Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI
imgur.com100 points by signa11 an hour ago
100 points by signa11 an hour ago
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.
I'm Assuming his Twitter is private right now, but his Mastodon does share the same event (minus the "nuclear"): https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/115782101216369455
And a screenshot just in case (archiving Mastodon seems tricky) : https://imgur.com/a/9tmo384
Seems the event was true, if nothing else.
EDIT: alternative screenshot: https://ibb.co/xS6Jw6D3
Apologies for not having a proper archive. I'm not at a computer and I wasn't able to archive the page through my phone. Not sure if that's my issue or Mastodon's
> Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link)
I can see it using this site:
This argument always felt insincere to me. What power do big tech companies have and why do you have a problem with it? They are simply providing a service you didn’t have access to.
For some context, this is the a long time Googler who's feats include major contributions to GoLang and Co-creating UTF-8.
To call him the Oppenheimer of Gemini would be overly dramatic. But he definitely had access to the Manhattan project.
>What power do big tech companies have and why do you have a problem with
Do you want the gist of the last 20 years or so, or are you just being rhetorical? im sure there will be much literature over time that will dissect such a question to its atoms. Whether it be a cautionary tale or a retrospective of how a part is society fell? Well, we still have time to write that story.
I remember a time when users had a great deal more control over their computers. Big tech companies are the ones who used their power to take that control away. You, my friend are the insincere one.
If you’re young enough not to remember a time before forced automatic updates that break things, locked devices unable to run software other than that blessed by megacorps, etc. it would do you well to seek out a history lesson.
Umm are you being serious? just look of the tech company titans in this photo in this trump inauguration - they are literally a stand in for putins oligarchs at this point
https://www.livenowfox.com/news/billionaires-trump-inaugurat...
> What power do big tech companies have
Aftermarket control, for one. You buy an Android/iPhone or Mac/Windows device and get a "free" OS along with it. Then, your attention subsidizes the device through advertising, bundled services and cartel-style anti-competitive price fixing. OEMs have no motivation not to harm the market in this way, and users aren't entitled to a solution besides deluding themselves into thinking the grass really is greener on the other side.
What power did Microsoft wield against Netscape? They could alter the deal, and make Netscape pray it wasn't altered further.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I fould golang to be one of the worst target for llms. PHP seems to always work, python works if the packages are not made up but go fails often. Trying to get inertia and the Buffalo framework to work together gave the llm trama.
I haven’t found this to be the case… LLMs just gave me a lot of Nil pointers
It isn't perfect, but it has been better than Python for me so far.
Elixir has also been working surprisingly well for me lately.
Hear hear
You spend a career automating things then decide "no, that's too much" when your personal threshold is eclipsed. You don't like the look of the paint as it begins to dry.
Can you imagine trying to explain to someone a 100 years from now we tried to stop AI because of training data. It will sound completely absurd.
Don't use imgur, it blocks half of the Internet.
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?):
> 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/
He also said:
> When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing.
It does say in the follow up tweet "To the others, I apologize for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."
Good energy, but we definitely need to direct it at policy if wa want any chance at putting the storm back in the bottle. But we're about 2-3 major steps away from even getting to the actual policy part.
Encryption is the key!
I appreciate though that the majority of cloud storage providers fall short, perhaps deliberately, of offering a zero knowledge service (where they backup your data but cannot themselves read it.)
"I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault"