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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#851

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's not upset that someone sent him an AI-generated thank you. He's upset about AI itself. And he's completely right.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#852

What I find infuriating is that it feels like the entire financial system has been rigged in countless ways and turned into some kind of race towards 'the singularity' and everything; humans, animals, the planet; are being treated as disposable resources. I think the way that innovation was funded and then centralized feels wrong on many levels. I already took issue with the tech ecosystem due to distortions and cent…

Im feeling the same way about everything you said. This feels like a huge divide between people that are doing things to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone e else.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#853

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…

I guess we're in the minority. I absolutely hate iPhotos, Google Photos, Facebook suggesting "memories". Apple, Google, Meta are not my friend or family and I don't want them behaving like they are. Even if they didn't fuck up and sent me memory of people or situation I don't want to remember.

Ditto

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.

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you can just disagree with reasons rather than this performative rhetoric. your post makes me realise i was wrong to tease people about rust the other day -- apologies for that.

edit: changed "ad hominem" to "performative rhetoric", think its more fitting in this case but it all seems borderline

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#855

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…

No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.

[deleted]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.

[flagged]

If you send me a Hallmark card, you don't take the time to compose it yourself, but you presumably don't just pick one at random. You read it, to decide if you like the tone and sentiment. You may read several before you pick one. That is, it still takes your time even if the words aren't yours.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#857

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…

No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.

So some AI company instructed their state of the art, world changing tech to “do some good” this holiday season and the best it could do was spam a bunch of famous CS people with the first paragraph of their respective Wikipedia articles? This is kinda hilarious to be honest, but also sad. Why not donate to a charity or something?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#858

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.

It fits perfectly with Microsoft's business strategy. Steal other people's ideas, implement it poorly, bundle it with other services so companies force their employees to use it.

I'm so mad Teams exists

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#859

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's not upset that someone sent him an AI-generated thank you. He's upset about AI itself . And he's completely right.

[flagged]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#860
post #849
post #781

Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore. I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's a…

Kant's categorical imperative is bullshit. Everyone can't sleep in my bed.

Yes, I did say:

> I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios.

The exercise I did is useful in part because I don't even think it's that unrealistic. We can't all sleep in your bed, and we all don't want to send notable people emails using AI, but it's not hard to imagine a future where our inboxes are flooded with AI spam like this. It's already happening. Look at what goes on with job postings. Someone posts a job posting which says to apply by sending an email to a certain email address. The email address gets thousands of emails of job applications, but most of them are AI bullshit. Then the person that posted the job uses AI to try to filter out the bullshit ones. Maybe the protocol in this case usually isn't SMTP and it's happening via other means, but my point stands. This is just spam.

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