Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

> I totally understand his rage.

Do you really? What follows makes me doubt it a bit.

> Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful,

Indeed, but that's quite minor.

> So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation:

Can't you see it? That would likely be a huge facepalm from rob pike here!

He writes more or less "fuck you people with your planet killing AI horror machine", and here you are, "what happened? I asked a planet killing horror machine (the same one btw) and...". No. Really. The bigger issue is not the email, or even the initiative behind, which is terrible, but just a symptom. And this:

> Don’t unleash agents on the world like this

> I don’t like this at all.

You're not wrong, but the cynic in me reads this as: " don't do this, it makes AI, which I love, look bad". Absolutely uncharitable view, I know, but really, the meaningless email is infuriating but hardly the important part.

This makes the post feel pretty myopic to me. You are spending your time on a minor symptom, you don't touch what fundamentally annoys rob pike (the planet killing part), and worse, you engaged in exactly what rob pike has just strongly rejected. You may not have and it may be you deliberately avoided touching the substance of robe pike's complaint because you disagree with it, but it feels like you missed the point. I would be in rob pike's position, it's possible I would feel infuriated by your article because through my anti ai message, I would have hated triggering even more AI use.

“AI is killing the planet” is basically made up. It’s not. Not even slightly. Like all industries, it uses some resources, but this is not a bad thing.

People who are mad about AI just reach for the environmental argument to try to get the moral highground.

it does not use "some" resources

it uses a fuck ton of resources[0]

and instead of reducing energy production and emissions we will now be increasing them, which, given current climate prediction models, is in fact "killing the planet"

[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...

This, and the insane amount of resources (energy and materials) to build the disposable hardware. And all the waste it's producing.

Simon,

> I find Claude Code personally useful and aim to help people understand why that is.

No offense, but we don't need your help really. You went on a mission to teach people to use LLMs, I don't know why you would feel the urge but it's not too late to quit doing this, and even teach them not to and why.

Given everything I've learned over the last ~3 years I think encouraging professional programmers (and increasingly other knowledge workers) not to learn AI tools would be genuinely unethical.

Like being an accountant in 1985 who learns to use Lotus-123 and then tells their peers that they should actively avoid getting a PC because this "spreadsheet" thing will all blow over pretty soon.

I agree that if you're going to do coding, using LLMs will become as commonplace as using a text editor, and it's valuable to help people upskill.

And as much as I find CC useful in my own work, I'm unhappy because I believe that AI -- actually not AI itself, which has its place, but the race to use AI to enrich corporations by replacing human labor, and to control what will become the most powerful tool ever known for informing, entertaining, monitoring, and controlling, the human race -- is very much a net negative for humanity and even our planet.

Data centers account for roughly ~1% of global electricity demand and ~.5% of CO2 emissions, as per your link. That's for data centers as a whole, as IEA and some other orgs group "data-centres, AI, and cryptocurrency" as a single aggregate unit. Alone, AI accounts for roughly ~10-14% of a given data center's total energy. Cloud deployments make up ~54%, traditional compute around ~35%.

The fact is that AI, by any definable metric, is only a sliver of the global energy supply right now. Outside the social media hype, what actual climate scientists and orgs talk about isn't (mostly) what AI is consuming now, it's what the picture looks like within the next decade. THAT is the real horror show if we don't pull policy levers. Anyone who says that AI energy consumption is "killing the planet" is either intentionally misleading the argument or unbelievably misinformed. What's actually, factually "killing the planet" are energy/power, heavy industry (steel, cement, chemicals), transport, and agriculture/land use. AI consumption is a rounding error compared to these. We'll ignore the fact AI is actually being used to manage DC energy efficiency and has reduced the energy consumption at some hyperscale DC's (Amazon, AliBaba, Alphabet, Microsoft) by up to 40%, making it one of the only industry sectors that has a real, non-trivial chance at net-zero if deployed at scale.

The most interesting thing about this whole paradigm is just how deep of a grasp AI (specifically LLMs) have on the collective social gullet. It's like nothing I've ever been a part of. When Deep Water Horizon blew up and spilled 210M gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, people (rightfully so) got pissed at BP and Transocean.

Nobody, from what I remember, got angry at the actual, physical metal structure.

> what actual climate scientists and orgs talk about isn't (mostly) what AI is consuming now, it's what the picture looks like within the next decade

that's the point - obviously the planet is not dying _today_, but at the rate at which we are not decreasing emissions, we will kill it. So no, "killing the planet" is not misinformed or misleading.

> Nobody, from what I remember, got angry at the actual, physical metal structure.

Nobody's mad at LLMs either. It's the companies that control them and that are fueling the AI "arms race", that are the problem.

>So no, "killing the planet" is not misinformed or misleading.

When we talk as if a few years of AI build‑out are “killing the planet” while long‑standing sectors that make up double‑digit shares of global emissions are treated as the natural background, we’re not doing climate politics, we’re doing scapegoating. The numbers just don’t support that narrative.

The IEA and others are clear: the trajectory is worrying (data‑center demand doubling, AI the main driver), but present‑day AI still accounts for a single‑digit percent of electricity, not a primary causal driver.

>Nobody's mad at LLMs either. It's the companies that control them and that are fueling the AI "arms race", that are the problem.

That’s what people say, yet when asked or given the opportunity, the literature shows they’re perfectly willing to “harm” and “punish” LLMs and social robots.

Corporations are absolutely the primary locus of power and responsibility (read: root of all evil) here, none of this denies AI’s energy risks, social harms, or the likelihood that deployments will push more people into precarity (read: homelessness) in 2026. The point is about where the anger actually lands in practice.

Even when it’s narratively framed as being “about” companies and climate policy, that anger is increasingly channeled through interactions with the models themselves. People insult them, threaten them, talk about “punishing” them, and argue over what they “deserve”, that's not "Nobody being mad at the LLMs", that's treating something as a socially legible agent.

So people can say they’re not mad at AI models, but their behavior tells a very different story.

TL;DR: Between those who think LLMs have “inner lights” and feelings and deserve moral patient‑hood, and those who insist they’re just “stochastic parrots” that are “killing the planet,” both camps have already installed them as socially legible agents and treat them accordingly. As AI “relationships” grow, so do hate‑filled interactions framed in terms of “harm,” abuse, and “punishment” directed at the systems/models themselves.

[https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/article...]

[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9951994/]

[https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/article...]

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002772...]

[https://fortune.com/2025/10/30/being-mean-to-chatgpt-can-boo...]

Two things can be true at once:

1. I think that sending "thank you" emails (or indeed any other form of unsolicited email) from AI is a terrible use of that technology, and should be called out.

2. I find Claude Code personally useful and aim to help people understand why that is. In this case I pulled off a quite complex digital forensics project with it in less than 15 minutes. Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare.

I was very aware of the tension involved in using AI tools to investigate a story about unethical AI usage. I made that choice deliberately.

> Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare.

Then maybe you shouldn’t have done it at all. It’s not like the world asked or imbued you with the responsibility for that investigation. It’s not like it was imperative to get to the bottom of this and you were the only one able to do it.

Your defence is analogous to all the worst tech bros who excuse their bad actions with “if we did it right/morally/legally, it wouldn’t be viable”. Then so be it, maybe it shouldn’t be viable.

You did it because you wanted to. It was for yourself. You saw Pike’s reaction and deliberately chose to be complicit in the use of technology he decried, further adding to his frustration. It was a selfish act.

I knew what I was doing. I don't know if I'd describe it as selfish so much as deliberately provocative.

I agree with Rob Pike that sending emails like that from unreviewed AI systems is extremely rude.

I don't agree that the entire generative AI ecosystem deserves all of those fuck yous.

So I hit back in a very subtle way by demonstrating a little-known but extremely effective application of generative AI - for digital forensics. I made sure anyone reading could follow along and see exactly what I did.

I think this post may be something of a Rorschach test. If you have strong negative feelings about generative AI you're likely to find what I did offensive. If you have favorable feelings towards generative AI you're more likely to appreciate my subtle dig.

So yes, it was a bit of a dick move. In the overall scheme of bad things humans do I don't feel like it's pretty far over the "this is bad" line.

> I don't agree that the entire generative AI ecosystem deserves all of those fuck yous.

Yes, I’ve noticed. You are frequently baffled that incredibly obvious and predictable things happen, like this or the misuse of “vibe coding” as a term.

That’s what makes your actions frustrating, your repeated glaring inability to understand the criticisms of the technology refering to the inevitable misuse, the lack of understanding that of course this is what it is going to be used for, and no amount of your blog posts is going to change it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398241

Your deliberate provocation didn’t accomplish good. Agreed, it was not by any means close to the worst things humans do, but it was still a public dick move (to borrow your words) which accomplished nothing.

One day, as will happen to most of us, you or someone close will be bitten hard by ignorant or malicious use outside your control. Perhaps then you’ll reflect on your role in it.

> One day, as will happen to most of us, you or someone close will be bitten hard by ignorant or malicious use outside your control.

Agreed. That's why I invest so much effort trying to help people understand the security risks that are endemic to how most of these systems work: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/

Useful idiots believe that these systems have "nascent emotions" or agency, or emergent behaviour [1]. So the will push for more and more idiotic uses of these systems. These behaviours need to be called out and shamed. And proper behaviours taught.

[1] Prime example in this very discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395196

As someone from the Humanities who isn't in the tech industry, I'm just absolutely electrified by how strong the division this technology has generated in the social dynamic is. Like I mean second-order and third-order effects. Human beings aren't even always able to create a rift this deep. It's fascinating.

Look at who you're responding to. You won't get through to him.

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