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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#971

Post by pritambarhate »

Smaug123 wrote: post #249
nkrisc wrote: post #227

What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?

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 .

As far as I understand Claude (or any other LLM) doesn't do anything on it's own account. It has to be prompted to something and it's actions depend on the prompt. The responsibility of this is on the creators of Agent Village.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#972

Post by sejje »

Firehawke wrote: post #903
socalgal2 wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get those, so there's definitely a setting you can change fwiw

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#973

Post by swat535 »

razodactyl wrote: post #937
deaux wrote: post #894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. For me, the dislike comes from the first part of the message. All of a sudden people who never gave a single shit about the environment, and still make zero lifestyle changes (besides "not using AI") for it, claim to massively care. It's all hypocritical bullshit by people who are scared of losing their jobs or of the societal damage. Which there is a risk of, d…

I appreciate the critical aspect of this comment. We definitely need more of it in society especially when we're inundated with low-quality data. Unfortunately, the negative commentary self-perpetuates a toxic community culture that won't help us in the long run. I upvoted for the critical stance. Constructive commentary in future will go much further to helping us all learn from each other. Personal attacks are a wa…

> the negative commentary self-perpetuates a toxic community

I read it differently, parent's comment is not toxic or negative, it's _realistic_. If you have never cared about the environment, and in fact actively worked to harm it, you have very little social credit left to make such a statement.

With all due respect to Rob, I'm also going to toss out all the arguments from authority. While UTF-8 is great and Go is kind of interesting, let's not pretend he did charitable work at the homeless shelter. He actively contributed to the Adware growth in tech and got rich and famous doing it. The fact that his projects were used in greater computing, doesn't absolve the ethical concerns.

I think that we should judge the argument based on its merit. We can do this by stripping away all the emotions and virtue signaling and ask: "Is AI, providing enough value to be a net positive?"

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#974

Post by beached_whale »

zwnow wrote: post #955
beached_whale wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, cannot resist all the AI companies are not "making" profit. Seriously though, it ignores that words of kindness need a entity that can actually feel expressing them. Automating words of kindness is shallow as the words meaning comes from the sender's feelings.

You cant possibly expect software engineers to be able to understand human emotions and meaning. We built Palantir and all the other fun tech making people's lifes miserable. If software engineers had ethics and would understand human meaning they wouldn't pump out predatory software like its cow milk. Fuck software engineers (excluding all the OSS devs that actually try and make the world a better place).

That's just another distraction from the class war being waged on the un-wealthy. We all contribute to it in small ways while it is being pushed by those with the means. Collectively we love to control others

Palantir wouldn't exist if regular people didn't use it to lookup details on an ex all the time to stalk them /jk.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#975

Post by api »

mrguyorama wrote: post #807
api wrote: post #470

Oh it’s Bluesky. Both Xhitter and Bluesky are outrage lasers, with the user base as a “lasing medium.” Xhitter is the right wing racist xenophobic one, and Bluesky is the lefty curmudgeon anti-everything one. They are this way because it’s intrinsic to the medium. “Micro blogging” or whatever Twitter called itself is a terrible way to do discourse. It buries any kind of nuanced thinking and elevates outrage and other…

You are wrong about AI "being a breath of fresh air" in comparison. For one, AI isn't something you use instead of a microblogging platform. LLMs push all sorts of utter trash in the guise of "information" for much the same reasons. But I wanted to go out of my way to comment to agree with you wholeheartedly about your claims about the irredeemability of the "microblogging" format. It is systemically structured to es…

AI has been a breath of fresh air to me, but I understand some of the problems with it.

Chatting with a bot and using it as a brainstorming or research assistant is the first time I’ve felt a since of wonder since Web 1.0. It offers a way to search and interact with knowledge that is both more efficient and different from anything else.

One of the most mind blowing to me is reverse idea search. “I heard the following idea once. Please tell me who may have said this.” Before LLMs this was utterly impossible.

But I also understand how these things work and that any fact or work that the LLM does must be checked. You can’t just mindlessly believe a chat bot. I can see how people who don’t keep that in mind could be led way out into lala land by these things.

I also see their potential for abuse, but that’s true of all tech. In prehistoric times I’m sure there were some guys sitting around a fire lamenting “maybe we should not have sharpened stick. Maybe we should not play god. Let stick be dull as god intended.”

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#976

Post by n0um3n4 »

I hate the email templates companies use to reject you especially the ones packed with empty words and fake hope.

Honestly, no reply would be better.

But an automated "thank you"? That's basically a f** you. Zero respect.

And to think the ancestor of this is those bloody Hallmark cards. Jesus.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#977

Post by dang »

rubiksx wrote: post #869
hijodelsol wrote: post #783

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]

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#978

Post by wat10000 »

nearbuy wrote: post #830
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…

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.

Why did it have the ability to send email in the first place?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#980

Post by bigfatkitten »

anacrolix wrote: post #964
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 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.

My uncle received a cheque for $0.12 from the Australian Taxation Office in the 1980s. He framed it, and it’s still on his wall today.
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