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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#761

Post by CerryuDu »

2026iknewit wrote: post #284

He worked in well paying jobs, probably traveles, has a car and a house and complains about toxic products etc. Yes there has to be a discussion on this and yeah he might generally have the right mindset, but lets be honest here: No one of them would have developed any of it just for free. We all are slaves to capitalism and this is were my point comes: Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be…

> We all are slaves to capitalism

Yes, but informedly choosing your slavedriver still has merit.

> Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.

This is an interesting thought!

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#762

Post by netsharc »

duxup wrote: post #611
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?

I'll bite. For say a random individual ... they may be unsure about their own writing skills and want to say something but unsure of the words to use.

I doubt the fuckwits who are shepherding that bot are even aware of Rob Pike, they just told the bot to find a list of names of great people in the software industry and write them a thank you note.

Having a machine lie to people that it is "deeply grateful" (it's a word-generating machine, it's not capable of gratitude) is a lot more insulting than using whatever writing skills a human might possess.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#763

Post by netsharc »

gaigalas wrote: post #258
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?

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.

gaigalas, my toaster is deeply grateful for your contributions to HN. It can't write or post on the Internet, and its ability to feel grateful is as much as Claude's, but it really is deeply grateful!

I hope that makes you feel good.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#764

Post by trinsic2 »

herval wrote: post #757
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

Yeah I see where you are going with this, but I think he was trying to make a point about being convinced by decree. It tended to get people to think that it should be moral.

Also I disagree with the context of what the purpose is for law. I don't think its just about making it easier to apply laws because people see things in moralistic ways. Pure Law, which came from the existence of Common Law (which relates to whats common to people) existed within the frame work of whats moral. There are certain things, which all humans know at some level are morally right or wrong regardless of what modernity teaches us. Common laws were built up around that framework. There is administrative law, which is different and what I think you are talking about.

IMHO, there is something moral that can be learned from trying to convince people that IP is moral, when it is, in fact, just a way to administrate people into thinking that IP is valid.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#765

Post by [deleted] »

mmooss wrote: post #49
neilv wrote: post #46

Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field. But the culture of our field right is in such a state that you won't influence many of the people in the field itself. And so much economic power is behind the baggery now, that citizens outsi…

Every problem these days is met with a lecture on helplessness. People have all the power they need; they just have believe it and use it. Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants - they all want to win the next election.

[deleted]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#766

Post by swee54 »

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.

You called it hateful, but you didnt call him a liar

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#767

Post by user34283 »

llmslave2 wrote: post #105

It's nice to see a name like Rob Pike, a personal hero and legend, put words to what we are all feeling. Gen AI has valid use cases and can be a useful tool, but the way it has been portrayed and used in the last few years is appalling and anti-human. Not to mention the social and environmental costs which are staggering. I try to keep a balanced perspective but I find myself pushed more and more into the fervent ant…

[flagged]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#768

Post by DetectDefect »

This reaction to one unsolicited email is frankly unhinged and likely rooted in a deep-seated or even unconscious regret of building systems which materialized the circumstances for this to occur in the first place. Such vitriol is really worth questioning and possibly getting professional help with, else one becomes subject to behavioral engineering by an actual robot - a far more devastating conclusion.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#770

Post by xoxolian »

tensor wrote: post #672
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…

I agree completely. Ads have driven the surveillance state and enshitification. It's allowed for optimized propaganda delivery which in turn has led to true horrors and has helped undo a century of societal progress.

Yeah, I've built ad systems. Sometimes I'd give a presentation to some other department of programmers who worked on content, and someone would ask the tense question: Not to be rude, but aren't ads bad?

And I'd promptly say: Ads are propaganda, and a security risk because it executes 3rd party code on your machine. All of us run adblockers.

There was no need for me to point out that ads are also their revenue generator. They just had a burning moral question before they proceeded to interop with the propaganda delivery system, I guess.

It would lead to unnecessary cognitive dissonance to convince myself of some dumb ideology to make me feel better about wasting so much of my one (1) known life, so I just take the hit and be honest about it. The moral question is what I do about it, if I intervene effectively to help dismantle such systems and replace them with something better.

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