Live data from Hacker News

Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

skyview.social

961–970 of 1001 posts

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact you can unironically get "furious" in general is probably not a good thing, and going on that glorified Twitter platform, and making that kind of post, doesn't make it look better.

It's totally warranted anger, many people feel it.

"Raping the planet" warranted? Hyperbole?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#962

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.

Actually the opposite is happening, more and more vibe coded source code is making it to github.

You could argue about quality but not "No one will ever want to open source their code ever again".

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#963

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…

Causes zero harm to anyone, less bad than normal spam. Silly thing to get angry about

LLMs cause a lot of harm to everyone:

- The investments in data centers to support the hungry slop producers drive habitat extinction and resource depletion that could be used for better things than a programmer too inept to write a for loop (https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmen...)

- The electricity demand from LLMs drives local electricity prices up so we as a society (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environme...). Not only that, but criminals like Belon Pusk provide electricity for their N*zi bots by totally ignoring environmental rules and regulations and just giving a huge methane middle finger to all (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw)

- LLM makes its users dumber and dependent on them in general (https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ove...)

- LLMs are created and trained by stealing labor (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/04/us-authors-cop..., https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-co...)

Spam itself is useless and bad, electricity, water and other resources, bits and bytes of attention taken from this world so somebody can try to convince you the next thing you need in your life is a plastic piece of trash or another version of a phone with marginal upgrades.

What Rob received is worse than spam, it's Spam 2.0. It's even less environmentally friendly, serves no purpose, and it makes its users dumber and dumber (and the inevitable bubble pop will take the whole economy with it because people were delusional enough to invest in a behemoth money guzzler with no path ever to profitability). Yeah, he works for EvilCorp, but it's never too late to grow a conscience. If you yourself are not angry and you consider it a "silly thing", you are part of the problem (see part about LLMs making populations dumber en masse).

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#964

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 got a cheque for some fuck up for $8. In this day and age, sending a cheque for a small amount like that is a dick move. You know heaps of people will not even bother. Many people have never seen a cheque these days.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#965

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…

[flagged]

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#967

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…

2 PLN is plenty enough to move you up the next tax bracket in ZUS, so... :-)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#968

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’d be furious

To me it just comes across as low emotional intelligence. There are very few things worthy of being furious, in my opinion. Being furious is high cost.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#969

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…

We're going to be in our 70s still writing code because LLMs will dumb down the next generation to the point where they won't be able to get software to work. Which luckily coincides with our social security and retirement systems collapsing.

I mean seriously is this the prediction folks are going with? Ok so we can build something like our SOTA coding agents today, breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction, and your prediction is it will be worse from here on out? Do you realize coding is a verifiable domain which means we don’t technically even need any human data to improve these models? Like in your movie of 2050 everyone’s throwing their hands up “oh no we made them dumber because people don’t need to take 8 years of school and industry experience to build a good UI and industry best practice backend infrastructure”. I guess we can all predict what we want but my god

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#970

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.

This is how we're going to destroy humankind.
Post reply on HN