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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#861
post #724

He only went nuclear because he knew it’s AI. Prepare for a future where you can’t tell the difference. Rob pikes reaction in immature and also a violation of HN rules. Anyone else going nuclear like this would be warned and banned. Comment why you don’t like it and why it’s bad, make thoughtful discussion. There’s no point in starting a mob with outbursts like that. He only gets a free pass because people admire him…

Are you a religious person? Because you are talking about progress like it has nothing to do with powerful people making decisions for everyone. You make it sound spiritual and outside human decision-making.

Explain how I make it sound more spiritual and outside human decision making.

It is outside individual human decision making in a way, but I never said this and I never said anything about spirits or religion.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#862

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]

> I hate the internet's psychosis-like reaction to AI more. The tone is always one of bravery and sacrifice mixed with disgust. You know how you can tell someone hates AI? They'll tell you fifty times. It's becoming a personality type.

Tell me again about performative rage.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#863
post #393

I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme. The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly purit…

> I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. Of course we do. We don't live inside some game theoretic fever dream.

[dead]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#864
post #393

I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme. The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly purit…

> If America doesn’t win, other countries will if anything the Chinese approach looks more responsible that that of the current US regime

[dead]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#865
post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really think that if Microsoft would be forced to improve user experience of Teams, it would lead to measurable impact when it comes to happiness of humankind.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#866

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

This holiday season, hearing my parents rant about AI features unnaturally forced onto their daily gadgets warmed my heart.

Hah, I was listening to a similar conversation that began with family members working in the school system complaining about AI slop that began (relatively) harmlessly in day-to-day email conversations padded with time wasting filler but now has trickled down into "professional" education materials and even textbooks.

Which led to a lot of agreement and rants from others with frustrating stories about their specific workplaces and how it just keeps getting worse by the day. Previously these conversations just popped up among me and the handful of family in tech but clearly now has much broader resonance.

As can be observed in my comment history, I use LLM agentic tools for software dev at work and on my personal projects (really my only AI use case) but cringe whenever I encounter "workslop" as it almost invariably serves to waste my time. My company has been doing a large pilot of 365 Copilot but I have yet to find anything useful, the email writing tools just seems to strip out my personal voice making me sound like I'm writing unsolicited marketing spam.

Every single time I've been using some Microsoft product and think "Hmm, wait maybe the Copilot button could actually be useful here?", it just tells me it can't help or gives me a link to a generic help page. It's like Microsoft deliberately engineered 365 Copilot to be as unhelpful as possible while simultaneously putting a Copilot button on every single visible surface imaginable.

The only tool that actually does something is designed to ruin emails by stripping out personal tone/voice and introducing ambiguity to waste the other person's time. Awesome, thanks for the productivity boost, Microsoft!

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#867
post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's emblematic of their entire worldview. When they need resources, training material or laws AI is everybody's accomplishment but when it comes to profits or even just being allowed to use the model then it's their accomplishment but yours.

AKA "communist in the streets, capitalist in the sheets".

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#869

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…

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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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#870

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]

> no one wants technodystopia.

What some people see as technoutopia, others see as technodystopia. In other words, some people do want your version of technodystopia, they just don’t call it that themselves.

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