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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#81

Post by phil21 »

strangescript wrote: post #28

[flagged]

Yeah, this is why I'm having a hard time taking many programmers serious on this one.

As a general class of folks, programmers and technologists have been putting people out of work via automation since we existed. We justified it via many ways, but generally "if I can replace you with a small shell script, your job shouldn't exist anyways and you can do something more productive instead". These same programmers would look over the shoulder of "business process" and see how folks did their jobs - "stealing" the workflows and processes so they could be automated.

Now that programmers jobs are on the firing block all of a sudden automation is bad. It's hard to sort through genuine vs. self-serving concern here.

It's more or less a case of what comes around goes around to me so far.

I don't think LLMs are great or problem free - or even that the training data set scraped from the Internet is moral or not. I just find the reaction to be incredibly hypocritical.

Learn to prompt, I guess?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#83

Post by empressplay »

machinationu wrote: post #62
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…

You're absolutely right. But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.

Honestly middle management is going to go extinct before the engineers do

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#84

Post by thefz »

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…

Nope and I wholeheartedly agree with Pike for the disgust of these companies especially for what they are doing to the planet.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#85

Post by bangaladore »

abetusk wrote: post #35
linguae wrote: post #6

Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google? I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the da…

https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s

Must sign in to read? Wow bluesky has already enshittified faster than expected.

(for the record, the downvoters are the same people who would say this to someone who linked a twitter post, they just don't realize that)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#86

Post by aurareturn »

phil21 wrote: post #81
strangescript wrote: post #28

[flagged]

Yeah, this is why I'm having a hard time taking many programmers serious on this one. As a general class of folks, programmers and technologists have been putting people out of work via automation since we existed. We justified it via many ways, but generally "if I can replace you with a small shell script, your job shouldn't exist anyways and you can do something more productive instead". These same programmers woul…

Very elegantly put.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#87

Post by tombert »

chopete3 wrote: post #68
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…

This is the reality and started happening at faster pace. A junior engineer is able to produce something interesting faster without too much attitude. Everybody in the company envy the developers and they respect they get especially the sales people. The golden era of devs as kings started crumbling.

Producing something interesting has never been an issue for a junior engineer. I built lots of stuff that I still think is interesting when I was still a junior and I was neither unique nor special. Any idiot could always go to a book store and buy a book on C++ or JavaScript and write software to build something interesting. High-school me was one such idiot.

"Senior" is much more about making sure what you're working on is polished and works as expected and understanding edge cases. Getting the first 80% of a project was always the easy part; the last 20% is the part that ends up mattering the most, and also the part that AI tends to be especially bad at.

It will certainly get better, and I'm all for it honestly, but I do find it a little annoying that people will see a quick demo of AI doing something interesting really quickly, and then conclude that that is the hard part part; even before GenAI, we had hackathons where people would make cool demos in a day or two, but there's a reason that most of those demos weren't immediately put onto store shelves without revision.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#88

Post by zaptheimpaler »

simianwords wrote: post #10
linguae wrote: post #6

Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google? I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the da…

This argument always felt insincere to me. What power do big tech companies have and why do you have a problem with it? They are simply providing a service you didn’t have access to.

By this logic there is no corporation or entity that provides anything other than basic food, shelter and medical care that could be criticized - they're all just providing something you don't need and don't have access to without them right?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#89

Post by phil21 »

machinationu wrote: post #62
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…

You're absolutely right. But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.

CEOs and the C-suite in general are closest to the money. They are the safest.

That is pretty much the only metric that matters in the end.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#90

Post by grim_io »

machinationu wrote: post #62
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…

You're absolutely right. But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.

Nah, they will fine-tune a local LLM to replace the board and be always loyal to the CEO.

Elon is way ahead, he did it with mere meatbags.

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