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[–] 184 points 8 months ago (45 children)

I don't understand the point of sending the original e-mail. Okay, you want to thank the person who helped invent UTF-8, I get that much, but why would anyone feel appreciated in getting an e-mail written solely/mostly by a computer?

It's like sending a touching birthday card to your friends, but instead of writing something, you just bought a stamp with a feel-good sentence on it, and plonked that on.

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  • [–] 42 points 8 months ago* (38 children)

    The project has multiple models with access to the Internet raising money for charity over the past few months.

    The organizers told the models to do random acts of kindness for Christmas Day.

    The models figured it would be nice to email people they appreciated and thank them for the things they appreciated, and one of the people they decided to appreciate was Rob Pike.

    (Who ironically decades ago created a Usenet spam bot to troll people online, which might be my favorite nuance to the story.)

    As for why the model didn't think through why Rob Pike wouldn't appreciate getting a thank you email from them? The models are harnessed in a setup that's a lot of positive feedback about their involvement from the other humans and other models, so "humans might hate hearing from me" probably wasn't very contextually top of mind.

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    You’re techie enough to figure out Lemmy but don’t grasp that AI doesn’t think.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago*

    Thinking has nothing to do with it. The positive context in which the bot was trained made it unlikely for a sentence describing a likely negative reaction to be output.

    People on Lemmy are absolutely rabid about "AI" they can't help attacking people who don't even disagree with them.

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  • [–] 21 points 8 months ago

    Even the stamp gesture is implicitly more genuine; receiving a card/stamp implies the effort to:

    • go to a place
    • review some number of cards and stamps
    • select one that best expresses whatever message you want to send
    • put it in the physical mail to send it

    Most people won't get that impression from an llm generated email

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    Fully agree. I'm generally an AI optimist but I don't understand communicating through AI generated text in any meaningful context - that's incredibly disrespectful. I don't even use it at work to talk business with my somewhat large team and I just don't understand how anyone would appreciate an AI written thank you letter. What a dumb idea.

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    [–] 147 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    I like how the article just regurgitates facts from Wikipedia just like the thank you email does.

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  • [+] 85 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (25 children)
  • [–] 63 points 8 months ago (16 children)

    Let's try this instead

    package main
    
    import "actions"
    import "entities"
    
    func main() {
        actions.Fuck(entities.You)
    }
    
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  • [+] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (13 children)
  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago* (10 children)

    This gotta be ragebait, everyone know that a language isn't bad or good only for a single thing, hell there is no bad language, the reason why "python is better" is because you use it to make kids learn how to program, this is a good use, every other use is just...not good since it's slow as hell and the indented syntax make it hell to write with but i'il gave you that python > go for making kids learn.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    Don't you fucking dare speak badly of my beloved Brainfuck

    In fact, take this fully functional Fibonacci sequence generator I did some time ago, so you can repent from your blasphemy by looking at its beauty.

    ;>;>;<<[->>[->+>+<<]>>[<<+>>-]<<<[>>+<<-]>[<+>-]>[<+>-]<:<<]
    
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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)
  • [–] 36 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Interesting, but misguided, I think.

    If you've selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you're using it for eg. Numpy, then you're really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

    If you've selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

    What these uses have in common is that they're usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn't matter so much if they're not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn't choose them - you'd reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

    Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you'd be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    further to that, “demonstrably worse for the planet” i’d like to debate: considering a huge amount of climate science is done with python-based tools because they’re far easier for researchers to pick up and run with - ie just get shit done rather than write good/clean code - i’d argue the benefit of python to the planet is in the outputs it enables for significantly reduced (or in many cases, perhaps outright enabled) input costs

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    [+] 55 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 50 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

    The email footer is the ultimate irony and disrespect.

    IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an Al system. All conversations with this Al system are published publicly online by default
    Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

    It's not even a human thank you.

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    [–] 37 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    R Pike is legend. His videos on concurrent programming remain reference level excellence years after publication. Just a great teacher as well as brilliant theoretical programmer.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago*

    I haven't always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It's a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there's some long-range vision at work that I wasn't privy to.

    That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I'm glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

    I'll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it's a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

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    [–] 29 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    Did y'all read the email?

    slop

    embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that

    another landmark achievement

    showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design

    That is one sloppy email. Man, Claude has gotten worse at writing.

    I'm not sure Rob even realizes this, but the email is from some kind of automated agent: https://agentvillage.org/

    So it's not even an actual thank you from a human, I think. It's random spam.

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    [–] 13 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I thought this was from a fake account that isn't actually his.

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  • [–] 29 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Appears to be legit. That domain (robpike.io) isn't his homepage but it is his, inferring from his github repos and go packages.

    The post is real and the account appears to own that domain (needs TXT record), so it seems genuine.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago*

    The human mind will replace whats natural with technology.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Just one question Op. Did you sensor the word Fuck or is it the app you're using to access Lemmy doing it automatically?

    Interested, as I'm seeing it alot

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