have n…

Ultimately LLMs are a trick. They are specifically trained to trick people into thinking they are intelligent. When you take into account Dunning-Kruger it's really no surprise what we're seeing. I just hope we can get through this stage before too much damage is done.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#693

Post by doctorpangloss »

CerryuDu wrote: post #689
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…

Don't be ridiculous. Google has been doing many things, some of those even nearly good. The super talented/prolific/capable have always gravitated to powerful maecenases. (This applies to Haydn and Händel, too.) If you uncompromisingly filter potential employers by "purely a blessing for society", you'll never find an employment that is both gainful and a match for your exceptional talents. Pike didn't make a deal wi…

Okay, but the discourse Rob Pike is engaging in is, “all parts of an experience are valid,” so you see how he’s legitimately in a “hypocrisy pickle”

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#694

Post by th0ma5 »

eleventen wrote: post #423
bigbluedots wrote: post #370

It 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…

I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers. We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful. We’ve been compromising on…

At least Excel worked a lot better.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#695

Post by riskable »

dcre wrote: post #644
olivierestsage wrote: post #296

Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation

How do you reconcile the sense that there's a vibe shift with the usage numbers: about a billion weekly users of ChatGPT and Gemini and continuing to grow.

The very people that whine and bitch that "AI is bad" will enunciate their complaints via their phone's AI-driven speech recognition feature.

It's pure cognitive dissonance.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#696

Post by arendtio »

CerryuDu wrote: post #689
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…

Don't be ridiculous. Google has been doing many things, some of those even nearly good. The super talented/prolific/capable have always gravitated to powerful maecenases. (This applies to Haydn and Händel, too.) If you uncompromisingly filter potential employers by "purely a blessing for society", you'll never find an employment that is both gainful and a match for your exceptional talents. Pike didn't make a deal wi…

I am not so sure about 'the mixed bag' vs 'unquestionably cancer', but I think the problem is that he is complaining while working for such a company.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#697

Post by CerryuDu »

eleventen wrote: post #423
bigbluedots wrote: post #370

It 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…

I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers. We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful. We’ve been compromising on…

> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career

Yes!

> The needle moved just a little bit

That's where we disagree.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#698

Post by a456463 »

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 has been doing has been bad faith and harmful since a looong time

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#699

Post by cons0le »

terminalshort wrote: post #233
hahahacorn wrote: post #222

If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying). GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse. Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear ov…

It's pure envy. Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers because they aren't making money like tech companies. The resource usage complaint is completely contrived.

>Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers

I don't know what Internet sites you visit, but people absolutely, 100% complain about alfalfa farmers online, especially in regards to their water usage in CA.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#700

Post by tonymet »

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…

What are you implying ? That he’s a hypocrite ? So he’s not allowed to have opinions ? If anything he’s in a better position than a random person . And Google is a massive enterprise, with hundreds of divisions. I imagine Pike and his peers share your reluctance
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