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.
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.
You're attributing a lot of agency to the fancy autocomplete, and that's big part of the overall problem.
You seem pretty confident in your position. Do you mind sharing where this confidence comes from?
Was there a particular paper or expert that anchored in your mind the surety that a trillion paramater transformer organizing primarily anthropomorphic data through self-attention mechanisms wouldn't model or simulate complex agency mechanics?
I see a lot of sort of hyperbolic statements about transformer limitations here on Lemmy and am trying to better understand how the people making them are arriving at those very extreme and certain positions.
That's the fun thing: burden of proof isn't on me. You seem to think that if we throw enough numbers at the wall, the resulting mess will become sentient any time now. There is no indication of that. The hypothesis that you operate on seems to be that complexity inevitably leads to not just any emerged phenomenon, but also to a phenomenon that you predicted would emerge. This hypotheses was started exclusively on idea that emerged phenomena exist. We spent significant amount of time running world-wide experiment on it, and the conclusion so far, if we peel the marketing bullshit away, is that if we spend all the computation power in the world on crunching all the data in the world, the autocomplete will get marginally better in some specific cases. And also that humans are idiots and will anthropomorphize anything, but that's a given.
It doesn't mean this emergent leap is impossible, but mainly because you can't really prove the negative. But we're no closer to understanding the phenomenon of agency than we were hundred years ago.
As has been pointed out to you, there is no thinking involved in an LLM. No context comprehension. Please don't spread this misconception.
Edit: a typo
You’re techie enough to figure out Lemmy but don’t grasp that AI doesn’t think.
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.
Even the stamp gesture is implicitly more genuine; receiving a card/stamp implies the effort to:
Most people won't get that impression from an llm generated email
Fine, I won't send you a bday card this year.
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.
I like how the article just regurgitates facts from Wikipedia just like the thank you email does.
itsfoss is genuinely terrible and it was that way before AI even
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.
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.
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.
Did y'all read the email?
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.
Yes, he understood it.
Ironically Go is such a shite verbose language that basically everyone I know who has to work with it will use an llm code-assistant tool to avoid having to write all the boilerplate themselves.
I know of no other language that comes close to prompting the level of LLM-dependency that Go inspires.
Edit: well, seems like this goes against the popular consensus but I stand by my guns if the down votes are from average Go enjoyers. If, on the other hand, the down votes stem from the sentiment that even Go should not be vibe coded, I can at least agree with that, but who knows what jimmies I've rustled
Dude, weird ass comment. You can share your opinions but you don’t have to be negative about it. Remember your opinions is truth (if is) not fact. Like more languages, GO is a tool and it has its purposes. There is no one tool fits all….. except duct tape.
Hey, here's my downvote.
I placed it not because I'm angry or disagree with your original statement, but because you have already acquired several downvotes and I just feel peer pressure to downvote you to hell
I upvoted you because I’m annoyed that downvotes often turn into a pack of chickens ganging up on a wounded chicken and pecking it to death. I usually upvote in this situation unless the downvotes are clearly deserved. Otherwise, I use downvotes sparingly and instead withhold my upvote if I don’t agree. I’m happy to get pecked myself to fight back against dickheads who overuse the downvote button in the same manner certain people overuse their car’s horn.
That being said, I don’t particularly enjoy programming in Go because of weird semantics and because of its missing language features like string interpolation and enums, as well as its use of pointers, which I find to be a lot of busy work with little benefit most of the time. I do actually agree with Go’s oft criticized error handling because it forces you to explicitly consider how to deal with every possible error, which I think is a good thing, though to your point, LLMs can reduce the workload here. Go’s concurrency and speed make it a good choice in many cases, though I’ll usually stick with something else if I don’t absolutely need Go’s benefits.
I thought this was from a fake account that isn't actually his.
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.
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
Gee Rob, don't hold back; tell us how you really feel
While bro uses Gmail though
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all make it near impossible to host your own email server. Mail will simply get lost.
Yes, we live in an age where email only works properly if you use a service from a large entity using weird badly-defined email security protocols that they invented.
This is the reality.
I host my own mail server with mailcow and it’s easier than ever
Long gone are the days of manually configuring postfix
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
