this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
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[–] Kissaki@feddit.org 10 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

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 [?]
Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

It's not even a human thank you.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 15 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 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.

[–] Schmuppes@lemmy.today 15 points 10 hours ago

Yes, he understood it.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 6 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

The human mind will replace whats natural with technology.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 146 points 22 hours ago (7 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.

[–] MajinBlayze@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours 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

[–] darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 38 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (4 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.

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 20 points 15 hours ago (7 children)
[–] Bakkoda@lemmy.zip 4 points 12 hours ago

Yes. The person (s) who set the llm/ai up.

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[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 51 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

You're attributing a lot of agency to the fancy autocomplete, and that's big part of the overall problem.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 15 minutes ago

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.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 16 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 13 minutes ago

Indeed, there's a pretty big gulf between the competency needed to run a Lemmy client and the competency needed to understand the internal mechanics of a modern transformer.

Do you mind sharing where you draw your own understanding and confidence that they aren't capable of simulating thought processes in a scenario like what happened above?

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours 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.

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 30 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (4 children)

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

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 10 minutes ago

You seem very confident in this position. Can you share where you draw this confidence from? Was there a source that especially impressed upon you the impossibility of context comprehension in modern transformers?

If we're concerned about misconceptions and misinformation, it would be helpful to know what informs your surety that your own position about the impossibility of modeling that kind of complexity is correct.

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[–] BonkTheAnnoyed@lemmy.blahaj.zone 34 points 1 day 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.

[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 6 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours 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.

[–] darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I've read The Practice of Programming more times than I care to remember, so simple, so useful.

[–] slappyfuck@lemmy.ca 5 points 15 hours ago

All the folks from the UNIX tradition really are/were. MIT and Bell Labs were just amazing.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 134 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 27 points 21 hours ago

itsfoss is genuinely terrible and it was that way before AI even

[–] natecox@programming.dev 48 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well, I guess I will learn Go after all.

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 4 points 14 hours ago

I appreciate Pike's attitude, but it's like Go has ignored all the advancements in programming languages for the part 30 years

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/lies-we-tell-ourselves-to-keep-using-golang

4 years old article, but still relevant

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