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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#981

Post by mgraczyk »

ath3nd wrote: post #963
mgraczyk wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of these sound like value judgements and opinions. You claim they make people dumber but the evidence is that using an LLM to search the Internet requires less brain usage? Of course it does, that's the point! Using a dishwasher also uses less of a our brain than washing dishes by hand. I will use my brain for other things.

And whether LLMs are a "good" use of electricity is purely a value judgement. I'm not a fan of cars and don't drive, and a single car ride can use more energy than every LLM query made in a year by most ChatGPT users. But I don't think that makes people who drive cars evil

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#982

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Any annual salary increase that is below inflation is a salary decrease.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#983

Post by OptionOfT »

999900000999 wrote: post #871
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…

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.

Yup, just like my dad built his own house, and I have to call a plumber/electrician.

I can do SOME things, but for more advanced, I need to call a professional.

Coincidently the plumber/electrician always complains about the work done by the person before him/her. Kinda like I do when I need to fix someone else's code.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#984

Post by NeutralCrane »

strogonoff wrote: post #785
trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity. Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for…

Property ownership is ultimately based on scarcity. If I using a thing prevents others from using that thing, there is scarcity, and there should be laws protecting it.

There is no scarcity with intellectual property. My ability to have or act on an idea is in no way affected by someone else having the same idea. The entire concept of ownership of an idea is dystopian and moronic.

I also strongly disagree with the notion that it inspires creativity. Can you imagine where we would be if IP laws existed when we first discovered agriculture, or writing, or art? IP law doesn’t stimulate creation, it stifles it.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#985

Post by jcgl »

derangedHorse wrote: post #204
Gigachad wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we really are in the last moments of the public internet. In the future you won’t be able to contact anyone you don’t know. If you want to thank Rob Pike for his work you’ll have to meet him in person. Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.

We need to bring back the web of trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust A mix of social interaction and cryptographic guarantees will be our saving grace (although I'm less bothered from AI generated content than most).

Maybe for nerds! But normies won't, can't, and shouldn't manage their own keys.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#986

Post by rldjbpin »

the related post from simonw is quite insightful and while the reaction is quite intense, this was quite technically interesting:

> Turns out Claude Opus 4.5 knows the trick where you can add .patch to any commit on GitHub to get the author’s unredacted email address (I’ve redacted it above).

given how capable certain aspects of these models are becoming over time, the user's intent is more important than ever. the resulting email content appears like a poorly-made spam (without the phishing parts), while able to contact someone just from their name!

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#987

Post by nearbuy »

wat10000 wrote: post #978
nearbuy wrote: post #830

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.

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

I'm probably not the best person to ask, having looked at the site for all of 5 minutes.

The experiment is having a bunch of AI agents using different models (Opus, Gemini, etc) try to do various real world tasks together. They might be tasked with organizing an event, opening a merchandise store, or help raise money for a charity (I'm not clear on the details). Sometimes their tasks require email (for example, signing up for some web service).

That aside, counterintuitively, removing their email access is less effective than simply telling them not to send unsolicited emails, since they could just sign up for a free email service.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#988

Post by callc »

cons0le wrote: post #710
sothatsit wrote: post #621

Wow I knew many people had anti-AI sentiments, but this post has really hit another level. It will be interesting to look back in 10 years at whether we consider LLMs to be the invention of the “tractor” of knowledge work, or if we will view them as an unnecessary misstep like crypto.

Thank you for at least acknowledging that we may eventually feel differently about AI. I'm so tired of being called a luddite just for voicing reservations. My company is all in on AI. My CEO has informed us that if we're not "100% all in on AI", then we should seek employment elsewhere. I use it all day at work, and it doesn't seem to be nearly enough for them.

Executives like that make me daydream about different ways to build medium/large organizations that put executives on the bottom (or not have any) and engineers on top.

These little lords of small fiefdoms make my skin crawl

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#989

Post by callc »

cake-rusk wrote: post #943

Slightly offtopic: Any good reasons for learning go now given that zig and rust exist?

Go is much more approachable. Small set of features, easy to pick up quickly. Good for beginners and for teams to work together in.

Rust and Zig have much much more depth.

There are definitely scenarios where Go is the good choice. For example, for teaching someone’s first C-like low(ish) level language

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#990

Post by sothatsit »

jabwd wrote: post #624
sothatsit wrote: post #621

Wow I knew many people had anti-AI sentiments, but this post has really hit another level. It will be interesting to look back in 10 years at whether we consider LLMs to be the invention of the “tractor” of knowledge work, or if we will view them as an unnecessary misstep like crypto.

It'll be the latter. Unfortunately a lot of damage (including psychological damage) has to be done before people realize it.

It’s interesting, it already is the former for niche areas in coding (e.g., basic web dev tasks). But as a whole for areas like social media or increased surveillance it could very well be a negative, and those affect a whole lot more people than coding and having more software would.
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