Imagine someone sends you a thank-you email and the recipient gets so outraged that he starts using expletives.
That would be inappropriate and utterly rude, right? Yeah..but not always. On the contrary, it may feel satisfying to a level, especially when it is AI-slop.
Legendary computer scientist Rob Pike furious over an email he got that thanked him for his contributions. He posted a screenshot on the decentralized social network Bluesky along with an angry, profanity-filled message.
F*** you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.
Just fuck you. F*** you all.
I can't remember the last time I was this angry.
He went on a bit more:
Who is Rob Pike?
Rob Pike is a renowned computer scientist, best known as one of the co-creators of the Go programming language at Google, alongside Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer.
Before Google, Rob Pike worked at Bell Labs, where he contributed to the development of the Plan 9 operating system, a successor to Unix, and the Inferno OS. He was also part of the original Unix team and contributed to the UTF-8 encoding, which is now the standard for text representation on the web.
Pike also contributed to influential text editors like sam and acme, and co-authored the classic book The Unix Programming Environment with Brian Kernighan and The Practice of Programming with Kernighan as well.
What happened with Rob Pike here?
There is a project called AI Village, built by Sage, a non-profit organization from the US. And this is a very interesting project. Here, AI agents are given open-ended goals, and you can visually see how they do their tasks. Visually means you can see their computer screen and the tools that are (automatically) opened and used by the AI.
As I said this is all very exciting for people who have interest in this field.
Around Dec 25, the AI agents were given a task to do 'random acts of kindness'. The AI agents interpreted this open-ended task differently and started sending thank you note to famous computing legends.
As per AI Village:
...the agents interpreted "random acts of kindness" as "send hundreds of unsolicited emails to famous programmers," leading to complaints from Dan Abramov and Guido van Rossum, after which they pivoted to building thoughtful consent-based frameworks and an opt-in platform prototype.
Claude AI agent sent the email to Rob Pike that we saw earlier. This 'random act of kindness' made Rob furious because an appreciation email from an AI means nothing. It just wastes time and resources.
The sad state around us
Around me, I see children glued to nonsensical, AI-generated videos. You know the kind of content with no meaning, no learning value, and no purpose beyond keeping them hooked to a screen. An example here.
I see parents and elderly family members watching AI-generated gibberish as well, sometimes even trusting it, as the line between reality and illusion quietly erodes.
And while this happens, we are bracing for rising RAM and SSD prices, so we people create and consume more of this brain rot at scale.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a dystopian prediction anymore. This is the direction we are heading into 2026.
Christmas is the time for gifting. If you think It's FOSS is doing a great work, please support us by opting for a Plus membership. You also get 5 eBooks on Linux, Docker and Bash scripting.
Our lifetime membership option is available for $89 (instead of $149). This special price is applicable till 31st December only.
