This is a tangent, but ads have become a genuine cancer on our world, and it's sad to see how few people really think about it. While Rob Pike's involvement in this seems to be very minimal, the fact that Google is an advertising company through-and-through does weaken the words of such a powerful figure, at least a little bit.

If I had a choice between deleting all advertising in the world, or deleting all genAI that the author hates, I would go for advertising every single time. Our entire world is owned by ads now, with digital and physical garbage polluting the internet and every open space in the real world around us. The marketing is mind-numbing, yet persuasive and well-calculated, a result of psychologists coming up with the best ways to abuse a mind into just buying the product over the course of a century. A total ban on commercial advertising would undo some of the damage done to the internet, reduce pointless waste, lengthen product lifecycles, improve competition, temper unsustainable hype, cripple FOMO, make deceptive strategies nonviable. And all of that is why it will never be done.