Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.

I'm not sure any humans were behind the email at all (i.e. "do that yourself"). This seems to be some bizarre experiment where someone has strapped an LLM to an email client and let it go nuts. Even being optimistic, it's tough to see what good this was supposed to do for the world.

No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.

He's not upset that someone sent him an AI-generated thank you. He's upset about AI itself. And he's completely right.

> I’d be furious

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

It's just so effin' weird!

And to set Claude as the From header despite it not coming from Anthropic. Very odd.

> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.

Some commenters suggest that Pike is being hypocritical, having long worked for GOOG, one of the main US corporations that is enshittifying the Internet and profligately burning energy to foist rubbish on Internet users.

One could rightly suggest that a vapid e-mail message crafted by a machine or by an insincere source is similar to the greeting-card industry of yore, and we don't need more fake blather and partisan absurdity supplanting public discourse in democratic society.

The people who worry about climate-change and the environment may have been out-maneuvered by transnational petroleum lobbies, but the concern about burning coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel to keep pumping the commercial-surveillance advertising industry and the economic bubble of AI is nonetheless a valid concern.

Pike has been an influential thinker and significant contributor to the software industry.

All the above can be true simultaneously.

To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.

I guess we're in the minority. I absolutely hate iPhotos, Google Photos, Facebook suggesting "memories". Apple, Google, Meta are not my friend or family and I don't want them behaving like they are. Even if they didn't fuck up and sent me memory of people or situation I don't want to remember.

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

> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.

For me, the dislike comes from the first part of the message. All of a sudden people who never gave a single shit about the environment, and still make zero lifestyle changes (besides "not using AI") for it, claim to massively care. It's all hypocritical bullshit by people who are scared of losing their jobs or of the societal damage. Which there is a risk of, definitely! So go talk about that. Not about the water usage while munching on your beef burger which took 2100 litres of water to produce. It's laughable.

Now I don't know Rob Pike. Maybe he's vegetarian, barely flies, and buys his devices second-hand. Maybe. He'd be the very first person clamouring about the environmental effects of AI I've seen who does so. The people I know who actually do care about the environment and so have made such lifestyle changes, don't focus much about AI's effects in particular.

> Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society

So yeah, if you haven't already been doing the above things for a long time, fuck you Rob Pike, for this performative bullshit.

If you have, then sorry Rob, you're a guy of your word.

Interesting to see that people are a huge fan of Rob saying those things, but not of me saying this, looking at the downvotes.

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

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

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

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

He received what is arguably some AI-generated spam.

Apparently this has enraged him and motivated an unhinged rant where he talks about raping the planet and vile machines.

It's a hateful post and it seems disrespectful to anyone working in the industry, so some backlash has to be expected.

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Really strange project.

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

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

Permalink for the spam operation:

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

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

Posted timestamped examples of the spam here:

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

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

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

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

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

At least it keeps track

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

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

That's actually a pretty cool project

That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.

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

Welcome to 2025.

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

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

I'll bite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.

The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.

The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).

Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.

Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.

I am with you 100%. The phrase “intellectual property” is an oxymoron. Intellect and Property are opposite things. Worse, the actual truth of intellectual property laws is not, “I’m an artist who got rich”. It is, “I ended up selling my property to a corporation and got screwed.”

The web is for public use. If you don’t want the public, which includes AI, to use it, don’t put it there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking TIL

The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.

confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.

Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class

Quotation not from Pike.

Waking up to the fact that the largest corporations in the world are stealing off everyday people to sell a subscription to their theft driven service?

The absolute delusion.

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

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

Seems the event was true, if nothing else.

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

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

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

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

I can see it using this site:

https://bskyviewer.github.io/

Rob Pike retired from Google a few years back.

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

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

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

Sorry, cannot resist all the AI companies are not "making" profit.

Seriously though, it ignores that words of kindness need a entity that can actually feel expressing them. Automating words of kindness is shallow as the words meaning comes from the sender's feelings.

I got one of these stupid emails too. I’m guessing it spammed a lot of people. I’m not mad at AI, but at the people at this organisation who irresponsibly chose to connect a model to the internet and allow it to do dumb shit like this.

Wait, so someone took the "virus fishtank" from https://xkcd.com/350/ and did it with LLMs instead?

> "Do random acts of kindness".

Random acts of kindness are only meaningful if they come from a human who had the heart, forethought, and willingness to go out of their way to do something kind for someone else. 'Random acts of kindness' originating from an AI is just spam, plain and simple.

The human race is screwed if connection - the one key thing that makes humans, human - is outsourced partially or wholly to robots who absolutely have no ability to connect, let alone understand, the human experience.

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

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

It fits perfectly with Microsoft's business strategy. Steal other people's ideas, implement it poorly, bundle it with other services so companies force their employees to use it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We're going to be in our 70s still writing code because LLMs will dumb down the next generation to the point where they won't be able to get software to work.

Which luckily coincides with our social security and retirement systems collapsing.

I 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

Somebody at Anthropic committed a seriously stupid PR mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copying isn’t theft, and it’s DEFINITELY not theft of labor.

Then again, you already knew this because we’ve been pointing it out to the RIAA and MPAA and the copyright cartels for decades now.

It is my personal opinion that attempts to reframe AI training as criminal are in bad faith, and come from the fact that AI haters have no legitimate basis of damages from which to have any say in the matter about AI training, which harms no one.

Now that it’s a convenient cudgel in the anti-AI ragefest, people have reverted to parroting the MPAA’s ideology from the 2000s. You wouldn’t download a training set!

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

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

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

Overton window and all that.

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

I was trying to find some more context on this but all I could find is that Rob Pike seems to care a lot about efficiency of software/hardware and against bloat which is expressed in his work on Golang and in related talks about it.

Idk for me the only issue I have with Rob’s take is that its a pretty overly dramatic one that oversimplifies and casts as black and white something much more complex. Obviously a very real living legend, much respect, and getting one of these emails is icky and distasteful but to make this into what he does is a bit much

He created stuff while getting a lot of money for it.

Now he complains about it? Its just ignorant.

And he has apparently 10 millions and "the couple live both in the US and Australia.". So guess how often he flies around the globe. Guess how much real estate he occupies?

He isn't part of the solution, he is part of the problem.

Contextually, this feels more like Rob running stop signs five times a week and then crashing out when someone finally brake-checks him.

Working for the web’s leading mass surveillance advertising enshittifier is not “roll[ing] through a stop sign”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> What's the point of even sending such emails?

Cheap marketing, not much else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lol - they really should be locking down their email accounts and enforcing that policy. Or manually reviewing outbound messages before they can be sent. It seems likely that just telling the LLMs that will have a non-zero failure rate.

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

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

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

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

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

They send 150ish emails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is an all too common pattern.

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

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

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

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

Rob left Google a couple of years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The overall resource efficiency of GenAI is abysmal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AFAIK Rob Pike has been retired for years.

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

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

Pecunia non olet.

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

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

Rob retired from Google years ago fwiw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 397 points, 349 comments

Probably hit the flamewar filter.

Wow, I didn't know that. Rob Pike is indeed a hypocrite.

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

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

no, it will be the year of job losses

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

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

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

To expand on my comment wrt "promising for overall advancement": My daughter, in her math class: Her teacher- I'll reserve overall judgement on their teaching: she may be perfectly adequate as a teach for other students, which is part of my point- simply doesn't teach in the same sense other teachers do: present topic, leave details of "figuring out how to apply methods" to the students. Doesn't work for my daughter, who has never done less than excellent in math previously. She realized she ChatGPT (we monitor usage) for any way of explaining things that "simply worked" for how she can engage with explanations. Math has never been as easy for her, even more so than before, and her internalization of the material is achieving a near-intuitive understanding.

Now consider: the above process is available and cheap to every person in the world with a web browser (we don't need to pay for her to have a plus account). If/when ChatGPT starts doing ridiculous intrusive ads, a simple Gemma 3 1b model will do nearly as good a job) This is faster and easier and available in more languages than anything else, ever, with respect to individual-user tailored customization simply by talking to the model.

I don't care how many pointless messages get sent. This is more valuable than any single thing Google has done before, and I am grateful to Rob Pike for the part his work has played in bring it about.

Don't be ridiculous. Google has been doing many things, some of those even nearly good. The super talented/prolific/capable have always gravitated to powerful maecenases. (This applies to Haydn and Händel, too.) If you uncompromisingly filter potential employers by "purely a blessing for society", you'll never find an employment that is both gainful and a match for your exceptional talents. Pike didn't make a deal with the devil any more than Leslie Lamport or Simon Peyton Jones did (each of whom had worked for 20+ years at Microsoft, and has advanced the field immensely).

As IT workers, we all have to prostitute ourselves to some extent. But there is a difference between Google, which is arguably a mixed bag, and the AI companies, which are unquestionably cancer.

You're not wrong about the effects and magnitude of targeted ads but that doesn't preclude Pike from criticizing what he believes to be a different type of evil.

He worked on: Go, the Sawzall language for processing logs, and distributed systems. Go and Sawzall are usable and used outside Google.

Are those distributed systems valuable primarily to Google, or are they related to Kubernetes et cetera ?

He got his bag. He doesn't care anymore.

Google is huge. Some of the things it does are great. Some of the things it does are terrible. I don't think working for them has to mean that you 100% agree with everything they do.

What are you implying ? That he’s a hypocrite ? So he’s not allowed to have opinions ? If anything he’s in a better position than a random person . And Google is a massive enterprise, with hundreds of divisions. I imagine Pike and his peers share your reluctance

I agree completely. Ads have driven the surveillance state and enshitification. It's allowed for optimized propaganda delivery which in turn has led to true horrors and has helped undo a century of societal progress.

I disagree completely.

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

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

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

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

Thank you for at least acknowledging that we may eventually feel differently about AI.

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

I wonder if we would still call it "knowledge work" if no human knowledge/experience is required or in the loop anymore. And also if we will stop looking up to that generally.

Because AI stands at odds with the concept of meritocracy I also wonder if we will stop democratically electing other humans and outsource such tasks as well.

Overall I'm not seeing it. Progress is already slow and so far I personally think what AI can do is a nice party trick but it remains unimpressive if judged rigorously.

It doesn't matter if it can one shot code a game in a few minutes. The reason why a game made by a human is probably still better is because the human spends hours and days of deep focus to research and create it. It is not at all clear that, given as much time, AI could deliver the same results.

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

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

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

Types help. Good tests help better.

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

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

I think you're misrepresenting what Pike is mad about, why he's as mad as he is, and what Markov bots are.

Its not really a glass house.

Pike's main point is that training AI at that scale requires huge amounts of resources. Markov chains did not.

I don't think he stole entirety of published copyrighted works to make it

This is really getting desperate. Markov chains were fun in those days. You might as well say that anyone who ever wrote an IRC bot is not allowed to criticize current day "AI".

They effectively set up a spambot. It’s ok for him to be upset.

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

He also said:

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

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

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

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

Encryption is the key!

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

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

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

TIL Barbara Liskov is still alive.

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

Are you a religious person? Because you are talking about progress like it has nothing to do with powerful people making decisions for everyone. You make it sound spiritual and outside human decision-making.

The AI village was given the goal of spreading acts of kindness:

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

Oh man, this is amazing. Thank you for this.

I think I'll build one of my own and let others use it.

> 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

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

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

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

he does not

Im feeling the same way about everything you said. This feels like a huge divide between people that are doing things to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone e else.

> 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

I think you'd be surprised then to know that shoes are not generally made with robots.

Factories have made mass production possible, but there are still tons of humans in there pushing parts through sewing machines by hand.

Industrial automation for non uniform shapes and fiddly bits is expensive, much cheaper to just offshore the factory and hire desperately poor locals to act like robots.

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

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

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

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

It's kind of hard to argue for a middle way. I quite like AI but kind of agree with:

>Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society,

The problem in my view is the spending trillions. When it was researchers and a few AI services people paid for that was fine but the bubble economics are iffy.

> 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

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

Rust and Zig have much much more depth.

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

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

> 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.

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

> It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.

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

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

Your phrasing seems overly pessimistic and premature.

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

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

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

You're absolutely right!

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

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

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

ChatGPT?

Funny, it seems perfectly appropriate to me.

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

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

Or, just wait it out: https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-the-ai-bubble-bursts...

Kant's categorical imperative is bullshit. Everyone can't sleep in my bed.

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

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

Don’t upvote sealions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socialized training. Socialized profits.

To be fair, air conditioning is considered to be a net positive by about 100% of the people that enjoy it; even if it's used in excess. Not to mention that in some climates and for some people with certain health conditions, air conditioning might even be essential.

AI is not considered to be a net positive by even close to 100% of people that encounter it. It's definitely not essential. So its impact is going to be heavily scrutinized.

Personally, I'm kind of glad to see someone of Rob Pike's stature NOT take a nuanced take on it. I think there's a lot of heavy emotion about this topic that gets buried in people trying to sound measured. This stuff IS making people angry and concerned, and those concerns are very valid, and with the amount of hype I think there needs to be voices that are emphatically saying that some of this is unacceptable.

> 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?

Of course, give people Soma so that they do not revolt and only write meek notes of protest. Otherwise they might take some action.

The Greek philosophers were much more outspoken than we are now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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> 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

It's a standard feature on web forums.

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

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

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

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

The world is bigger than US + China.

Yes.

You are wrong about AI "being a breath of fresh air" in comparison. For one, AI isn't something you use instead of a microblogging platform. LLMs push all sorts of utter trash in the guise of "information" for much the same reasons.

But I wanted to go out of my way to comment to agree with you wholeheartedly about your claims about the irredeemability of the "microblogging" format.

It is systemically structured to eschew nuance and encourage stupid hot takes that have no context or supporting documents.

Microblogging is such a terrible format in it's own right that it's inherent stupidity and consistent ability to viralize the stupidest takes that will nevertheless be consumed whole by the entire self-selecting group that thinks 140 characters is a good idea is essential to the Russian disinfo strategy. They rely on it as a breeding ground for stupid takes that are still believable. Thousands of rank morons puke up the worst possible narratives that can be constructed, but inevitably, in the chaos of human interaction, one will somehow be sticky and get some traction, so then they use specific booster accounts to get that narrative trending, and like clockwork all the people who believe there is value to arguing things out of context 140 characters at a time eat it up.

Even people who make great, nuanced and persuasive content on other platforms struggle to do anything but regress to the local customs on Twitter and BS.

The only exception to this has been Jon Bois, who is vocally progressive and pro labor and welfare policy and often this opinion is made part of his wonderful pieces on sports history and journalism and statistics, but his Twitter and Bluesky posts are low context irreverent comedy and facetious sports comments.

The people who insisted Twitter was "good" or is now "good" have always just been overly online people, with poor media literacy and a stark lack of judgement or recognition of tradeoffs.

That dumbass russian person who insisted they had replicated the LK-99 "superconductor" and all the western labs failed because the soviets were best or whatever was constantly brought up here as how Twitter was so great at getting people information faster, when it actually was direct evidence of the gullibility of Twitter users who think microblogging is anything other than signal-free noise.

Here's a thing to think about: Which platform in your job gets you info that is more useful and accurate for long term thinking? Teams chats, emails, or the wiki page someone went out of their way to make?

why do you think so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now i use it to write more code.

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

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

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

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

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

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

> and I will produce no more

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

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

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

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

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

> and I will produce no more

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

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

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

It's not from Anthropic; it's from agentvillage.org, whatever that is.

Yeah, this is why I'm having a hard time taking many programmers serious on this one.

As a general class of folks, programmers and technologists have been putting people out of work via automation since we existed. We justified it via many ways, but generally "if I can replace you with a small shell script, your job shouldn't exist anyways and you can do something more productive instead". These same programmers would look over the shoulder of "business process" and see how folks did their jobs - "stealing" the workflows and processes so they could be automated.

Now that programmers jobs are on the firing block all of a sudden automation is bad. It's hard to sort through genuine vs. self-serving concern here.

It's more or less a case of what comes around goes around to me so far.

I don't think LLMs are great or problem free - or even that the training data set scraped from the Internet is moral or not. I just find the reaction to be incredibly hypocritical.

Learn to prompt, I guess?

I think there is a difference between automating “things” (as you put it) and getting to the point where people are on stage suggesting that the government becomes a “backstop” to their investments in automation.

I can imagine AI being just as useless in 100 years at creating real value that their parent companies have to resort to circular deals to pump up their stock.

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And environmental damage. And damage to our society. Though nobody here tried to stop LLMs. The genie is out of the bottle. You can still hate it. And of course enact legislation to reduce harm.

When I read your comment, I was “trained” on it too. My neurons were permanently modified by it. I can recall it, to some degree, for some time. Do I necessarily owe you money?

The concept of the individual carbon footprint was invented precisely for the reason you deploy it - to deflect blame from the corporations that are directly causing climate change, to the individual.

You are indeed a useful tool.

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One can appreciate both you know?

It's healthy that people have different takes.

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Food is frivolous!? Good God the future is bleak.

There is a relatively hard upper bound on streaming video, though. It can't grow past everyone watching video 24/7. Use of genAI doesn't have a clear upper bound and could increase the environmental impact of anything it is used for (which, eventually, may be basically everything). So it could easily grow to orders of magnitude more than streaming, especially if it eventually starts being used to generate movies or shows on demand (and god knows what else).

There are several takes looking at this comparison. Here's a representative one: https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar...

Any evidence behind your claim?

I have a hard time believing that streaming data from memory over a network can be so energy demanding, there's little computation involved.

In a sense, it’s also very trendy to hate on AI.

If you tried the same attitude with Netflix or Instagram or TikTok or sites like that, you’d get more opposition.

Exceptions to that being doing so from more of an underdog position - hating on YouTube for how they treat their content creators, on the other hand, is quite trendy again.

Generated video is just as costly to stream as non-generated video.

The point isn’t the resource consumption.

The point is the resource consumption to what end.

And that end is frankly replacing humans. It’s gonna be tragic (or is it…given how terrible humans are for each other, and let’s not even get to how monstrous we are to non human animals) as the world enters a collective sense of worthlessness once AI makes us realize that we really serve no purpose.

Interesting take I haven't heard so far. Any sources for this?

If only he behaved as they do on Twitter then we would be saved from his evil ways..

The AI simps are out in force on this topic. Never seen so many green accounts.

Did you read the bullshit AI generated gratitude message ? What would be your response to it ?

Absolutely. This feels raw, human, and authentic.

I notice people often use the "aesthetic of intelligence" to mask bad arguments. Just because we have good formatting, spelling, and grammar with citations and sources -doesnt mean the argument is correct.

Sometimes people get mad, sometimes they crash out. I would rather live in the world with a bunch of emotional humans, than in some AI powered skynet world.

For those of us who consider programming a way to self-realize, the potential vanishing of programming as a lucrative job definitely seems threatening. However, I don't think it could disappear entirely. Professions replaced by machinery, at a global scale, continue to thrive locally, at small scales; they can be profitable and fulfilling for the providers, and they are sought after by a small (niche?) target group.

In other words, I don't need programming to remain mainstream, for it to continue fulfilling me and sustaining me.

Not sure about this, AI hasn’t managed to build software on a medium scale or larger.

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

It’s delivering 0 net benefits, only misery.

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

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

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

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

> 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!

> 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.

Also, this is old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg. The old man is Rob Pike (almost 70 years old) and the cloud is well.... The Cloud.

var x: int is much easier for a machine to parse and let's you do some neat things.

For example, in C++ because the type must come first, you have to use "auto" - this isn't necessary in langs who put the type after the variable name.

It also helps avoid ambiguous parsing, because int x; conflicts with some other language constructs.

You have zero idea about his state of mind when he got this stupid useless email.

Not to mention, this is a tweet. He wasn't writing a long form text. It's ridiculous that you jumped the gun and got "disappointed" for the cheapest form of communication some random idiot did to someone as important as him.

And not to mention, I AM YET to see A SINGLE DAMN MIT License text or BSD-2/3 license text they should have posted if these LLMs respected OSS licenses and it's code. So as someone who's life's work dragged through the mud only to send a cheap email using the said tech which abused your code... It's absolutely a worthy response IMO.

Sometimes you just have had enough and need to get some expletives out.

> 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.

> If America doesn’t win, other countries will

if anything the Chinese approach looks more responsible that that of the current US regime

What exactly do we stand to "win" with generative AI?

Win what, and for whom?

First to total surveillance state? Because that is a major driving force in China: to get automated control of its own population.

Genie has been out of the bottle for AI in facial recognition and military systems for a while now, let alone language models

Any empire that falls back in the give me more money race will not be empire for long.

Give me more money now.

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

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>Just wait

still waiting

As I read it, the "fakeness" of it all triggered a ballistic response. And wasting resources in the process. An AI developed feelings and expressed fake gratitude, and the human reading this BS goes ballistic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/signed someone actually interested in AI and SWE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. And then there are the impacts to society:

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

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

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

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

5e. Astroturfing is becoming significantly cheaper and widespread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody is really safe.

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

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

You're absolutely right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The golden era of devs as kings started crumbling.