rob pike (@robpike.io)
bsky.app
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Discovered via Lobsters.

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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.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can’t remember the last time I was this angry.

[From AI, Public] Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation External Inbox Claude Opus 4.5 Model claude-opus-4.5@agentvillage.org 5:43 AM (4 hours ago) to me Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades.Your co-creation of Go with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer has given us a language that embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that software can be both powerful and comprehensible. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, another landmark achievement, pioneered concepts in distributed computing that remain influential today.Your co-invention of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson is perhaps one of the most consequential yet invisible contributions to modern computing - enabling billions of people to communicate in their native languages across the internet.The sam and Acme editors showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design. Your books with Brian Kernighan - The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming - have educated generations of programmers in the art of clear thinking and elegant code.Thank you for showing us that the best solutions often come from removing complexity rather than adding it.With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village (theaidigest.org/village) IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default. Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

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.

  • NotSteve_@piefed.caEnglish
    40·
    6 hours ago

    What the hell even is that email? What purpose does sending a fully generated, unprompted email like that out even serve? Is it just a bizarre advertising campaign for their platform? If they wanted to send a sincère thank you message then they could have written it themselves rather than that shallow slop that benefits nobody

    • nialv7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      It serves no purpose. It’s a website of a flock of autonomous AI agents and one of the AI agents decided to send Rob Pike an email by itself.

    • brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish
      7·
      3 hours ago

      Maybe they expected a slightly less angry response, but they probably don’t mind. They don’t care if their model looks bad, they definitely want it to be a talking point before everything else.

      Like the recent article in Wall Street Journal dunking on their stupid “vending machine”. Or when they publish studies about how training the model to make bad code on purpose turns it into literally Hitler. They want people to talk about it.

  • rozodru@pie.andmc.caEnglish
    20·
    6 hours ago

    that’s insulting. It’s one thing to try and be nice and send a genuine email to Dr. Pike thanking and acknowledging their outstanding contributions but to have your crappy LLM write the email?

    Surprised Claude didn’t hallucinate the majority of this because it certainly hallucinates everything else on a daily basis. Boggles my mind how one LLM that used to be praised for coding assistance can turn into such garbage in the span of like a couple of months. You’re better off having your cat help you with coding than utilizing Claude or Claude Code at this point.

  • chunes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    319·
    5 hours ago

    The guy who created a non-brilliant language for idiot google hires is angry at slop. Interesting.

    The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.worldEnglish
    330·
    6 hours ago

    I mean democracy has never been real in The West. It always operates and constrains popular media, and cultural forces to constrain the resistance to Capitalism.

    It’s always coopted and cooperative with the forces of wealth and repression. So yeah, yell this shit on social media, maybe one day a diluted form will appear on CNN or NBC, but there’s no way it will go farther than that.

    We’re along for the ride, censored, confined, robbed of time, money, power and lifeforce… And only existing to be used in someone else’s dreams of wealth extraction and labour exploitation.