The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.
Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
In this specific situation, it's not really a case of using an LLM to replace real interaction. No real person set out to write to Rob Pike, they just let an LLM do whatever and it had then eventually chosen to send an email to Rob Pike, among other people, based on its existing data. To me, the wrongdoing here is about the spammy pestering, because the email wasn't written by anyone and therefore isn't really expressing anything material, but it's not replacing anyone here.
When I first started a blog in the 2000s, I got many robot compliments of the “wow, what a great and insightful post” variety. Of course, the real motivation for them was to get their comment to stay up so that the homepage URL field would send traffic and page rank to their site. It didn’t take an AI agent, just a template message, and it was equally unwelcome then
Rob over-reacted? How would you like it if you were a known figure and your efforts to remain attentive to the general public lead to this?
Your openness weaponized in such deluded way by some randomizing humans who have so little to say that they would delegate their communication to GPT's?
> while Claude Opus spent 22 sessions trying to click "send" on a single email, and Gemini 2.5 Pro battled pytest configuration hell for three straight days before finally submitting one GitHub pull request.
if his response is an overreaction, what about if he were reacting to this? it's sort of the same thing, so IMO it's not an overreaction at all.
It would be just he uses a similar email, say last+first@gmail and gives it out incorrectly at times. Or people assume it is his. My friend has a first+last@gmail and I constantly confuse the order (or was it last+first? idk), a decade later. So you two are just seeing a subset of incorrectly addressed email, imo.
I remember a decade+ ago when this was discovered as some issue and caused a bunch of drama in the blogosphere.
after two decades my muscle memory in the terminal is pretty important. that + with keyboard shortcuts ive had multiple jobs ask me to "slow down" when doing screenshares as everything moves so fast.
> I'm currently the type of person that is always plugged into noise (music, podcast, YT). It is rare that I sit in silence.
Not directed towards you, but this brings up a thought I often ponder. I have friends and people around me who are plugged in 24/7. I don't really think they spend any time, what so ever, on internal thought or introspection / reflection. I think it really affects them. The "default mode network" as its neuroscience has coined it. No time to analyze the past or correlate cause with effect. Lives surrendered to notifications and scrolling the same 3 feeds, day in and day out. I don't even know what to say to them sometimes.
On the flip side, I do accept people for who they are. If this is what they want, and they enjoy it, then whatever. But it can be frustrating trying to communicate or interact with them.
There's an orthogonal aspect to it: control. I know I need some amount of noise to stay grounded and look outwards instead of collapsing into infinite reflection regression - but I also need control over that noise. That is, it needs to be my noise. Living in noise introduced by people around me is not reinvigorating, it's draining and depressing.
I couldn't agree more. Especially noise introduced by people around me. Drains me.
I'm not on a high horse either, I do succumb to modern temptations. I have a YouTube addiction, but its all educational / a topic I'm learning / a hobby / etc. I just got my Recap and somehow I have watched 4500 different channels this year, that's saying nothing of # of videos or watchtime. I was pretty shocked.
Still though, I purposefully make time to be alone and just daydream or relax and ponder. I don't use my phone while driving (besides maps etc). I try to put my phone away when others are around (unless we're sharing memes or photos or you know, actively using our phones together). I'm not a snob, go ahead and reply to your significant other while we're eating dinner - that's understandable. When I watch movies or TV (that I care about, I do keep old scifi on in the background while on the PC or doing stuff around the house) I am actively watching and do not touch my phone, and if I do need to I pause first.
The worst part? When you know someone is on their phone 24/7, phone in hand at all times, and you can't get them to respond to your calls or texts.
I feel like I'm bragging or showing off or something but I'm really not, just interested in how people interact with their devices, and their life.
> I do accept people for who they are. If this is what they want, and they enjoy it, then whatever.
You do you, but you're not obliged to accept someone for who they are if who they are is a brainless wastoid. I recommend minimizing the time wasted on zombies in favor of seeking out people who still value their brains.
Depending on how you categorize people into being a "brainless wastoid", that could potentially shrink some people's interactions with other humans to literal 0...
I see this type of sentiment reflected all over the internet as well, avoiding people because they don't fit whatever type of mold, I think this type of mentality is terrible. Not saying you gotta go out and find someone who has 14 hours of screen on time a day and hang out with them, but even just lumping people into the category of "brainless wastoid" feels to me very much like bordering on dehumanization.
the term "brainless wastoid" doesnt come across as dehumanization to you? thats strange. I think we are okay with taking people without brain activity off life support, so it certainly screams dehumanization to me.
> You are the average of the people you spend your time with. To spend time with thoughtless people is to drag yourself down.
this is a popular thing to say, that PROBABLY shouldn't be taken THIS literally, if i spend time with an idiot relative on a holiday, am i suddenly a dumber person? Is it suddenly your obligation to avoid certain gatherings because you know some of the people there aren't gonna meet your minimum standards of intelligence? If your child ends up not really being all that smart.. just hard abandon them? How literal should this statement be taken?
> Humans are just animals with a superiority complex.
I feel you are just attempting to avoid defending your actual stances tbh.
I actually AGREE that humans are not that special... however, that applies to literally every single human. what you are doing is isolating groups of humans, which is something drastically different.
We can be not special on a grand scale, but we still must all live together.
Geotargeting. I live in a semi rural area. My town has 1.1% of kids who are classified as ESL. There’s a much larger town near us that has 32% ESL and 70+% of Hispanic descent.
We get podcast and very infrequent YouTube ads in Spanish. So does everyone else we’ve talked to. When you use IP address databases it almost always says our IP addresses are in the other town.
I looked up the stats and apparently my metro area (Detroit) is about 4.5 million people, with 7-10% of them speaking Spanish or having Spanish ancestry.
I do think it makes sense their ad algo messes up once in awhile.
https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5
At least it keeps track
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