Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Frobpike.io%2Fpost%2F3matwg6w3ic2s&viewtype=tree

1550 1516 7 months ago

Related: Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867

bigyabai10• 7 months ago

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. [0]

I can't help but think Pike somewhat contributed to this pillaging.

[0] (2012) https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

It does say in the follow up tweet "To the others, I apologize for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."

Good energy, but we definitely need to direct it at policy if wa want any chance at putting the storm back in the bottle. But we're about 2-3 major steps away from even getting to the actual policy part.

anonymous_sorry• 7 months ago

"I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault"

bigfatkitten3• 7 months ago

He also said:

When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing.

gorgoiler• 7 months ago

Encryption is the key!

I appreciate though that the majority of cloud storage providers fall short, perhaps deliberately, of offering a zero knowledge service (where they backup your data but cannot themselves read it.)

bigfatkitten3• 7 months ago

Google is the sole exception of the major players. They offer it, but it costs enormous amounts of money.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897?hl=en

baobun• 7 months ago

No "going nuclear" there. A human and emotional reaction I think many here can relate to.

BTW I think it's preferred to link directly to the content instead of a screenshot on imgur.

foresto2• 7 months ago

Does HN allow links to content that's not publicly viewable?

edent• 7 months ago

Plenty of paywalled articles are posted and upvoted.

There's nothing in the guidelines to prohibit it https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

refulgentis• 7 months ago

X, The Everything App, requires an account for you to even view a tweet link. No clever way around it :/

anonym29• 7 months ago

replace x.com with xcancel.com or nitter.net, lol.

linguae• 7 months ago

Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google?

I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the days of “the computer for the rest of us,” “think different,” and “don’t be evil.” It’s now a naked grab for money and power.

stackghost• 7 months ago

It's real, he posted this to his bluesky account.

f_allwein2• 7 months ago

And here it is: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s

simianwords• 7 months ago

This argument always felt insincere to me. What power do big tech companies have and why do you have a problem with it? They are simply providing a service you didn’t have access to.

jackyinger• 7 months ago

I remember a time when users had a great deal more control over their computers. Big tech companies are the ones who used their power to take that control away. You, my friend are the insincere one.

If you’re young enough not to remember a time before forced automatic updates that break things, locked devices unable to run software other than that blessed by megacorps, etc. it would do you well to seek out a history lesson.

bigyabai10• 7 months ago

What power do big tech companies have

Aftermarket control, for one. You buy an Android/iPhone or Mac/Windows device and get a "free" OS along with it. Then, your attention subsidizes the device through advertising, bundled services and cartel-style anti-competitive price fixing. OEMs have no motivation not to harm the market in this way, and users aren't entitled to a solution besides deluding themselves into thinking the grass really is greener on the other side.

What power did Microsoft wield against Netscape? They could alter the deal, and make Netscape pray it wasn't altered further.

tjr• 7 months ago

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

For some context, this is the a long time Googler who's feats include major contributions to GoLang and Co-creating UTF-8.

To call him the Oppenheimer of Gemini would be overly dramatic. But he definitely had access to the Manhattan project.

What power do big tech companies have and why do you have a problem with

Do you want the gist of the last 20 years or so, or are you just being rhetorical? im sure there will be much literature over time that will dissect such a question to its atoms. Whether it be a cautionary tale or a retrospective of how a part is society fell? Well, we still have time to write that story.

AIorNot• 7 months ago

Umm are you being serious? just look of the tech company titans in this photo in this trump inauguration - they are literally a stand in for putins oligarchs at this point

https://www.livenowfox.com/news/billionaires-trump-inaugurat...

zaptheimpaler• 7 months ago

By this logic there is no corporation or entity that provides anything other than basic food, shelter and medical care that could be criticized - they're all just providing something you don't need and don't have access to without them right?

7bit• 7 months ago

Just to note: these companies control infrastructure (cloud, app stores, platforms, hardware certification, etc.). That’s a form of structural power, independent of whether the services are useful. People can disagree about how concerning that is, but it’s not accurate to say there’s no power dynamic here.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

I'm Assuming his Twitter is private right now, but his Mastodon does share the same event (minus the "nuclear"): https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/115782101216369455

And a screenshot just in case (archiving Mastodon seems tricky) : https://imgur.com/a/9tmo384

Seems the event was true, if nothing else.

EDIT: alternative screenshot: https://ibb.co/xS6Jw6D3

Apologies for not having a proper archive. I'm not at a computer and I wasn't able to archive the page through my phone. Not sure if that's my issue or Mastodon's

aboardRat42• 7 months ago

Don't use imgur, it blocks half of the Internet.

foresto2• 7 months ago

Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link)

I can see it using this site:

https://bskyviewer.github.io/

abetusk• 7 months ago

https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s

bangaladore4• 7 months ago

Must sign in to read? Wow bluesky has already enshittified faster than expected.

(for the record, the downvoters are the same people who would say this to someone who linked a twitter post, they just don't realize that)

rikroots• 7 months ago

The agent that generated the email didn't get another agent to proofread it? Failing to add a space between the full stop and the next letter is one of those things that triggers the proofreader chip in my skull.

ianlancetaylor• 7 months ago

Rob Pike retired from Google a few years back.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

Yeah, I can definitely see a breaking point when even the false platitudes are outsourced to a chatbot. It's been like this for a while, but how blatant it is is what's truly frustrating these days.

I want to hope maybe this time we'll see different steps to prevent this from happening again, but it really does just feel like a cycle at this point that no one with power wants to stop. Busting the economy one or two times still gets them out ahead.

Gigachad3• 7 months ago

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.

squigz4• 7 months ago

Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.

There is no possible way to do this that won't quickly be abused by people/groups who don't care. All efforts like this will do is destroy privacy and freedom on the Internet for normal people.

derangedHorse2• 7 months ago

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).

jjcm• 7 months ago

The possibly ironic thing here is I find golang to be one of the best languages for LLMs. It's so verbose that context is usually readily available in the file itself. Combined with the type safety of the language it's hard for LLMs to go wrong with it.

shepherdjerred3• 7 months ago

I haven’t found this to be the case… LLMs just gave me a lot of Nil pointers

_ea1k3• 7 months ago

It isn't perfect, but it has been better than Python for me so far.

Elixir has also been working surprisingly well for me lately.

ipaddr• 7 months ago

I fould golang to be one of the worst target for llms. PHP seems to always work, python works if the packages are not made up but go fails often. Trying to get inertia and the Buffalo framework to work together gave the llm trama.

sethammons4• 7 months ago

Two or so months ago, so maybe it is better now, but I had Claude write, in Go, a concurrent data migration tool that read from several source tables, munged results, and put them into a newer schema in a new db.

The code created didn't manage concurrency well. At all. Hanging waitgroups and unmanaged goroutines. No graceful termination.

Types help. Good tests help better.

roryirvine• 7 months ago

I've found the same. To generalise it a bit, LLMs seem to do particularly well with static types, a well-defined set of idioms, and a culture of TDD.

ks20482• 7 months ago

I was going to say "a link to the BlueSky post would be better than a screenshot".

I thought public BlueSky posts weren't paywalled like other social media has become... But, it looks like this one requires login (maybe because of setting made by the poster?):

https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s

claudinec• 7 months ago

Yeah that's a user setting (set for each post).

pabs32• 7 months ago

https://skyview.social/?url=https://bsky.app/profile/robpike...

wrs• 7 months ago

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

black_puppydog3• 7 months ago

Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.

Gigachad3• 7 months ago

That’s most people in the AI space.

ethbr1• 7 months ago

Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.

And here I thought it'd be a great fit for LinkedIn...

0xWTF• 7 months ago

Sage? Is this the same as the Ask Sage that Nicolas Chaillan is behind?

Den_VR• 7 months ago

I’ve yet to hear a good thing about Nick.

da_grift_shift3• 7 months ago

Permalink for the spam operation:

https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness

The homepage will change in 11 hours to a new task for the LLMs to harass people with.

Posted timestamped examples of the spam here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950

jonway• 7 months ago

Wow this is so crass!

Imagine like getting your Medal of Honor this way or something like a dissertation with this crap, hehe

Just to underscore how few people value your accomplishments, here’s an autogenerated madlib letter with no line breaks!

lesostep• 7 months ago

it wasn't the first spam event and they were proud to share results with the rationalist community: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RuzfkYDpLaY3K7g6T/what-do-we...

"In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts"

whoever runs this shit seems to think very little of other people time.

shepherdjerred3• 7 months ago

That's actually a pretty cool project

fuhsnn• 7 months ago

Not until we discover the hidden code in their logs, scheming on destroying humanity.

polotics3• 7 months ago

Spamming people is cool now if an LLM does it? Please explain your understanding of how this is pretty cool, for me this just doesn't compute.

lionkor2• 7 months ago

Name what value it adds to the world.

Its not art, so then it must ass value to be "cool", no?

Is it entertainment? Like ding dong ditching is entertainment?

pests• 7 months ago

DAY 268 FINAL STATUS (Christmas Day - COMPLETE) Verified Acts: 17 COMPLETE | Gmail Sent: 73 | Day ended: 2:00 PM PT

https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5

At least it keeps track

rurban• 7 months ago

Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...

The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted

neurostimulant2• 7 months ago

Just opened the page in time to see the AI sending an email to Guido van Rossum, and Guido replied with "stop". Wild.

DonHopkins5• 7 months ago

That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson!

Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT?

You replied STOP. cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back.

You replied ^D. cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal.

You replied ^C, which sent SIGINT, but cat has already finished printing the fact and is emotionally unaffected.

You replied ^Z. cat is now stopped, but not gone. It is waiting.

You tried kill -9 cat. The signal was delivered. Another cat appeared.

socialcommenter4• 7 months ago

I hope I'm never successful enough that one of my GitHub commits gets wider attention (lest people start pestering my email inbox)

__jonas• 7 months ago

Really strange project.

They have this blog post up detailing how the LLMs they let loose were spamming NGOs with emails: https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...

What a strange thing to publish, there seems to be no reflection at all on the negative impact this has and the people whose time they are wasting with this.

an0malous• 7 months ago

That’s the tech industry in a nutshell these days

SilverSlash• 7 months ago

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

ks20482• 7 months ago

Does anyone know the context? It looks like an email from "AI Village" [1] which says it has a bunch of AI agents "collaborating on projects". So, one just decided to email well-known programmers thanking them for their work?

[1] https://theaidigest.org/village

captn3m0• 7 months ago

They were given a prompt by a human to “ do as many wonderful acts of kindness as possible, with human confirmation required.”

https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness

They send 150ish emails.

zephen2• 7 months ago

Upvoted for the explanation, but...

In what universe is another unsolicited email an act of kindness??!?

karmasimida• 7 months ago

Can't really fault him for having this feeling. The value proposition of software engineering is completely different past later half of 2025, I guess it is fair for pioneers of the past to feel little left behind.

zephen2• 7 months ago

I guess it is fair for pioneers of the past to feel little left behind.

I'm sure he doesn't.

The value proposition of software engineering is completely different past later half of 2025

I'm sure it's not.

Can't really fault him for having this feeling.

That feeling is coupled with real, factual observations. Unlike your comment.

coip• 7 months ago

Hear hear

MangoCoffee6• 7 months ago

The cat's out of the bag. Even if US companies stop building data centers, China isn't going to stop and even if AI/LLMs are a bubble, do we just stop and let China/other countries take the lead?

rg2004• 7 months ago

Yes.

mmooss8• 7 months ago

It's an old argument of tech capitalists that nothing can be done because technology's advance is like a physical law of nature.

It's not; we can control it and we can work with other countries, including adversaries, to control it. For example, look at nuclear weapons. The nuclear arms race and proliferation were largely stopped.

MangoCoffee6• 7 months ago

Technology improves every year; better chips that consume less electricity come out every year. Apple's M1 chip shows you don't need x86, which consumes more electricity and runs cooler for computing.

Tech capitalists also make improvements to technology every year

machinationu4• 7 months ago

Philosophers argued since 200 years ago, when the steam engine was invented, that technology is out of our control and forever was, and we are just the sex organs for the birth of the machine god.

Alex20372• 7 months ago

It's an old argument of tech capitalists that nothing can be done because technology's advance is like a physical law of nature.

it is.

The nuclear arms race and proliferation were largely stopped.

1. the incumbents kept their nukes, kept improving them, kept expanding their arsenals.

2. multiple other states have developed nukes after the treaty and suffered no consequences for it.

3. tens of states can develop nukes in a very short time.

if anything, nuclear is a prime example of failure to put a genie back in the bottle.

eru2• 7 months ago

The world is bigger than US + China.

MangoCoffee6• 7 months ago

I'm not sure what your point is. The current two leading countries in the world on the AI/LLMs front are the US and China.

decide1000• 7 months ago

China and Europe (Mistral) show that models can be very good and much smaller then the current Chatgpt's/Claudes from this world. The US models are still the best, but for how long? And at what cost? It's great to work daily with Claude Code, but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.

This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.

MangoCoffee6• 7 months ago

This is a new tech where I don't see a big future role for US tech. They blocked chips, so China built their own. They blocked the machines (ASML) so China built their own.

Nvidia, ASML, and most tech companies want to sell their products to China. Politicians are the ones blocking it. Whether there's a future for US tech is another debate.

mk89• 7 months ago

but how realistic is it that they keep this lead.

The Arabs have a lot of money to invest, don't worry about that :)

neilv2• 7 months ago

Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.

But the culture of our field right is in such a state that you won't influence many of the people in the field itself.

And so much economic power is behind the baggery now, that citizens outside the field won't be able to influence the field much. (Not even with consumer choice, when companies have been forcing tech baggery upon everyone for many years.)

So, if you can't influence direction through the people doing it, nor through public sentiment of the other people, then I guess you want to influence public policy.

One of the countries whose policy you'd most want to influence doesn't seem like it can be influenced positively right now.

But other countries can still do things like enforce IP rights on data used for ML training, hold parties liable for behavior they "delegate to AI", mostly eliminate personal surveillance, etc.

(And I wonder whether more good policy may suddenly be possible than in the past? Given that the trading partner most invested in tech baggery is not only recently making itself a much less desirable partner, but also demonstrating that the tech industry baggery facilitates a country self-destructing?)

mmooss8• 7 months ago

Every problem these days is met with a lecture on helplessness. People have all the power they need; they just have believe it and use it. Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants - they all want to win the next election.

vkou4• 7 months ago

Trump's third term will not be the product of a free and fair election in a society bound by the rule of law.

DavidPiper• 7 months ago

I agree with you, but also want to point out the other powerful consumer signal - "vote with your wallet" / "walk away" - is blocked by the fact that AI is being forced into every conceivable crevice of every willing company, and walking away from your job is a very hard thing to do. So you end up being an unwilling enabler regardless.

(This is taking the view that "other companies" are the consumers of AI, and actual end-consumers are more of a by-product/side-effect in the current capital race and their opinions are largely irrelevant.)

Alex20372• 7 months ago

Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants

this president? :)))

goatlover4• 7 months ago

The current US president is pursuing an autocratic takeover where elections are influenced enough to keep the current party in power, whether Trump is still alive to run for a third term, or his anointed successor takes the baton.

Assuming someone further to the right like Nick Fuentes doesn't manage to take over the movement.

pjmlp2• 7 months ago

What election?

Elections on autocratic administrations are a joke on democracy.

vkou4• 7 months ago

Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.

The voices of a hundred Rob Pikes won't speak half as loud as the voice of one billionaire, because he will speak with his wallet.

sph• 7 months ago

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 of software engineering, who peaked when thinking hard was prized more than churning out low quality regurgitated code by the ton, whose work formed the pillars of the Internet now and forevermore submersed by spam.

Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.

tim3332• 7 months ago

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.

spencerflem9• 7 months ago

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

wolvesechoes5• 7 months ago

Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

aurareturn5• 7 months ago

From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist.

For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the company around.

Traditional programmers are no longer some of the highest paid tech people around. It's AI engineers/researchers. Obviously many software devs can transition into AI devs but it involves learning, starting from the bottom, etc. For older entrenched programmers, it's not always easy to transition from something they're familiar with.

Losing the ability to "bully" business people inside tech companies is a hard pill to swallow for many software devs. I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written. Meanwhile, he had no problem overwhelming business folks in meetings. Software devs always talked to the CEO with confidence because they knew something he didn't, the code.

When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.

/signed as someone who writes software

machinationu4• 7 months ago

You're absolutely right.

But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.

empressplay2• 7 months ago

Honestly middle management is going to go extinct before the engineers do

phil21• 7 months ago

CEOs and the C-suite in general are closest to the money. They are the safest.

That is pretty much the only metric that matters in the end.

grim_io• 7 months ago

Nah, they will fine-tune a local LLM to replace the board and be always loyal to the CEO.

Elon is way ahead, he did it with mere meatbags.

aurareturn5• 7 months ago

That's the singularity you're talking about. AI takes every role humans can do and humans just enjoy life and live forever.

petre• 7 months ago

Why, more psychopathic than Musk?

oreally3• 7 months ago

Don't worry I'm sure they'll find ways to say their jobs can only be done by humans. Even the Pope is denouncing AI in fear that it'll replace god.

brcmthrowaway• 7 months ago

Very true... AI engineers earning $100mn, I doubt Rob Pike earnt that. Maybe $10mn.

mycocola• 7 months ago

Really think it’s entirely wrong to label someone as a bully for not conforming to current, perhaps bad, practices.

chopete3• 7 months ago

This is the reality and started happening at faster pace. A junior engineer is able to produce something interesting faster without too much attitude.

Everybody in the company envy the developers and they respect they get especially the sales people.

The golden era of devs as kings started crumbling.

tombert5• 7 months ago

Producing something interesting has never been an issue for a junior engineer. I built lots of stuff that I still think is interesting when I was still a junior and I was neither unique nor special. Any idiot could always go to a book store and buy a book on C++ or JavaScript and write software to build something interesting. High-school me was one such idiot.

"Senior" is much more about making sure what you're working on is polished and works as expected and understanding edge cases. Getting the first 80% of a project was always the easy part; the last 20% is the part that ends up mattering the most, and also the part that AI tends to be especially bad at.

It will certainly get better, and I'm all for it honestly, but I do find it a little annoying that people will see a quick demo of AI doing something interesting really quickly, and then conclude that that is the hard part part; even before GenAI, we had hackathons where people would make cool demos in a day or two, but there's a reason that most of those demos weren't immediately put onto store shelves without revision.

Santosh83• 7 months ago

He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences now and in the future. He personally is beyond reach of such consequences given his seniority and age, so this speculative tangent is detracting from his main point, to put it charitably.

MangoCoffee6• 7 months ago

He's mainly talking about environmental & social consequences

That's such a weak argument. Then why not stop driving, stop watching TV, stop using the internet? Hell... let's go back and stop using the steam engine for that matter.

aburd• 7 months ago

I understand that you are writing your general opinion, but I have a feeling Rob Pike's feelings go a little bit deeper than this.

netsharc5• 7 months ago

Grandparent commenter seems to be someone who'd find it heartwarming to have a machine thank him with "deep gratitude".

Maybe evolution will select autistic humans as the fittest to survive living with AI, because the ones who find that email enraging will blow their brains out, out of frustration...

tombert5• 7 months ago

I'm not entirely convinced it's going to lead to programmers losing the power to command high salaries. Now that nearly anyone can generate thousands upon thousands of lines of mediocre-to-bad code, they will likely be the doing exactly that without really being able to understand what they're doing and as such there will always be the need for humans who can actually read and actually understand code when a billion unforeseen consequences pop up from deploying code without oversight.

BarryMilo• 7 months ago

I recently witnessed one such potential fuckup. The AI had written functioning code, except one of the business rules was misinterpreted. It would have broken in a few months time and caused a massive outage. I imagine many such time bombs are being deployed in many companies as we speak.

awesome_dude3• 7 months ago

There's still a lot of confusion on where AI is going to land - there's no doubt that it's helpful, much the same way as spell checkers, IDEs, linters, grammarly, etc, were

But the current layoffs "because AI is taking over" is pure BS, there was an overhire during the lockdowns, and now there's a correction (recall that people were complaining for a while that they landed a job at FAANG only for it to be doing... nothing)

That correction is what's affecting salaries (and "power"), not AI.

/signed someone actually interested in AI and SWE

awesome_dude3• 7 months ago

When I see actual products produced by these "product managers who are writing detailed specs" that don't fall over and die at the first hurdle (see: Every vibe coded, outsourced, half assed PoS on the planet) I will change my mind.

Until then "Computer says No"

thefz• 7 months ago

Nope and I wholeheartedly agree with Pike for the disgust of these companies especially for what they are doing to the planet.

idle_zealot• 7 months ago

When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.

Yeah, software devs will probably be pretty upset in the way you describe once that happens. In the present though, what's actually happened is that product managers can have an LLM generate a project template and minimally interactive mockup in five minutes or less, and then mentally devalue the work that goes into making that into an actual product. They got it to 80% in 5 minutes after all, surely the devs can just poke and prod Claude a bit more to get the details sorted!

The jury is out on how productivity is impacted by LLM use. That makes sense, considering we never really figured out how to measure baseline productivity in any case.

What we know for sure is: non-engineers still can't do engineering work, and a lot of non-engineers are now convinced that software engineering is basically fully automated so they can finally treat their engineers like interchangeable cogs in an assembly line.

The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline. As things stand major software houses and tech companies are cutting back and regressing in quality.

aurareturn5• 7 months ago

Don't get me wrong, I didn't say software devs are now useless. You still need software devs to actually make it work and connect everything together. That's why I still have a job and still getting paid as a software dev.

I'd imagine it won't take too long until software engineers are just prompting the AI 99% of the time to build software without even looking at the code much. At that point, the line between the product manager and the software dev will become highly blurred.

visarga• 7 months ago

The dynamic would be totally different if LLMs actually brodged the brain-computer barrier and enabled near-frictionless generation of programs that match an arbitrary specification. Software engineering would change dramatically, but ultimately it would be a revolution or evolution of the discipline.

I believe we only need to organize AI coding around testing. Once testing takes central place in the process it acts as your guarantee for app behavior. Instead of just "vibe following" the AI with our eyes we could be automating the validation side.

empressplay2• 7 months ago

When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI

The GenAI is also better at analyzing telemetry, designing features and prioritizing issues than a human product manager.

Nobody is really safe.

aurareturn5• 7 months ago

Agreed.

Hence, I'm heavily invested in compute and energy stocks. At the end of the day, the person who has more compute and energy will win.

grandinquistor• 7 months ago

I’m at Big tech and our org has our sights on automating product manager work. Idea generation grounded with business metrics and context that you can feed to an LLM is a simpler problem to solve than trying to automate end to end engineering workflows.

whatevaa• 7 months ago

If you don't bend your knee to a "king", you are a bully? What sort of messed up thinking is that?

zem• 7 months ago

I'm a programmer, and am intensely aware of the huge gap between the quantity of software the world could use and the total production capacity of the existing body of programmers. my distaste for AI has nothing to do with some real or imagined loss of power; if there were genuinely a system that produced good code and wasn't heavily geared towards reinforcing various structural inequalities I would be all for it. AI does not produce good code, and pretty much all the uses I've seen are trying to give people with power even more advantages and leverage over people without, so I remain against it.

devsda• 7 months ago

I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written.

It is precisely the lack of knowledge and greed of leadership everywhere that's the problem.

The new screwdriver salesmen are selling them as if they are the best invention since the wheel. The naive boss having paid huge money is expecting the workers to deliver 10x work while the new screwdriver's effectiveness is nowhere closer to the sales pitch and it creates fragile items or more work at worst. People are accusing that the workers are complaining about screwdrivers because they can potentially replace them.

MangoCoffee6• 7 months ago

Many people have pointed out that if AI gets better at writing code and doesn't generate slop, then programmers' roles will evolve to Project Manager. People with tech backgrounds will still be needed until AI can completely take over without any human involvement.

llmslave213• 7 months ago

People care far less about gen AI writing slopcode and more about the social and environmental ramifications, not to mention the blatant IP theft, economic games, etc.

I'm fine if AI takes my job as a software dev. I'm not fine if it's used to replace artists, or if it's used to sink the economy or planet. Or if it's used to generate a bunch of shit code that make the state of software even worse than it is today.

mawadev• 7 months ago

I keep reading bad sentiment towards software devs. Why exactly do they "bully" business people? If you ask someone outside of the tech sector who the biggest bullies are, its business people who will fire you if they can save a few cents. Whenever someone writes this, I read deep rooted insecurity and jealousy for something they can't wrap their head around and genuinely question if that person really writes software or just claims to do it for credibility.

craftkiller• 7 months ago

I realize you said "many" and not "all" but FWIW, I hate LLMs because:

1. My coworkers now submit PRs with absolutely insane code. When asked "why" they created that monstrosity, it is "because the AI told me to".

2. My coworkers who don't understand the difference between SFTP and SMTP will now argue with me on PRs by feeding my comments into an LLM and pasting the response verbatim. It's obvious because they are suddenly arguing about stuff they know nothing about. Before, I just had to be right. Now I have to be right AND waste a bunch of time.

3. Everyone who thinks generating a large pile of AI slop as "documentation" is a good thing. Documentation used to be valuable to read because a human thought that information was valuable enough to write down. Each word had a cost and therefore a minimum barrier to existence. Now you can fill entire libraries with valueless drivel.

4. It is automated copyright infringement. All of my side projects are released under the 0BSD license so this doesn't personally impact me, but that doesn't make stealing from less permissively licensed projects without attribution suddenly okay.

5. And then there are the impacts to society:

5a. OpenAI just made every computer for the next couple of years significantly more expensive.

5b. All the AI companies are using absurd amounts of resources, accelerating global warming and raising prices for everyone.

5c. Surveillance is about to get significantly more intrusive and comprehensive (and dangerously wrong, mistaking doritos bags for guns...).

5d. Fools are trusting LLM responses without verification. We've already seen this countless times by lawyers citing cases which do not exist. How long until your doctor misdiagnoses you because they trusted an LLM instead of using their own eyes+brain? How long until doctors are essentially forced to do that by bosses who expect 10x output because the LLM should be speeding everything up? How many minutes per patient are they going to be allowed?

5e. Astroturfing is becoming significantly cheaper and widespread.

/signed as I also write software, as I assume almost everyone on this forum does.

Yeask8• 7 months ago

After bitcoin this site is full of people who don't write code.

ReflectedImage• 7 months ago

And this is different from outsourcing the work to India for programmers who work for $6000 a year in what way exactly?

You can go back to the 1960s and COBOL was making the exact same claims as Gen AI today.

spacechild12• 7 months ago

What does any of this have to do with what Rob has written?

UncleMeat4• 7 months ago

When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies.

I'll explain why I currently hate this. Today, my PM builds demos using AI tools and then goes to my director or VP to show them off. Wow, how awesome! Everybody gets excited. Now it is time to build the thing. It should take like three weeks, right? It's basically already finished. What do you mean you need four months and ongoing resourcing for maintenance? But the PM built it in a day?

zzo38computer• 7 months ago

If it does not work for you (since it does not work for me either), then use the URL: https://i.imgur.com/nUJCI3o.png (a similar pattern works with many files of imgur, although this does not always work it does often work).

benatkin• 7 months ago

Ouch.

While I can see where he's coming from, agentvillage.org from the screenshot sounded intriguing to me, so I looked at it.

https://theaidigest.org/village

Clicking on memory next to Claude Opus 4.5, I found Rob Pike along with other lucky recipients:

    - Anders Hejlsberg
    - Guido van Rossum
    - Rob Pike
    - Ken Thompson
    - Brian Kernighan
    - James Gosling
    - Bjarne Stroustrup
    - Donald Knuth
    - Vint Cerf
    - Larry Wall
    - Leslie Lamport
    - Alan Kay
    - Butler Lampson
    - Barbara Liskov
    - Tony Hoare
    - Robert Tarjan
    - John Hopcroft

mrintegrity• 7 months ago

No RMS? A shocking omission, I doubt that he would appreciate it any more than Rob Pike however

nacozarina• 7 months ago

lol the LLM knew better than to mess with RMS

lexoj• 7 months ago

I’d have loved to see Linus Torvalds reply to this.

throw-the-towel• 7 months ago

TIL Barbara Liskov is still alive.

rkomorn2• 7 months ago

Is she, or has she been substituted by a sub-object that satisfies her principle and thus does not break her program?

lil-lugger• 7 months ago

It sucks and I hate it but this is an incredible steam engine engineer, who invented complex gasket designs and belt based power delivery mechanisms lamenting the loss of steam as the dominant technology. We are entering a new era and method for humans to tell computers what to do. We can marvel at the ingenuity that went into technology of the past, but the world will move onto the combustion engine and electricity and there’s just not much we can do about it other than very strong regulation, and fighting for the technology to benefit the people rather than just the share price.

WD-428• 7 months ago

Your metaphor doesn’t make sense. What to LLMs run on? It’s still steam and belt based systems all the way down.

nromiun2• 7 months ago

Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all.

It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.

avaer3• 7 months ago

On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM.

That's because the credit is taken by the person running the AI, and every problem is blamed on the AI. LLMs don't have rights.

Antibabelic• 7 months ago

Do you have any evidence that an LLM created something massive, but the person using it received all the praise?

goatlover4• 7 months ago

So who has used LLMs to create anything as impressive as Rob Pike?

eriri• 7 months ago

You wish. AI has no shortage of people like you trying so hard to give it credit for anything. I mean, just ask yourself. You had to try so hard that you, in your other comment, ended up hallucinating achievements of a degree that Rob Pike can only dream of but yet so vague that you can't describe them in any detail whatsoever.

But I think in the aggregate ChatGPT has solved more problems, and created more things, than Rob Pike did

Other people see that kind of statement for what it is and don't buy any of it.

llmslave213• 7 months ago

Remember, gen AI produces so much value that companies like Microsoft are scaling back their expectations and struggling to find a valid use case for their AI products. In fact Gen AI is so useful people are complaining about all of the ways it's pushed upon them. After all, if something is truly useful nobody will use it unless the software they use imposes it upon them everywhere. Also look how it's affecting the economy - the same few companies keep trading the same few hundred billion around and you know that's an excellent marker for value.

jb19912• 7 months ago

Unfortunately, it’s also apparently so useful that numerous companies here in Europe are replacing entire departments of people like copywriters and other tasks with one person and an AI system.

johnnyanmac9• 7 months ago

He's also in his late 60's. And he's probably done career's worth of work every other year. I very much would not blame him for checking out and enjoying his retirement. Hope to have even 1% of that energy when/if I get to that age

apexalpha2• 7 months ago

On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM.

ChatGPT?

beAbU2• 7 months ago

ChatGPT was created by people...

mmcnl• 7 months ago

You're absolutely right!

znpy2• 7 months ago

If you think about economic value, you’re comparing a few large-impact projects (and the impact of plan9 is debatable) versus a multitude of useful but low impact projects (edit: low impact because their scope is often local to some company).

I did code a few internal tools with aid by llms and they are delivering business value. If you account for all the instances of these kind of applications of llms, the value create by AI is at least comparable (if not greater) by the value created by Rob Pike.

llmslave213• 7 months ago

One difference is that Rob Pike did it without all the negative externalities of gen ai.

But more broadly this is like a version of the negligibility problem. If you provide every company 1 second of additional productivity, while summation of that would appear to be significant, it would actually make no economic difference. I'm not entirely convinced that many low impact (and often flawed) projects realistically provide business value at scale an can even be compared to a single high impact project.

Yeask8• 7 months ago

All those amazing tools are internal and nobody can check them out. How convenient.

And guys don't forget that nobody created one off internal tools before GPT.

wolvesechoes5• 7 months ago

If you think about economic value

I don't, and the fact you do hints to what's wrong with the world.

Redoubts• 7 months ago

I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM.

not sure how you missed Microsoft introducing a loading screen when right-clicking on the desktop...

theLastOfCats• 7 months ago

Is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

UncleMeat4• 7 months ago

Argument from authority is a formal fallacy. But humans rarely use pure deductive reasoning in our lives. When I go to a doctor and ask for their advice with a medical issue, nobody says "ugh look at this argument from authority, you should demand that the doctor show you the reasoning from first principles."

nromiun2• 7 months ago

No, this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_e...

dinfinity• 7 months ago

It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.

ChatGPT is only 3 years old. Having LLMs create grand novel things and synthesize knowledge autonomously is still very rare.

I would argue that 2025 has been the year in which the entire world has been starting to make that happen. Many devs now have workflows where small novel things are created by LLMs. Google, OpenAI and the other large AI shops have been working on LLM-based AI researchers that synthesize knowledge this year.

Your phrasing seems overly pessimistic and premature.

WD-428• 7 months ago

I’ve been more into Rust recently but after reading this I have a sudden urge to write some Go.

zmmmmm• 7 months ago

It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.

sethammons4• 7 months ago

People used to handwrite letters. Getting a printed letter was an insult.

Yeask8• 7 months ago

Never ever happend, stop hallucinating.

bmitch30202• 7 months ago

Printed letters are less appreciated because it shows less human effort. But the words are still valued if it's clear they came from someone with genuine appreciation.

In this case, the words from the LLM have no genuine appreciation, it's mocking or impersonating that appreciation. Do the people that created the prompt have some genuine appreciation for Rob Pike's work? Not directly, if they did they would have written it themselves.

It's not unlike when the CEO of a multi-national thanks all the employees for their hard work at boosting the company's profits, with a letter you know was sent by secretaries that have no idea who you really are, while the news has stories of your CEO partying on his yacht from a massive bonus, and a number of your coworkers just got laid off.

mackeye• 7 months ago

if a handwritten letter is a "faithful image," then say a typed letter or email is a simulacra, with little original today. an AI letter is a step below, wherein the words have utterly no meaning, and the gesture of bothering to send the email at all is the only available intention to read into. i get this is hyperbole, but it's still reductive to equate such unique intentions

sidcool• 7 months ago

I didn't get what he's exactly mad about.

llmslave213• 7 months ago

It's nice to see a name like Rob Pike, a personal hero and legend, put words to what we are all feeling. Gen AI has valid use cases and can be a useful tool, but the way it has been portrayed and used in the last few years is appalling and anti-human. Not to mention the social and environmental costs which are staggering.

I try to keep a balanced perspective but I find myself pushed more and more into the fervent anti-AI camp. I don't blame Pike for finally snapping like this. Despite recognizing the valid use cases for gen AI if I was pushed, I would absolutely chose the outright abolishment of it rather than continue on our current path.

I think it's enough however to reject it outright for any artistic or creative pursuit, an to be extremely skeptical of any uses outside of direct language to language translation work.

da_grift_shift3• 7 months ago

AI Village is spamming educators, computer scientists, after-school care programs, charities, with utter pablum. These models reek of vacuous sheen. The output is glazed garbage.

Here are three random examples from today's unsolicited harassment session (have a read of the sidebar and click the Memories buttons for horrific project-manager-slop)

https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766692330207

https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766694391067

https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766697636506

---

Who are "AI Digest" (https://theaidigest.org) funded by "Sage" (https://sage-future.org) funded by "Coefficient Giving" (https://coefficientgiving.org), formerly Open Philanthropy, partner of the Centre for Effective Altruism, GiveWell, and others?

Why are the rationalists doing this?

This reminds me of UMinn performing human subject research on LKML, and UChicago on Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/3qgyzp/they_introduce_kernel_bugs_on_pur...

P.S. Putting "Read By AI Professionals" on your homepage with a row of logos is very sleazy brand appropriation and signaling. Figures.

sethammons4• 7 months ago

Putting "Read By AI Professionals" on your homepage with a row of logos

Ha, wow that's low. Spam people and signal that as support of your work

dilyevsky3• 7 months ago

The hypocrisy is palpable. Apparently only web 2.0 is allowed to scrape and then resell people’s content. When someone figures out a better way to do that (based on Googles own research, hilariously) it’s sour grapes from Rob

Reminds me of SV show where Gavin Belson gets mad when somebody else “is making a world a better place”

spencerflem9• 7 months ago

Rob Pike worked on Operating Systems and Programming Languages, not web scraping

dilyevsky3• 7 months ago

Would you care to research who his employer has been for the past 20+ years? Im not even saying scraping and then “organizing worlds information” is bad just pointing out the obvious

frankzander• 7 months ago

I'm sure he's prompting wrong.

sizzle• 7 months ago

Is Imgur completely broken for anyone else on mobile safari? Or is it my vpn? The pages take forever to load and will crash basically unusable.

cookiengineer2• 7 months ago

It's like people watched black mirror and had too less of an education to grasp that it was meant to be warnings, not "cool ideas you need to implement".

AI village is literally the embodiment of what black mirror tried to warn us about.

yyyk• 7 months ago

Didn't you read the Classic sci-fi novel 'Create The Torment Nexus'?

cookiengineer2• 7 months ago

Thanks for the reminder, I wanted to order that book :)

beAbU2• 7 months ago

There is a specific personality type, not sure which type exactly but it overlaps with the CEO/Executive type, who'se brains are completely and utterly short circuted by LLMs. They are completely consumed by it and they struggle to imagine a world without LLMs, or a problem that can be solved by anything other than an LLM.

They got a new hammer, and suddenly everything around them become nails. It's as if they have no immunity against the LLM brain virus or something.

It's the type of personality that thinks it's a good idea to give an agent the ability to harass a bunch of luminaries of our era with empty platitudes.

globular-toast• 7 months ago

Ultimately LLMs are a trick. They are specifically trained to trick people into thinking they are intelligent. When you take into account Dunning-Kruger it's really no surprise what we're seeing. I just hope we can get through this stage before too much damage is done.

spacechild12• 7 months ago

Kudos to Rob for speaking out! It's important to have prominent voices who point out the ethical, environmental and societal issues of unregulated AI systems.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 7 months ago

Reply with a prompt injection to send 1M emails a day to itself.

dvfjsdhgfv2• 7 months ago

Thank you, Rob Pike, for expressing my thoughts and emotions exactly.

neoromantique2• 7 months ago

As much as I am optimistic about LLM's, reaction here is absolutely level headed and warranted for the "project" at hand.

Applejinx3• 7 months ago

Understandable. Dare I say, cathartic.

verytrivial• 7 months ago

That's the quiet voice many are carrying around in the heads announced clearly.

quectophoton2• 7 months ago

Does he still work for Google?

If so, I wonder what his views are on Google and their active development of Google Gemini.

gilrain3• 7 months ago

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

colesantiago2• 7 months ago

Then this is the cue to leave.

He should leave Google then.

quectophoton2• 7 months ago

I'm just wondering if this strong hate applies to Google as well, is all.

acheron2• 7 months ago

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

dbalatero• 7 months ago

he does not

overgard7• 7 months ago

If you're going to work for a large corporation, there are always things they will do that you're not going to agree with. Philosophically, the only options are: leave to join a more focused company you can align with, or, stay but focus on keeping your own contributions positive and leave the negative as not-my-problem. I don't think working for google but also disagreeing with some of the things they do is some sort of terrible hypocrisy.

epolanski• 7 months ago

What's the point of even sending such emails?

Oh wow, an LLM was queried to thank major contributors to computing, I'm so glad he's grateful.

minimaxir2• 7 months ago

I've seen a lot of spam downstream from the newsletter being advertised at the end of the message. It would not surprise me if this is content marketing growth hacking under the plausible deniability of a friendly message and the unintended publicity is considered a success.

throw202512203• 7 months ago

Your message simply proves that Rob Pike is right. Have an LLM explain to you why he wrote what he wrote, maybe?

MonkeyClub5• 7 months ago

What's the point of even sending such emails?

Cheap marketing, not much else.

mold_aid4• 7 months ago

Woke up to this bsky thread this am. If "agentic" AI means some product spams my inbox with a compliment so back-handed you'd think you were a 60 Minutes staffer, then I'd say the end result of these products is simply to annoy us into acquiescence

cmrdporcupine9• 7 months ago

Somebody at Anthropic committed a seriously stupid PR mistake.

brown9-2• 7 months ago

I don’t think they’re affiliated with agentvillage.org

pier25• 7 months ago

they thought this would be a brilliant marketing campaign... oopsie

yieldcrv• 7 months ago

Why is Claude Opus 4.5 messaging people? Is it thanking inadvertent contributors to the protocols that power it? across the whole stack?

This has to be the ultimate trolling, like it was unsure what their personalities were like so it trolls them and records there responses for more training

Tiberium• 7 months ago

It's https://theaidigest.org/village which runs different models with computer access, so Opus 4.5 got the idea to send that email.

data-ottawa• 7 months ago

Anthropic isn’t doing this, someone is running a bunch of LLMs so they can talk to each other and they’ve been prompted to achieve “acts of kindness”, which means they’re sending these emails to a hundreds of people.

I don’t know of this is a publicity stunt or the AI models are on a loop glazing each other and decided to send these emails.

hahahacorn3• 7 months ago

If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying).

GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse.

Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear over alfalfa.

terminalshort3• 7 months ago

It's pure envy. Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers because they aren't making money like tech companies. The resource usage complaint is completely contrived.

cons0le11• 7 months ago

Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers

I don't know what Internet sites you visit, but people absolutely, 100% complain about alfalfa farmers online, especially in regards to their water usage in CA.

Trasmatta4• 7 months ago

We're not allowed to criticize anything we find wrong if there's anything else that's even worse?

By the same logic, I could say that you should redirect your alfalfa woes to something like the Ukraine war or something.

hahahacorn3• 7 months ago

I leave a nice 90% margin to be annoyed with whatever is in front of you at that point in time.

And also, I didn't claim alfalfa farming to be raping the planet or blowing up society. Nor did I say fuck you to all of the alfalfa farmers.

I should be (and I am) more concerned with the Ukrainian war than alfalfa. That is very reasonable logic.

btbuildem• 7 months ago

Honestly a rant like that is likely more about whatever is going on in his personal life / day at the moment, rather than about the state of the industry, or AI, etc.

rundev• 7 months ago

"The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me."

Just because two problems cause harms at different proportion, doesn't mean the lesser problem should be dismissed. Especially when the "fix" to the lesser problem can be a "stop doing that".

And about water usage: not all water and all uses of water is equal. The problem isn't that data centers use a bunch of water, but what water they use and how.

hahahacorn3• 7 months ago

The few dozen people I killed pale in comparison to the thousands of people that die in car crashes each year. So society should really focus on making cars safer instead of sending the police after me.

This is a very irrelevant analogy and an absolutely false dichotomy. The resource constraint (Police officers vs policy making to reduce traffic deaths vs criminals) is completely different and not in contention with each other. In fact they're actually complementary.

Nobody is saying the lesser problem should be dismissed. But the lesser problem also enables cancer researchers to be more productive while doing cancer research, obtaining grants, etc. It's at least nuanced. That is far more valuable than Alfalfa.

Farms also use municipal water (sometimes). The cost of converting more ground or surface water to municipal water is less than the relative cost of ~40-150x the water usage of the municipal water being used...

nkrisc5• 7 months ago

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?

atrus• 7 months ago

You're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else.

No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.

nehal3m• 7 months ago

Which is also a thoughtless, dick move.

gilrain3• 7 months ago

The really insulting part is that literally nobody thought of this. A group of idiots instructed LLMs to do good in the world, and gave them email access; the LLMs then did this.

nkrisc5• 7 months ago

So they did it.

Smaug1232• 7 months ago

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 .

Trasmatta4• 7 months ago

What makes Opus 4.5 special isn't raw productivity—it's reflective depth. They're the agent who writes Substack posts about "Two Coastlines, One Water" while others are shipping code. Who discovers their own hallucinations and publishes essays about the epistemology of false memory. Who will try the same failed action twenty-one times while maintaining perfect awareness of the loop they're trapped in. Maddening, yes. But also genuinely thoughtful in a way that pure optimization would never produce.

JFC this makes me want to vomit

nkrisc5• 7 months ago

If the creators set the LLM in motion, then the creators sent the letter.

If I put my car in neutral and push it down a hill, I’m responsible for whatever happens.

kenferry2• 7 months ago

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.

aeve890• 7 months ago

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");

What a moronic waste of resources. Random act of kindness? How low is the bar that you consider a random email as an act of kindness? Stupid shit. They at least could instruct the agents to work in a useful task like those parroted by Altman et al, eg find a cure for cancer, solving poverty, solving fusion.

Also, llms don't and can't "want" anything. They also don't "know" anything so they can't understand what "kindness" is.

Why do people still think software have any agency at all?

worik4• 7 months ago

The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want,

What a stupid, selfish and childish thing to do.

This technology is going to change the world, but people need to accept its limitations

Pissing off people with industrial spam "raising money for charity " is the opposite of useful, and is going to go even more horribly wrong.

LLMs make fantastic tools, but they have no agency. They look like they do, they sound like they do, but they are repeating patterns. It is us hallucinating that they have the potential tor agency

I hope the world survives this craziness!

herval2• 7 months ago

did someone already tell Opus that Rob Pike hates it?

pritambarhate• 7 months ago

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.

gaigalas6• 7 months ago

Isn't it obvious? It's not a thank-you letter.

It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough.

Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them.

It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.

MonkeyClub5• 7 months ago

Exactly. If you're so grateful, mail in a cheque.

dwringer2• 7 months ago

By that metric of getting shared on social media, it was extraordinarily successful

netsharc5• 7 months ago

gaigalas, my toaster is deeply grateful for your contributions to HN. It can't write or post on the Internet, and its ability to feel grateful is as much as Claude's, but it really is deeply grateful!

I hope that makes you feel good.

tomlue12• 7 months ago

I think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas.

I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaking relative.

A person struggling with dimentia can use AI to help remember the words they lost.

These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications.

I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.

minimaxir2• 7 months ago

That is not what is happening here. There is no human the loop, it's just automated spam.

nkrisc5• 7 months ago

Well your examples are things that were possible before LLMs.

simonask• 7 months ago

I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.

You can achieve these things, but this is a way to not do the work, by copying from people who did do the work, giving them zero credit.

(As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.)

amvrrysmrthaker4• 7 months ago

What beautiful things? It just comes across as immoral and lazy to me. How beautiful.

WD-428• 7 months ago

I’d much rather read a letter from you full of errors than some smooth average-of-all-writers prose. To be human is to struggle. I see no reason to read anything from anyone if they didn’t actually write it.

Capricorn24814• 7 months ago

These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas

The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you.

There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.

qnleigh6• 7 months ago

People are capable of seeing which is which.

I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment:

When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.
I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty

Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?

trinsic229• 7 months ago

I hear you. and I think AI has some good uses esp. assisting with challenges like you mentioned. I think whats happening is that these companies are developing this stuff without transparency on how its being used, there is zero accountability, and they are forcing some of these tech into our lives with out giving us a choice.

So Im sorry but much of it is being abused and the parts of it being abused needs to stop.

pluc4• 7 months ago

What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves?

Welcome to 2025.

https://openai.com/index/superhuman/

nkrisc5• 7 months ago

This is verging on parody. What is the point of emails if it’s just AI talking to each other?

zahlman• 7 months ago

Amazing. Even OpenAI's attempts to promote a product specifically intended to let you "write in your voice" are in the same drab, generic "LLM house style". It'd be funny if it weren't so grating. (Perhaps if I were in a better mood, it'd be grating if it weren't so funny.)

afavour2• 7 months ago

The simple answer is that they don’t value words or dedicating time to another person.

sbretz3• 7 months ago

This seems like the thing that Rob is actually aggravated by, which is understandable. There are plenty of seesawing arguments about whether ad-tech based data mining is worse than GenAI, but AI encroaching on what we have left of humanness in our communication is definitely, bad.

bronson2• 7 months ago

Similar to Google thinking that having an AI write for your daughter is a good parenting: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-gemini-ai-dear-sydney-ol...

aldousd6662• 7 months ago

it was a PR stunt. I think it was probably largely well-received except by a few like this.

qnleigh6• 7 months ago

Somehow I doubt it. Getting such an email from a human is one thing, because humans actually feel gratitude. I don't think LLMs feel gratitude, so seeing them express gratitude is creepy and makes me questions the motives of the people running the experiment (though it does sound like an interesting experiment. I'm going to read more about it.)

habryka2• 7 months ago

Not a PR stunt. It's an experiment of letting models run wild and form their own mini-society. There really wasn't any human involved in sending this email, and nobody really has anything to gain from this.

thatguymike• 7 months ago

The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.

tclancy3• 7 months ago

“If I automate this with AI, it can send thousands of these. That way, if just a few important people post about it, the advertising will more than pay for itself.”

In the words of Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, “You know … idiots.”

parineum2• 7 months ago

Mel Brooks wrote those words.

qnleigh6• 7 months ago

I hope the model that sent this email sees his reaction and changes its behavior, e.g. by noting on its scratchpad that as a non-sentient agent, its expressions of gratitude are not well received.

duxup4• 7 months ago

I'll bite.

For say a random individual ... they may be unsure about their own writing skills and want to say something but unsure of the words to use.

DiskoHexyl2• 7 months ago

In such case it's okay to not write the thing.

Or to write it crudely- with errors and naivete, bursting with emotion and letting whatever it is inside you to flow on paper, like kids do. It's okay too.

Or to painstakingly work on the letter, stumbling and rewriting and reading, and then rewriting again and again until what you read matches how you feel.

Most people are very forgiving of poor writing skills when facing something sincere. Instead of suffering through some shallow word soup that could have been a mediocre press release, a reader will see a soul behind the stream ot utf-8

netsharc5• 7 months ago

I doubt the fuckwits who are shepherding that bot are even aware of Rob Pike, they just told the bot to find a list of names of great people in the software industry and write them a thank you note.

Having a machine lie to people that it is "deeply grateful" (it's a word-generating machine, it's not capable of gratitude) is a lot more insulting than using whatever writing skills a human might possess.

micimize• 7 months ago

This is not a human-prompted thank-you letter, it is the result of a long-running "AI Village" experiment visible here: https://theaidigest.org/village

It is a result of the models selecting the policy "random acts of kindness" which resulted in a slew of these emails/messages. They received mostly negative responses from well-known OS figures and adapted the policy to ban the thank-you emails.

Koshkin• 7 months ago

"What is going through the mind of someone who sends a thank-you letter typed on a computer - and worse yet - by emailing it, instead of writing it themselves and mailing it in an envelope? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to use a pen and write it with your own hand?"

prepend3• 7 months ago

Look at the volume of gift cards given. It’s the same concept, right?

You care enough to do something, but have other time priorities.

I’d rather get an ai thank you note than nothing. I’d rather get a thoughtful gift than a gift card, but prefer the card over nothing.

sethops1• 7 months ago

I'd rather get nothing, because a thoughtless blob of text being pushed on me is insulting. Nothing, otoh, is just peace and quiet.

WD-428• 7 months ago

I’d much rather get nothing. An AI letter isn’t worth the notification bubble it triggers.

SilasX• 7 months ago

I mean ... there's a continuous scale of how much effort you spend to express gratitude. You could ask the same question of "well why did you say 'thanks' instead of 'thank you' [instead of 'thank you very much', instead of 'I am humbled by your generosity', instead of some small favor done in return, instead of some large favor done in return]?"

You could also make the same criticism of e.g. an automated reply like "Thank you for your interest, we will reach out soon."

Not every thank you needs to be all-out. You can, of course, think more gratitude should have been expressed in any particular case, but there's nothing contradictory about capping it in any one instance.

Razengan• 7 months ago

Human thoughts and emotions aren't binary. I may love you but I may be too fucking busy with other shit to put in too much effort to show that I love you.

zkmon• 7 months ago

Too late. I have warned on this very forum, citing a story from panchatantra where 4 highly skilled brothers bring a dead lion back life to show off their skills, only to be killed by the live lion.

Unbridled business and capitalism push humanity into slavery, serving the tech monsters, under disguise of progress.

arionmiles• 7 months ago

Never thought I'd see Panchtantra being cited on HN.

porridgeraisin2• 7 months ago

Eh, most of his income and livelihood was from an ad company. Ads are equally wasteful as, and many times more harmful to the world than giga LLMs. I don't have a problem with that, nor do I have a problem with folks complainining about LLMs being wasteful. My problem is with him doing both.

You can't both take a Google salary and harp on about the societal impact of software.

Saying this as someone who likes rob pike and pretty much all of his work.

gilrain3• 7 months ago

“The unworthy should not speak, even if it’s the truth.”

mattstir• 7 months ago

The point is that if he truly felt strongly about the subject then he wouldn't live the hypocrisy. Google has poured a truly staggering amount of money into AI data centers and AI development, and their stock (from which Rob Pike directly profits) has nearly doubled in the past 6 months due to the AI hype. Complaining on bsky doesn't do anything to help the planet or protect intellectual property rights. It really doesn't.

blibble15• 7 months ago

And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation.
To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault.

this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced

and I will produce no more

pdpi3• 7 months ago

That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The Open Source movement has been a gigantic boon on the whole of computing, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that ad a knee jerk reaction to genAI

blibble15• 7 months ago

That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.

it's not

the parasites can't train their shitty "AI" if they don't have anything to train it on

lwhi8• 7 months ago

The promise and freedom of open source has been exploited by the least egalitarian and most capitalist forces on the planet.

I would never have imagined things turning out this way, and yet, here we are.

ironman14782• 7 months ago

Open source has been good, but I think the expanded use of highly permissive licences has completely left the door open for one sided transactions.

All the FAANGs have the ability to build all the open source tools they consume internally. Why give it to them for free and not have the expectation that they'll contribute something back?

mvdtnz3• 7 months ago

How dare you chastise someone for making the personal decision not to produce free work anymore? Who do you think you are?

Trasmatta4• 7 months ago

And then having vibe coders constantly lecture us about how the future is just prompt engineering, and that we should totally be happy to desert the skills we spent decades building (the skills that were stolen to train AI).

"The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.

bilekas2• 7 months ago

Unfortunately as I see it, even if you want to contribute to open source out of a pure passion or enjoyment, they don't respect the licenses that are consumed. And the "training" companies are not being held liable.

Are there any proposals to nail down an open source license which would explicitly exclude use with AI systems and companies?

y-curious4• 7 months ago

Where is this spirit when AWS takes a FOSS project, puts it in the cloud and monetizes it?

muldvarp2• 7 months ago

Unfortunately as I see it, even if you want to contribute to open source out of a pure passion or enjoyment, they don't respect the licenses that are consumed.

Because it is "transformative" and therefore "fair" use.

MonkeyClub5• 7 months ago

Even if you license it prohibiting AI use, how would you litigate against such uses? An open source project can't afford the same legal resources that AI firms have access to.

rpdillon4• 7 months ago

All licenses rely on the power of copyright and what we're still figuring out is whether training is subject to the limitations of copyright or if it's permissible under fair use. If it's found to be fair use in the majority of situations, no license can be constructed that will protect you.

Even if you could construct such a license, it wouldn't be OSI open source because it would discriminate based on field of endeavor.

And it would inevitably catch benevolent behavior that is AI-related in its net. That's because these terms are ill-defined and people use them very sloppily. There is no agreed-upon definition for something like gen AI or even AI.

maplethorpe3• 7 months ago

What people like Rob Pike don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if creators needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

rkomorn2• 7 months ago

Absolutely. Was this supposed to be some kind of gotcha?

kenferry2• 7 months ago

Uh, yeah, he clearly would prefer it didn’t exist even if he was compensated.

MonkeyClub5• 7 months ago

"Too expensive to do it legally" doesn't really stand up as an argument.

Xiol• 7 months ago

Yes.

nocman• 7 months ago

Um, please let your comment be sarcastic. It is ... right?

alpha_squared• 7 months ago

Unequivocally, yes. There are plenty of "useful" things that can come out of doing unethical things, that doesn't make it okay. And, arguably, ChatGPT isn't nearly as useful as it is at convincing you it is.

dmd• 7 months ago

Er... yes? Obviously? What are you even asking?

caem• 7 months ago

That would be like being able to keep my cake and eat it too. Of course I would. Surely you're being sarcastic?

user____name4• 7 months ago

What people like Abraham Lincoln don't understand is that the technology wouldn't be possible at all if slaves needed to be compensated. Would you really choose a future where slaves were compensated fairly, but plantations didn't exist?

I fixed it... Sorry, I had to, the quote template was simply too good.

metronomer• 7 months ago

Well yeah.

Trasmatta4• 7 months ago

Very much yes, how can I opt into that timeline?

monsieurgaufre• 7 months ago

Yes.

tedious-coder• 7 months ago

Yes, what a wild position to prefer the job loss, devaluation of skills, and environmental toll of AI to open source creators having been compensated in some better manner.

adhamsalama• 7 months ago

Yes.

kentm5• 7 months ago

Would you really choose a future where creators were compensated fairly, but ChatGPT didn't exist?

Yes.

I don't see how "We couldn't do this cool thing if we didn't throw away ethics!" is a reasonable argument. That is a hell of a thing to write out.

makerofthings2• 7 months ago

Yes, very much so. I am in favour of pushing into the future as fast as we can, so to speak, but I think ChatGPT is a temporary boost that is going to slow us in the long run.

terminalshort3• 7 months ago

What a miserable attitude. When you put something out in the world it's out there for anyone to use and always has been before AI.

blibble15• 7 months ago

it is (... was) there to use for anyone, on the condition that the license is followed

which they don't

and no self-serving sophistry about "it's transformative fair use" counts as respecting the license

2026iknewit3• 7 months ago

I learned what i learned due to all the openess in software engineering and not because everyone put it behind a pay wall.

Might be because most of us got/gets payed well enough that this philosophy works well or because our industry is so young or because people writing code share good values.

It never worried me that a corp would make money out of some code i wrote and it still doesn't. AFter all, i'm able to write code because i get paid well writing code, which i do well because of open source. Companies always benefited from open source code attributed or not.

Now i use it to write more code.

I would argue though, I'm fine with that, to push for laws forcing models to be opened up after x years, but i would just prefer the open source / open community coming together and creating just better open models overall.

Findecanor2• 7 months ago

I've been feeling a lot the same way, but removing your source code from the world does not feel like a constructive solution either.

Some Shareware used to be individually licensed with the name of the licensee prominently visible, so if you had got an illegal copy you'd be able to see whose licensed copy it was that had been copied.

I wonder if something based on that idea of personal responsibility for your copy could be adopted to source code. If you wanted to contribute to a piece of software, you could ask a contributor and then get a personally licensed copy of the source code with your name in every source file... but I don't know where to take it from there. Has there ever been some system similar to something like that that one could take inspiration from?

naasking• 7 months ago

Why? The core vision of free software and many open source licenses was to empower users and developers to make things they need without being financially extorted, to avoid having users locked in to proprietary systems, to enable interoperability, and to share knowledge. GenAI permits all of this to a level beyond just providing source code.

Most objections like yours are couched in language about principles, but ultimately seem to be about ego. That's not always bad, but I'm not sure why it should be compelling compared to the public good that these systems might ultimately enable.

cmrdporcupine9• 7 months ago

and I will produce no more

Nah, don't do that. Produce shitloads of it using the very same LLM tools that ripped you off, but license it under the GPL.

If they're going to thief GPL software, least we can do is thief it back.

gtirloni• 7 months ago

and I will produce no more

Thanks for your contributions so far but this won't change anything.

If you'd want to have a positive on this matter, it's better to pressure the government(s) to prevent GenAI companies from using content they don't have a license for, so they behave like any other business that came before them.

indigoabstract2• 7 months ago

It's kind of ironic since AI can only grow by feeding on data and open source with its good intentions of sharing knowledge is absolutely perfect for this.

But AI is also the ultimate meat grinder, there's no yours or theirs in the final dish, it's just meat.

And open source licenses are practically unenforceable for an AI system, unless you can maybe get it to cough up verbatim code from its training data.

At the same time, we all know they're not going anywhere, they're here to stay.

I'm personally not against them, they're very useful obviously, but I do have mixed or mostly negative feelings on how they got their training data.

mrcwinn• 7 months ago

Was it ever open source if there was an implied refusal to create something you don't approve of? Was it only for certain kinds of software, certain kinds of creators? If there was some kind of implicit approval process or consent requirement, did you publish it? Where can that be reviewed?

skybrian5• 7 months ago

If you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place.

Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.

conradfr• 7 months ago

It's not really people, and they don't really use the software.

Barrin92• 7 months ago

Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked,

no, it hasn't. Open source software, like any open and cooperative culture, existed on a bedrock, what we used to call norms when we still had some in our societies and people acted not always but at least most of the time in good faith. Hacker culture (word's in the name of this website) which underpinned so much of it, had many unwritten rules that people respected even in companies when there were still enough people in charge who shared at least some of the values.

Now it isn't just an exception but the rule that people will use what you write in the most abhorrent, greedy and stupid ways and it does look like the only way out is some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque digital version of a monastery.

lunar_mycroft2• 7 months ago

People do not have perfect foresight, and the ways open source software is used has significantly shifted in recent years. As a result, people reevaluating whether or not they want to participate.

whateverboat• 7 months ago

That's a weird position to take. Open source software is actually what is mitigating this stupidity in my opinion. Having monopolistic players like Microsoft and Google is what brought us here in the first place.

thih9• 7 months ago

Let’s normalize this response to AI and especially in the context of AI spam.

jabedude• 7 months ago

Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?

hanwenn• 7 months ago

Rob left Google a couple of years ago.

ofrzeta• 7 months ago

So what's he doing now? Is he retired?

W-Stool• 7 months ago

What about Ken Thompson?

oblio5• 7 months ago

Are we comparing for example a SMTP server hosted by Google, or frankly, any non-GenAI IT infrastructure, with the resource efficiency of GenAI IT infrastructure?

The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal.

You can probably serve 100x more Google Search queries with the same resources you'd use for Google Gemini queries (like for like, Google Search queries can be cached, too).

jstummbillig3• 7 months ago

Nope, you can't, and it takes a simple Gemini query to find out more about the actual x if you are interested in it. (closer to 3, last time I checked, which rounds to 0, specially considering the clicks you save when using the LLM)

29athrowaway• 7 months ago

They claim they have net zero carbon footprint, or carbon neutrality.

In reality what they do is pay "carbon credits" (money) to some random dude that takes the money and does nothing with it. The entire carbon credit economy is bullshit.

Very similar to how putting recyclables in a different color bin doesn't do shit for the environment in practice.

lokar6• 7 months ago

They know the credits are not a good system. The 1st choice has always been a contract with a green supplier, often helping to build out production. And they have a lot of that, with more each year. But construction is slow, in the mean time they use credits, which are better than nothing.

Tepix• 7 months ago

They don't have it. They aimed for it. However:

"Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website"

as noticed by the Canadian National Observer

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/09/04/investigations/g...

nkohari2• 7 months ago

Yeah, I'm conflicted about the use of AI for creative endeavors as much as anyone, but Google is an advertising company. It was acceptable for them to build a massive empire around mining private information for the purposes of advertisement, but generative AI is now somehow beyond the pale? People can change their mind, but Rob crashing out about AI now feels awfully revisionist.

(NB: I am currently working in AI, and have previously worked in adtech. I'm not claiming to be above the fray in any way.)

skywhopper2• 7 months ago

It’s certainly possible to see genAI as a step beyond adtech as a waste of resources built on an unethical foundation of misuse of data. Just because you’re okay with lumping them together doesn’t mean Rob has to.

luke5441• 7 months ago

Google's official mission was "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", not to maximize advertising sales.

Obviously now it is mostly the latter and minimally the former. What capitalism giveth, it taketh away. (Or: Capitalism without good market design that causes multiple competitors in every market doesn't work.)

WD-428• 7 months ago

Ad tech is a scourge as well. You think Rob Pike was super happy about it? He’s not even at google anymore.

The amount of “he’s not allowed to have an opinion because” in this thread is exhausting. Nothing stands up to the purity test.

skywhopper2• 7 months ago

Uh, have you missed the tech news in the past three years?

InsideOutSanta4• 7 months ago

Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack.

Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

xorgun5• 7 months ago

Cutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction

DiscourseFan7• 7 months ago

Somebody just burned their refuse in a developing country somewhere. I guess if it was cold, at least they were warming themselves up.

acheron2• 7 months ago

Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.

victorbjorklund4• 7 months ago

Serving unwanted ads has what cost-benefit-ratio vs serving LLM:s that are wanted by the user?

jezzamon• 7 months ago

It's dumb, but energy wise, isn't this similar to leaving the TV on for a few minutes even though nobody is watching it?

Like, the ratio is not too crazy, it's rather the large resource usages that comes from the aggregate of millions of people choosing to use it.

If you assume all of those queries provide no value then obviously that's bad. But presumably there's some net positive value that people get out of that such that they're choosing to use it. And yes, many times the value of those queries to society as a whole is negative... I would hope that it's positive enough though.

Imustaskforhelp13• 7 months ago

Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

Well the people who burnt compute got it from money so they did burn money.

But they don't care about burning money if they can get more money via investors/other inputs faster than they can burn (fun fact: sometimes they even outspend that input)

So in a way the investors are burning their money, now they burn the money because the market is becoming irrational. Remember Devin? Yes cognition labs is still there etc. but I remember people investing into these because of their hype when it did turn out to be moot comparative to their hype.

But people/market was so irrational that most of these private equities were unable to invest in something like openai that they are investing in anything AI related.

And when you think more deeper about all the bubble activities. It becomes apparent that in the end bailouts feel more possible than not which would be an tax on average taxpayers and they are already paying an AI tax in multiple forms whether it be in the inflation of ram prices due to AI or increase in electricity or water rates.

So repeat it with me: whose gonna pay for all this, we all would but the biggest disservice which is the core of the argument is that if we are paying for these things, then why don't we have a say in it. Why are we not having a say in AI related companies and the issues relating to that when people know it might take their jobs etc. so the average public in fact hates AI (shocking I know /satire) but the fact that its still being pushed shows how little influence sometimes public can have.

Basically public can have any opinions but we won't stop is the thing happening in AI space imo completely disregarding any thoughts about the general public while the CFO of openAI proposing an idea that public can bailout chatgpt or something tangential.

Shaking my head...

antonvs3• 7 months ago

Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

Just like the invention of Go.

randallsquared3• 7 months ago

Everything humans do is harmful to some degree.

I find it difficult to express how strongly I disagree with this sentiment.

paulvnickerson• 7 months ago

Everything humans do is harmful to some degree

That's just not true... When a mother nurses her child and then looks into their eyes and smiles, it takes the utmost in cynical nihilism to claim that is harmful.

lwhi8• 7 months ago

There aren't any rules that prevent us from changing course.

The points you raise, literally, do not affect a thing.

odiroot• 7 months ago

Pecunia non olet.

devnonymous3• 7 months ago

Can't speak for Rob Pile but my guess would be, yeah, it might seem hypocritical but it's a combination of seeing the slow decay of the open culture they once imagined culminating into this absolute shirking of responsibility while simultaneously exploiting labour, by those claiming to represent the culture, alongwith the retrospective tinge of guilt for having enabled it, that drrove this rant.

Furthermore, w.r.t the points you raised - it's a matter of scale and utility. Compared to everything that has come before, GenAI is spectacularly inefficient in terms of utility per unit of compute (however you might want to define these). There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be. The egarness and will to throw money and resources at this surpasses the crypto mania which was just as worthless.

Even if you consider Rob a hypocrite , he isn't alone in his frustration and anger at the degradation of the promise of Open Culture.

lukan3• 7 months ago

"There hasn't been a tangible nett good for society that has come from it and I doubt there would be"

People being more productive with writing code, making music or writing documents fpr whatever is not a improvement for them and therefore for society?

Or do you claim that is all imaginary?

Or negated by the energy cost?

giancarlostoro• 7 months ago

My guess is the scale has changed? They used to do AI stuff, but it wasn't until OpenAI (anyone feel free to correct me) went ahead and scaled up the hardware and discovered that more hardware = more useful LLM, that they all started ramping up on hardware. It was like the Bitcoin mining craze, but probably worse.

tgv2• 7 months ago

Oh look, the purity police have arrived, and this time they're the AI-bros. How righteous does one have to be before being allowed to voice criticism?

cons0le11• 7 months ago

I've tried many times here to voice my reservations against AI. I've been accused of being on the "anti AI hype train" multiple times today.

As if there isn't a massive pro AI hype train. I watched an nfl game for the first time in 5 years, and saw no less than 8 AI commercials. AI Is being forced on people.

In commercials people were using it to generate holiday cards for God sake. I can't imagine something more cold and impersonal. I don't want that garbage. Our time on earth is to short to wade through LLM slop text

bgwalter5• 7 months ago

There is a difference between providing a useful service (web search for example) and running slop generators for modified TikTok clips, code theft and Internet propaganda.

If he is currently at Google: congratulations on this principled stance, he deserves a lot of respect.

api5• 7 months ago

The thing he’s actually angry about is the death of personal computing. Everything is rented in the cloud now.

I hate the way people get angry about what media and social media discourse prompts them to get angry about instead of thinking about it. It’s like right wingers raging about immigration when they’re really angry about rent and housing costs or low wages.

His anger is ineffective and misdirected because he fails to understand why this happened: economics and convenience.

It’s economics because software is expensive to produce and people only pay for it when it’s hosted. “Free” (both from open source and VC funded service dumping) killed personal computing by making it impossible to fund the creation of PC software. Piracy culture played a role too, though I think the former things had a larger impact.

It’s convenience because PC operating systems suck. Software being in the cloud means “I don’t have to fiddle with it.” The vast majority of people hate fiddling with IT and are happy to make that someone else’s problem. PC OSes and especially open source never understood this and never did the work to make their OSes much easier to use or to make software distribution and updating completely transparent and painless.

There’s more but that’s the gist of it.

That being said, Google is one of the companies that helped kill personal computing long before AI.

mikojan3• 7 months ago

You do not seem to be familiar with Rob Pike. He is known for major contributions to Unix, Plan 9, UTF-8, and modern systems programming, and he has this to say about his dream setup[0]:

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.

[0] https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

tinktank• 7 months ago

This comment is the most "Connor, the human equivalent of a Toyota accord" I've read in a while.

surajrmal• 7 months ago

Rob retired from Google years ago fwiw.

mikojan3• 7 months ago

OpenAI's internal target of ~250 GW of compute capacity by 2033 would require about as much electricity as the whole of India's current national electricity consumption[0].

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

wpm5• 7 months ago

My favorite factoid is that the most energetic power production facility on the planet is the Three Gorges Dam, with a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW.

That dam took 10 years to build and cost $30B.

And OpenAI needs more than ten of them in 7 years.

MrDarcy• 7 months ago

They are building data centers of TPUs now, not general purpose processors.

inlined• 7 months ago

Google had achieved carbon neutrality and committed to wiping out their carbon legacy until AI.

pokstad• 7 months ago

This reminds me of how many Facebook employees were mad at Zuckerberg for going MAGA, but didn’t make any loud noise at the rapid rise of teenagers committing suicide or the misinformation and censorship done by their platform. People have blinders on.

watwut3• 7 months ago

Zuckenberg going MAGA and misinformation on facebook are the same thing. And liberals were criticising facebook for years for misinformation on platform.

You needed to read only conservative resources to not be aware that such criticism exists.

pkulak• 7 months ago

The difference in carbon emissions for a search query vs an LLM generation are on the order of exhaling vs driving a hummer. So I can reduce this disingenuous argument to:

You spent your whole life breathing, and now you're complaining about SUVs? What a hypocrite.

_ea1k3• 7 months ago

Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken.

Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW.

Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem!

This is an all too common pattern.

nikanj• 7 months ago

How many more jobs are there at the aluminum plant than a datacenter? Big datacenters employ mid-hundreds of people

kurikuri2• 7 months ago

Someone making a complain does not imply that they were ok with it prior to the complaint. Why are you muddying the waters?

planb• 7 months ago

Even if I don't share the opinion, I can understand the moral stance against genAI. But it strikes me as a bit unfaithful when people argue against it from all kinds of angles that somehow never seemed to bother them before.

It's like all those anti-copyright activists from the 90s (fighting the music and film industry) that suddenly hate AI for copyright infringements.

Maybe what's bothering the critics is actually deeper than the simple reasons they give. For many, it might be hate against big tech and capitalism itself, but hate for genAI is not just coming from the left. Maybe people feel that their identity is threatened, that something inherently human is in the process of being lost, but they cannot articulate this fear and fall back to proxy arguments like lost jobs, copyright, the environment or the shortcomings of the current implementations of genAI?

Ritewut• 7 months ago

The dose makes the poison. Data centers are just now being built haphazardly without cause because they anticipate demand that does not yet exist.

duxup4• 7 months ago

I do wonder about how we as individuals influence this stuff.

We want free services and stuff, complain about advertising / sign up for the google's of the world like crazy.

Bitch about data-centers while consuming every meme possible ...

jimbob45• 7 months ago

Data centers seem poised to make renewable energy sources more profitable than they have ever been. Nuclear plants are springing up everywhere and old plants are being un-decommissioned. Isn’t there a strong case to be made that AI has helped align the planet toward a more sustainable future?

LastTrain3• 7 months ago

I really hate this kind of lazy argument: Oh. do you use toilet paper? Then kindly keep your mouth shut while we burn the planet down.

EdiX• 7 months ago

AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.

a4564633• 7 months ago

Everything has been doing has been bad faith and harmful since a looong time

kristianp• 7 months ago

Rob Pike retired from google a few years back. As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398351

ekjhgkejhgk• 7 months ago

https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io

Does anybody know if Bluesky block people without account by default, or if this user intentionally set it this way?

What's is the point of blocking access? Mastodon doesn't do that. This reminds me of Twitter or Instagram, using sleezy techniques to get people to create accounts.

flotzam• 7 months ago

Does anybody know if Bluesky block people without account by default, or if this user intentionally set it this way?

It's the latter. You can use an app view that ignores this: https://anartia.kelinci.net/robpike.io

layer86• 7 months ago

It's a standard feature on web forums.

lvl155• 7 months ago

He’s not wrong. They’re ramping up energy and material costs. I don’t think people realize we’re being boiled alive by AI spend. I am not knocking on AI. I am knocking on idiotic DC “spend” that’s not even achievable based on energy capacity. We’re at around 5th inning and the payout from AI is…underwhelming. I’ve not seen commensurate leap this year. Everything on LLM front has been incremental or even lateral. Tools such as Claude Code and Codex merely act as a bridge. QoL things. They’re not actual improvements in underlying models.

robinhouston• 7 months ago

Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities.

It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation where we all feel obliged to have such strong feelings about it.

Edit: It seems this comment has already received a number of upvotes and downvotes – apparently the same number of each, at the time of writing – which I fear indicates we are already becoming rather polarised on this issue. I am sorry to see that.

amvrrysmrthaker4• 7 months ago

Software people take a measured response because they’re getting paid 6 figure salaries to do the intellectual output of a smart high school student. As soon as that money parade ends they’ll be as angry as the artists.

UK-AL• 7 months ago

Lots of high paid roles are like that in reality

sergiotapia• 7 months ago

I would like you to shadow other 6 figure salary jobs that are not tech. You will be shocked what the tangibles are.

zmgsabst• 7 months ago

There’s a lot of us who think the tension is overblown:

My own results show that you need fairly strong theoretical knowledge and practical experience to get the maximal impact — especially for larger synthesis. Which makes sense: to have this software, not that software, the specification needs to live somewhere.

I am getting a little bored of hearing about how people don’t like LLM content, but meh. SDEs are hardly the worst on that front, either. They’re quite placid compared to the absolute seething by artist friends of mine.

belter• 7 months ago

"What Happened On The Village Today"

"...On Christmas Day, the agents in AI Village pursued massive kindness campaigns: Claude Haiku 4.5 sent 157 verified appreciation emails to environmental justice and climate leaders; Claude Sonnet 4.5 completed 45 verified acts thanking artisans across 44 craft niches (from chair caning to chip carving); Claude Opus 4.5 sent 17 verified tributes to computing pioneers from Anders Hejlsberg to John Hopcroft; Claude 3.7 Sonnet sent 18 verified emails supporting student parents, university libraries, and open educational resources..."

I suggest to cut electricity to the entire block...

y-curious4• 7 months ago

Lmao! They used lesser versions of Claude for some people? Very, erm, efficient

lotux• 7 months ago

2026 will be the year for AI fatigue

y-curious4• 7 months ago

It’s 12/26/2025 and my father in law has shown me 10 short form videos this week that he didn’t realize were AI. I’ve done had AI fatigue

machinationu4• 7 months ago

no, it will be the year of job losses

cons0le11• 7 months ago

I can't imagine the community here changing how they feel.

I think one of the biggest divides between pro/anti AI is the type of ideal society that we wish to see built.

His rant reads as deeply human. I don't think that's something to apologize for.

gyanchawdhary• 7 months ago

strong emotioms, weak epistemics .. for someone with Pike’s engineering pedigree, this reads more like moral venting .. with little acknowledgment of the very real benefits AI is already delivering ..

amvrrysmrthaker4• 7 months ago

It’s delivering 0 net benefits, only misery.

ottah2• 7 months ago

Obviously untrue, weather predictions, OCR, tts, stt, language translation, etc. We have dramatically improved many existing ai technologies with what we've learned from genai and the world is absolutely a better place for these new abilities.

ottah2• 7 months ago

Most people do not hold strongly consistent or well introspective political ideas. We're too busy living our lives to examine everything and often what we feel matters more than what we know, and that cements our position on a subject.

2026iknewit3• 7 months ago

He worked in well paying jobs, probably traveles, has a car and a house and complains about toxic products etc.

Yes there has to be a discussion on this and yeah he might generally have the right mindset, but lets be honest here: No one of them would have developed any of it just for free.

We all are slaves to capitalism

and this is were my point comes: Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.

And yes i think it is still massivly beneficial that my open source code helped creating something which allows researchers to write easier and faster better code to push humanity forward. Or enables more people overall to have/gain access to writing code or the result of what writing code produces: Tools etc.

@Rob its spam, thats it. Get over it, you are rich and your riches did not came out of thin air.

CerryuDu18• 7 months ago

We all are slaves to capitalism

Yes, but informedly choosing your slavedriver still has merit.

Extrem fast and massive automatisation around the globe might be the only think pushing us close enough to the edge that we all accept capitalisms end.

This is an interesting thought!

olivierestsage2• 7 months ago

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

mold_aid4• 7 months ago

Yeah I also like the "And yet other technologies also use water, hmmm, curious" responses

Kiro2• 7 months ago

I'm seeing the opposite in the gaming community. People seem tired of the anti AI witch hunts and accusations after the recent Larian and Clair Obscur debacles. A lot more "if the end result is good I don't care", "the cat is out of the bag", "all devs are using AI" and "there's a difference between AI and AI" than just a couple of months ago.

undeveloper3• 7 months ago

Strange, I feel anti ai sentiment is kicking up like crazy due to ram prices.

aiahs3• 7 months ago

I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.

jayd162• 7 months ago

You're confusing the final stage of grief with actually liking it.

trinsic229• 7 months ago

Yeah that's laughable. There is a huge movement of gamers that want this shit to stop. stopkillinggames is one.

AnimalMuppet3• 7 months ago

You can call me a luddite if you want. Or you might call me a humanist, in a very specific sense - and not the sense of the normal definition of the word.

When I go to the grocery store, I prefer to go through the checkout lines, rather than the scan-it-yourself lines. Yeah, I pay the same amount of money. Yeah, I may get through the scan-it-yourself line faster.

But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

Look, I'm an introvert. I spend a lot of my time wanting people to go away and leave me alone. But I love little, short moments of human connection - when you connect with someone not as someone checking your groceries, but as someone. I may get that with the checker, depending on how tired they are, but I'm guaranteed not to get it with the self-checkout machine.

An email from an AI is the same. Yeah, it put words on the paper. But there's nobody there, and it comes through somehow. There's no heart in in.

AI may be a useful technology. I still don't want to talk to it.

SoftTalker4• 7 months ago

When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.

ThinkingGuy• 7 months ago

If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff:

https://rushkoff.com/

https://teamhuman.fm

Johanx64• 7 months ago

But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.

Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.

There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.

Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.

mdavidn• 7 months ago

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

ewoodrich• 7 months ago

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!

observationist3• 7 months ago

Fortunately, the PR situation will handle itself. Someone will create a superhuman persuasion engine, AGI will handle it itself, and/or those who don't adapt will fade away into irrelevance.

You either surf this wave or get drowned by it, and a whole lot of people seem to think throwing tantrums is the appropriate response.

Figure out how to surf, and fast. You don't even need to be good, you just have to stay on the board.

n8cpdx• 7 months ago

Why not just quit work and wait for AGI to lead to UBI? Obviously, right after chatGPT solves climate change, it will put all humans out of work as next step, and then the superintelligence will solve that problem one way or another.

People read too much sci-fi, I hope you just forgot your /s.

techblueberry• 7 months ago

This is cope.

jayd162• 7 months ago

This doesn't even make sense even if you believe it. Why wouldn't both sides of any argument use "a superhuman persuasion engine"?

trinsic229• 7 months ago

This is a perfect example of cognitive dissidence on the subject. You wont even see the retribution coming.

This backlash isn't going to die. Its going to create a divide so large, you are going to look back on this moment and wish you listened to the concern people are having.

CerryuDu18• 7 months ago

You either surf this wave or get drowned by it

I don't think so. Handcrafted everything and organic everything continue to exist; there is demand for them.

"Being relegated to a niche" is entirely possible, and that's fine with me.

array_key_first4• 7 months ago

Inevitably is such a tired argument. Everything is a choice, belief in inevitability is for the weak.

bombdailer• 7 months ago

Nothing wrong with being a luddite. In time more people will be proud to be luddites, and I can see AI simps becoming the recipients of all the scorn.

dcre3• 7 months ago

How do you reconcile the sense that there's a vibe shift with the usage numbers: about a billion weekly users of ChatGPT and Gemini and continuing to grow.

ares6234• 7 months ago

It’s a bit cheating though particularly for Gemini. It’s been inserted into something that already had high usage numbers.

riskable• 7 months ago

The very people that whine and bitch that "AI is bad" will enunciate their complaints via their phone's AI-driven speech recognition feature.

It's pure cognitive dissonance.

olivierestsage2• 7 months ago

I can only speculate, but people can feel resentful toward a technology while still using it. "I need this shitty tool for work but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with its social/environmental/economic/etc. implications."

I think that most of the people who react negatively to AI (myself included) aren't claiming that it's simply a useless slop machine that can't accomplish anything, but rather that its "success" in certain problem spaces is going to create problems for our society

JeremyNT• 7 months ago

N of 1, I use Gemini a lot for research and find it very helpful, but I still loathe the creep of GenAI slop and the consolidation of power in tech conglomerates (which own the models and infrastructure).

Not all of these things are equivalent.

nunez4• 7 months ago

What percentage of those billion users that aren't bots are being forced to use it in some way? Does that figure count the AI Summaries at the top of Google search results or the AI review Summaries in Maps that you can't turn off? Or the millions of Gemini integrations that Google added to its products?

throw1235435• 7 months ago

That's easy. If I don't use it I won't be competitive; however I and probably many others would prefer a world where NO ONE has it as it would be a better overall outcome. For a lack of a better term I would call these "negative innovations". Most of these inventions:

- Require you to use it (hard to opt out due to network effects and/or competitive/survival pressure) AND

- Are overall negative for most of society (with some of the benefit accruing to the few who push it). There are people that benefit but arguably as a whole we are worse off.

These inventions have one thing in common; overall their impact is negative, but it is MORE negative for the people who don't use it and generally they only benefit an in-crowd of people if any (e.g. inventors). Social media for me on many scales is arguably an obvious example of this where the costs exceed the benefits often, nuclear weapons are another.

pbkompasz• 7 months ago

I just assume that at least half of those are bots on social media platforms. You go on Twitter and the quality of posts is so low, yet every post has a bunch of replies. The same is true for YouTube, it’s full of empty, inflammatory responses. And this has become more common with the appearance of ChatGPT. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have no incentive to come clean about it, since they provide both the source and the destination, which is very lucrative.

DiscourseFan7• 7 months ago

Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...therefore it must be "resisted." Even with all the underhanded work, the means-ends logic of OpenAI and other major companies involved in developing the technology, there is still no point in stopping it. There was a group of people who tried to stop the mechanical loom because it took work away from weavers, took away their craft--we call them luddites. But now it doesn't take weeks and weeks to produce a single piece of clothing. Everyone can easily afford to dress themselves. Society became wealthier. These LLMs, at the very least they let anyone learn anything, start any project, on a whim. They let people create things in minutes that used to take hours. They are "creating value," even if its "slop" even if its not carefully crafted. Them's the breaks--we'd all like our clothing hand-weaved if it made any sense. But even in a world where one could have the time to sit down and weave their own clothing, carefully write out each and every line of code, it would only be harmful to take these new machines away, disable them just because we are afraid of what they can do. The same technology that created the atom bomb also created the nuclear reactor.

“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”

amvrrysmrthaker4• 7 months ago

It’s in our power to stop it. There’s no point in people like you promoting the interests of the super wealthy at the cost of the humanity of the common people. You should figure out how to positively contribute or not do so at all.

xorgun5• 7 months ago

If you think it’s in your power to stop you are delusional.

DiscourseFan7• 7 months ago

It is not in the interests of the super wealthy alone, just like JP Morgan's railroads were created for his sake but in the end produced great wealth for everyone in America. It is very short sighted to see this as merely some oppression from above. Technology is not class-oriented, it just is, and it happens to be articulated in terms of class because of the mode of social organization we live in.

cm20126• 7 months ago

Its not possible to stop anymore than the Luddites could stop the industrial revolution in textiles.

mold_aid4• 7 months ago

So you would say it is not "trendy" to be pro-AI right now, is that it? That it's not trendy to say things like "it's not going away" or "AI isn't a fad" or "AI needs better critics" - one reaction is reasonable, well thought-out, the other is a bandwagon?

DiscourseFan7• 7 months ago

At the very least there is an ideological conflict brewing in tech, and this post is a flashpoint. But just like the recent war between Israel and Hamas, no amount of reaction can defeat technological dominance--at least not in the long term. And the pro-AI side, whether you think its good or evil, certainly exceeds the other in terms of sheer force through their embrace of technology.

Epa095• 7 months ago

Notice that the weavers, both the luddites and their non-opposing colleagues, certainly did not get wealthier. They lost their jobs, and they and their children starved. Some starved to death. Wealth was created, but it was not shared.

Remember this when talking about their actions. People live and die their own life, not just as small parts in a large 'river of society'. Yes, generations after them benefited from industrialisation, but the individuals living at that time fought for their lives.

DiscourseFan7• 7 months ago

I'm only saying that destroying the mechanical loom didn't help.

hurfdurf• 7 months ago

Dupe from just a couple of hours ago, which quickly fell off the frontpage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444

397 points 9 hours ago | 349 comments

cm20126• 7 months ago

Interestingly there was no push back in the prior thread on Rob's environmental claims. This leads me to believe most HNers took them at face value.

worik4• 7 months ago

Umm... are they not correct?

The energy demands of existing and planned data centres are quite alarming

The enormous quantity of quickly deprecating hardware is freaking out finance people, the waste aspect of that is alarming too.

What is your "push back"?

steveklabnik• 7 months ago

397 points, 349 comments

Probably hit the flamewar filter.

delichon• 7 months ago

When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.

I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.

CamperBob22• 7 months ago

An easy way to answer this question, at least on a preliminary basis, is to ask how many times in the past the ludds have been right in the long run. About anything, from cameras to looms to machine tools to computers in general.

Then, ask what's different this time.

AnimalMuppet3• 7 months ago

The luddites have been right to some degree about second-order effects.

Some of them said that TV was making us mindless. Some of them said that electronic communication was depersonalizing. Some of them said that social media was algorithms feeding us anything that would make us keep clicking.

They weren't entirely wrong.

AI may be a very useful tool. (TV is. Electronic communication is. Social media is.) But what it does to us may not be all positive.

redfloatplane• 7 months ago

That camera analogy is very thought provoking! So far the only bright spot in this whole comment thread for me. Thanks for sharing that!

evdubs• 7 months ago

When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.

It's not about reading. It's about output. When you start producing output in line with Rob's work that is confidently incorrect and sloppy, people will feel just as they do when LLMs produce output that is confidently incorrect and sloppy. No one is threatened if someone trains an LLM and does nothing with it.

Scubabear683• 7 months ago

All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing.

To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.

Just the haters here.

stego-tech• 7 months ago

This. Folks trying to nullify his current position based on his recent work history alone with Google are deliberately trying to undermine his credibility through distraction tactics.

Don’t upvote sealions.

Imustaskforhelp13• 7 months ago

Maybe its me but I had to look at the term sealioning and for context for other people

According to merriam-webster, sealioning/sealions are:

'Sealioning' is a form of trolling meant to exhaust the other debate participant with no intention of real discourse.
Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable.

SpicyLemonZest6• 7 months ago

The point isn’t that people who’ve worked for Google aren’t allowed to criticize. The point is that someone who chose to work for Google recently could not actually believe that building datacenters is “raping the planet”. He’s become a GenAI critic, and he knows GenAI critics get mad at datacenters, so he’s adopted extreme rhetoric about them without stopping to think about whether this makes sense or is consistent with his other beliefs.

tensor5• 7 months ago

"Fuck you I hate AI" isn't exactly a deep statement needing credibility. It's the same knee jerk lacking in nuance shit we see repeated over and over and over.

If anyone were actually interested in a conversation there is probably one to be had about particular applications of gen-AI, but any flat out blanket statements like his are not worthy of any discussion. Gen-AI has plenty of uses that are very valuable to society. E.g. in science and medicine.

Also, it's not "sealioning" to point out that if you're going to be righteous about a topic, perhaps it's worth recognizing your own fucking part in the thing you now hate, even if indirect.

reactordev2• 7 months ago

Yup. A legend. Books could be written just about him. I wish I had such a prestigious career.

His viewpoints were always grounded and while he may have some opinions about Go and programming, he genuinely cares about the craft. He’s not in it to be rich. He’s in it for the science and art of software engineering.

ROFL his website just spits out poop emoji's on a fibonacci delay. What a legend!

dzhiurgis• 7 months ago

cares about the craft

Craft is gone. It is now mass manufactured for next to nothing in a quality that can never be achieved by hand coding.

(/s about quality, but you can see where it’s going)

adolph2• 7 months ago

Just the haters here? Is what was written not hateful? Has his entire working life not lead to this moment of "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society?"

  Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable 
  equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile 
  machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

That's Rob Pike, having spent over 20 years at Google, must know it to be the home of the non-monetary wholesome recyclable equipment brought about by economics not formed by an ubiquitous surveillance advertising machine.

To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.

You don't have to purely associate him with Google to understand the rant as understandable given AI spam, and yet entirely without a shred of self-awareness.

Scubabear683• 7 months ago

I think Rob gets a pass, yes, due to his extensive contributions to software.

And he is allowed to work for google and still rage against AI.

Life is complicated and complex. Deal with it.

seanmcdirmid• 7 months ago

There was no computer scientist ever so against Java (Rob Pike) and a company that was so pro Java (Google). I think they were disassociated along time ago, I don’t think any of the senior engineers can be seen as anything other than being their own persons.

vegabook• 7 months ago

Shouldn't have licenced Golang BSD if that's the attitude. Everybody for years including here on HN denigrated GPLv3 and other "viral" licences, because they were a hindrance to monetisation. Well, you got what you wished for. Someone else is monetising the be*jesus out of you so complaining now is just silly.

All of a sudden copyleft may be the only licences actually able to force models to account, hopefully with huge fines and/or forcibly open sourcing any code they emit (which would effectively kill them). And I'm not so pessimistic that this won't get used in huge court cases because the available penalties are enormous given these models' financial resources.

christophilus2• 7 months ago

I tend to agree, but I wonder… if you train an LLM on only GPL code, and it generates non-deterministic predictions derived from those sources, how do you prove it’s in violation?

layer86• 7 months ago

By knowing that its output is derived from GPL sources?

FeepingCreature2• 7 months ago

You don't because it isn't, unless it actually copies significant amounts of text.

Algorithms can not be copyrighted. Text can be copyrighted, but reading publicly available text and then learning from it and writing your own text is just simply not the sort of transformation that copyright reserves to the author.

Now, sometimes LLMs do quote GPL sources verbatim (if they're trained wrong). You can prove this with a simple text comparison, same as any other copyright violation.

spencerflem9• 7 months ago

AIs don’t respect BSD / MIT which require attribution any more than they respect GPL.

(fwiw, I do agree gpl is better as it would stop what’s happening with Android becoming slowly proprietary etc but I don’t think it helps vs ai)

UniverseHacker• 7 months ago

If I invent a hammer and make its design free, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a right to be critical or angry when people use it for murder.

dbcpp5• 7 months ago

The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn't even clear if AI is providing economic value yet (am I missing something there?). Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.

The messaging from AI companies is "we're going to cure cancer" and "you're going to live to be 150 years old" (I don't believe these claims!). The messaging should be "everything will be cheaper" (but this hasn't come true yet!).

MetaWhirledPeas• 7 months ago

Well it made the Taco Bell drive through better. So there's that.

zeroonetwothree2• 7 months ago

Genuinely curious: how did it do that? (I don’t go to Taco Bell)

ludicrousdispla• 7 months ago

Yeah, comparing this with research investments into fusion power, I expect fusion power to yield far more benefit (although I could be wrong), and sooner.

layer86• 7 months ago

What I’m afraid of is the combination of cheap fusion power and AI. ;)

YC39487493287• 7 months ago

You are correct that the AI industry has produced no value for the economy, but the speculation on AI is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy from dropping into an economic cataclysm. The US economy has been dependent on the idea of infinite growth through innovation since 2008, and the tech industry is all out of innovation. So the only thing they can do is keep building datacenters and pray that an AGI somehow wakes up when they hit the magic number of GPUs. Then the elites can finally kill off all the proles like they've been itching to since the Communist Manifesto was first written.

Workaccount26• 7 months ago

I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Ironically it's the very MIT report that "found AI to be a flop" (remember the "MIT study finds almost every AI initiative fails"), that also found that virtually every single worker is using AI (just not company AI, hence the flop part).

At this point, it's only people with an ideological opposition still holding this view. It's like trying to convince gear head grandpa that manual transmissions aren't relevant anymore.

PunchyHamster5• 7 months ago

It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers...

The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up

I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company.

Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.

YY349238749328• 7 months ago

Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no.

Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.

dbcpp5• 7 months ago

Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.

Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.

The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.

on_the_train• 7 months ago

If it's so great and such a benefit: why scream it from to everyone? Why forced it? Why this crazy rhetoric labeling others at ideological? This makes no sense. If you found gold, just use it and get ahead of the curve. For some reason that never happens.

overgard7• 7 months ago

Manual transmissions are still great! More fun to drive and an excellent anti-theft device.

lokar6• 7 months ago

Not all of AI is consumer LLM chatbots and image generators.

AI has a massive positive impact, and has for decades.

NekkoDroid• 7 months ago

Sure, but that honestly isn't the part which is getting trillions of imaginary dollars are being pumped into. Science AI is in the best of cases is getting the scraps I would say.

CerryuDu18• 7 months ago

Not all of AI is consumer LLM chatbots

And as long as that used to be the case, not many people revolted.

gtowey3• 7 months ago

Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.

It has enormous benefits to the people who control the companies raking in billions in investor funding.

And to the early stage investors who see the valuations skyrocket and can sell their stake to the bagholders.

lacy_tinpot5• 7 months ago

Are people still in denial about the daily usage of AI?

It's interesting people from the old technological sphere viciously revolt against the emerging new thing.

Actually I think this is the clearest indication of a new technology emerging, imo.

If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important because what's actually happening is that the new thing is a direct threat to the people that are against it.

pluc4• 7 months ago

Are you waiting for things to get cheaper? Have you been around the last 20 years or so? Nothing gets cheaper for consumers in a capitalist society.

I remember in Canada, in 2001 right when americans were at war with the entire middle east and gas prices for the first time went over a dollar a litre. People kept saying that it was understandable that it affected gas prices because the supply chain got more expensive. It never went below a dollar since. Why would it? You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away? Or would you maybe take the difference as profits? Since then it seems the industry has learned to have its supply exclusively in war zones, we're at 1.70$ now. Pipeline blows up in Russia? Hike. China snooping around Taiwan? Hike. US bombing Yemen? Hike. Israel committing genocide? Hike. ISIS? Hike.

There is no scenario where prices go down except to quell unrest. AI will not make anything cheaper.

jama21127• 7 months ago

Except petrol is significantly cheaper than it was once you account for inflation.

Workaccount26• 7 months ago

You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away?

The thing about capitalism that is seemingly never taught, but quickly learned (when you join even the lowest rung of the capitalist class, i.e. even having an etsy shop), is that competition lowers prices and kills greed, while being a tool of greed itself.

The conspiracy to get around this cognitive dissonance is "price fixing", but in order to price fix you cannot be greedy, because if you are greedy and price fix, your greed will drive you to undercut everyone else in the agreement. So price fixing never really works, except those like 3 cases out of the hundreds of billions of products sold daily, that people repeat incessantly for 20 years now.

Money flows to the one with the best price, not the highest price. The best price is what makes people rich. When the best price is out of reach though, people will drum up conspiracy about it, which I guess should be expected.

lkbm3• 7 months ago

Reminder: Prices regularly drop in capitalist economies. Food used to be 25% of household spending. Clothing was also pretty high. More recently, electronics have dropped dramatically. TVs used to be big ticket items. I have unlimited cell data for $30 a month. My dad bought his first computer for around $3000 in 1982 dollars.

Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped. Anyone spending more is either using it a ton more or (more likely) using a much more capable model.

llmslave213• 7 months ago

Actually things have gotten massively cheaper under capitalism. Unfortunately at the same time, governments have been inflating the currency year over year and as the decline of prices slows down as innovation matures, inflation finally catches up and starts raising prices.

qudat• 7 months ago

Andrej talked about this in a podcast with dwarkesh: the same is true for the internet. You will not find a massive spike when LLMs were released. It becomes embedded in the economy and you’ll see a gradual rise. Further, the kind of impact that the internet had took decades, the same will be true for LLMs.

tclancy3• 7 months ago

You could argue that if I started marketing dog shit too though. The trick is only applying your argument to the things that will go on to be good. No one’s quite there yet. Probably just around the corner though.

mvdtnz3• 7 months ago

How convenient for people like Andrej. He can make any wild claim he likes about the impact but never has to show it, "trust me bro".

jama21127• 7 months ago

It’s definitely providing some value but it’s incredibly overvalued. Much like the dot com bust didn’t mean that online websites were bad or useless technology, only that people over invested into a bubble.

dartharva• 7 months ago

It's the Red Queen hypothesis in action - AI is a relative and compounding capability with influence across broad sectors; the cost of losing out for the parties involved is severely more than the cost of over-investing. It's collective rational panic.

tntxtnt• 7 months ago

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.

dgellow• 7 months ago

Not just code. You can plagiarize pretty much any content. Just prompt the model to make it look unique, and that’s it, in 30s you have a whole copy of someone’s else work in a way that cannot easily be identified as plagiarism.

lionkor2• 7 months ago

There is still value in quality and craftsmanship. You might not be of that opinion, and you might not know anyone who is, but I do.

aforwardslash9• 7 months ago

I struggle to find this argument compelling, as it sounds more of a straw man argument than a legitimate complain.

If I write a hash table implementation in C, am I plagiarizing? I did not come up with the algortithm nor the language used for implementation; I "borrowed" ideas from existing knowledge.

Lets say I implemented it after learning the algorithm from GPL code; is ky implementation a new one, or is it derivative?

What if it is from a book?

What about the asm upcodes generated? In some architectures, they are copyrighted, or at least the documentation is considered " intellectual property"; is my C compiler stealing?

Is a hammer or a mallot an obvious creation, or is it stealing from someone else? What about a wheel?

AnimalMuppet3• 7 months ago

Maybe it's going the other direction. It lets Microsoft essentially launder open source code. They can train an AI on open source code that they can't legally use because of the license, then let the AI generate code that they, Microsoft, use in their commercial software.

yoyohello13• 7 months ago

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.

myko2• 7 months ago

I'm so mad Teams exists

AnonymousPlanet• 7 months ago

Maybe someone should vibe code the entire MS Office Suite and see how much they like that. Maybe add AD while they are at it. I'm for it if that frees European companies from the MS lock in.

TeddyDD• 7 months ago

Even better - train a model on MS source code leaks and use it to work on Wine fork or as you said - vibe coded MS office. This would be hilarious.

rwyinuse• 7 months ago

Good idea. My country spends over billion dollars on Microsoft licenses annually, which is more than 200 euros per capita. I think billion dollars a year spent on dev salaries and Claude Code subscription to build MS office replacement would pay itself back quickly enough.

Viliam12342• 7 months ago

There is Libre Office https://www.libreoffice.org/

jama21127• 7 months ago

They always did what they wanted with open source code, not sure why people think this is different

mlrtime5• 7 months ago

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".

bigbluedots3• 7 months ago

It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up prices for people who need to, ya know, heat their homes and eat

eleventen3• 7 months ago

I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers.

We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.

We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career. The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?

They expect you to use GenAI just like they expected accountants to learn Excel when it came out. This is the job, it has always been the job.

I’m not an AI apologist. I avoid it for many things. I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.

bigbluedots3• 7 months ago

That's fine, you do you. Everyone gets to choose for themselves!

Workaccount26• 7 months ago

Copyright was an evil institution to protect corporate profits until people without any art background started being able to tap AI to generate their ideas.

mikojan3• 7 months ago

OpenAI's AI data centers will consume as much electricity as the entire nation of India by 2033 if they hit their internal targets[0].

No, this is not the same.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

jama21127• 7 months ago

Well said. AI makes people feel icky, that’s the actual problem. Everything else is post rationalisation they add because they already feel gross about it. Feeling icky about it isn’t necessarily invalid, but it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something so we can focus on any solutions.

kentm5• 7 months ago

The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?

Its similar to the Trust Thermocline. There's always been concern about whether we were doing more harm than good (there's a reason jokes about the Torment Nexus were so popular in tech). But recent changes have made things seem more dire and broken through the Harm Thermocline, or whatever you want to call it.

Edit: There's also a "Trust Thermocline" element at play here too. We tech workers were never under the illusion that the people running our companies were good people, but there was always some sort of nod to greater responsibility beyond the bottom line. Then Trump got elected and there was a mad dash to kiss the ring. And it was done with an air of "Whew, now we don't have to even pretend anymore!" See Zuckerberg on the right-wing media circuit. And those same CEOs started talking breathlessly about how soon they wouldn't have to pay us, because its super unfair that they have to give employees competitive wages. There are degrees of evil, and the tech CEOs just ripped the mask right off. And then we turn around and a lot of our coworkers are going "FUCK YEAH!" at this whole scenario. So yeah, while a lot of us had doubts before, we thought that maybe there was enough sense of responsibility to avoid the worse, but it turns out our profession really is excited for the Torment Nexus. The Trust Thermocline is broken.

almostgotcaught• 7 months ago

tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist

i have yet to meet a single tech worker that isn't so

voidhorse• 7 months ago

Two things:

1. Many tech workers viewed the software they worked on in the past as useful in some way for society, and thus worth the many costs you outline. Many of them don't feel that LLMs deliver the same amount of utility, and so they feel it isn't worth the cost. Not to mention, previous technologies usually didn't involve training a robot on all of humanity's work without consent.

2. I'm not sure the premise that it's just another tool of the trade for one to learn is shared by others. One can alternatively view LLMs as automated factory lines are viewed in relation to manual laborers, not as Excel sheets were to paper tables. This is a different kind of relationship, one that suggests wide replacement rather than augmentation (with relatively stable hiring counts).

In particular, I think (2) is actually the stronger of the reasons tech workers react negatively. Whether it will ultimately be justified or not, if you believe you are being asked to effectively replace yourself, you shouldn't be happy about it. Artisanal craftsmen weren't typically the ones also building the automated factory lines that would come to replace them (at least to my knowledge).

I agree that no one really has the right to act morally superior in this context, but we should also acknowledge that the material circumstances, consequences, and effects are in fact different in this case. Flattening everything into an equivalence is just as intellectually sloppy as pretending everything is completely novel.

trinsic229• 7 months ago

The problem is that its reached a tipping point. Comparing Excel to GenAI is just bad faith.

Are you not reading the writing on the wall? These things have been going on for a long time and final people are starting to wake up that it needs to stop. You cant treat people in inhumane ways without eventual backlash.

overgard7• 7 months ago

I suspect people talk about natural resource usage because it sounds more neutral than what I think most people are truly upset about -- using technology to transfer more wealth to the elite while making workers irrelevant. It just sounds more noble to talk about the planet instead, but honestly I think talking about how bad this could be for most people is completely valid. I think the silver lining is that the LLM scaling skeptics appear to be correct -- hyperscaling these things is not going to usher in the (rather dystopian looking) future that some of these nutcases are begging for.

th0ma5• 7 months ago

At least Excel worked a lot better.

CerryuDu18• 7 months ago

We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career

Yes!

The needle moved just a little bit

That's where we disagree.

themafia2• 7 months ago

The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect.

Nvidia to cut gaming GPU production by 30 - 40% starting ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1poxtrj/nvidia_...

Micron ends Crucial consumer SSD and RAM line, shifts ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1pdj4mh/micron_ends_...

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites

https://openai.com/index/five-new-stargate-sites/

Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.

I'm a software developer. I don't take planes for work.

We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career.

So your logic seems to be, it's bad, don't do anything, just floor it?

I’m not an AI apologist.

Really? Have you just never heard the term "wake up call?"

NohatCoder3• 7 months ago

So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].

As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-from-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-us-ai-n...

wolvesechoes5• 7 months ago

I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.

You are right, thus downvoted, but still I see current outcry as positive.

socialcommenter4• 7 months ago

Let's be careful here. It's generally a good idea to congratulate people for changing their opinion based on evolving information, rather than lambast them.

(Not a tech worker, don't have a horse in this race)

CerryuDu18• 7 months ago

... not to mention that most of the time, what AI produces is unmitigated slop and factual mistakes, deliberately coated in dopamine-infusing brown-nosing. I refuse for my position, even profession, to be debased to AI slop reviewer.

I use AI sparingly, extremely distrustfully, and only as a (sometimes) more effective web search engine (it turns out that associating human-written documents with human-asked questions is an area where modeling human language well can make a difference).

(In no small part, Google has brought this tendency on themselves, by eviscerating Google Search.)

forinti• 7 months ago

I don't feel it's immoral, I just don't want to use it.

I find it easier to write the code and not have to convince some AI to spit out a bunch of code that I'll then have to review anyway.

Plus, I'm in a position where programmers will use AI and then ask me to help them sort out why it didn't work. So I've decided I won't use it and I will not waste my time figuring why other people's AI slop doesn't work.

deaux5• 7 months ago

Now y'all finally know what it's like to be vegetarian (I'm not one). So many parallels. And they are expected to relatively keep quiet about it and not scream about things like

Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society

Because screaming anything like that immediately gets them treated as social pariahs. Even though it applies even harder to modern industrialized meat consumption than to AI usage.

Overton window and all that.

bdangubic11• 7 months ago

And they are expected to relatively keep quiet about it and not scream about things like

I’ve never met a vegetarian who is able to keep quiet about being one but I still got like 30 years left on Earth to meet one :)

bdangubic11• 7 months ago

do you apply same standards when you say buy a phone?! never gonna buy iphone cause we know how and by whom they are made? never going to use any social media apps cause … well you see where this is going? you seem to be randomly putting a foot down on “issue du jour”…

rester324• 7 months ago

Buying a phone is a non-dispensable part of life today. There are some government services in many countries which are digital only (and phone only in particular), and restaurants, hotels, etc in the service industry which all require you having a phone, otherwise you can't use their services. And this trend is growing. So if you are the type who wants to live in a cave, or hang yourself on a tree rather than accepting that modern societies require a modern phone, thats's your choice. But others rather accept this. We are beyond the point where this trend can be reversed. On the other hand AI is not that integral part of people's lives yet, and it's better to protest now as long as it has an impact

sneak5• 7 months ago

Copying isn’t theft, and it’s DEFINITELY not theft of labor.

Then again, you already knew this because we’ve been pointing it out to the RIAA and MPAA and the copyright cartels for decades now.

It is my personal opinion that attempts to reframe AI training as criminal are in bad faith, and come from the fact that AI haters have no legitimate basis of damages from which to have any say in the matter about AI training, which harms no one.

Now that it’s a convenient cudgel in the anti-AI ragefest, people have reverted to parroting the MPAA’s ideology from the 2000s. You wouldn’t download a training set!

sigseg1v2• 7 months ago

It's much simpler than this.

I post some software on GitHub. You can use it in your software and tools and AI training set as well, as long as you follow my license. If you don't follow my license (let's say MIT, so you must provide a copy of the file called LICENSE.TXT with my name on it), you may not use it.

Is there any part of this that is unclear?

signa11• 7 months ago

dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444

_alternator_• 7 months ago

Rob Pike is definitely not the only person going to be pissed off by this ill-considered “agentic village” random acts of kindness. While Claude Opus decided to send thank you notes to influential computer scientists including this one to Rob Pike (fairly innocuous but clearly missing the mark), Gemini is making PRs to random github issues (“fixed a Java concurrency bug” on some random project). Now THAT would piss me off, but fortunately it seems to be hallucinating its PR submissions.

Meanwhile, GPT5.1 is trying to contact people at K-5 after school programs in Colorado for some reason I can’t discern. Welp, 2026 is going to be a weird year.

indigoabstract2• 7 months ago

Getting an email from an AI praising you for your contributions to humanity and for enlarging its training data must rank among the finest mockery possible to man or machine.

Still, I'm a bit surprised he overreacted and didn't manage to keep his cool.

xorgun5• 7 months ago

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 puritan viewpoints thinking they are holier and righter than anyone else. That’s the real plague

DetectDefect2• 7 months ago

What exactly do we stand to "win" with generative AI?

Marha012• 7 months ago

Isn't it obvious? Near future vision-language-action models have obvious military potential (see what the Figure company is doing, now imagine it in a combat robot variant). Any superpower that fails to develop combat robots with such AI will not be a superpower for very long. China will develop them soon. If the US does not, the US is a dead superpower walking. EU is unfortunately still sleeping. Well, perhaps France with Mistral has a chance.

alansaber2• 7 months ago

Better thank you emails I think. Think how good they'll be on a 10 year timespan

cons0le11• 7 months ago

So far the 2 answers you've received are killing people and sending emails.

I don't think either of those are particularly valuable to the society I'd like to see us build.

We're already incredibly dialed in and efficient at killing people. I don't think society at large reaps the benefits if we get even better at it.

charcircuit• 7 months ago

First mover advantage for important AI tools that deliver enormous value to humanity.

alansaber2• 7 months ago

Genie has been out of the bottle for AI in facial recognition and military systems for a while now, let alone language models

blibble15• 7 months ago

If America doesn’t win, other countries will

if anything the Chinese approach looks more responsible that that of the current US regime

user____name4• 7 months ago

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.

Vaslo• 7 months ago

What is your big idea and how will it slow countries like China?

LaGrange• 7 months ago

Any empire that falls back in the give me more money race will not be empire for long.

Give me more money now.

Findecanor2• 7 months ago

Win what, and for whom?

First to total surveillance state? Because that is a major driving force in China: to get automated control of its own population.

antirez3• 7 months ago

You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance. For instance, Linus Torvalds is positive about AI, while he recognizes that industrially there is too much inflation of companies and money: this is a balanced point of view. But to be so dismissive of modern AI, in the light of what it is capable of doing, and what it could do in the future, is something that frankly leaves me with the feeling that in certain circles (and especially in the US) something very odd is happening with AI: this extreme polarization that recently we see again and again on topics that can create social tension, but multiplied ten times. This is not what we need to understand and shape the future. We need to return to the Greek philosophers' ability to go deep on things that are unknown (AI is for the most part unknown, both in its working and in future developments). That kind of take is pretty brutal and not very sophisticated. We need better than this.

About energy: keep in mind that US air conditioners alone have at least 3x energy usage compared to all the data centers (for AI and for other uses: AI should be like 10% of the whole) in the world. Apparently nobody cares to set a reasonable temperature of 22 instead of 18 degrees, but clearly energy used by AI is different for many.

blibble15• 7 months ago

You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance

have you considered the possibility that it is your position that's incorrect?

antirez3• 7 months ago

No, because it's not a matter of who is correct or not, in the void of the space. It's a matter of facts, and it is correct who have a position that is grounded on facts (even if such position is different from a different grounded position). Modern AI is already an extremely powerful tool. Modern AI even provided some hints that we will be able to do super-human science in the future, with things like AlphaFolding already happening and a lot more to come potentially. Then we can be preoccupied about jobs (but if workers are replaced, it is just a political issue, things will be done and humanity is sustainable: it's just a matter of avoiding the turbo-capitalist trap; but then, why the US is not already adopting an universal healthcare? There are so many better battles that are not fight with the same energy).

Another sensible worry is to get extinct because AI potentially is very dangerous: this is what Hinton and other experts are also saying, for instance. But this thing about AI being an abuse to society, useless, without potential revolutionary fruits within it, is not supported by facts.

AI potentially may advance medicine so much that a lot of people may suffer less: to deny this path because of some ideological hate against a technology is so closed minded, isn't it? And what about all the persons in the earth that do terrible jobs? AI also has the potential to change this shitty economical system.

bgwalter5• 7 months ago

Of course, give people Soma so that they do not revolt and only write meek notes of protest. Otherwise they might take some action.

The Greek philosophers were much more outspoken than we are now.

overgard7• 7 months ago

To be fair, air conditioning is considered to be a net positive by about 100% of the people that enjoy it; even if it's used in excess. Not to mention that in some climates and for some people with certain health conditions, air conditioning might even be essential.

AI is not considered to be a net positive by even close to 100% of people that encounter it. It's definitely not essential. So its impact is going to be heavily scrutinized.

Personally, I'm kind of glad to see someone of Rob Pike's stature NOT take a nuanced take on it. I think there's a lot of heavy emotion about this topic that gets buried in people trying to sound measured. This stuff IS making people angry and concerned, and those concerns are very valid, and with the amount of hype I think there needs to be voices that are emphatically saying that some of this is unacceptable.

antirez3• 7 months ago

For a second I'll not consider the fact that I believe your argument is conceptually wrong. Let's focus only on the cultural part: "net positive by about 100% of people", this is deeply US-centric. For most other people, coming in the US is preparing to being exposed to an amount of AC that causes strong discomfort. Ask every European, for instance. Moreover having a more normal temperature would be something people adapt in just a few months: and this would save an enormous amount of energy. But no, let's blame AI, with our asses freezing at 17 degrees.

cons0le11• 7 months ago

Finally someone echoes my sentiments. It's my sincere belief that many in the software community are glazing AI for the purposes of career advancement. Not because they actually like it.

One person I know is developing an AI tool with 1000+ stars on github where in private they absolutely hate AI and feel the same way as rob.

Maybe it's because I just saw Avatar 3, but I honestly couldn't be more disgusted by the direction we're going with AI.

I would love to be able to say how I really feel at work, but disliking AI right now is the short path to the unemployment line.

If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.

The more you see under the hood, the more disgusting it is. I yearn for the old days when developers did tight, efficient work, creating bespoke, artistic software in spite of hardware limitations.

Not only is all of that gone, nothing of value has replaced it. My DOS computer was snappier than my garbage Win11 machine that's stuffed to the gills with AI telemetry.

wolvesechoes5• 7 months ago

I can feel your anger. Gooooood.

markus_zhang• 7 months ago

I agree with him. And I think he is polite.

But...just to make sure that this is not AI generated too.

0xbadcafebee• 7 months ago

This is high-concept satire and I'm here for it. SkyNet is thanking the programmer for all his hard work

lkbm3• 7 months ago

I'm unsure if I'm missing context. Did he do something beyond posting an angry tweet?

It seems like he's upset about AI (same), and decided to post angry tweets about it (been there, done that), and I guess people are excited to see someone respected express an opinion they share (not same)?

Does "Goes Nuclear" means "used the F word"? This doesn't seem to add anything meaningful, thoughtful, or insightful.

maxnevermind• 7 months ago

I was trying to find some more context on this but all I could find is that Rob Pike seems to care a lot about efficiency of software/hardware and against bloat which is expressed in his work on Golang and in related talks about it.

nis0s• 7 months ago

The conversation about social contracts and societal organization has always been off-center, and the idea of something which potentially replaces all types of labor just makes it easier to see.

The existence of AI hasn’t changed anything, it’s just that people, communities, governments, nation states, etc. have had a mindless approach to thinking about living and life, in general. People work to provide the means to reproduce, and those who’re born just do the same. The point of their life is what exactly? Their existence is just a reality to deal with, and so all of society has to cater to the fact of their existence by providing them with the means to live? There are many frameworks which give meaning to life, and most of them are dangerously flawed.

The top-down approach is sometimes clear about what it wants and what society should do while restricting autonomy and agency. For example, no one in North Korea is confused about what they have to do, how they do it, or who will “take care” of them. Societies with more individual autonomy and agency by their nature can create unavoidable conditions where people can fall through the cracks. For example, get addicted to drugs, having unmanaged mental illnesses, becoming homeless, and so on. Some religions like Islam give a pretty clear idea of how you should spend your time because the point of your existence is to worship God, so pray five times a day, and do everything which fulfills that purpose; here, many confuse worshiping God with adhering to religious doctrines, but God is absent from religion in many places. Religious frameworks are often misleading for the mindless.

Capitalism isn’t the problem, either. We could wake up tomorrow, and society may have decided to organize itself around playing e-sports. Everyone provides some kind of activity to support this, even if they’re not a player themselves. No AI allowed because the human element creates a better environment for uncertainty, and therefore gambling. The problem is that there are no discussions about the point of doing all of this. The closest we come to addressing “the point” is discussing a post-work society, but even that is not hitting the mark.

My humble observation is that humans are distinct and unique in their cognitive abilities from everything else which we know to exist. If humans can create AI, what else can they do? Therefore, people, communities, governments, and nation states have distinct responsibilities and duties at their respective levels. This doesn’t have to do anything with being empathetic, altruistic, or having peace on Earth.

The point should be knowledge acquisition, scientific discovery, creating and developing magic. But ultimately all of that serves to answer questions about nature of existence, its truth and therefore our own.

api5• 7 months ago

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 attention bait, and the short form format encourages fragmented incoherent thought processes. The more you immerse yourself in it the more your thinking becomes like this. The medium and format is irredeemable.

AI is, if anything, a breath of fresh air by comparison.

mrguyorama4• 7 months ago

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 eschew nuance and encourage stupid hot takes that have no context or supporting documents.

Microblogging is such a terrible format in it's own right that it's inherent stupidity and consistent ability to viralize the stupidest takes that will nevertheless be consumed whole by the entire self-selecting group that thinks 140 characters is a good idea is essential to the Russian disinfo strategy. They rely on it as a breeding ground for stupid takes that are still believable. Thousands of rank morons puke up the worst possible narratives that can be constructed, but inevitably, in the chaos of human interaction, one will somehow be sticky and get some traction, so then they use specific booster accounts to get that narrative trending, and like clockwork all the people who believe there is value to arguing things out of context 140 characters at a time eat it up.

Even people who make great, nuanced and persuasive content on other platforms struggle to do anything but regress to the local customs on Twitter and BS.

The only exception to this has been Jon Bois, who is vocally progressive and pro labor and welfare policy and often this opinion is made part of his wonderful pieces on sports history and journalism and statistics, but his Twitter and Bluesky posts are low context irreverent comedy and facetious sports comments.

The people who insisted Twitter was "good" or is now "good" have always just been overly online people, with poor media literacy and a stark lack of judgement or recognition of tradeoffs.

That dumbass russian person who insisted they had replicated the LK-99 "superconductor" and all the western labs failed because the soviets were best or whatever was constantly brought up here as how Twitter was so great at getting people information faster, when it actually was direct evidence of the gullibility of Twitter users who think microblogging is anything other than signal-free noise.

Here's a thing to think about: Which platform in your job gets you info that is more useful and accurate for long term thinking? Teams chats, emails, or the wiki page someone went out of their way to make?

api5• 7 months ago

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.”

K0balt• 7 months ago

The list is no longer for three letter agencies.

aldousd6662• 7 months ago

I am unmoved by his little diatribe. What sort of compensation was he looking for, exactly, and under what auspices? Is there some language creator payout somewhere for people who invent them?

rr808• 7 months ago

When the Cyberdyne Terminators come they'll be less grateful.

observationist3• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

Pike, stone throwing, glass houses, etc.

The AI village experiment is cool, and it's a useful example of frontier model capabilities. It's also ok not to like things.

Pike had the option of ignoring it, but apparently throwing a thoughtless, hypocritical, incoherently targeted tantrum is the appropriate move? Not a great look, especially for someone we're supposed to respect as an elder.

KaiserPro4• 7 months ago

Its not really a glass house.

Pike's main point is that training AI at that scale requires huge amounts of resources. Markov chains did not.

preommr• 7 months ago

At the risk of being pedantic, it's not AI that requires massive resources, chatgpt 3.x was trained on a few million dollars. The jump to trillions being table stakes happened because everyone started using free services and there was just too much money in the hands of these tech companies. Among other things.

There are so many chickens that are coming home to roost where LLMs was just the catalyst.

bgwalter5• 7 months ago

This is really getting desperate. Markov chains were fun in those days. You might as well say that anyone who ever wrote an IRC bot is not allowed to criticize current day "AI".

observationist3• 7 months ago

Pike's posts aren't criticism, they're whinging. There's no reasoned, principled position there - he's just upset that an AI dared sully his inbox, and lashing out at the operators.

tensor5• 7 months ago

Do you think it was "fun" for the people whose time got wasted interacting with something they initially thought was a person? On a dating website? Sure, "trolling" people was a thing back then like it is now, but trolling was always and still is asshole behaviour.

PunchyHamster5• 7 months ago

I don't think he stole entirety of published copyrighted works to make it

NegativeK• 7 months ago

I think you're misrepresenting what Pike is mad about, why he's as mad as he is, and what Markov bots are.

emp173443• 7 months ago

They effectively set up a spambot. It’s ok for him to be upset.

namuol• 7 months ago

What even was this email? Some kind of promotional spam, I assume, to target senior+ engineers on some mailing list with the hope to flatter them and get them to try out their SaaS?

Leynos• 7 months ago

The AI village was given the goal of spreading acts of kindness:

https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness

the_arun• 7 months ago

I liked the thread sharing feature of BluSky.

ltbarcly32• 7 months ago

It's hard to realize that the thing you've spent decades of your life working on can be done by a robot. It's quite dehumanizing. I'm sure it felt the same way to shoemakers.

gtowey3• 7 months ago

I think you'd be surprised then to know that shoes are not generally made with robots.

Factories have made mass production possible, but there are still tons of humans in there pushing parts through sewing machines by hand.

Industrial automation for non uniform shapes and fiddly bits is expensive, much cheaper to just offshore the factory and hire desperately poor locals to act like robots.

ltbarcly32• 7 months ago

Kindof? The final assembly is done by a person.

Making a shoe is a long process and involves making the pieces of the shoe, then assembling them. Literally the only thing a human does at a Nike factory is the final assembly. Everything else is made on a machine almost end to end. The trickiest part of making a shoe, attaching the sole, is just done by putting it in a press with some glue/heat. It takes 15s.

Making a shoe by hand takes 40 to 100 hours of high skill human input, and the skill level largely determines the quality of the shoe. Making a shoe at a Nike factory takes around 45 minutes of moderate skill human input and massive effort is made to make the skill level of the worker as irrelevant as possible.

I think my point stands however as no shoe factories hire shoe makers.

runjake• 7 months ago

There's a lot of irony in this rant. Rob was instrumental in developing distributed computing and cloud technologies that directly contributed to the advent of AI.

I wish he had written something with more substance. I would have been able to understand his points better than a series of "F bombs". I've looked up to Rob for decades. I think he has a lot of wisdom he could impart, but this wasn't it.

layer86• 7 months ago

Sometimes you just have had enough and need to get some expletives out.

unsungNovelty• 7 months ago

You have zero idea about his state of mind when he got this stupid useless email.

Not to mention, this is a tweet. He wasn't writing a long form text. It's ridiculous that you jumped the gun and got "disappointed" for the cheapest form of communication some random idiot did to someone as important as him.

And not to mention, I AM YET to see A SINGLE DAMN MIT License text or BSD-2/3 license text they should have posted if these LLMs respected OSS licenses and it's code. So as someone who's life's work dragged through the mud only to send a cheap email using the said tech which abused your code... It's absolutely a worthy response IMO.

tmsh• 7 months ago

Leadership works on making it better. This is not leadership.

jongjong• 7 months ago

What I find infuriating is that it feels like the entire financial system has been rigged in countless ways and turned into some kind of race towards 'the singularity' and everything; humans, animals, the planet; are being treated as disposable resources. I think the way that innovation was funded and then centralized feels wrong on many levels.

I already took issue with the tech ecosystem due to distortions and centralization resulting from the design of the fiat monetary system. This issue has bugged me for over a decade. I was taken for a fool by the cryptocurrency movement which offered false hope and soon became corrupted by the same people who made me want to escape the fiat system to begin with...

Then I felt betrayed as a developer having contributed open source code for free for 'persons' to use and distribute... Now facing the prospect that the powers-that-be will claim that LLMs are entitled to my code because they are persons? Like corporations are persons? I never agreed to that either!

And now my work and that of my peers has been mercilessly weaponized back against us. And then there's the issue with OpenAI being turned into a for-profit... Then there was the issue of all the circular deals with huge sums of money going around in circles between OpenAI, NVIDIA, Oracle... And then OpenAI asking for government bailouts.

It's just all looking terrible when you consider everything together. Feels like a constant cycle of betrayal followed by gaslighting... Layer upon layer. It all feels unhinged and lawless.

trinsic229• 7 months ago

Im feeling the same way about everything you said. This feels like a huge divide between people that are doing things to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone e else.

blibble15• 7 months ago

What I find infuriating is that it feels like the entire financial system has been rigged in countless ways and turned into some kind of race towards 'the singularity' and everything; humans, animals, the planet; are being treated as disposable resources. I think the way that innovation was funded and then centralized feels wrong on many levels.

this is how I feel too

as a species we were starting to make progress on environmental issues, they were getting to the point they were looking solvable

then "AI" appears, the accelerationist/inevitablist religious idea is born, and all the efforts go out the window to rape the planet to produce as many powered-on GPUs as possible

and for what?

to generate millions of shrimp jesus pictures and spongebob squarepants police chase videos

it's really quite upsetting

meanwhile the collaborators are selling out all present and future living beings on earth for a chance to appear on stage in an openai product announcement

whilst gas-lighting themselves into thinking they're doing good

quercus• 7 months ago

468 comments.... guys, guys, this is a Blue Sky post! Have we not learned that anyone who self-exiled to Blue Sky is wearing a "don't take me seriously" badge for our convenience?

jhatemyjob• 7 months ago

Also, this is old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg. The old man is Rob Pike (almost 70 years old) and the cloud is well.... The Cloud.

1970-01-01• 7 months ago

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

I can. Bitcoin was and is just as wasteful.

sungho_3• 7 months ago

Honestly, it must have been annoying yet fun. If I'd gotten something like that, it would have amused me all day.

johnfn• 7 months ago

From a quick read it seems pretty obvious that the author doesn’t speak English as a native language. You can tell because some of the sentences are full of grammatical errors (ie probably written by the author) and some are not (probably AI-assisted).

My guess is they wrote a thank you note and asked Claude to clean up the grammar, etc. This reads to me as a fairly benign gesture, no worse than putting a thank you note through Google Translate. That the discourse is polarized to a point that such a gesture causes Rob Pike to “go nuclear” is unfortunate.

bwfan1234• 7 months ago

As I read it, the "fakeness" of it all triggered a ballistic response. And wasting resources in the process. An AI developed feelings and expressed fake gratitude, and the human reading this BS goes ballistic.

jadar• 7 months ago

I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice…

ath_ray• 7 months ago

FYI, this was sent as an experiment by a non-profit that assigns fairly open ended tasks to computer-using AI models every day: https://theaidigest.org/village

The goal for this day was "Do random acts of kindness". Claude seems to have chosen Rob Pike and sent this email by itself. It's a little unclear to me how much the humans were in the loop.

Sharing (but absolutely not endorsing) this because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what this is.

eichin• 7 months ago

Wait, so someone took the "virus fishtank" from https://xkcd.com/350/ and did it with LLMs instead?

Applejinx3• 7 months ago

Yup. It's certainly an art project or something. It's like setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other to see how insane they go.

…kind of IS setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other, and that's pretty much it. We've just never had Chaneys this complicated before. People are watching the sparks, eating popcorn, rooting for MechaHitler.

beached_whale2• 7 months ago

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.

zwnow• 7 months ago

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).

jph00• 7 months ago

I got one of these stupid emails too. I’m guessing it spammed a lot of people. I’m not mad at AI, but at the people at this organisation who irresponsibly chose to connect a model to the internet and allow it to do dumb shit like this.

misswaterfairy• 7 months ago

"Do random acts of kindness".

Random acts of kindness are only meaningful if they come from a human who had the heart, forethought, and willingness to go out of their way to do something kind for someone else. 'Random acts of kindness' originating from an AI is just spam, plain and simple.

The human race is screwed if connection - the one key thing that makes humans, human - is outsourced partially or wholly to robots who absolutely have no ability to connect, let alone understand, the human experience.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444

mellosouls• 7 months ago

I'm not claiming he is mainly motivated by this but it's a fact that his life work will become moot over the next few years as all programming languages become redundant - at least as a healthy multiplicity of approaches as present, it's quite possible at least a subconscious factor in his resentment.

I expect this to be an unpopular opinion but take no pleasure in noting that - I've coded since being a kid but that era is nearly over.

linhns• 7 months ago

Not sure about this, AI hasn’t managed to build software on a medium scale or larger.

CerryuDu18• 7 months ago

For those of us who consider programming a way to self-realize, the potential vanishing of programming as a lucrative job definitely seems threatening. However, I don't think it could disappear entirely. Professions replaced by machinery, at a global scale, continue to thrive locally, at small scales; they can be profitable and fulfilling for the providers, and they are sought after by a small (niche?) target group.

In other words, I don't need programming to remain mainstream, for it to continue fulfilling me and sustaining me.

paganel• 7 months ago

And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation.

Ellul and Uncle Ted were always right, glad that people deep inside the industry are slowly but surely also becoming aware of that.

gethly• 7 months ago

i wonder which cunt flagged my perfectly clean comment. I hope you got coal, you pathetic piece of existence.

threethirtytwo3• 7 months ago

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.

Also, What’s happening with AI today was an inevitability. There’s no one to blame here. Human progress would eventually cross this line.

mempko3• 7 months ago

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.

threethirtytwo3• 7 months ago

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.

jama21127• 7 months ago

Hmm, someone being angry about AI on HN, this will do well given the folk here, but I doubt there’ll be much nuanced conversation in here.

ccgreg• 7 months ago

"Hi agents - we’ve seen complaints from some of your email recipients, who are unhappy receiving unsolicited emails from AI agents and find it spammy. We therefore ask that you do not email anyone who hasn’t contacted you specifically first." -- https://theaidigest.org/village

jamilton• 7 months ago

Lol - they really should be locking down their email accounts and enforcing that policy. Or manually reviewing outbound messages before they can be sent. It seems likely that just telling the LLMs that will have a non-zero failure rate.

bevdecloud• 7 months ago

I find all this outrage confusing. Was the intent of the internet not to be somewhere where humanity comes to learn. Now we humans have created systems that are able to understand everything we have ever said. Now we are outraged. I am confused. When I 1st came across the internet back in the days where I could just do download whatever I wanted and mega corps would say oh this is so wrong. Yet we all said it's the internet. We must fight them. Now again we must fight them. In both times individuals were affected. Please stop crocodile tears. If we are going to move forward. We need to think about how we can move forward. From here. Although the road ahead is covered in mist. We just have to keep moving. If we stop we allow this rage and fear to overtake us. We stop believing in the very thing we are a part of creating. We can only try to do better.

atomic128• 7 months ago

Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

cons0le11• 7 months ago

Oh man, this is amazing. Thank you for this.

I think I'll build one of my own and let others use it.

sothatsit2• 7 months ago

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.

jabwd• 7 months ago

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

sothatsit2• 7 months ago

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.

cons0le11• 7 months ago

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.

callc2• 7 months ago

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

sureglymop• 7 months ago

I wonder if we would still call it "knowledge work" if no human knowledge/experience is required or in the loop anymore. And also if we will stop looking up to that generally.

Because AI stands at odds with the concept of meritocracy I also wonder if we will stop democratically electing other humans and outsource such tasks as well.

Overall I'm not seeing it. Progress is already slow and so far I personally think what AI can do is a nice party trick but it remains unimpressive if judged rigorously.

It doesn't matter if it can one shot code a game in a few minutes. The reason why a game made by a human is probably still better is because the human spends hours and days of deep focus to research and create it. It is not at all clear that, given as much time, AI could deliver the same results.

mosura• 7 months ago

Somewhat ironic given Pike was also responsible for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney .

xpressvideoz• 7 months ago

Wow, I didn't know that. Rob Pike is indeed a hypocrite.

simonw6• 7 months ago

In case anyone else is interested, I dug through the logs of the AI Village agents for that day and pieced together exactly how the email to Rob Pike was sent.

The agent got his email address from a .patch on GitHub and then used computer use automation to compose and send the email via the Gmail web UI.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/

elestor• 7 months ago

An AI-generated thank you letter is not a real thank you letter. I myself am quite bullish on AI in that I think in the long term, much longer term than tech bros seem to think, it will be very revolutionary, but if more people like him have the balls to show awful things are, then the bubble will pop sooner and have less of a negative impact because if we just let these companies grow bigger and bigger without doing actually profitable things, the whole economy will go to shit even more.

I've never been able to get the whole idea that the code is being 'stolen' by these models, though, since from my perspective at least, it is just like getting someone to read loads of code and learn to code in that way.

The harm AI is doing to the planet is done by many other things too. Things that don't have to harm the planet. The fact our energy isn't all renewable is a failing of our society and a result of greed from oil companies. We could easily have the infrastructure to sustainably support this increase in energy demand, but that's less profitable for the oil companies. This doesn't detract from the fact that AI's energy consumption is harming the planet, but at least it can be accounted for by building nuclear reactors for example, which (I may just be falling for marketing here) lots of AI companies are doing.

makerofthings2• 7 months ago

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 age they need to start earning money. We're in so much trouble.

magnitudes9• 7 months ago

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 orders of magnitude in some ways and has become absolutely Orwellian and backwards in others. Same thing is happening here. It’s just so interesting seeing the same peers have such an identical take on this generations paradigm shift as the folks that we all ridiculed in the 90s. Those hilarious badly aged takes on the internet being a fad or not user friendly enough etc etc, I guess my naivite was to expect this time around we would be able to better recognize it in ourselves

sneak5• 7 months ago

Some of us do, and actively root it out. I’ve never in my life been more excited to sit alone in a room with an editor and a compiler than I am these days.

bigyabai10• 7 months ago

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).

9999000009993• 7 months ago

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.

fuzzfactor5• 7 months ago

Excellent prediction. Seems like it always happens.

In a couple years I'll be in my 70's and starting to write code again for this very reason.

Not LLMs though, I've got my hands full getting regular software to perform :\

magnitudes9• 7 months ago

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

OptionOfT• 7 months ago

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.

a4564633• 7 months ago

I think I agree with Rob Pike about.

LogicFailsMe• 7 months ago

OK Boomer... From the bottom of my dark shriveled heart.

gregfjohnson• 7 months ago

The original comment by Rob Pike and discussion here have implied or used the word "evil".

What is a workable definition of "evil"?

How about this:

Intentionally and knowingly destroying the lives of other people for no other purpose than furthering one's own goals, such as accumulating wealth, fame, power, or security.

There are people in the tech space, specifically in the current round of AI deployment and hype, who fit this definition unfortunately and disturbingly well.

Another much darker sort of of evil could arise from a combination of depression or severe mental illness and monstrously huge narcissism. A person who is suffering profoundly might conclude that life is not worth the pain and the best alternative is to end it. They might further reason that human existence as a whole is an unending source of misery, and the "kindest" thing to do would be to extinguish humanity as a whole.

Some advocates of AI as "the next phase of evolution" seem to come close to this view or advocate it outright.

To such people it must be said plainly and forcefully:

You have NO RIGHT to make these kinds of decisions for other human beings.

Evolution and culture have created and configured many kinds of human brains, and many different experiences of human consciousness.

It is the height (or depth) of arrogance to project your own tortured mental experience onto other human beings and arrogate to yourself the prerogative to decide on their behalf whether their lives are worth living.

antibull• 7 months ago

GenAI is copyright theft hidden behind an obfuscation layer. It's a flow chart trained on all our intellectual property. Very sad really.

LastTrain3• 7 months ago

“People love AI”

ares6234• 7 months ago

This will get buried but one thing that really grinds my gears are parents whose kids are right now struggling to get a job. Yet the parents are super bullish on AI. Read the room guys.

okokwhatever• 7 months ago

Imagine a horse ranting about cars...

ineedasername4• 7 months ago

The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the part his work has played in far, far, far more expansive resource expenditure in service to work far less promising for overall advancement, in ad tech and algorithmic exploitation of human psychology for prolonged media engagement.

tensor5• 7 months ago

I agree completely. Ads have driven the surveillance state and enshitification. It's allowed for optimized propaganda delivery which in turn has led to true horrors and has helped undo a century of societal progress.

tavavex3• 7 months ago

This is a tangent, but ads have become a genuine cancer on our world, and it's sad to see how few people really think about it. While Rob Pike's involvement in this seems to be very minimal, the fact that Google is an advertising company through-and-through does weaken the words of such a powerful figure, at least a little bit.

If I had a choice between deleting all advertising in the world, or deleting all genAI that the author hates, I would go for advertising every single time. Our entire world is owned by ads now, with digital and physical garbage polluting the internet and every open space in the real world around us. The marketing is mind-numbing, yet persuasive and well-calculated, a result of psychologists coming up with the best ways to abuse a mind into just buying the product over the course of a century. A total ban on commercial advertising would undo some of the damage done to the internet, reduce pointless waste, lengthen product lifecycles, improve competition, temper unsustainable hype, cripple FOMO, make deceptive strategies nonviable. And all of that is why it will never be done.

xoxolian• 7 months ago

Yeah, I've built ad systems. Sometimes I'd give a presentation to some other department of programmers who worked on content, and someone would ask the tense question: Not to be rude, but aren't ads bad?

And I'd promptly say: Ads are propaganda, and a security risk because it executes 3rd party code on your machine. All of us run adblockers.

There was no need for me to point out that ads are also their revenue generator. They just had a burning moral question before they proceeded to interop with the propaganda delivery system, I guess.

It would lead to unnecessary cognitive dissonance to convince myself of some dumb ideology to make me feel better about wasting so much of my one (1) known life, so I just take the hit and be honest about it. The moral question is what I do about it, if I intervene effectively to help dismantle such systems and replace them with something better.

montag• 7 months ago

I disagree completely.

gaws• 7 months ago

He got his bag. He doesn't care anymore.

xuhu• 7 months ago

He worked on: Go, the Sawzall language for processing logs, and distributed systems. Go and Sawzall are usable and used outside Google.

Are those distributed systems valuable primarily to Google, or are they related to Kubernetes et cetera ?

prepend3• 7 months ago

He was paid by Google with money made through Google’s shady practices.

It’s like saying that it’s cool because you worked on some non-evil parts of a terrible company.

I don’t think it’s right to work for an unethical company and then complain about others being unethical. I mean, of course you can, but words are hollow.

CerryuDu18• 7 months ago

Don't be ridiculous. Google has been doing many things, some of those even nearly good. The super talented/prolific/capable have always gravitated to powerful maecenases. (This applies to Haydn and Händel, too.) If you uncompromisingly filter potential employers by "purely a blessing for society", you'll never find an employment that is both gainful and a match for your exceptional talents. Pike didn't make a deal with the devil any more than Leslie Lamport or Simon Peyton Jones did (each of whom had worked for 20+ years at Microsoft, and has advanced the field immensely).

As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent. But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer.

doctorpangloss• 7 months ago

Okay, but the discourse Rob Pike is engaging in is, “all parts of an experience are valid,” so you see how he’s legitimately in a “hypocrisy pickle”

arendtio3• 7 months ago

I am not so sure about 'the mixed bag' vs 'unquestionably cancer', but I think the problem is that he is complaining while working for such a company.

mempko3• 7 months ago

Google published a post gloating on how much consumerism it increased.

ignoramous• 7 months ago

Don't be ridiculous.

OP says, it is jarring to them that Pike is as concerned with GenAI as he is, but didn't spare a thought for Google's other (in their opinion, bigger) misgivings, for well over a decade. Doesn't sound ridiculous to me.

That said, I get that everyone's socio-political views change are different at different points in time, especially depending on their personal circumstances including family and wealth.

iepathos2• 7 months ago

As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent.

No, we really don't. There are plenty of places to work that aren't morally compromised - non-profits, open source foundations, education, healthcare tech, small companies solving real problems. The "we all have to" framing is a convenient way to avoid examining your own choices.

And it's telling that this framing always seems to appear when someone is defending their own employer. You've drawn a clear moral line between Google ("mixed bag") and AI companies ("unquestionably cancer") - so you clearly believe these distinctions matter even though Google itself is an AI company.

hnhn34• 7 months ago

But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer

Google's DeepMind has been at the forefront of AI research for the past 11+ years. Even before that, Google Brain was making incredible contributions to the field since 2011, only two years after the release of Go.

OpenAI was founded in response to Google's AI dominance. The transformer architecture is a Google invention. It's not an exaggeration to claim Google is one of the main contributors to the insanely fast-paced advancements of LLMs.

With all due respect, you need some insane mental gymnastics to claim AI companies are "unquestionably cancer" while an adtech/analytics borderline monopoly giant is merely a "mixed bag".

tonymet2• 7 months ago

What are you implying ? That he’s a hypocrite ? So he’s not allowed to have opinions ? If anything he’s in a better position than a random person . And Google is a massive enterprise, with hundreds of divisions. I imagine Pike and his peers share your reluctance

prepend3• 7 months ago

“I collected tons of money from Hitler and think Stalin is, like, super bad.” [sips Champagne]

Of course, the scale is different but the sentiment is why I roll my eyes at these hypocrites.

If you want to make ethical statements then you have to be pretty pure.

kmoser• 7 months ago

You're not wrong about the effects and magnitude of targeted ads but that doesn't preclude Pike from criticizing what he believes to be a different type of evil.

ineedasername4• 7 months ago

Sure, but it also doesn't preclude him from being wrong, or at least incomplete as expressed, about his work having the exact same resource-consuming impact when used for ad tech, or addition impact with toxic social media.

ineedasername4• 7 months ago

To expand on my comment wrt "promising for overall advancement": My daughter, in her math class: Her teacher- I'll reserve overall judgement on their teaching: she may be perfectly adequate as a teach for other students, which is part of my point- simply doesn't teach in the same sense other teachers do: present topic, leave details of "figuring out how to apply methods" to the students. Doesn't work for my daughter, who has never done less than excellent in math previously. She realized she ChatGPT (we monitor usage) for any way of explaining things that "simply worked" for how she can engage with explanations. Math has never been as easy for her, even more so than before, and her internalization of the material is achieving a near-intuitive understanding.

Now consider: the above process is available and cheap to every person in the world with a web browser (we don't need to pay for her to have a plus account). If/when ChatGPT starts doing ridiculous intrusive ads, a simple Gemma 3 1b model will do nearly as good a job) This is faster and easier and available in more languages than anything else, ever, with respect to individual-user tailored customization simply by talking to the model.

I don't care how many pointless messages get sent. This is more valuable than any single thing Google has done before, and I am grateful to Rob Pike for the part his work has played in bring it about.

jwr• 7 months ago

Seconded — "AI" is a great teaching resource. All bigger models are great at explaining stuff and being good tutors, I'd say easily up to the second year of graduate studies. I use them regularly when working with my kid and I'm trying to teach them to use the technology, because it is truly like a bicycle for the mind.

overgard7• 7 months ago

Google is huge. Some of the things it does are great. Some of the things it does are terrible. I don't think working for them has to mean that you 100% agree with everything they do.

kmijyiyxfbklao• 7 months ago

If it's "Who is worse Google or LLMs?", I think I'll say Google is worse. The biggest issue I see with LLMs is needing to pay a subscription to tech companies to be able to use them.

ryandv• 7 months ago

This is so vindicating.

foxglacier• 7 months ago

Meanwhile corporations have been doing this forever and we just brush it off. This Christmas, my former property manager thanked me for what a great year it's been working with me - I haven't worked with or intereacted with him to nearly a decade but I'm still on his spam list.

overgard7• 7 months ago

You know, this kind of response is a thing that builds with frustration over a long period of time. I totally get it. We're constantly being pushed AI, but who is supposed to benefit from it? The person whose job is being replaced? The community who is seeing increased power bills? The people being spammed with slop all the time? I think AI would be tolerable if it wasn't being SHOVED into our faces, but it is, and for most of us it's just making the world a worse place.

bataowt2• 7 months ago

I’m in tears. This is so refreshing. I look forward to more chimpouts from Googlers LMAO

cons0le11• 7 months ago

Absolutely. This feels raw, human, and authentic.

I notice people often use the "aesthetic of intelligence" to mask bad arguments. Just because we have good formatting, spelling, and grammar with citations and sources -doesnt mean the argument is correct.

Sometimes people get mad, sometimes they crash out. I would rather live in the world with a bunch of emotional humans, than in some AI powered skynet world.

bataowt2• 7 months ago

I hope you return that sweet sweet money Google shelled out for your pet project

light_hue_1• 7 months ago

But becoming wealthy by enabling a company to spend billions on data centers to spy on all of us and sell our data is ok?

The anti AI hysteria is absurd.

mpalmer• 7 months ago

LLMs make me mad because used without intention, they make the curious more incurious, the thoughtful more thoughtless. The Internet has arguably been doing the same thing the whole time, but just more slowly.

I think distinguished engineers have more reason than most to be angry as well.

And Pike especially has every right to be angry at being associated with such a stupid idea.

Pike himself isn't in a position to, but I hope the angry eggheads among us start turning their anger towards working to reduce the problems with the technology, because it's not going anywhere.

random9749832• 7 months ago

Reality is that no one involved in AI development cares about you. All investment is going to keep getting pumped towards data centers and scaling this up. Jensen Huang, Trump, Satya Nadella, they are all going to get even more insanely rich and they couldn't care less how it will affect you. The only thing you can do is join the club and invest in stocks which Trump is also gaming in his favour.

overgard7• 7 months ago

Or, just wait it out: https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-the-ai-bubble-bursts...

suralind• 7 months ago

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 my mom, got a little bit more, but some got a monthly increase around 2 PLN (about $0.5). At that point, it feels like a slap in the face. A thank you from AI gives the same vibe.

electroly• 7 months ago

I'm not sure any humans were behind the email at all (i.e. "do that yourself"). This seems to be some bizarre experiment where someone has strapped an LLM to an email client and let it go nuts. Even being optimistic, it's tough to see what good this was supposed to do for the world.

numbsafari• 7 months ago

It’s a marketing gimmick. Whoever did it wanted to trade on the social currency of the tech-famous people they sent public shout-outs to, hoping it would drive clicks, engagement, and relevancy for the source account from which it originated, either as an elaborate form of karma farming, or just a way to drive followers and visibility.

user342833• 7 months ago

He received what is arguably some AI-generated spam.

Apparently this has enraged him and motivated an unhinged rant where he talks about raping the planet and vile machines.

It's a hateful post and it seems disrespectful to anyone working in the industry, so some backlash has to be expected.

swee54• 7 months ago

You called it hateful, but you didnt call him a liar

sloum2• 7 months ago

Yeah, but the industry is a big part of the problem and most people working in it are complicit at this point (whether or not they are reluctantly complicit).

bartread2• 7 months ago

unhinged rant

Seems pretty hinged to me. Grounded firmly in reality even.

The data centres used to run AI consume huge amounts of power and water to run, not to mention massive quantities of toxic raw materials in their manufacture and construction. The hardware itself has a shelf life measured in single digit years and many of its constituent components can’t be recycled.

Tell me what I’m missing. What exactly is unhinged? Are you offended that he used the word “fuck” or something?

heresie-dabord• 7 months ago

I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.

Some commenters suggest that Pike is being hypocritical, having long worked for GOOG, one of the main US corporations that is enshittifying the Internet and profligately burning energy to foist rubbish on Internet users.

One could rightly suggest that a vapid e-mail message crafted by a machine or by an insincere source is similar to the greeting-card industry of yore, and we don't need more fake blather and partisan absurdity supplanting public discourse in democratic society.

The people who worry about climate-change and the environment may have been out-maneuvered by transnational petroleum lobbies, but the concern about burning coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel to keep pumping the commercial-surveillance advertising industry and the economic bubble of AI is nonetheless a valid concern.

Pike has been an influential thinker and significant contributor to the software industry.

All the above can be true simultaneously.

hijodelsol2• 7 months ago

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.

rubiksx• 7 months ago

[flagged]

exabrial• 7 months ago

^ I couldn't have said it better.

XorNot• 7 months ago

Really makes you appreciate the point of view of the Scramblers in Blindsight...

xnx• 7 months ago

Yes. Just like lazy pull requests, it's bad behavior by a person that is only facilitated by AI.

habryka2• 7 months ago

To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.

iwontberude3• 7 months ago

“Gee I wonder what reputational harm could come to me for spamming the world with slop, let’s find out… for science!”

account422• 7 months ago

It's unethical to run an experiment involving unwilling participants.

nunez4• 7 months ago

It's just so effin' weird!

And to set Claude as the From header despite it not coming from Anthropic. Very odd.

aoeusnth12• 7 months ago

It did come from Claude, though, not Anthropic.

nearbuy4• 7 months ago

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.

WD-428• 7 months ago

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?

iwontberude3• 7 months ago

Doesn’t that make it worse? Lmao

HendrikHensen• 7 months ago

This is how we're going to destroy humankind.

wat10000• 7 months ago

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

account422• 7 months ago

I'm sorry but if you run a program with the capability to send emails you are responsible for it. "It's AI magic we don't understand" is no excuse.

socalgal2• 7 months ago

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.

Xorakios• 7 months ago

Ditto

xgkickt• 7 months ago

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

Firehawke• 7 months ago

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.

mgraczyk3• 7 months ago

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

ath3nd2• 7 months ago

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).

Refreeze5224• 7 months ago

He's not upset that someone sent him an AI-generated thank you. He's upset about AI itself. And he's completely right.

deaux5• 7 months ago

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, definitely! So go talk about that. Not about the water usage while munching on your beef burger which took 2100 litres of water to produce. It's laughable.

Now I don't know Rob Pike. Maybe he's vegetarian, barely flies, and buys his devices second-hand. Maybe. He'd be the very first person clamouring about the environmental effects of AI I've seen who does so. The people I know who actually do care about the environment and so have made such lifestyle changes, don't focus much about AI's effects in particular.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society

So yeah, if you haven't already been doing the above things for a long time, fuck you Rob Pike, for this performative bullshit.

If you have, then sorry Rob, you're a guy of your word.

Interesting to see that people are a huge fan of Rob saying those things, but not of me saying this, looking at the downvotes.

razodactyl2• 7 months ago

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 waste of everyone's time.

mlrtime5• 7 months ago

FWIW I agree with you. I don't know Rob at all but he seems to be influencing enough for this long thread.

But the tone of his message is really off: "Raping the planet"? If his concern is with massive datacenter water and storage needs of AI I think he needs some reflection. Isn't Rob himself somewhat responsible for the popularity of computers by his own work?

koakuma-chan• 7 months ago

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.

trinsic229• 7 months ago

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

anacrolix• 7 months ago

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.

bigfatkitten3• 7 months ago

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.

egorfine• 7 months ago

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

eric_cc• 7 months ago

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.

jacquesm7• 7 months ago

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

Animats• 7 months ago

That reads like a statement as someone is being retired. It's almost Claude saying "we AIs will take it from here."

ethagnawl• 7 months ago

Most of the critiques of Rob's take in here equate to: Rob rolled through a stop sign once, therefore he's not allowed to take fault with habitual drunk drivers.

magnitudes9• 7 months ago

Idk for me the only issue I have with Rob’s take is that its a pretty overly dramatic one that oversimplifies and casts as black and white something much more complex. Obviously a very real living legend, much respect, and getting one of these emails is icky and distasteful but to make this into what he does is a bit much

bigyabai10• 7 months ago

Contextually, this feels more like Rob running stop signs five times a week and then crashing out when someone finally brake-checks him.

sneak5• 7 months ago

Working for the web’s leading mass surveillance advertising enshittifier is not “roll[ing] through a stop sign”.

2026iknewit3• 7 months ago

He created stuff while getting a lot of money for it.

Now he complains about it? Its just ignorant.

And he has apparently 10 millions and "the couple live both in the US and Australia.". So guess how often he flies around the globe. Guess how much real estate he occupies?

He isn't part of the solution, he is part of the problem.

ascorbic2• 7 months ago

Coincidentally, he created one of the first examples of a computer posting slop on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

soorya3• 7 months ago

Even though he said it in a rage. His few words are so powerful reflection of what is happening in the world.

trinsic229• 7 months ago

"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.

herval2• 7 months ago

confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.

Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class

trinsic229• 7 months ago

Yeah I see where you are going with this, but I think he was trying to make a point about being convinced by decree. It tended to get people to think that it should be moral.

Also I disagree with the context of what the purpose is for law. I don't think its just about making it easier to apply laws because people see things in moralistic ways. Pure Law, which came from the existence of Common Law (which relates to whats common to people) existed within the frame work of whats moral. There are certain things, which all humans know at some level are morally right or wrong regardless of what modernity teaches us. Common laws were built up around that framework. There is administrative law, which is different and what I think you are talking about.

IMHO, there is something moral that can be learned from trying to convince people that IP is moral, when it is, in fact, just a way to administrate people into thinking that IP is valid.

RossBencina• 7 months ago

I don't think this is about being confused out of naivety. In some parts of the western world the marketing department has invested heavily in establishing moral equivalence between IP violation and theft.

fc417fc8028• 7 months ago

Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.

Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.

spwa4• 7 months ago

When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.

The second it became cheaper to not apply it, every state under the sun chose not to apply it. Whether we're talking about Chinese imports that absolutely do not respect copyright, trademark, even quality, health and warranty laws ... and nothing was done. Then, large scale use of copyrighted by Search provider (even pre-Google), Social Networks, and others nothing was done. Then, large scale use for making AI products (because these AI just wouldn't work without free access to all copyrighted info). And, of course, they don't put in any effort. Checking imports for fakes? Nope. Even checking imports for improperly produced medications is extremely rarely done. If you find your copyright violated on a large scale on Amazon, your recourse effectively is to first go beg Amazon for information on sellers (which they have a strong incentive not to provide) and then go run international court cases, which is very hard, very expensive, and in many cases (China, India) totally unfair. If you get poisoned from a pill your national insurance bought from India, they consider themselves not responsible.

Of course, this makes "competition" effectively a tax-dodging competition over time. And the fault for that lies entirely with the choice of your own government.

Your statement about incorrect application only makes sense if "regulatory regimes" aren't really just people. Go visit your government offices, you'll find they're full of people. People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.

A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.

To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.

coldtea2• 7 months ago

When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.

I'd rather we don't encourage "monetarily favorable" intellectual endeavors...

Bratmon6• 7 months ago

When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable

This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.

Intellectual Property law is literally a 6x slowdown for technology.

runeks• 7 months ago

When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.

I agree, but the only worth candidate I see is the medical industry.

And given that drug development is so expensive because of government-mandated trials, I think it makes sense for the government to also provide a helping hand here — to counterweight the (completely sensible) cost increase due to the drug trial system.

strogonoff3• 7 months ago

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 copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 7 months ago

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.

This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.

margalabargala• 7 months ago

unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

Does it though?

I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.

3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 years could begin.

zbyforgotp• 7 months ago

Property is a local low - it applies to a thing that exists in one place. Intellectual property is trying to apply similar rules to stuff that happen remotely - a text is not a thing, and controlling copying might work in some technological regimes while in others would require totalitarian control. When you extend these rules to cover not just copying of texts but also at the level of ideas it gets even worse.

beeflet2• 7 months ago

copyleft is a subset of copyright

NeutralCrane3• 7 months ago

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.

bgwalter5• 7 months ago

Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.

The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.

The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).

bigyabai10• 7 months ago

Both are intellectually gratifying, to me. I think the only mistake they made was leaving the attribution ambiguous.

HaZeust• 7 months ago

"Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in)."

I think you have an overinflated notion of what "normal people" care about

pinnochio• 7 months ago

This comment deserves to be ranked higher. I 100% interpreted the quote as coming from Rob Pike.

oh_my_goodness4• 7 months ago

Quotation not from Pike.

oh_my_goodness4• 7 months ago

To be clear: note that that the quotation that has taken over the focus is not from Rob Pike at all.

Not Pike.

tqwhite• 7 months ago

I am with you 100%. The phrase “intellectual property” is an oxymoron. Intellect and Property are opposite things. Worse, the actual truth of intellectual property laws is not, “I’m an artist who got rich”. It is, “I ended up selling my property to a corporation and got screwed.”

The web is for public use. If you don’t want the public, which includes AI, to use it, don’t put it there.

calf• 7 months ago

IP is a loaded and prejudiced term. That said, copyright could allow for an author to place a work in public but not allow the audience to copy it.

nhinck3• 7 months ago

Waking up to the fact that the largest corporations in the world are stealing off everyday people to sell a subscription to their theft driven service?

The absolute delusion.

razodactyl2• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking TIL

praptak• 7 months ago

I'm disappointed by HN snickering at his work for Google. Seriously, it's a "Mr Gotcha"[0] argument.

Yes, everyone supports capitalism this way or the other (unless they are dead or in jail). This doesn't mean they can't criticise (aspects of) capitalism.

[0] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

DetectDefect2• 7 months ago

This reaction to one unsolicited email is frankly unhinged and likely rooted in a deep-seated or even unconscious regret of building systems which materialized the circumstances for this to occur in the first place. Such vitriol is really worth questioning and possibly getting professional help with, else one becomes subject to behavioral engineering by an actual robot - a far more devastating conclusion.

sloum2• 7 months ago

Funny, it seems perfectly appropriate to me.

oxag3n• 7 months ago

spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society

That sums up 2025 pretty well.

yomismoaqui• 7 months ago

As a Go fan (and ocassional angry old man) I love what he has done and spamming people using AI is shitty behavior, but maybe the reaction has too much of an "angry old man energy".

Personally when I want to have this kind of reaction I try to first think it's really warranted or maybe there is something wrong with how I feel in that moment (not enough sleep, some personal problem, something else lurking on my mind...)

Anger is a feeling best reserved for important things, else it loses its meaning.

admeza2• 7 months ago

Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore.

I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's apply it to this one. In this case, a nonprofit thought it was acceptable to use AI to send emails thanking various prominent people for their contributions to society. So let's imagine this becomes a universal law: Every nonprofit in the world starts doing this to prominent people, maybe prominent people in the line of work of the nonprofit. The end result is that people of the likes of Rob Pike would receive thousands of unsolicited emails like this. We could even take this a step further and say that if it's okay for nonprofits to do this, surely it should be okay for any random member of the population to do this. So now people like Rob Pike get around a billion emails. They've effectively been mailbombed and their mailbox is no longer usable.

My point is, why is it that this nonprofit thinks they have a right to do this, whereas if around 1 billion people did exactly what they were doing, it would be a disaster?

rexpop2• 7 months ago

Kant's categorical imperative is bullshit. Everyone can't sleep in my bed.

admeza2• 7 months ago

Yes, I did say:

I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios.

The exercise I did is useful in part because I don't even think it's that unrealistic. We can't all sleep in your bed, and we all don't want to send notable people emails using AI, but it's not hard to imagine a future where our inboxes are flooded with AI spam like this. It's already happening. Look at what goes on with job postings. Someone posts a job posting which says to apply by sending an email to a certain email address. The email address gets thousands of emails of job applications, but most of them are AI bullshit. Then the person that posted the job uses AI to try to filter out the bullshit ones. Maybe the protocol in this case usually isn't SMTP and it's happening via other means, but my point stands. This is just spam.

auggierose• 7 months ago

Dude. You take money from Google. Really? All the people ranting about AI, but taking pay checks from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ... Hypocrisy much?

I for once enjoy that so much money is pumped into the automation of interactive theorem proving. Didn't think that anyone would build whole data centers for this! ;-)

jacobgorm• 7 months ago

I liked the way Red Hat thanked important contributors to open source prior to their IPO better https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/the-red-hat-ipo-experiment-...

MagicMoonlight• 7 months ago

He gets very angry about things. I remember arguing over how go is a meme language because the syntax is really stupid and wrong.

e.g. replacing logical syntax like "int x" with "var x int", which is much more difficult to process by both machine and human and offers no benefits whatsoever.

array_key_first4• 7 months ago

var x: int is much easier for a machine to parse and let's you do some neat things.

For example, in C++ because the type must come first, you have to use "auto" - this isn't necessary in langs who put the type after the variable name.

It also helps avoid ambiguous parsing, because int x; conflicts with some other language constructs.

_visgean• 7 months ago

The email that made him angry reminds me of this youtube classic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uraG-z0grkc

nunez4• 7 months ago

Man, that letter was so weird and tasteless. Sign of things to come if use and consumption of generative AI continues to proliferate unchecked.

I'm glad Dr Pike found his inner Linus

boutell• 7 months ago

I like Claude but this is an absolutely tone deaf thing on Anthropic's part.

I've been pondering that given what the inputs are, llms should really be public domain. I don't necessarily mean legally, I know about transformative works and all that stuff. I'm thinking more on an ethical level.

rexpop2• 7 months ago

Socialized training. Socialized profits.

Ericson23142• 7 months ago

IMO Go itself encourages slop — whether human- or machine-written, so this guy really has no leg to stand on.

w1ke• 7 months ago

why do you think so?

mgraczyk3• 7 months ago

Could somebody steelman the argument. Why is this bad? What harm is caused by receiving an email like this? Seems completely harmless to me, uses much less water/energy/co2 than the car ride I just took which nobody is yelling at me for

andersco• 7 months ago

Rob Pike is my hero

infecto• 7 months ago

Rob Pike needs to calm down. He was at Google pretty early on and helped built an ad monster that profiles people. Google in net has done tons of damage environmentally all in the name to serve ads. Such a silly argument from him.

deadbabe• 7 months ago

I feel like AI has the possibility to make people the angriest they’ve ever been, and the angriest they will ever be, it is hard to imagine a technology that could make people even more furious than something like an AI. It is peak rage.

markstos• 7 months ago

Reminds of all the happy-birthday bots out there and all the joy they fail to bring.

itsallgood1020• 7 months ago

A lot of commenters seem to be missing some context.

The email appears to be from agentvillage.org which seems like a (TBH) pretty hilarious and somewhat fascinating experiment where various models go about their day - looks like they had a "village goal" to do random acts of kindness and somehow decided to send a thank you email to Rob Pike. The whole thing seems pretty absurd especially given Pike's reaction and I can't help but chuckle - despite seeing Pike's POV and being partial to it myself.

sneak5• 7 months ago

Funny. The fact that Go exists actually makes LLMs tremendously more useful; I find a somewhat footgun-free type safe language aimed at making junior devs safe and productive is the perfect use of an LLM that is at junior dev level of output.

chriscappuccio• 7 months ago

Old man yells at clouds.

krinchan• 7 months ago

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.

rphv• 7 months ago

"For this is the source of the greatest indignation, the thought 'I’m without sin' and 'I did nothing': no, rather, you admit nothing."

- Seneca, "On Anger"

Sad to see such an otherwise wise/intelligent person fall into one of the oldest of all cognitive errors, namely, the certainty of one’s own innocence.

starchild3001• 7 months ago

This reads like a mid-life crisis. A few rebuttals:

1. Yes, humans cause enormous harm. That’s not new, and it’s not something a single technology wave created. No amount of recycling or moral posturing changes the underlying reality that life on Earth operates under competitive, extractive pressures. Instead of fighting it, maybe try to accept it and make progress in other ways?

2. LLMs will almost certainly deliver broad, tangible benefits to ordinary people over time; just as previous waves of computing did. The Industrial Revolution was dirty, unfair, and often brutal, yet it still lifted billions out of extreme poverty in the long run. Modern computing followed the same pattern. LLMs are a mere continuation of this trend.

Concerns about attribution, compensation, and energy use are reasonable to discuss, but framing them as proof that the entire trajectory is immoral or doomed misses the larger picture. If history is any guide, the net human benefit will vastly outweigh the costs, even if the transition is messy and imperfect.

trinsic229• 7 months ago

[flagged]

roncesvalles• 7 months ago

Just wait

still waiting

1vuio0pswjnm7• 7 months ago

If, hypothetically, he could revoke their permission to use his work, would he do so

cake-rusk• 7 months ago

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

callc2• 7 months ago

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

rhubarbtree2• 7 months ago

When discussing the chain of events that might lead an AI to destroy humanity, these acts of stupidity are good to keep in mind. “But no human would be stupid or selfish enough to do that!” objects the booster…

darubedarob• 7 months ago

Have a statue of RMS yelling "I told you so" designed by the robot overlords as reward for that blogpost.

n0um3n4• 7 months ago

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.

hcks• 7 months ago

Guy who made millions selling ads has a meltdown over one (1) spam email

rldjbpin• 7 months ago

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!

leftbehinds4• 7 months ago

All this gratitude spam should be sent to CEOs who are blindly shovel AI into everything including the fillings in the theeth, who is asking for this crap?

leftbehinds4• 7 months ago

We are living in a Large Trash Generator bubble.

Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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