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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#751

Post by rwyinuse »

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.

Good idea. My country spends over billion dollars on Microsoft licenses annually, which is more than 200 euros per capita. I think billion dollars a year spent on dev salaries and Claude Code subscription to build MS office replacement would pay itself back quickly enough.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#752

Post by llmslave2 »

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.…

Actually things have gotten massively cheaper under capitalism. Unfortunately at the same time, governments have been inflating the currency year over year and as the decline of prices slows down as innovation matures, inflation finally catches up and starts raising prices.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#753

Post by NohatCoder »

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…

So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].

As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-from-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-us-ai-n...

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#754

Post by user34283 »

suralind wrote: post #727

I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too. This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like m…

He received what is arguably some AI-generated spam.

Apparently this has enraged him and motivated an unhinged rant where he talks about raping the planet and vile machines.

It's a hateful post and it seems disrespectful to anyone working in the industry, so some backlash has to be expected.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#755

Post by CerryuDu »

mellosouls wrote: post #567

I'm not claiming he is mainly motivated by this but it's a fact that his life work will become moot over the next few years as all programming languages become redundant - at least as a healthy multiplicity of approaches as present, it's quite possible at least a subconscious factor in his resentment. I expect this to be an unpopular opinion but take no pleasure in noting that - I've coded since being a kid but that…

For those of us who consider programming a way to self-realize, the potential vanishing of programming as a lucrative job definitely seems threatening. However, I don't think it could disappear entirely. Professions replaced by machinery, at a global scale, continue to thrive locally, at small scales; they can be profitable and fulfilling for the providers, and they are sought after by a small (niche?) target group.

In other words, I don't need programming to remain mainstream, for it to continue fulfilling me and sustaining me.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#756

Post by wolvesechoes »

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…

> I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.

You are right, thus downvoted, but still I see current outcry as positive.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#757

Post by herval »

trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.

Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#758

Post by forinti »

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 don't feel it's immoral, I just don't want to use it.

I find it easier to write the code and not have to convince some AI to spit out a bunch of code that I'll then have to review anyway.

Plus, I'm in a position where programmers will use AI and then ask me to help them sort out why it didn't work. So I've decided I won't use it and I will not waste my time figuring why other people's AI slop doesn't work.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#759

Post by cindyllm »

user34283 wrote: post #754
suralind wrote: post #727

I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too. This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like m…

He received what is arguably some AI-generated spam. Apparently this has enraged him and motivated an unhinged rant where he talks about raping the planet and vile machines. It's a hateful post and it seems disrespectful to anyone working in the industry, so some backlash has to be expected.

[dead]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#760

Post by herval »

Smaug123 wrote: post #249
nkrisc wrote: post #227

What 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?

That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .

did someone already tell Opus that Rob Pike hates it?
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