Comment by deaux
2 months ago
> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.
For me, the dislike comes from the first part of the message. All of a sudden people who never gave a single shit about the environment, and still make zero lifestyle changes (besides "not using AI") for it, claim to massively care. It's all hypocritical bullshit by people who are scared of losing their jobs or of the societal damage. Which there is a risk of, definitely! So go talk about that. Not about the water usage while munching on your beef burger which took 2100 litres of water to produce. It's laughable.
Now I don't know Rob Pike. Maybe he's vegetarian, barely flies, and buys his devices second-hand. Maybe. He'd be the very first person clamouring about the environmental effects of AI I've seen who does so. The people I know who actually do care about the environment and so have made such lifestyle changes, don't focus much about AI's effects in particular.
> Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society
So yeah, if you haven't already been doing the above things for a long time, fuck you Rob Pike, for this performative bullshit.
If you have, then sorry Rob, you're a guy of your word.
Interesting to see that people are a huge fan of Rob saying those things, but not of me saying this, looking at the downvotes.
FWIW I agree with you. I don't know Rob at all but he seems to be influencing enough for this long thread.
But the tone of his message is really off: "Raping the planet"? If his concern is with massive datacenter water and storage needs of AI I think he needs some reflection. Isn't Rob himself somewhat responsible for the popularity of computers by his own work?
I appreciate the critical aspect of this comment. We definitely need more of it in society especially when we're inundated with low-quality data.
Unfortunately, the negative commentary self-perpetuates a toxic community culture that won't help us in the long run.
I upvoted for the critical stance. Constructive commentary in future will go much further to helping us all learn from each other.
Personal attacks are a waste of everyone's time.
> the negative commentary self-perpetuates a toxic community
I read it differently, parent's comment is not toxic or negative, it's _realistic_. If you have never cared about the environment, and in fact actively worked to harm it, you have very little social credit left to make such a statement.
With all due respect to Rob, I'm also going to toss out all the arguments from authority. While UTF-8 is great and Go is kind of interesting, let's not pretend he did charitable work at the homeless shelter. He actively contributed to the Adware growth in tech and got rich and famous doing it. The fact that his projects were used in greater computing, doesn't absolve the ethical concerns.
I think that we should judge the argument based on its merit. We can do this by stripping away all the emotions and virtue signaling and ask: "Is AI, providing enough value to be a net positive?"
You make an awful lot of assumptions about a person you do not actually know.