This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
While as a struggling inventor I think these people should always know where their inventions lead to, it is nice that finally woke-up. As a former degreed & certified from our stat’s most respected education higher school education school this is what happens with our educations systems are setup, “organized”, “improved” & “maintained” for Capitalism.
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.
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
I don't understand the point of sending the original e-mail.
There never was any point to it, it was done by an LLM, a computer program incapable of understanding. That's why it was so infuriating.
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.
All the folks from the UNIX tradition really are/were. MIT and Bell Labs were just amazing.
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.
For a non-native speaker: what is sloppy about it? Genuinely curious.
"embodies the elegance of simplicity"
corporate speak that doesn't mean anything. Also If you are talking to the creator of a programming language they already know that. That was the goal of the language.
"Plan 9 from bell labs, another landmark achievement"
the sentence is framed as if its a school essay where the teacher asked the question "describe the evolution of unix and linux in 300 words"
"The sam and Acme editors which showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design"
Again explaining how good software is to the author. Also note how this sentence could have been a question in a school essay: "What are the design philosopies behind the sam and acme editors?"
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.
The human mind will replace whats natural with technology.
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
