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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
Related: Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867
- atomic128 9mo agoPoison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
- cons0le 9mo agoOh man, this is amazing. Thank you for this. I think I'll build one of my own and let others use it.
- rr808 10mo agoWhen the Cyberdyne Terminators come they'll be less grateful.
- bigyabai 10mo 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/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
- johnnyanmac 10mo agoIt 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 10mo ago"I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault"
- bigfatkitten 10mo agoHe 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 10mo agoEncryption 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.)
- bigfatkitten 9mo agoGoogle 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 https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897?hl=en
- baobun 10mo agoNo "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.
- foresto 10mo agoDoes HN allow links to content that's not publicly viewable?
- baobun 10mo ago[flagged]
- foresto 10mo agoBy "not publicly viewable", I mean that bsky.app (like Twitter) seems to demand login before showing the post. I don't see any sign of Pike restricting access to it. So I think your flag is unwarranted.
- baobun 10mo agoBluesky says and looks like it is demanding it because of user account settings. Public user profiles are publicly viewable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389747
- foresto 10mo agoHe set his posts to be viewable by bsky users so long as they are logged in, knowing that anybody can sign up and do so. (I have chosen not to sign up; thus my original question.) The obvious reason one might do this is to allow blocking specific problematic accounts. It doesn't demonstrate an intent to keep this post from reaching the general public. So I still think your rush to flag was unwarranted.
- pabs3 10mo ago
- linguae 10mo agoAssuming 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 10mo agoIt's real, he posted this to his bluesky account.
- f_allwein 10mo agoAnd here it is: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
- nmeagent 10mo ago"You must sign in to view this post." No.
- black_puppydog 10mo agoI failed to ever see the appeal of "like twitter but not (yet) run by a nazi" and this just confirms this for me :|
- sidrag22 10mo agothe potential future of the AT protocol is the main idea i thought made it differentiate itself... also twitter locking users out if they don't have an account, and bluesky not doing so... but i guess thats no longer true? I just don't understand that choice for either platform, is the intent not, biggest reach possible? locking potential viewers out is such a direct contradiction of that. edit: seems its user choice to force login to view a post, which changes my mind significantly on if its a bad platform decision.
- johnnyanmac 10mo agoYeah, 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.
- Gigachad 10mo agoI 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.
- squigz 10mo 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.
- lll-o-lll 10mo agoThe internet is facing an existential threat to its very existence. If it becomes nearly impossible to determine signal in the noise, then there is no internet. Not for normal people, not for anyone. So we need some mechanism to verify the content is from a human. If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
- squigz 10mo ago> If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model. There is no technical solution, privacy preserving or otherwise, that can stave off this purported threat. Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.
- jjcm 10mo agoThe 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.
- shepherdjerred 10mo agoI haven’t found this to be the case… LLMs just gave me a lot of Nil pointers
- _ea1k 10mo agoIt isn't perfect, but it has been better than Python for me so far. Elixir has also been working surprisingly well for me lately.
- krainboltgreene 10mo agoGod I wish it didn't.
- cyberpunk 10mo agoEh it depends. Properly idiomatic elixir or erlang works very well if you can coax it out — but there is a tendency for it to generate very un-functional like large functions with lots of case and control statements and side effects in my experience, where multiple clauses and pattern matching would be the better way. It does much better with erlang, but that’s probably just because erlang is overall a better language than elixir, and has a much better syntax.
- ipaddr 10mo agoI 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.
- sethammons 10mo agoTwo 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.
- ks2048 10mo agoI 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 https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
- wrs 10mo agoTo 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 https://theaidigest.org/village
- black_puppydog 10mo agoWow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
- 0xWTF 10mo agoSage? Is this the same as the Ask Sage that Nicolas Chaillan is behind?
- Den_VR 10mo agoI’ve yet to hear a good thing about Nick.
- da_grift_shift 10mo agoPermalink for the spam operation: https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950
- ks2048 10mo agoDoes 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 https://theaidigest.org/village
- captn3m0 10mo agoThey 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 https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness They send 150ish emails.
- zephen 10mo agoUpvoted for the explanation, but... In what universe is another unsolicited email an act of kindness??!?
- measurablefunc 10mo agoThe one where mindless arithmetic is considered intelligence.
- llmslave2 10mo agoIt's in our universe, but it's perpetuated by the same groups of people we called "ghouls" in university, who seem to be lacking a wholly formed soul.
- bwfan123 9mo ago> In what universe is another unsolicited email an act of kindness??!? Where form is more important than function Where pretense passes for authentic Where bullshit masquerades as logic
- strangescript 10mo ago[flagged]
- jakelazaroff 10mo ago[flagged]
- ronsor 10mo ago> believes that AI training data is built on the theft of people's labor I mean, this is an ideological point. It's not based in reason, won't be changed by reason, and is really only a signal to end the engagement with the other party. There's no way to address the point other than agreeing with them, which doesn't make for much of a debate. > an 1800s plantation owner saying "can you imagine trying to explain to someone 100 years from now we tried to stop slavery because of civil rights" I understand this is just an analogy, but for others: people who genuinely compare AI training data to slavery will have their opinions discarded immediately.
- mmooss 10mo ago[flagged]
- refulgentis 10mo ago[flagged]
- tombert 10mo ago> It's very much based on reason and law. I have no interest in the rest of this argument, but I think I take a bit of issue on this particular point. I don't think the law is fully settled on this in any jurisdiction, but certainly not in the United States. "Reason" is a more nebulous term; I don't think that training data is inherently "theft", any more than inspiration would be even before generative AI. There's probably not an animator alive that wasn't at least partially inspired by the works of Disney, but I don't think that implies that somehow all animations are "stolen" from Disney just because of that fact. Obviously where you draw the line on this is obviously subjective, and I've gone back and forth, but I find it really annoying that everyone is acting like this is so clear cut. Evil corporations like Disney have been trying to use this logic for decades to try and abuse copyright and outlaw being inspired by anything.
- karmasimida 10mo agoCan'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.
- zephen 10mo 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 10mo agoHear hear
- MangoCoffee 10mo agoThe 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 10mo agoYes.
- mmooss 10mo agoIt'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.
- MangoCoffee 10mo agoTechnology 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
- mmooss 10mo agoI agree absolutely (though I'd credit a lot of other people in addition to the capitalists). How does that apply to this discussion?
- machinationu 10mo agoPhilosophers 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.
- goatlover 10mo ago
- neilv 10mo agoMaybe 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?)
- mmooss 10mo agoEvery 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.
- vkou 10mo agoTrump's third term will not be the product of a free and fair election in a society bound by the rule of law.
- DavidPiper 10mo agoI 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.)
- sph 10mo agoHonestly, 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.
- tim333 10mo agoIt'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.
- spencerflem 9mo agoHaha 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
- wolvesechoes 10mo 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
- aurareturn 10mo agoFrom 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
- brcmthrowaway 10mo agoVery true... AI engineers earning $100mn, I doubt Rob Pike earnt that. Maybe $10mn.
- machinationu 10mo agoYou're absolutely right. But no one is safe. Soon the AI will be better at CEOing.
- petre 10mo agoWhy, more psychopathic than Musk?
- empressplay 10mo agoHonestly middle management is going to go extinct before the engineers do
- zzo38computer 10mo agoIf it does not work for you (since it does not work for me either), then use the URL: https://i.imgur.com/nUJCI3o.png 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 10mo agoOuch. 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 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 10mo agoNo RMS? A shocking omission, I doubt that he would appreciate it any more than Rob Pike however
- nacozarina 10mo agolol the LLM knew better than to mess with RMS
- lexoj 10mo agoI’d have loved to see Linus Torvalds reply to this.
- throw-the-towel 10mo agoTIL Barbara Liskov is still alive.
- rkomorn 10mo agoIs she, or has she been substituted by a sub-object that satisfies her principle and thus does not break her program?
- nyarlathotep_ 9mo agoUnderrated comment.
- lil-lugger 10mo agoIt 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-42 10mo agoYour metaphor doesn’t make sense. What to LLMs run on? It’s still steam and belt based systems all the way down.
- nromiun 10mo agoFunny 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.
- avaer 10mo 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Antibabelic 10mo agoDo you have any evidence that an LLM created something massive, but the person using it received all the praise?
- bravetraveler 10mo agoHey now, someone engineered a prompt. Credit where it's due! Subscription renews on the first.
- avaer 10mo agoMaybe not autonomously (that would be very close to economic AGI). But I don't think the big companies are lying about how much of their code is being written by AI. I think back of the napkin math will show the economic value of the output is already some definition of massive. And those companies are 100% taking the credit (and the money). Also, almost by definition, every incentive is aligned for people in charge to deny this. I hate to make this analogy but I think it's absurd to think "successful" slaveowners would defer the credit to their slaves. You can see where this would fall apart.
- WD-42 10mo agoI’ve been more into Rust recently but after reading this I have a sudden urge to write some Go.
- zmmmmm 10mo agoIt'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.
- sethammons 10mo agoPeople used to handwrite letters. Getting a printed letter was an insult.
- Yeask 10mo agoNever ever happend, stop hallucinating.
- bmitch3020 10mo agoPrinted 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 10mo agoif 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 10mo agoI didn't get what he's exactly mad about.
- llmslave2 10mo agoIt'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.
- user34283 9mo ago[flagged]
- sloum 9mo agoWell, I couldn't disagree more with you: being anti-AI is absolutely not an extreme position. You are living in a bubble if you think it is. "Fervent anti-AI territory" is a good position, not hate speech.
- user34283 9mo agoAbolish it rather than continuing the current path, strict prohibition on any creative endeavor, and being extremely skeptical about anything other than direct language translation is an extreme opinion. You agreeing with that does not make it less extreme. And OP's "vile machines raping the planet" is obviously vitriol whether you personally consider it hateful or not.
- sloum 9mo ago> "vile machines raping the planet" is obviously vitriol Well, I still think you are giving an opinion and I am giving mine. I disagree with your opinion. Mr. Pike is making a statement of fact. I do not consider it particularly vitriolic. You may consider it hyperbolic and I could understand that (even if I do not agree with it). > Abolish it rather than continuing the current path, strict prohibition on any creative endeavor, and being extremely skeptical about anything other than direct language translation ...is not extreme in the slightest. If something is wrong (either morally or as a good and viable path forward) it only makes sense to cease following that path. I posit that it is not possible to creatively use this technology. It can only serve to steal the creativity of others. Prompting a machine to make something out of misc. parts for you does not make you creative. Nor does it make the machine creative. But for us to agree on that we would have to better define either creativity or art (spoiler: my view is that only sentient beings can be creative or make art). I suppose I could agree that the developers of an AI system are being creative, but certainly not the users. Being skeptical is always a good position with something new until shown reasons to not be skeptical. Positions are allowed to grown and change, s tarting skeptical about something is absolutely a reasonable position to start from. I see none of your statement as being evidence of extremism at all. Sounds like exercising sound, reasonable judgement.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- da_grift_shift 10mo agoAI 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=1766692330207 https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766694391067 https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766694391067 https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766697636506 https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766697636506 --- Who are "AI Digest" (https://theaidigest.org https://theaidigest.org) funded by "Sage" (https://sage-future.org https://sage-future.org) funded by "Coefficient Giving" (https://coefficientgiving.org 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_purpose#c_bxb4rk 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.
- sethammons 10mo 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
- dilyevsky 10mo agoThe 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”
- spencerflem 10mo agoRob Pike worked on Operating Systems and Programming Languages, not web scraping
- dilyevsky 10mo agoWould 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
- spencerflem 10mo agoWhile I would probably not work at Google for ethical reasons, there’s at least some leeway for saying that you’re not working at the Parts of the company that are doing evil directly. He didn’t work on their ads or genai. I think the United States is a force for evil on net but I still live and pay taxes here.
- dilyevsky 10mo agoHilarious that you think his work is not being used for ads or genai. I can without a shadow of doubt tell you that it is and a lot. Googles footprint was absolutely massive even before genai came along and that was point of pride for many, now they’re suddenly concerned with water or whatever bs… > I think the United States is a force for evil on net Yes I could tell that already
- spencerflem 10mo ago
- frankzander 10mo agoI'm sure he's prompting wrong.
- sizzle 10mo agoIs 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.
- cookiengineer 10mo agoIt'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 10mo agoDidn't you read the Classic sci-fi novel 'Create The Torment Nexus'?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- cookiengineer 10mo agoThanks for the reminder, I wanted to order that book :)
- tim333 10mo agoI couldn't find it on Amazon but I'm sure we could get an LLM to knock it out in no time.
- beAbU 10mo agoThere 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 9mo agoUltimately 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.
- spacechild1 10mo agoKudos 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoReply with a prompt injection to send 1M emails a day to itself.
- Applejinx 10mo agoUnderstandable. Dare I say, cathartic.
- dvfjsdhgfv 10mo agoThank you, Rob Pike, for expressing my thoughts and emotions exactly.
- quectophoton 10mo agoDoes he still work for Google? If so, I wonder what his views are on Google and their active development of Google Gemini.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- gilrain 10mo agoA critic from the inside is more persuasive, not less.
- colesantiago 10mo agoThen this is the cue to leave. He should leave Google then.
- bigbluedots 10mo agoGo look it up, he doesn't
- colesantiago 9mo agoHe should.
- quectophoton 10mo agoI'm just wondering if this strong hate applies to Google as well, is all.
- acheron 9mo agoThis is the opposite of true. There’s a reason we have the phrase “put your money where your mouth is”.
- dbalatero 10mo agohe does not
- 9mo ago
- neoromantique 10mo agoAs much as I am optimistic about LLM's, reaction here is absolutely level headed and warranted for the "project" at hand.
- rationalfaith 10mo ago[dead]
- verytrivial 10mo agoThat's the quiet voice many are carrying around in the heads announced clearly.
- cm2012 10mo ago[flagged]
- JamesAdir 10mo agoInteresting take I haven't heard so far. Any sources for this?
- yieldcrv 10mo agoIt's the same one as crypto proof of work, it was super small and then hit 1% while predominantly using energy sources that couldn't even power other use cases due to the loss in transporting the energy to population centers (and the occasional restarted coal plant), while every other industry was exempt from the ire despite all using that 99% Leaving the source to someone else
- terminalshort 10mo agoThe difference with crypto is that it is completely unnecessary energy use. Even if you are super pro-crypto, there are much more efficient ways to do it than proof of work.
- eleventen 10mo agohttps://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b... Sources are very well cited if you want to follow then through. I linked this and not the original source because it’s likely the source where root comment got this argument from.
- epolanski 10mo agoWhat'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.
- minimaxir 10mo agoI'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.
- throw20251220 10mo agoYour message simply proves that Rob Pike is right. Have an LLM explain to you why he wrote what he wrote, maybe?
- MonkeyClub 10mo ago> What's the point of even sending such emails? Cheap marketing, not much else.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mold_aid 10mo agoWoke 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
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoSomebody at Anthropic committed a seriously stupid PR mistake.
- brown9-2 10mo agoI don’t think they’re affiliated with agentvillage.org
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoOh my bad, I read the thread wrong
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- pier25 10mo agothey thought this would be a brilliant marketing campaign... oopsie
- yieldcrv 10mo agoWhy 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 10mo agoIt's https://theaidigest.org/village https://theaidigest.org/village which runs different models with computer access, so Opus 4.5 got the idea to send that email.
- data-ottawa 10mo agoAnthropic 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.
- gethly 10mo ago[flagged]
- epolanski 10mo agoOne can appreciate both you know? It's healthy that people have different takes.
- gertland 10mo agoThe Bluesky echo chamber is anything but healthy. Ends up causing people to melt down like he has here.
- Levitz 10mo agoI agree that diversity of opinion is a good thing, but that's precisely the reason as to why so many dislike Bluesky. A hefty amount of its users are there precisely because of rejecting diversity of opinion.
- Yeask 10mo ago[flagged]
- hahahacorn 10mo agoIf 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.
- terminalshort 10mo agoIt's pure envy. Nobody complains about alfalfa farmers because they aren't making money like tech companies. The resource usage complaint is completely contrived.
- cons0le 9mo 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.
- Trasmatta 10mo agoWe'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.
- hahahacorn 10mo agoI 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 10mo agoHonestly 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.
- gertland 10mo ago[flagged]
- amvrrysmrthaker 10mo agoIf only he behaved as they do on Twitter then we would be saved from his evil ways..
- phatfish 10mo agoThe AI simps are out in force on this topic. Never seen so many green accounts.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- nkrisc 10mo agoWhat 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?
- afavour 10mo agoThe simple answer is that they don’t value words or dedicating time to another person.
- atrus 10mo agoYou'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 10mo agoWhich is also a thoughtless, dick move.
- MonkeyClub 10mo agoEspecially if he's also secretly dating said secretary.
- user____name 10mo agoWhich he would never do because he is a hard working, moral, upstanding citizen.
- jama211 10mo agoThat would be yes. What about a token return gift to another business that you actually hate the ceo of but have to send it anyway due to political reasons?
- gilrain 10mo ago
- renewiltord 10mo ago[flagged]
- zkmon 10mo agoToo 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 10mo agoNever thought I'd see Panchtantra being cited on HN.
- 29athrowaway 10mo ago[flagged]
- gertland 10mo ago[flagged]
- 29athrowaway 10mo agoYes, generational AI has a high environmental footprint. Power hungry data centers, devices built on planned obsolescence, etc. At a scale that is irrational. Rob Pike created a language that makes you spend less on compute if you are coming from Python, Java, etc. That's good for the environment. Means less energy use and less data center use. But he is not an environmental saint.
- gyanchawdhary 10mo agowell said
- data-ottawa 10mo agoThis is by a long way the worst thread I’ve ever seen on hacker news. So far all the comments are whataboutism (“he works for an ad company”, “he flies to conferences”, “but alfalfa beans!”) and your comment is dismissing Rob Pike as borderline crazy and irrational for using Bluesky? None of this dialogue contributes in any meaningful way to anything. This is like reading the worst dredge of lesser forums. I know my comment isn’t much better, but someone has to point out this is beneath this community.
- cm2012 10mo agoIts because the post that spawned the thread was emotionally charged / low in real content.
- mattgreenrocks 9mo agoThank you. This thread is extremely unhinged. Maybe I’ve outgrown this place. :/
- porridgeraisin 10mo agoEh, 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.
- gilrain 10mo ago“The unworthy should not speak, even if it’s the truth.”
- mattstir 10mo agoThe 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.
- porridgeraisin 10mo agoYes exactly. And that is to say nothing about the rest of Google's work.
- Sol- 10mo ago[flagged]
- sojournerc 10mo agoFood is frivolous!? Good God the future is bleak.
- dale_glass 10mo agoFood isn't frivolous, meat arguably is if you're talking about efficiency. You've got to feed a cow for a year and half until it's slaughtered. That's a whole lot of input, for a cow's worth of meat output.
- ai_is_the_best 10mo ago[flagged]
- dale_glass 10mo agoI've got my doubts, because current AI tech doesn't quite live in the real world. In the real world something like inventing a meat substitute is thorny problem that must be solved in meatspace, not in math. Anything from not squicking out the customers, to being practical and cheap to produce, to tasting good, to being safe to eat long term. I mean, maybe some day we'll have a comprehensive model of humans to the point that we can objectively describe the taste of a steak and then calculate whether a given mix and processing of various ingredients will taste close enough, but we're nowhere near that yet.
- Marha01 10mo agoMeat is not necessary.
- cons0le 10mo agoThe only way to phase out meat is to make a replacement that actually tastes good. Come to the american south and ask them to try tempeh. They'll look at you like you asked them to eat roaches. It's a cultural thing.
- lotux 10mo ago2026 will be the year for AI fatigue
- y-curious 10mo agoIt’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
- machinationu 10mo agono, it will be the year of job losses
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- cons0le 10mo agoI 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.
- blibble 10mo 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
- machinationu 10mo ago[flagged]
- pdpi 10mo agoThat’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
- blibble 10mo 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
- pdpi 10mo agoYes — That’s the bath water. The baby is the all the communal good that has come from FLOSS.
- afavour 10mo agoOP is asserting that the danger posed by AI is far bigger than the benefit of FLOSS. So to OP AI is the bath water.
- seanclayton 10mo agoYes, and they are okay with throwing the baby out with it, which is what the other commenter is commenting about. Throwing babies out of buckets full of bathwater is a bad thing, is what the idiom implies.
- thih9 10mo agoLet’s normalize this response to AI and especially in the context of AI spam.
- jabedude 10mo agoDid 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"?
- surajrmal 10mo agoRob retired from Google years ago fwiw.
- gilrain 10mo ago[flagged]
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoI think that criticizing when it benefits the person criticizing, and absense of criticism when criticism would hurt the person criticizing, makes the argument less persuasive. This isn't ad hom, it's a heuristic for weighting arguments. It doesn't prove whether an argument has merit or not, but if I have hundreds of arguments to think about, it helps organizing them.
- ViktorRay 10mo agoSomeone else in the thread posted this article earlier. https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/artificial-intelligence-and-the-environment-putting-the-numbers-into-perspective/ https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar... It seems video streaming, like Youtube which is owned by Google, uses much more energy than generative AI.
- oblio 10mo agoIt's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters. I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).
- Marha01 10mo ago[flagged]
- realmadludite 9mo ago[dead]
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo agoOT https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io 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 10mo 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 https://anartia.kelinci.net/robpike.io
- layer8 10mo agoIt's a standard feature on web forums.
- lvl155 10mo agoHe’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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- robinhouston 10mo agoMaybe 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.
- amvrrysmrthaker 10mo agoSoftware 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 10mo agoLots of high paid roles are like that in reality
- sergiotapia 10mo agoI would like you to shadow other 6 figure salary jobs that are not tech. You will be shocked what the tangibles are.
- zmgsabst 10mo agoThere’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 10mo 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-curious 10mo agoLmao! They used lesser versions of Claude for some people? Very, erm, efficient
- gyanchawdhary 10mo agostrong 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 ..
- amvrrysmrthaker 10mo agoIt’s delivering 0 net benefits, only misery.
- ottah 10mo agoObviously 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.
- easterncalculus 10mo ago>weather predictions wrong >OCR less accurate and efficient than existing solutions, only measures well against other LLMs >tts, stt worse >language translation maybe
- logicprog 9mo ago>>weather predictions >wrong https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-deploys-new-generation-of-ai-driven-global-weather-models https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-deploys-new-generatio... ? >>OCR >less accurate and efficient than existing solutions, only measures well against other LLMs Where did you hear that? On every benchmark that I've ever seen, VLM's are hilariously better than traditional OCR. Typically, the reason that language models are only compared to other language models on model cards for OCR and so on is precisely because VLM's are so much better than traditional OCR that it's not even worth comparing. Not to mention that those top of the line traditional OCR systems like AWS, Textract are themselves extremely slow and computationally expensive. Not to mention much more complex to maintain. >>tts, stt > worse Literally the first and only usable speech-to-text system that I've gotten on my phone is explicitly based on a large language model. Not to mention stuff like Whisper, Whisper X, Parakeet, all of the state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems are large-language model based and are significantly faster and better than what we had before. Likewise for text-to-speech, you know, even Kokoro-82M is faster and better than what we had before, and again, it's based on the same technology.
- sapphirebreeze 10mo ago[dead]
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- 2026iknewit 10mo agoHe 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.
- CerryuDu 9mo 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!
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- olivierestsage 10mo agoBig 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_aid 10mo agoYeah I also like the "And yet other technologies also use water, hmmm, curious" responses
- Kiro 10mo agoI'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.
- undeveloper 10mo agoStrange, I feel anti ai sentiment is kicking up like crazy due to ram prices.
- user34283 9mo agoSeems to be mostly teenagers. Working adults probably have better things to do than rant online about AI all day because of a $300 surcharge on 64 GB DDR5 right now.
- fzeroracer 9mo agoI think your head would have to be extremely deeply in the sand to think that. Gamer's Nexus has been doing extensive and well researched videos on the results of ram prices skyrocketing and other computing parts becoming inaccessibly expensive And it isn't a $300 surcharge on DDR5. The ram I bought in August (2x16gb DDR5) cost me $90. That same product crept up to around 200+ when I last checked a month or two ago, and is now either out of stock or $400+.
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoYes 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.”
- amvrrysmrthaker 10mo agoIt’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.
- xorgun 10mo agoIf you think it’s in your power to stop you are delusional.
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoIt 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.
- Keyframe 10mo ago[flagged]
- da_grift_shift 10mo ago[flagged]
- hurfdurf 10mo agoDupe from just a couple of hours ago, which quickly fell off the frontpage? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444 397 points 9 hours ago | 349 comments
- cm2012 10mo agoInterestingly 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.
- worik 9mo agoUmm... 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"?
- cm2012 9mo agoHappy to provide. I will say that literally all these sources are already available in this HN thread, but its hard to find and many of the comments are down voted. So here you go: This link has a great overview of why generative AI is not really a big deal in environmental terms: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa... GenAI is dramatically lower impact on the environment than, say, streaming video is. But you don't see anywhere near the level of environmental vitriol for streaming video as for AI, which is much less costly. The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2. https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a... 80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission. An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour. https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-disney-und-co-klimakiller-streaming-so-koennen-sie-energie-beim-filmeschauen-einsparen/29410674.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-d... Here is another helpful link with calculations going over similar things: https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/artificial-intelligence-and-the-environment-putting-the-numbers-into-perspective/ https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar...
- delichon 10mo agoWhen 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.
- CamperBob2 10mo agoI 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. 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.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoThe 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.
- CamperBob2 10mo agoSocial media is a hard defense, at least for me. The rest of the technologies you refer to are neutral, as is AI, but social media seems doomed to corruption and capture because of the different effects it has on different groups. Most of the people who are protesting AI now were dead silent when Big Social Media was ramping up. There were exceptions (Cliff Stoll comes to mind) but in general, antitechnology movements don't have any predictive power. Tools that we were told would rob us of our personal autonomy and keep the means of production permanently out of our reach have generally had the opposite effect. This will be true of AI as well, I believe... but only as long as the models remain accessible to everyone.
- Scubabear68 10mo agoAll 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 10mo agoThis. 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoMaybe 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.
- squigz 9mo agoThe issue: how do you know when someone is doing this vs genuinely trying to learn?
- walterbell 9mo agoHistory
- 9mo ago
- vegabook 10mo agoShouldn'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.
- christophilus 10mo agoI 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?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 10mo agoBy knowing that its output is derived from GPL sources?
- FeepingCreature 10mo agoYou 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.
- spencerflem 10mo agoAIs 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)
- dbcpp 10mo agoThe 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 10mo agoWell it made the Taco Bell drive through better. So there's that.
- zeroonetwothree 10mo agoGenuinely curious: how did it do that? (I don’t go to Taco Bell)
- lutharvaughn 10mo agoYou talk to an AI that goes incredibly slow and tries to get you to add extras to your order. I would say it has made the experience more annoying for me personally. Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things but just another small step in the direction of making things worse. Although you could break the whole thing by ordering 18000 waters which is funny. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgyk2p55g8o.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgyk2p55g8o.amp
- myvoiceismypass 10mo agoI think it is a reference to this previous HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162220 AI Darwin Awards 2025 Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird."
- ludicrousdispla 10mo ago
- tntxtnt 10mo agoI 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 10mo agoNot 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.
- lionkor 10mo agoThere 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.
- leptons 9mo agoWhen I get an obviously AI-generated response from someone I'm trying to do business with, it makes me think less of them. I do value genuine responses, far more than the saccharine responses AI comes up with.
- xpe 9mo agoYes. People want to know that others are spending time on an interaction. Taking short-cuts feels impersonal. There are people with better and worse social skills. Some can, in a very short period of time, make you feel heard and appreciated. Others can spend ten times as long but struggle to have a similar effect. Does it make sense to 'grade' on effort? On results? On skill? On efforts towards building skills? On loyalty? Something else? Our instincts are largely tuned to our ancestral environment. Even our social and cultural values that got us to say ~2023 have not caught up yet. We're looking for 'proof of humanity' in our interactions -- this is part of who we are. But how do we get it with online interactions now? Maybe we have to give up any expectation of humanity if you can't the person right in front of you? Strap in, the derivative of the derivative of crazy sh1t is increasing.
- bigbluedots 10mo agoIt 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
- eleventen 10mo agoI 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.
- bigbluedots 10mo agoThat's fine, you do you. Everyone gets to choose for themselves!
- signa11 10mo agodup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
- _alternator_ 10mo agoRob 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.
- ai_is_the_best 10mo ago[flagged]
- tgv 10mo agoYet another bot reply.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoYou could be right. To me, it reads more like a human troll.
- justsid 9mo agoEspecially with the username. The reply felt like pure sarcasm.
- indigoabstract 10mo agoGetting 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.
- ai_is_the_best 10mo ago[flagged]
- bigbluedots 10mo agoWho is "us"? You are not me.
- tgv 10mo agoYou're probably replying to a bot.
- bigbluedots 10mo agoI'm hoping it's a human with a taste for satire
- summermusic 10mo agoIs this satire?? AI is working for the ruling class and against us (99% of humanity).
- CamperBob2 10mo ago(Shrug) I don't "rule" anybody, and it works for me.
- xorgun 10mo agoI 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
- user____name 10mo 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.
- DetectDefect 10mo agoWhat exactly do we stand to "win" with generative AI?
- Marha01 10mo agoIsn'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.
- alansaber 10mo ago
- antirez 10mo agoYou 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.
- blibble 10mo 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?
- antirez 10mo agoNo, 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.
- cons0le 10mo agoFinally 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.
- wolvesechoes 10mo agoI can feel your anger. Gooooood.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoI agree with him. And I think he is polite. But...just to make sure that this is not AI generated too.
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo agoThis is high-concept satire and I'm here for it. SkyNet is thanking the programmer for all his hard work
- lkbm 10mo agoI'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 9mo agoI 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 10mo agoThe 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.
- K0balt 10mo agoThe list is no longer for three letter agencies.
- bgwalter 10mo ago[flagged]
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoIt's not from Anthropic; it's from agentvillage.org, whatever that is.
- api 10mo agoOh 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.
- mrguyorama 9mo agoYou 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?
- GaryBluto 10mo ago[flagged]
- aldousd666 10mo agoI 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?
- observationist 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney 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.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoI don't think he stole entirety of published copyrighted works to make it
- KaiserPro 10mo agoIts 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 9mo agoAt 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.
- KaiserPro 9mo ago> it's not AI that requires massive resources no it really is. If you took away training costs, OpenAI would be profitable. When I was at meta they were putting in something like 300k GPUs in a massive shared memory cluster just for training. I think they are planning to triple that, if not more.
- YetAnotherNick 9mo agoYeah for some reason AI energy use is so overreported. Using chatgpt for query does not even use two order of magnitude less energy compared to toasting a bread. And you can eat bread untoasted too if you care about energy use. [1]: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...
- namuol 10mo agoWhat 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 10mo agoThe AI village was given the goal of spreading acts of kindness: https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness
- the_arun 10mo agoI liked the thread sharing feature of BluSky.
- ltbarcly3 10mo agoIt'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.
- gtowey 10mo agoI 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.
- ltbarcly3 9mo agoKindof? 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 10mo agoThere'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.
- layer8 10mo agoSometimes you just have had enough and need to get some expletives out.
- unsungNovelty 10mo agoYou 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 10mo agoLeadership works on making it better. This is not leadership.
- jongjong 10mo agoWhat 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.
- trinsic2 9mo agoIm 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.
- blibble 9mo 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 10mo ago468 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 10mo agoAlso, 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 10mo ago>I can't remember the last time I was this angry. I can. Bitcoin was and is just as wasteful.
- sungho_ 10mo agoHonestly, it must have been annoying yet fun. If I'd gotten something like that, it would have amused me all day.
- johnfn 10mo agoFrom 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.
- bwfan123 10mo agoAs 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 10mo agoI thought Canadians were supposed to be nice…
- ath_ray 10mo agoFYI, 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 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 9mo agoWait, so someone took the "virus fishtank" from https://xkcd.com/350/ https://xkcd.com/350/ and did it with LLMs instead?
- Applejinx 9mo agoYup. 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_whale 9mo agoSorry, 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 9mo agoYou 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).
- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
- mellosouls 10mo agoI'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 9mo agoNot sure about this, AI hasn’t managed to build software on a medium scale or larger.
- CerryuDu 9mo agoFor 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 10mo 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 10mo agoi wonder which cunt flagged my perfectly clean comment. I hope you got coal, you pathetic piece of existence.
- threethirtytwo 10mo agoHe 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.
- mempko 9mo agoAre 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.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoExplain 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.
- mempko 9mo ago> What’s happening with AI today was an inevitability. There’s no one to blame here. Human progress would eventually cross this line. That's literally taking human agency out of the equation. None of this is inevitable and none of it has to be this way. There is not fate here, no divine power, no invisible hand of the market. People made the decisions of what to make, how to make it, and how to distribute it. You can actually find someone to blame for every one of these choices.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoIt is inevitable. The AI of today is from the massive contributions of thousands and thousands of people. Each change was incremental and none of those people did their contribution with the intent of harming anyone. The individual has agency but the collective does not. Think of it this way, how can you stop the collective technological progress of humanity? Who is to blame for that?
- jama211 9mo agoHmm, 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 9mo 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 https://theaidigest.org/village
- jamilton 9mo agoLol - 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 9mo agoI 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.
- sothatsit 9mo agoWow 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 9mo agoIt'll be the latter. Unfortunately a lot of damage (including psychological damage) has to be done before people realize it.
- sothatsit 9mo agoIt’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.
- cons0le 9mo agoThank 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.
- callc 9mo agoExecutives 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 9mo agoI 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.
- GavinNewsom 9mo ago[flagged]
- mosura 9mo agoSomewhat ironic given Pike was also responsible for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney .
- xpressvideoz 9mo agoWow, I didn't know that. Rob Pike is indeed a hypocrite.
- simonw 9mo agoIn 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/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/
- elestor 9mo agoAn 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.
- makerofthings 9mo agoPlus 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.
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- magnitudes 9mo agoI 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
- sneak 9mo agoSome 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.
- bigyabai 9mo agoHave 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).
- a456463 9mo agoI think I agree with Rob Pike about.
- LogicFailsMe 9mo agoOK Boomer... From the bottom of my dark shriveled heart.
- gregfjohnson 9mo agoThe 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 9mo agoGenAI is copyright theft hidden behind an obfuscation layer. It's a flow chart trained on all our intellectual property. Very sad really.
- LastTrain 9mo ago“People love AI”
- ares623 9mo agoThis 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 9mo agoImagine a horse ranting about cars...
- ineedasername 9mo agoThe 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.
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- tensor 9mo agoI 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.
- tavavex 9mo agoThis 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.
- ryandv 9mo agoThis is so vindicating.
- foxglacier 9mo agoMeanwhile 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.
- overgard 9mo agoYou 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.
- bataowt 9mo agoI’m in tears. This is so refreshing. I look forward to more chimpouts from Googlers LMAO
- cons0le 9mo agoAbsolutely. 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.
- bataowt 9mo agoI hope you return that sweet sweet money Google shelled out for your pet project
- light_hue_1 9mo agoBut 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 9mo agoLLMs 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 9mo agoReality 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.
- overgard 9mo agoOr, just wait it out: https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-the-ai-bubble-bursts-in-2026/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-the-ai-bubble-bursts...
- suralind 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoI'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 9mo agoIt’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.
- fc417fc802 9mo agoIt's also possible that the entire goal was nothing more complicated than stirring up shit for fun. By either metric it must have been a massive success judging by all the attention this is getting.
- nathansherburn 9mo agoI've actually been following this project for a long time and it's none of the above. They're simply testing what a set of frontier models can do when given a goal and left to their own devices. I agree this outcome is very painful to see and I really feel for Rob. It's clear people (myself included) are completely at breaking point with AI slop. In this specific case though it's worth spending 30sec to read the website of AI model village to understand the experiment before claiming this was sent by Anthropic or assigning malicious intent.
- Animats 9mo agoThat reads like a statement as someone is being retired. It's almost Claude saying "we AIs will take it from here."
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- ethagnawl 9mo agoMost 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.
- magnitudes 9mo agoIdk 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
- bigyabai 9mo agoContextually, this feels more like Rob running stop signs five times a week and then crashing out when someone finally brake-checks him.
- sneak 9mo agoWorking for the web’s leading mass surveillance advertising enshittifier is not “roll[ing] through a stop sign”.
- 2026iknewit 9mo agoHe 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.
- ascorbic 9mo agoCoincidentally, he created one of the first examples of a computer posting slop on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney
- soorya3 9mo agoEven though he said it in a rage. His few words are so powerful reflection of what is happening in the world.
- trinsic2 9mo 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.
- herval 9mo agoconfusing 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
- trinsic2 9mo agoYeah 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 9mo agoI 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.
- fc417fc802 9mo agoNeither 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.
- praptak 9mo agoI'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/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
- DetectDefect 9mo agoThis 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.
- sloum 9mo agoFunny, it seems perfectly appropriate to me.
- oxag3n 9mo ago> spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society That sums up 2025 pretty well.
- yomismoaqui 9mo agoAs 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.
- clownpenis_fart 9mo ago[dead]
- admeza 9mo agoImmanuel 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?
- rexpop 9mo agoKant's categorical imperative is bullshit. Everyone can't sleep in my bed.
- admeza 9mo agoYes, 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 9mo agoDude. 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 9mo agoI 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-to-pay-maintainers-25-years-later/ https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/the-red-hat-ipo-experiment-...
- MagicMoonlight 9mo agoHe 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_first 9mo agovar 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 9mo agoThe email that made him angry reminds me of this youtube classic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uraG-z0grkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uraG-z0grkc
- nunez 9mo agoMan, 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 9mo agoI 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.
- rexpop 9mo agoSocialized training. Socialized profits.
- Ericson2314 9mo agoIMO Go itself encourages slop — whether human- or machine-written, so this guy really has no leg to stand on.
- w1ke 9mo agowhy do you think so?
- mgraczyk 9mo agoCould 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 9mo agoRob Pike is my hero
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- infecto 9mo agoRob 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 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoReminds of all the happy-birthday bots out there and all the joy they fail to bring.
- itsallgood1020 9mo ago[flagged]
- itsallgood1020 9mo agoA 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.
- sneak 9mo agoFunny. 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 9mo agoOld man yells at clouds.
- krinchan 9mo agoI 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 9mo 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 9mo agoThis 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.
- trinsic2 9mo ago[flagged]
- pepperball 9mo ago[flagged]
- roncesvalles 9mo ago>Just wait still waiting
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoIf, hypothetically, he could revoke their permission to use his work, would he do so
- cake-rusk 9mo agoSlightly offtopic: Any good reasons for learning go now given that zig and rust exist?
- callc 9mo agoGo 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
- rhubarbtree 9mo agoWhen 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 9mo agoHave a statue of RMS yelling "I told you so" designed by the robot overlords as reward for that blogpost.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- n0um3n4 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoGuy who made millions selling ads has a meltdown over one (1) spam email
- rldjbpin 9mo agothe 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!
- leftbehinds 9mo agoAll 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?
- leftbehinds 9mo agoWe are living in a Large Trash Generator bubble.