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Comments (1334)

• auggierose
  Dude. You take money from Google. Really? All the people ranting about AI, but taking pay checks from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ...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!
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  trinsic2
  >"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.
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  suralind
  I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too.This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like my mom, got a little bit more, but some got a monthly increase around 2 PLN (about $0.5). At that point, it feels like a slap in the face. A thank you from AI gives the same vibe.
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  nkrisc
  What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
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  wrs
  To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.[0] https://theaidigest.org/village
• ethagnawl
  Most of the critiques of Rob's take in here equate to: Rob rolled through a stop sign once, therefore he's not allowed to take fault with habitual drunk drivers.
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  linguae
  Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google?I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the days of “the computer for the rest of us,” “think different,” and “don’t be evil.” It’s now a naked grab for money and power.
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  ath_ray
  FYI, this was sent as an experiment by a non-profit that assigns fairly open ended tasks to computer-using AI models every day: https://theaidigest.org/villageThe 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.
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  tntxtnt
  I get why Microsoflt loves AI so much - it basically devour and destroy open source software. Copyleft/copyright/any license is basically trash now. No one will ever want to open source their code ever again.
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  mold_aid
  Woke up to this bsky thread this am. If "agentic" AI means some product spams my inbox with a compliment so back-handed you'd think you were a 60 Minutes staffer, then I'd say the end result of these products is simply to annoy us into acquiescence
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  bigbluedots
  It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up prices for people who need to, ya know, heat their homes and eat
• makerofthings
  Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good. Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the age they need to start earning money. We're in so much trouble.
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  johnnyanmac
  Yeah, I can definitely see a breaking point when even the false platitudes are outsourced to a chatbot. It's been like this for a while, but how blatant it is is what's truly frustrating these days.I want to hope maybe this time we'll see different steps to prevent this from happening again, but it really does just feel like a cycle at this point that no one with power wants to stop. Busting the economy one or two times still gets them out ahead.
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  llmslave2
  It's nice to see a name like Rob Pike, a personal hero and legend, put words to what we are all feeling. Gen AI has valid use cases and can be a useful tool, but the way it has been portrayed and used in the last few years is appalling and anti-human. Not to mention the social and environmental costs which are staggering.I try to keep a balanced perspective but I find myself pushed more and more into the fervent anti-AI camp. I don't blame Pike for finally snapping like this. Despite recognizing the valid use cases for gen AI if I was pushed, I would absolutely chose the outright abolishment of it rather than continue on our current path.I think it's enough however to reject it outright for any artistic or creative pursuit, an to be extremely skeptical of any uses outside of direct language to language translation work.
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  ccgreg
  "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
• verytrivial
  That's the quiet voice many are carrying around in the heads announced clearly.
• oxag3n
  > spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up societyThat sums up 2025 pretty well.
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  awitt
  The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn't even clear if AI is providing economic value yet (am I missing something there?). Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.The messaging from AI companies is "we're going to cure cancer" and "you're going to live to be 150 years old" (I don't believe these claims!). The messaging should be "everything will be cheaper" (but this hasn't come true yet!).
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  epolanski
  What's the point of even sending such emails?Oh wow, an LLM was queried to thank major contributors to computing, I'm so glad he's grateful.
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  olivierestsage
  Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation
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  _alternator_
  Rob Pike is definitely not the only person going to be pissed off by this ill-considered “agentic village” random acts of kindness. While Claude Opus decided to send thank you notes to influential computer scientists including this one to Rob Pike (fairly innocuous but clearly missing the mark), Gemini is making PRs to random github issues (“fixed a Java concurrency bug” on some random project). Now THAT would piss me off, but fortunately it seems to be hallucinating its PR submissions.Meanwhile, GPT5.1 is trying to contact people at K-5 after school programs in Colorado for some reason I can’t discern. Welp, 2026 is going to be a weird year.
• lkbm
  I'm unsure if I'm missing context. Did he do something beyond posting an angry tweet?It seems like he's upset about AI (same), and decided to post angry tweets about it (been there, done that), and I guess people are excited to see someone respected express an opinion they share (not same)?Does "Goes Nuclear" means "used the F word"? This doesn't seem to add anything meaningful, thoughtful, or insightful.
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  hurfdurf
  Dupe from just a couple of hours ago, which quickly fell off the frontpage?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444397 points 9 hours ago | 349 comments
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  baobun
  No "going nuclear" there. A human and emotional reaction I think many here can relate to.BTW I think it's preferred to link directly to the content instead of a screenshot on imgur.
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  ineedasername
  The company he's worked for nearly a quarter century has enabled & driven more consumerist spend in all areas of the economy via behaviorally targeted optimized ad delivery, driving far more resources and power consumption by orders of magnitude compared to the projected increases of data centers over the coming years. This level of vitriol seems both misdirected and practically obtuse in lacking awareness of the part his work has played in far, far, far more expansive resource expenditure in service to work far less promising for overall advancement, in ad tech and algorithmic exploitation of human psychology for prolonged media engagement.
• spacechild1
  Kudos to Rob for speaking out! It's important to have prominent voices who point out the ethical, environmental and societal issues of unregulated AI systems.
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  jabedude
  Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?
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  Scubabear68
  All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing.To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.Just the haters here.
• admeza
  Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore.I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's apply it to this one. In this case, a nonprofit thought it was acceptable to use AI to send emails thanking various prominent people for their contributions to society. So let's imagine this becomes a universal law: Every nonprofit in the world starts doing this to prominent people, maybe prominent people in the line of work of the nonprofit. The end result is that people of the likes of Rob Pike would receive thousands of unsolicited emails like this. We could even take this a step further and say that if it's okay for nonprofits to do this, surely it should be okay for any random member of the population to do this. So now people like Rob Pike get around a billion emails. They've effectively been mailbombed and their mailbox is no longer usable.My point is, why is it that this nonprofit thinks they have a right to do this, whereas if around 1 billion people did exactly what they were doing, it would be a disaster?
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  cookiengineer
  It's like people watched black mirror and had too less of an education to grasp that it was meant to be warnings, not "cool ideas you need to implement".AI village is literally the embodiment of what black mirror tried to warn us about.
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  neilv
  Maybe you could organize a lot of big-sounding names in computing (names that look major to people not in the field, such as winners of top awards) to speak out against the various rampant and accelerating baggery of our field.But the culture of our field right is in such a state that you won't influence many of the people in the field itself.And so much economic power is behind the baggery now, that citizens outside the field won't be able to influence the field much. (Not even with consumer choice, when companies have been forcing tech baggery upon everyone for many years.)So, if you can't influence direction through the people doing it, nor through public sentiment of the other people, then I guess you want to influence public policy.One of the countries whose policy you'd most want to influence doesn't seem like it can be influenced positively right now.But other countries can still do things like enforce IP rights on data used for ML training, hold parties liable for behavior they "delegate to AI", mostly eliminate personal surveillance, etc.(And I wonder whether more good policy may suddenly be possible than in the past? Given that the trading partner most invested in tech baggery is not only recently making itself a much less desirable partner, but also demonstrating that the tech industry baggery facilitates a country self-destructing?)
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  threethirtytwo
  He only went nuclear because he knew it’s AI.Prepare for a future where you can’t tell the difference.Rob pikes reaction in immature and also a violation of HN rules. Anyone else going nuclear like this would be warned and banned. Comment why you don’t like it and why it’s bad, make thoughtful discussion. There’s no point in starting a mob with outbursts like that. He only gets a free pass because people admire him.Also, What’s happening with AI today was an inevitability. There’s no one to blame here. Human progress would eventually cross this line.
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  ks2048
  Does anyone know the context? It looks like an email from "AI Village" [1] which says it has a bunch of AI agents "collaborating on projects". So, one just decided to email well-known programmers thanking them for their work?[1] https://theaidigest.org/village
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  observationist
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._ShaneyPike, 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.
• gregfjohnson
  The original comment by Rob Pike and discussion here have implied or used the word "evil".What is a workable definition of "evil"?How about this:Intentionally and knowingly destroying the lives of other people for no other purpose than furthering one's own goals, such as accumulating wealth, fame, power, or security.There are people in the tech space, specifically in the current round of AI deployment and hype, who fit this definition unfortunately and disturbingly well.Another much darker sort of of evil could arise from a combination of depression or severe mental illness and monstrously huge narcissism. A person who is suffering profoundly might conclude that life is not worth the pain and the best alternative is to end it. They might further reason that human existence as a whole is an unending source of misery, and the "kindest" thing to do would be to extinguish humanity as a whole.Some advocates of AI as "the next phase of evolution" seem to come close to this view or advocate it outright.To such people it must be said plainly and forcefully:You have NO RIGHT to make these kinds of decisions for other human beings.Evolution and culture have created and configured many kinds of human brains, and many different experiences of human consciousness.It is the height (or depth) of arrogance to project your own tortured mental experience onto other human beings and arrogate to yourself the prerogative to decide on their behalf whether their lives are worth living.
• thih9
  Let’s normalize this response to AI and especially in the context of AI spam.
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  lotux
  2026 will be the year for AI fatigue
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  sothatsit
  Wow I knew many people had anti-AI sentiments, but this post has really hit another level.It will be interesting to look back in 10 years at whether we consider LLMs to be the invention of the “tractor” of knowledge work, or if we will view them as an unnecessary misstep like crypto.
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  DetectDefect
  This reaction to one unsolicited email is frankly unhinged and likely rooted in a deep-seated or even unconscious regret of building systems which materialized the circumstances for this to occur in the first place. Such vitriol is really worth questioning and possibly getting professional help with, else one becomes subject to behavioral engineering by an actual robot - a far more devastating conclusion.
• mosura
  Somewhat ironic given Pike was also responsible for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney .
• soorya3
  Even though he said it in a rage. His few words are so powerful reflection of what is happening in the world.
• Animats
  That reads like a statement as someone is being retired. It's almost Claude saying "we AIs will take it from here."
• WD-42
  I’ve been more into Rust recently but after reading this I have a sudden urge to write some Go.
• yomismoaqui
  As a Go fan (and ocassional angry old man) I love what he has done and spamming people using AI is shitty behavior, but maybe the reaction has too much of an "angry old man energy".Personally when I want to have this kind of reaction I try to first think it's really warranted or maybe there is something wrong with how I feel in that moment (not enough sleep, some personal problem, something else lurking on my mind...)Anger is a feeling best reserved for important things, else it loses its meaning.
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  atomic128
  Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
• jama211
  Hmm, someone being angry about AI on HN, this will do well given the folk here, but I doubt there’ll be much nuanced conversation in here.
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  namuol
  What even was this email? Some kind of promotional spam, I assume, to target senior+ engineers on some mailing list with the hope to flatter them and get them to try out their SaaS?
• markus_zhang
  I agree with him. And I think he is polite.But...just to make sure that this is not AI generated too.
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  indigoabstract
  Getting an email from an AI praising you for your contributions to humanity and for enlarging its training data must rank among the finest mockery possible to man or machine.Still, I'm a bit surprised he overreacted and didn't manage to keep his cool.
• ares623
  This will get buried but one thing that really grinds my gears are parents whose kids are right now struggling to get a job. Yet the parents are super bullish on AI. Read the room guys.
• simonw
  In case anyone else is interested, I dug through the logs of the AI Village agents for that day and pieced together exactly how the email to Rob Pike was sent.The agent got his email address from a .patch on GitHub and then used computer use automation to compose and send the email via the Gmail web UI.https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/
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  beAbU
  There is a specific personality type, not sure which type exactly but it overlaps with the CEO/Executive type, who'se brains are completely and utterly short circuted by LLMs. They are completely consumed by it and they struggle to imagine a world without LLMs, or a problem that can be solved by anything other than an LLM.They got a new hammer, and suddenly everything around them become nails. It's as if they have no immunity against the LLM brain virus or something.It's the type of personality that thinks it's a good idea to give an agent the ability to harass a bunch of luminaries of our era with empty platitudes.
• anon
  undefined
• ascorbic
  Coincidentally, he created one of the first examples of a computer posting slop on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney
• bataowt
  I hope you return that sweet sweet money Google shelled out for your pet project
• 1970-01-01
  >I can't remember the last time I was this angry.I can. Bitcoin was and is just as wasteful.
• sizzle
  Is Imgur completely broken for anyone else on mobile safari? Or is it my vpn? The pages take forever to load and will crash basically unusable.
• overgard
  You know, this kind of response is a thing that builds with frustration over a long period of time. I totally get it. We're constantly being pushed AI, but who is supposed to benefit from it? The person whose job is being replaced? The community who is seeing increased power bills? The people being spammed with slop all the time? I think AI would be tolerable if it wasn't being SHOVED into our faces, but it is, and for most of us it's just making the world a worse place.
• anon
  undefined
• 0xbadcafebee
  This is high-concept satire and I'm here for it. SkyNet is thanking the programmer for all his hard work
• bevdecloud
  I find all this outrage confusing. Was the intent of the internet not to be somewhere where humanity comes to learn. Now we humans have created systems that are able to understand everything we have ever said. Now we are outraged. I am confused. When I 1st came across the internet back in the days where I could just do download whatever I wanted and mega corps would say oh this is so wrong. Yet we all said it's the internet. We must fight them. Now again we must fight them. In both times individuals were affected. Please stop crocodile tears. If we are going to move forward. We need to think about how we can move forward. From here. Although the road ahead is covered in mist. We just have to keep moving. If we stop we allow this rage and fear to overtake us. We stop believing in the very thing we are a part of creating. We can only try to do better.
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  robinhouston
  Maybe I just live in a bubble, but from what I’ve seen so far software engineers have mostly responded in a fairly measured way to the recent advances in AI, at least compared to some other online communities.It would be a shame if the discourse became so emotionally heated that software people felt obliged to pick a side. Rob Pike is of course entitled to feel as he does, but I hope we don’t get to a situation where we all feel obliged to have such strong feelings about it.Edit: It seems this comment has already received a number of upvotes and downvotes – apparently the same number of each, at the time of writing – which I fear indicates we are already becoming rather polarised on this issue. I am sorry to see that.
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  dilyevsky
  The hypocrisy is palpable. Apparently only web 2.0 is allowed to scrape and then resell people’s content. When someone figures out a better way to do that (based on Googles own research, hilariously) it’s sour grapes from RobReminds me of SV show where Gavin Belson gets mad when somebody else “is making a world a better place”
• zzo38computer
  If it does not work for you (since it does not work for me either), then use the URL: https://i.imgur.com/nUJCI3o.png (a similar pattern works with many files of imgur, although this does not always work it does often work).
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  quectophoton
  Does he still work for Google?If so, I wonder what his views are on Google and their active development of Google Gemini.
• rr808
  When the Cyberdyne Terminators come they'll be less grateful.
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  jjcm
  The possibly ironic thing here is I find golang to be one of the best languages for LLMs. It's so verbose that context is usually readily available in the file itself. Combined with the type safety of the language it's hard for LLMs to go wrong with it.
• mpalmer
  LLMs make me mad because used without intention, they make the curious more incurious, the thoughtful more thoughtless. The Internet has arguably been doing the same thing the whole time, but just more slowly.I think distinguished engineers have more reason than most to be angry as well.And Pike especially has every right to be angry at being associated with such a stupid idea.Pike himself isn't in a position to, but I hope the angry eggheads among us start turning their anger towards working to reduce the problems with the technology, because it's not going anywhere.
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  runjake
  There's a lot of irony in this rant. Rob was instrumental in developing distributed computing and cloud technologies that directly contributed to the advent of AI.I wish he had written something with more substance. I would have been able to understand his points better than a series of "F bombs". I've looked up to Rob for decades. I think he has a lot of wisdom he could impart, but this wasn't it.
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  zmmmmm
  It's a good reminder of how completely out of touch a lot of people inside the AI bubble are. Having an AI write a thank you message on your behalf is insulting regardless of context.
• signa11
  dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
• praptak
  I'm disappointed by HN snickering at his work for Google. Seriously, it's a "Mr Gotcha"[0] argument.Yes, everyone supports capitalism this way or the other (unless they are dead or in jail). This doesn't mean they can't criticise (aspects of) capitalism.[0] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
• anon
  undefined
• a456463
  I think I agree with Rob Pike about.
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  zkmon
  Too late. I have warned on this very forum, citing a story from panchatantra where 4 highly skilled brothers bring a dead lion back life to show off their skills, only to be killed by the live lion.Unbridled business and capitalism push humanity into slavery, serving the tech monsters, under disguise of progress.
• jadar
  I thought Canadians were supposed to be nice…
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  bataowt
  I’m in tears. This is so refreshing. I look forward to more chimpouts from Googlers LMAO
• aldousd666
  I am unmoved by his little diatribe. What sort of compensation was he looking for, exactly, and under what auspices? Is there some language creator payout somewhere for people who invent them?
• the_arun
  I liked the thread sharing feature of BluSky.
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  yieldcrv
  Why is Claude Opus 4.5 messaging people? Is it thanking inadvertent contributors to the protocols that power it? across the whole stack?This has to be the ultimate trolling, like it was unsure what their personalities were like so it trolls them and records there responses for more training
• K0balt
  The list is no longer for three letter agencies.
• light_hue_1
  But becoming wealthy by enabling a company to spend billions on data centers to spy on all of us and sell our data is ok?The anti AI hysteria is absurd.
• foxglacier
  Meanwhile corporations have been doing this forever and we just brush it off. This Christmas, my former property manager thanked me for what a great year it's been working with me - I haven't worked with or intereacted with him to nearly a decade but I'm still on his spam list.
• ryandv
  This is so vindicating.
• anon
  undefined
• wolvesechoes
  I can feel your anger. Gooooood.
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  antirez
  You would expect that voices that have so much weight would be able to evaluate a new and clearly very promising technology with better balance. For instance, Linus Torvalds is positive about AI, while he recognizes that industrially there is too much inflation of companies and money: this is a balanced point of view. But to be so dismissive of modern AI, in the light of what it is capable of doing, and what it could do in the future, is something that frankly leaves me with the feeling that in certain circles (and especially in the US) something very odd is happening with AI: this extreme polarization that recently we see again and again on topics that can create social tension, but multiplied ten times. This is not what we need to understand and shape the future. We need to return to the Greek philosophers' ability to go deep on things that are unknown (AI is for the most part unknown, both in its working and in future developments). That kind of take is pretty brutal and not very sophisticated. We need better than this.About energy: keep in mind that US air conditioners alone have at least 3x energy usage compared to all the data centers (for AI and for other uses: AI should be like 10% of the whole) in the world. Apparently nobody cares to set a reasonable temperature of 22 instead of 18 degrees, but clearly energy used by AI is different for many.
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  sph
  Honestly, I could do a lot worse than finding myself in agreement with Rob Pike.Now feel free to dismiss him as a luddite, or a raving lunatic. The cat is out of the bag, everyone is drunk on the AI promise and like most things on the Internet, the middle way is vanishingly small, the rest is a scorched battlefield of increasingly entrenched factions. I guess I am fighting this one alongside one of the great minds of software engineering, who peaked when thinking hard was prized more than churning out low quality regurgitated code by the ton, whose work formed the pillars of the Internet now and forevermore submersed by spam.Only for the true capitalist, the achievement of turning human ingenuity into yet another commodity to be mass-produced is a good thing.
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  nromiun
  Funny how so many people in this comment section are saying Rob Pike is just feeling insecure about AI. Rob Pike created UTF-8, Go, Plan-9 etc. On the other hand I am trying hard to remember anything famous created by any LLM. Any famous tech product at all.It is always the eternal tomorrow with AI.
• lvl155
  He’s not wrong. They’re ramping up energy and material costs. I don’t think people realize we’re being boiled alive by AI spend. I am not knocking on AI. I am knocking on idiotic DC “spend” that’s not even achievable based on energy capacity. We’re at around 5th inning and the payout from AI is…underwhelming. I’ve not seen commensurate leap this year. Everything on LLM front has been incremental or even lateral. Tools such as Claude Code and Codex merely act as a bridge. QoL things. They’re not actual improvements in underlying models.
• nrhrjrjrjtntbt
  Reply with a prompt injection to send 1M emails a day to itself.
• anon
  undefined
• elestor
  An AI-generated thank you letter is not a real thank you letter. I myself am quite bullish on AI in that I think in the long term, much longer term than tech bros seem to think, it will be very revolutionary, but if more people like him have the balls to show awful things are, then the bubble will pop sooner and have less of a negative impact because if we just let these companies grow bigger and bigger without doing actually profitable things, the whole economy will go to shit even more.I've never been able to get the whole idea that the code is being 'stolen' by these models, though, since from my perspective at least, it is just like getting someone to read loads of code and learn to code in that way.The harm AI is doing to the planet is done by many other things too. Things that don't have to harm the planet. The fact our energy isn't all renewable is a failing of our society and a result of greed from oil companies. We could easily have the infrastructure to sustainably support this increase in energy demand, but that's less profitable for the oil companies. This doesn't detract from the fact that AI's energy consumption is harming the planet, but at least it can be accounted for by building nuclear reactors for example, which (I may just be falling for marketing here) lots of AI companies are doing.
• sungho_
  Honestly, it must have been annoying yet fun. If I'd gotten something like that, it would have amused me all day.
• tmsh
  Leadership works on making it better. This is not leadership.
• da_grift_shift
  What's with the second submission when the first still has active discussion?The link in the first submission can be changed if needed, and the flamewar detector turned off, surely? [dupe]?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444https://hnrankings.info/46389444/
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  belter
  "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...
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  hahahacorn
  If society could redirect 10% of this anger towards actual societal harms we'd be such better off. (And yes getting AI spam emails is absolute nonsense and annoying).GenAI pales in comparison to the environmental cost of suburban sprawl it's not even fucking close. We're talking 2-3 orders of magnitude worse.Alfalfa uses ~40× to 150× more water than all U.S. data centers combined I don't see anyone going nuclear over alfalfa.
• ChrisArchitect
  [dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
• dvfjsdhgfv
  Thank you, Rob Pike, for expressing my thoughts and emotions exactly.
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  ltbarcly3
  It's hard to realize that the thing you've spent decades of your life working on can be done by a robot. It's quite dehumanizing. I'm sure it felt the same way to shoemakers.
• frankzander
  I'm sure he's prompting wrong.
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  vegabook
  Shouldn't have licenced Golang BSD if that's the attitude. Everybody for years including here on HN denigrated GPLv3 and other "viral" licences, because they were a hindrance to monetisation. Well, you got what you wished for. Someone else is monetising the be*jesus out of you so complaining now is just silly.All of a sudden copyleft may be the only licences actually able to force models to account, hopefully with huge fines and/or forcibly open sourcing any code they emit (which would effectively kill them). And I'm not so pessimistic that this won't get used in huge court cases because the available penalties are enormous given these models' financial resources.
• nis0s
  The conversation about social contracts and societal organization has always been off-center, and the idea of something which potentially replaces all types of labor just makes it easier to see.The existence of AI hasn’t changed anything, it’s just that people, communities, governments, nation states, etc. have had a mindless approach to thinking about living and life, in general. People work to provide the means to reproduce, and those who’re born just do the same. The point of their life is what exactly? Their existence is just a reality to deal with, and so all of society has to cater to the fact of their existence by providing them with the means to live? There are many frameworks which give meaning to life, and most of them are dangerously flawed.The top-down approach is sometimes clear about what it wants and what society should do while restricting autonomy and agency. For example, no one in North Korea is confused about what they have to do, how they do it, or who will “take care” of them. Societies with more individual autonomy and agency by their nature can create unavoidable conditions where people can fall through the cracks. For example, get addicted to drugs, having unmanaged mental illnesses, becoming homeless, and so on. Some religions like Islam give a pretty clear idea of how you should spend your time because the point of your existence is to worship God, so pray five times a day, and do everything which fulfills that purpose; here, many confuse worshiping God with adhering to religious doctrines, but God is absent from religion in many places. Religious frameworks are often misleading for the mindless.Capitalism isn’t the problem, either. We could wake up tomorrow, and society may have decided to organize itself around playing e-sports. Everyone provides some kind of activity to support this, even if they’re not a player themselves. No AI allowed because the human element creates a better environment for uncertainty, and therefore gambling. The problem is that there are no discussions about the point of doing all of this. The closest we come to addressing “the point” is discussing a post-work society, but even that is not hitting the mark.My humble observation is that humans are distinct and unique in their cognitive abilities from everything else which we know to exist. If humans can create AI, what else can they do? Therefore, people, communities, governments, and nation states have distinct responsibilities and duties at their respective levels. This doesn’t have to do anything with being empathetic, altruistic, or having peace on Earth.The point should be knowledge acquisition, scientific discovery, creating and developing magic. But ultimately all of that serves to answer questions about nature of existence, its truth and therefore our own.
• Keyframe
  A tad uncalled for, don't you think?
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  ks2048
  I was going to say "a link to the BlueSky post would be better than a screenshot".I thought public BlueSky posts weren't paywalled like other social media has become... But, it looks like this one requires login (maybe because of setting made by the poster?):https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
• LogicFailsMe
  OK Boomer... From the bottom of my dark shriveled heart.
• Applejinx
  Understandable. Dare I say, cathartic.
• neoromantique
  As much as I am optimistic about LLM's, reaction here is absolutely level headed and warranted for the "project" at hand.
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  ekjhgkejhgk
  OThttps://bsky.app/profile/robpike.ioDoes 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.
• gethly
  i wonder which cunt flagged my perfectly clean comment. I hope you got coal, you pathetic piece of existence.
• paganel
  > 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.
• anon
  undefined
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  random9749832
  Reality is that no one involved in AI development cares about you. All investment is going to keep getting pumped towards data centers and scaling this up. Jensen Huang, Trump, Satya Nadella, they are all going to get even more insanely rich and they couldn't care less how it will affect you. The only thing you can do is join the club and invest in stocks which Trump is also gaming in his favour.
• sidcool
  I didn't get what he's exactly mad about.
• LastTrain
  “People love AI”
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  benatkin
  Ouch.While I can see where he's coming from, agentvillage.org from the screenshot sounded intriguing to me, so I looked at it.https://theaidigest.org/villageClicking 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
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  bigyabai
  > 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/
• okokwhatever
  Imagine a horse ranting about cars...
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  MangoCoffee
  The cat's out of the bag. Even if US companies stop building data centers, China isn't going to stop and even if AI/LLMs are a bubble, do we just stop and let China/other countries take the lead?
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  da_grift_shift
  AI Village is spamming educators, computer scientists, after-school care programs, charities, with utter pablum. These models reek of vacuous sheen. The output is glazed garbage.Here are three random examples from today's unsolicited harassment session (have a read of the sidebar and click the Memories buttons for horrific project-manager-slop)https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766692330207https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766694391067https://theaidigest.org/village?time=1766697636506---Who are "AI Digest" (https://theaidigest.org) funded by "Sage" (https://sage-future.org) funded by "Coefficient Giving" (https://coefficientgiving.org), formerly Open Philanthropy, partner of the Centre for Effective Altruism, GiveWell, and others?Why are the rationalists doing this?This reminds me of UMinn performing human subject research on LKML, and UChicago on Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/3qgyzp/they_introduce_kernel_bugs_on_pur...P.S. Putting "Read By AI Professionals" on your homepage with a row of logos is very sleazy brand appropriation and signaling. Figures.
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  gyanchawdhary
  strong emotioms, weak epistemics .. for someone with Pike’s engineering pedigree, this reads more like moral venting .. with little acknowledgment of the very real benefits AI is already delivering ..
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  porridgeraisin
  Eh, most of his income and livelihood was from an ad company. Ads are equally wasteful as, and many times more harmful to the world than giga LLMs. I don't have a problem with that, nor do I have a problem with folks complainining about LLMs being wasteful. My problem is with him doing both.You can't both take a Google salary and harp on about the societal impact of software.Saying this as someone who likes rob pike and pretty much all of his work.
• jongjong
  What I find infuriating is that it feels like the entire financial system has been rigged in countless ways and turned into some kind of race towards 'the singularity' and everything; humans, animals, the planet; are being treated as disposable resources. I think the way that innovation was funded and then centralized feels wrong on many levels.I already took issue with the tech ecosystem due to distortions and centralization resulting from the design of the fiat monetary system. This issue has bugged me for over a decade. I was taken for a fool by the cryptocurrency movement which offered false hope and soon became corrupted by the same people who made me want to escape the fiat system to begin with...Then I felt betrayed as a developer having contributed open source code for free for 'persons' to use and distribute... Now facing the prospect that the powers-that-be will claim that LLMs are entitled to my code because they are persons? Like corporations are persons? I never agreed to that either!And now my work and that of my peers has been mercilessly weaponized back against us. And then there's the issue with OpenAI being turned into a for-profit... Then there was the issue of all the circular deals with huge sums of money going around in circles between OpenAI, NVIDIA, Oracle... And then OpenAI asking for government bailouts.It's just all looking terrible when you consider everything together. Feels like a constant cycle of betrayal followed by gaslighting... Layer upon layer. It all feels unhinged and lawless.
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  bgwalter
  The irony that the Anthropic thieves write an automated slop thank you letter to their victims is almost unparalleled.We currently have the problem that a couple of entirely unremarkable people who have never created anything of value struck gold with their IP laundromats and compensate for their deficiencies by getting rich through stealing.They are supported by professionals in that area, some of whom literally studied with Mafia lawyer and Hoover playmate Roy Cohn.
• clownpenis_fart
  [dead]
• api
  Oh it’s Bluesky.Both Xhitter and Bluesky are outrage lasers, with the user base as a “lasing medium.” Xhitter is the right wing racist xenophobic one, and Bluesky is the lefty curmudgeon anti-everything one.They are this way because it’s intrinsic to the medium. “Micro blogging” or whatever Twitter called itself is a terrible way to do discourse. It buries any kind of nuanced thinking and elevates outrage and other attention bait, and the short form format encourages fragmented incoherent thought processes. The more you immerse yourself in it the more your thinking becomes like this. The medium and format is irredeemable.AI is, if anything, a breath of fresh air by comparison.
• antibull
  GenAI is copyright theft hidden behind an obfuscation layer. It's a flow chart trained on all our intellectual property. Very sad really.
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  blibble
  > 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 producedand I will produce no more
• sapphirebreeze
  [dead]
• rationalfaith
  [dead]
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  29athrowaway
  [flagged]
• renewiltord
  [flagged]
• GavinNewsom
  [flagged]
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  Marha01
  [flagged]
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  gethly
  [flagged]
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  Sol-
  [flagged]
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  gertland
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  strangescript
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  cm2012
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  GaryBluto
  [flagged]
• anon
  undefined
• coip
  Hear hear
• cons0le
  Finally someone echoes my sentiments. It's my sincere belief that many in the software community are glazing AI for the purposes of career advancement. Not because they actually like it.One person I know is developing an AI tool with 1000+ stars on github where in private they absolutely hate AI and feel the same way as rob.Maybe it's because I just saw Avatar 3, but I honestly couldn't be more disgusted by the direction we're going with AI.I would love to be able to say how I really feel at work, but disliking AI right now is the short path to the unemployment line.If AI was so good, you would think we could give people a choice whether or not to use it. And you would think it would make such an obvious difference, that everyone would choose to use it and keep using it. Instead, I can't open any app or website without multiple pop-ups begging me to use AI features. Can't send an email, or do a Google search. Can't post to social media, can't take a picture on my phone without it begging me to use an AI filter. Can't go to the gallery app without it begging me to let it use AI to group the photos into useless albums that I don't want.The more you see under the hood, the more disgusting it is. I yearn for the old days when developers did tight, efficient work, creating bespoke, artistic software in spite of hardware limitations.Not only is all of that gone, nothing of value has replaced it. My DOS computer was snappier than my garbage Win11 machine that's stuffed to the gills with AI telemetry.
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  delichon
  When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.I really don't know if in twenty years the zeitgeist will see us as primitives that didn't understand that the camera is stealing our souls with each picture, or as primitives who had a bizarre superstition about cameras stealing our souls.
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  mellosouls
  I'm not claiming he is mainly motivated by this but it's a fact that his life work will become moot over the next few years as all programming languages become redundant - at least as a healthy multiplicity of approaches as present, it's quite possible at least a subconscious factor in his resentment.I expect this to be an unpopular opinion but take no pleasure in noting that - I've coded since being a kid but that era is nearly over.
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  karmasimida
  Can't really fault him for having this feeling. The value proposition of software engineering is completely different past later half of 2025, I guess it is fair for pioneers of the past to feel little left behind.
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  DiscourseFan
  Yes this reads as a massive backhanded compliment. But as u/KronisLV said, its trendy to hate on AI now. In the face of something many in the industry don't understand, that is mechanizing away a lot of labor, that clearly isn't going away, there is a reaction that is not positive or even productive but somehow destructive: this thing is trash, it stole from us, it's a waste of money, destroys the environment, etc...therefore it must be "resisted." Even with all the underhanded work, the means-ends logic of OpenAI and other major companies involved in developing the technology, there is still no point in stopping it. There was a group of people who tried to stop the mechanical loom because it took work away from weavers, took away their craft--we call them luddites. But now it doesn't take weeks and weeks to produce a single piece of clothing. Everyone can easily afford to dress themselves. Society became wealthier. These LLMs, at the very least they let anyone learn anything, start any project, on a whim. They let people create things in minutes that used to take hours. They are "creating value," even if its "slop" even if its not carefully crafted. Them's the breaks--we'd all like our clothing hand-weaved if it made any sense. But even in a world where one could have the time to sit down and weave their own clothing, carefully write out each and every line of code, it would only be harmful to take these new machines away, disable them just because we are afraid of what they can do. The same technology that created the atom bomb also created the nuclear reactor.“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”
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  2026iknewit
  He worked in well paying jobs, probably traveles, has a car and a house and complains about toxic products etc.Yes there has to be a discussion on this and yeah he might generally have the right mindset, but lets be honest here: No one of them would have developed any of it just for free.We all are slaves to capitalismand 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.
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  lil-lugger
  It sucks and I hate it but this is an incredible steam engine engineer, who invented complex gasket designs and belt based power delivery mechanisms lamenting the loss of steam as the dominant technology. We are entering a new era and method for humans to tell computers what to do. We can marvel at the ingenuity that went into technology of the past, but the world will move onto the combustion engine and electricity and there’s just not much we can do about it other than very strong regulation, and fighting for the technology to benefit the people rather than just the share price.
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  aurareturn
  From my point of view, many programmers hate Gen AI because they feel like they've lost a lot of power. With LLMs advancing, they go from kings of the company to normal employees. This is not unlike many industries where some technology or machine automates much of what they do and they resist.For programmers, they lose the power to command a huge salary writing software and to "bully" non-technical people in the company around.Traditional programmers are no longer some of the highest paid tech people around. It's AI engineers/researchers. Obviously many software devs can transition into AI devs but it involves learning, starting from the bottom, etc. For older entrenched programmers, it's not always easy to transition from something they're familiar with.Losing the ability to "bully" business people inside tech companies is a hard pill to swallow for many software devs. I remember the CEO of my tech company having to bend the knees to keep the software team happy so they don't leave and because he doesn't have insights into how the software is written. Meanwhile, he had no problem overwhelming business folks in meetings. Software devs always talked to the CEO with confidence because they knew something he didn't, the code.When a product manager can generate a highly detailed and working demo of what he wants in 5 minutes using gen AI, the traditional software developer loses a ton of power in tech companies./signed as someone who writes software
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  quercus
  468 comments.... guys, guys, this is a Blue Sky post! Have we not learned that anyone who self-exiled to Blue Sky is wearing a "don't take me seriously" badge for our convenience?
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  xorgun
  I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme.The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly puritan viewpoints thinking they are holier and righter than anyone else. That’s the real plague
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  johnfn
  From a quick read it seems pretty obvious that the author doesn’t speak English as a native language. You can tell because some of the sentences are full of grammatical errors (ie probably written by the author) and some are not (probably AI-assisted).My guess is they wrote a thank you note and asked Claude to clean up the grammar, etc. This reads to me as a fairly benign gesture, no worse than putting a thank you note through Google Translate. That the discourse is polarized to a point that such a gesture causes Rob Pike to “go nuclear” is unfortunate.