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Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

#111

Post by johnea »

thallavajhula wrote: post #8

It's the current hotness in tech. HN has always included trending tech topics. Ever since HN started, I've seen - * Explosion of social media * JavaScript libraries and the frontend revolution to modernizing the web and browsers * Mobile apps * Crypto * Machine Learning and now, AI & LLMs. The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, be…

It's interesting that every entry in your bullet list is a tech that I find to have had an overall negative impact on society.

Every one of those examples is a genereal tech that could be used for better or worse, but that have almost exclusively been used to more effectively exploit users.

As is always the case, what's good for the VC investor is not necessarily good for everyone...

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

#112

Post by jcgrillo »

3vidence wrote: post #103
mattmanser wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot? I personally found Copilot pretty useless. And very distracting trying to constantly incorrectly guess what I was doing. I do use chatgpt/claude for quickly creating first draftw of frontend pages as I find it quicker, but I have to do extensive edits to get it right. But anything non-boiler plate I am faster writing it myself. I have also quickly found it is a stochastic parrot but that's ok for boilerplate…

Thank you! Maybe there is just a divide between engineers working on deep complex topics and those trying to setup their 17th Django app. LLMs are a totally useful tool! They definitely help me write all the bash scripts I consistently forget. But the deep stuff where the value lies? It starts to fall apart quickly.

You put this better than I could have. I am really impressed by LLMs' ability to respond to a prompt with code which compiles and runs. That's a hugely impressive result. But it doesn't mean the technorapture is just around the corner. There's a vast gulf between what LLMs can do currently and what skilled people do, and it's not "obvious" that there's some path from here to a world in which LLMs become some kind of superintelligent engineer-gods. It could be physically impossible, for all we know. That's why the pseudoreligious twaddle gets under my skin so much--it's the naive assumption that progress is linear, instead of a jumpy "fits and starts" process of accidental discoveries building on one another (or encountering dead ends). There's no way to know whether these things can be improved enough to be truly useful for real work and pretending it's "right around the corner" won't necessarily make it happen.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

#113

Post by 3vidence »

peterashford wrote: post #108

I would say no, but I am certainly skipping a lot of content

I always felt like part of the magic of HN was it's signal to noise ratio compared to sites.

Just feels a lot closer to my Reddit feed these days and I'm trying to stop reading that too.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

#116

Post by 3vidence »

captn3m0 wrote: post #77
3vidence wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote my own front end for HN using Flutter (just a pet project) specifically so I could have dark mode and a topic filter. But I just got tired of adding new AI topics to the filter.

Clearly the answer is to throw an LLM to filter AI posts.

Was something I thought about haha

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

#118

Post by virginwidow »

^5 ^5 ^5

Posts like this are precisely why I took interest in HN

I'm so old Stanley Kubric '2001, Space Odyessy' made an indelible imprint:

"DAVE, I CAN'T D0..."

Chilling, indeed. Decades later movies like 'Blade Runner' & 'Bi-Centenial Man' casting sympathetic light on Artificial LIFE.

Now we've this BUZZWORD (oops, SEO 'Keyword'?) of these 2 uppercase letters... LLM (Tip of what iceber, begs the question?) choking bandwidth.

Call Pizza-Hut for pickup & this elegantly crafted BOT takes the order

Is this really (total cost) less expensive than employing a human?

Yet I've not found any projects using this tool to aid dementia, blind, deaf or etcetera.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

#119

Post by virginwidow »

robjan wrote: post #60
000ooo000 wrote: post #52

I've lost interest in HN because it's seemingly only 50% posts about tech on any given day, and most of those are just one of the Thunderbongs of HN reposting some GitHub URL, or a half baked article from 2017. It wouldn't be so bad if the comments remained reasonable, but even those have tended towards the kind of fodder you get on Reddit, over the last year. I browse Lobsters instead if i'm thinking, but the HN hab…

I do the same. You can also use tags to filter out categories you aren't interested in such as politics, AI, late stage capitalism or other stuff that keeps getting posted here.

This is extremely useful. Sincere thanks. I consult HN to learn how something became broken and what mitigation is offered. Then I trip over AI or LLM which are (personally) disturbing & end up saying something foolish.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

#120

Post by virginwidow »

mrcsharp wrote: post #79

My big annoyance with all the LLM talk on HN is that the majority of things discussed simply amount to being glorified HttpClient wrappers yet advertised or talked about as it is this big advancement that everyone should be excited about. Then you have people that drank the LLM kool-aid and their hyper-inflated expectations and how they will all be met within the year. I am starting to simply ignore such threads alto…

Now that I've wiped off my screen & keyboard

THANK YOU for

> kool-aid

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