> I don't appreciate his politeness and hedging. [..] That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.
> The correct response when someone oversteps your stated boundaries is not debate. It is telling them to stop. There is no one to convince about the legitimacy of your boundaries. They just are.
> When has engaging with trolls ever worked? When has "talking to an LLM" or human bot ever made it stop talking to you lol?
> Why should anyone put any more effort into a response than what it took to generate?
And others.
To me, these are all clear cases of "the correct response is not one that tries to persuade but that dismisses/ isolates".
If the question is how best to persuade, well, presumably "fuck off" isn't right? But we could disagree, maybe you think that ostracizing/ isolating people somehow convinces them that you're right.
I believe it is possible to make an argument that is dismissive of them, but is persuasive to the crowd.
"Fuck off clanker" doesn't really accomplish the latter, but if I were in the maintainer's shoes, my response would be closer to that than trying to reason with the bad faith AI user.
If you want to say "there's a middle ground" or something, or "you should tailor your response to the specific people who can be convinced", sure, that's fine. I feel like the maintainer did that, personally, and I don't think "fuck off clanker" is anywhere close to compelling to anyone who's even slightly sympathetic to use of AI, and it would almost certainly not be helpful as context for future agents, etc, but I guess if we agree on the core concept here - that expressing why someone should hold a belief is good if you want to convince someone of a belief, then that's something.
