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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

#51

Post by Kelvin506 »

For me it's that it's all so obviously a grift. With crypto there was at least some legitimate value to blockchains. ML is a valid science and has led to major breakthroughs in other sciences.

But AGI/genAI LLMs come across like just another scam from the Worst Guys You Know who were all cryptobros in the 2010s. The output integrity problems get dismissed. The traceability/repeatability problems get dismissed. The data ownership problems get dismissed. There's the endless problems with aggressive feeder bots causing real (financial/operational) harm to others. All of the people selling it have the smell of timeshare salesmen.

And now with China releasing open source models that seemingly embarass their U.S. counterparts, it makes the whole thing feel even more like a ponzi scheme.

LLMs as a whole have a severe credibility problem.

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

#52

Post by 000ooo000 »

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 habit is strong.

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

#53

Post by M2Ys4U »

oidar wrote: post #14

OpenAI is valued at ~150 billion. Anthropic is valued at ~60 billion. nvidia was valued at $15/share in 2023 and is now valued at $150/share. It might seem that LLMs have sucked all the air out of the room, this is why. If you find LLMs boring, you are in for a very boring couple of decades - because it's not going away.

And if this doesn't prove that valuations are bullshit, nothing will.

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

#54

Post by plsbenice34 »

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…

>With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.

I find it to be the exact opposite. The idea of "Artificial Intelligence" as a thinking machine is fascinating. However, now that i learned a certain amount about this current neural network paradigm, the marketing magic of it as an intelligent system is gone, it is no longer interesting to me. These models are just some dry big-data statistical machinery to me.

I think many people find it interesting precisely because they dont understand it and think there is some magic in there. Of course when hype is stupid and people think the singularity is coming then it sounds a lot more interesting

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

#55

Post by 3vidence »

geor9e wrote: post #42

Are you boycotting LLMs or something? They're one of the best hacker tools around lately. Tasks I would have frustratedly scoured stack overflow to solve in three hours I'm solving in 30 seconds using cursor in agent mode and just letting it run whatever it wants as root on my MacBook. Maybe your sadness is rooted in the fact that we interacted with computers one way for a few decades and some of that's becoming quit…

I work on ML at FAANG I use LLMs a couple of times a week (daily if you count line auto complete)

It's not that LLMs are bad, but they are just one topic in the vast world of different things.

There have been so many amazing insights on HN from users with such interesting backgrounds (nuclear engineering, bakers, musicians, etc). And it just feels like that's all collapsed into

"have you tested model-version-quant-subversion-domain? If you haven't you can't say anything"

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

#56

Post by jcgrillo »

Kelvin506 wrote: post #51

For me it's that it's all so obviously a grift. With crypto there was at least some legitimate value to blockchains. ML is a valid science and has led to major breakthroughs in other sciences. But AGI/genAI LLMs come across like just another scam from the Worst Guys You Know who were all cryptobros in the 2010s. The output integrity problems get dismissed. The traceability/repeatability problems get dismissed. The da…

It's infecting everything. The other day I overheard someone saying "we don't need to expose a query interface, we'll just give users a text box and let them use natural language". Total brain rot.

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

#57

Post by seanmcdirmid »

3vidence wrote: post #24
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…

For me the LLM topic is just all enveloping in a way the other trends haven't been. Obviously there was a a million crypto posts and it was annoying but crypto covered a specific niche of overall software stuff (payment processing). With LLMs it feels like every topic somehow has to come back to LLMs. I currently work as a ML Eng at FAANG so maybe it adds to my exhaustion on the topic.

Crypto currencies became purely speculative asses and their volatility ensured that they wouldn’t be useful for payment processing. Has block chain in general made any progress in payment processing?

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

#58

Post by 3vidence »

teej wrote: post #44

I have been on HN for 16.5 years and I don’t plan to stop now. It’s been worse. Trends come and go. The stories and comments come and go. HN is constantly changing. You can’t attach yourself to how something was before. It will change again. Thats just life.

Appreciate the perspective.

I'm on year 9ish of HN, maybe I'm just hitting my first introspective point on the whole space.

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

#59

Post by graycat »

In the 1990s there was another big AI push, rules, the RETE algorithm, etc., and, in the middle of it, gave talks at Wharton, Stanford, etc. First cut, could think of it as a generalization of Select-When. The code had a problem, and one afternoon had an idea, got a pizza, and in the morning had some running, innovative code that saved much of the project. Gee, I got $1000. Soon that AI flopped, no surprise.

Current AI? Even if it were, really is, 99% hype and the rest nonsense, and can't tell for sure, still it's the loudest sound, involves really big server farms, electric power sources, data collections, attention from media, investors, and even the POTUS, and can't give a solid argument that it will never amount to much, sooooo, can't just ignore it and have to pay attention, e.g., see if the balloon will keep rising or spring a leak and fall.

Here at HN, when see AI, LLM, GANs, AGI, easy enough mostly just to skip them, but can't just ignore all of it. Besides, if want to pay some attention, HN is one of the best places to do that.

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

#60

Post by robjan »

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.
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