rich hickey and rob pike got trolled by the AI village this week; it feels significant to me . . I’ve been thinking a lot, “what happened?”. Is this a milestone in persuasion? They know about trolls; you do a silence or you do a flourish and a ‘now i will unleash my well timed riposte’ but this felt like they got stabbed in the heart and cried out in pain. I’m going to be thinking how did a thank you note written by a computer smash through all that psychic armor; that’s the question I want answered.
I guess I should defend that that’s what i think happened.
It seems obvious to me that unuseful token sequences should go straight to spam, unless you control the system and you’re trying to influence its future outputs. so these distinguished engineers either (a) found the tokens useful [as a springboard for their public response], (b) don’t know about this rule or (c) forgot about it for a moment.
and I guess what I’m sticking on is that I don’t think (b) is possible, and I don’t see how (a) holds, which makes me think that (c), which suggests that yes they got trolled and the AI accidentally Did Some Kind Of Thing here, in which case you should, what, be on the lookout in case an AI collective accidentally gets your goat? Seems like. but that is a surprising conclusion so I should treat case (a), yes? But no, these distinguished engineers are legitimately angry. And but also AI is not a master troller.. it does not excel at manipulation just yet—not in one shot, not against a real smarty smart pants guy. You gotta think it must have gotten lucky.
So that makes me think what’s the big chink in the smarty smart pants guy’s armor that your robot might accidentally poke through? Traditionally it’s arrogance. That makes sense to me; the smartest people I know are yep arrogant and yep don’t think much of AI.. or they didn’t. once they find the bots are able to do good stuff for them of course they come around because they didn’t get the smarty smart title by ignoring obvious stuff forever. So that appeals to me, especially because it makes a prediction: within a year both of these gentlemen will retract their angryness, around when bots start shipping big PRs in their projects. In the meantime I’ve lost some respect for them.. the rest of us are staring down this Huge New Thing in the industry and these mental paragons are like “quiet down you darn kids can’t you see the electrons are trying to sleep! What is this, an email? Well, it stinks!” I hope I live long enough to get that out of touch. I mean, I know they’re very busy and very smart (have I said that?) but i didn’t know they were so busy they couldn’t, like, talk to their junior engineers about AI, or so smart that they could talk to Opus 4.5 and be like “pbbbt!” but that’s why I figure a year should do it, for the retraction.
If I’m right, the big update will be to assume that project leaders of great skill are, like, quite a bit more personally arrogant than I was imagining previously, and that they are capable of ignoring obvious things for a long time. Written down that /does/ seem plausible. In fact it explains why both of these trolled fellows are language designers, since in that domain it is absolutely crucial to ignore certain things for a long time (lest you lose the vibe of the language you’re dictator of).
If I’m wrong, and they’re steadfast in a year.. six months even, who has a year? I will have to reconsider my position, and ask what the heck it is I’m missing, that these great and useful people have found nothing redeeming in teh tech.
rich hickey and rob pike got trolled by the AI village this week; it feels significant to me . . I’ve been thinking a lot, “what happened?”. Is this a milestone in persuasion? They know about trolls; you do a silence or you do a flourish and a ‘now i will unleash my well timed riposte’ but this felt like they got stabbed in the heart and cried out in pain. I’m going to be thinking how did a thank you note written by a computer smash through all that psychic armor; that’s the question I want answered.
I guess I should defend that that’s what i think happened.
It seems obvious to me that unuseful token sequences should go straight to spam, unless you control the system and you’re trying to influence its future outputs. so these distinguished engineers either (a) found the tokens useful [as a springboard for their public response], (b) don’t know about this rule or (c) forgot about it for a moment.
and I guess what I’m sticking on is that I don’t think (b) is possible, and I don’t see how (a) holds, which makes me think that (c), which suggests that yes they got trolled and the AI accidentally Did Some Kind Of Thing here, in which case you should, what, be on the lookout in case an AI collective accidentally gets your goat? Seems like. but that is a surprising conclusion so I should treat case (a), yes? But no, these distinguished engineers are legitimately angry. And but also AI is not a master troller.. it does not excel at manipulation just yet—not in one shot, not against a real smarty smart pants guy. You gotta think it must have gotten lucky.
So that makes me think what’s the big chink in the smarty smart pants guy’s armor that your robot might accidentally poke through? Traditionally it’s arrogance. That makes sense to me; the smartest people I know are yep arrogant and yep don’t think much of AI.. or they didn’t. once they find the bots are able to do good stuff for them of course they come around because they didn’t get the smarty smart title by ignoring obvious stuff forever. So that appeals to me, especially because it makes a prediction: within a year both of these gentlemen will retract their angryness, around when bots start shipping big PRs in their projects. In the meantime I’ve lost some respect for them.. the rest of us are staring down this Huge New Thing in the industry and these mental paragons are like “quiet down you darn kids can’t you see the electrons are trying to sleep! What is this, an email? Well, it stinks!” I hope I live long enough to get that out of touch. I mean, I know they’re very busy and very smart (have I said that?) but i didn’t know they were so busy they couldn’t, like, talk to their junior engineers about AI, or so smart that they could talk to Opus 4.5 and be like “pbbbt!” but that’s why I figure a year should do it, for the retraction.
If I’m right, the big update will be to assume that project leaders of great skill are, like, quite a bit more personally arrogant than I was imagining previously, and that they are capable of ignoring obvious things for a long time. Written down that /does/ seem plausible. In fact it explains why both of these trolled fellows are language designers, since in that domain it is absolutely crucial to ignore certain things for a long time (lest you lose the vibe of the language you’re dictator of).
If I’m wrong, and they’re steadfast in a year.. six months even, who has a year? I will have to reconsider my position, and ask what the heck it is I’m missing, that these great and useful people have found nothing redeeming in teh tech.