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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#901

Post by xgkickt »

socalgal2 wrote: post #842
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…

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.

Sometimes it does seem like they’re just showing off how much data they’ve gathered on you.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#903

Post by Firehawke »

socalgal2 wrote: post #842
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…

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. Every time I get a "Hey, you should send your father a happy birthday message!" it's a stab to the heart over someone dead over 12 years now.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#905

Post by SilverSlash »

wrs wrote: post #19

To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails. At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly. [0] https://theaidigest.org/village

Why does Anthropic even allow this crap? Isn't such use against their ToS?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#906

Post by acheron »

gilrain wrote: post #231
quectophoton wrote: post #211

Does he still work for Google? If so, I wonder what his views are on Google and their active development of Google Gemini.

A critic from the inside is more persuasive, not less.

This is the opposite of true. There’s a reason we have the phrase “put your money where your mouth is”.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#907

Post by bigyabai »

magnitudes wrote: post #850
makerofthings wrote: post #634

Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good. Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the…

I find a lot of folks share this sentiment but from where I sit it just sounds so much like the “kids these days” crap that spawned all of YOU folks when you were younger. I grew up so inspired by the internet culture of the nineties, people that understood a technology and had a passion for wrangling it to do great things. We had a mixed run and the internet today has simultaneously exceeded these early dreams by or…

Have you considered that the people in the 1990s were mostly correct, and it's you that has been corrupted by modern marketing influences and external pressures?

There's no shortage of "Chicken Little" technologies that look great on-paper and fail catastrophically in real life. Tripropellant rockets, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, flying cars, the list never ends. There's nothing that stops AI from being similarly disappointing besides scale and expectation (both of which are currently unlimited).

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#908

Post by krinchan »

I got an email update for a very adult kink event recently that was entirely written by Claude with emoji bulleted lists and everything. All that was missing was the EXECUTIVE SUMMARY header.

My reaction was about the same.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#909

Post by antonvs »

kenferry wrote: post #351
Smaug123 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Wow. The people who set this up are obnoxious. It’s just spamming all the most important people it can think of? I wouldn’t appreciate such a note from an ai process, so why do they think rob pike would. They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.

If anyone deserves this, it’s Rob Pike. He was instrumental in inflicting Go on the world. He could have studied programming languages and done something to improve the state of the art and help communicate good practices to a wider audience. Instead he perpetuated 1970s thinking about programming with no knowledge or understanding of what we’ve discovered in the half-century since then.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#910

Post by spencerflem »

tim333 wrote: post #184
sph wrote: post #54

Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike. Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds o…

It's kind of hard to argue for a middle way. I quite like AI but kind of agree with: >Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, The problem in my view is the spending trillions. When it was researchers and a few AI services people paid for that was fine but the bubble economics are iffy.

Haha yup. Blowing up society sucks too tho :)

Hard to trust commenters are real these days. ( I am tho don’t worry )

None of this AI stuff is helpful for a flourishing society. It’s plagiarism and spam and flattery and disassociation and lies

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