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AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

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Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#291

Post by yalogin »

ViktorRay wrote: post #285
yalogin wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where first mover advantage and habit play too. Chat gpt and meta ai are good enough for basic recall and summarization tasks. Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into their search UI, so they just want people to continue the same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds n…

I mentioned Perplexity because their service focuses pretty much only on using LLMs for searching and summarizing. It doesn’t do creative stuff like some of the other services do. I mainly also just use AI for searching and summarizing like you seem to do as well so that’s why I recommended it.

Cool will give it a try. This is motivation enough :)

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#292

Post by TZubiri »

DaSHacka wrote: post #287
TZubiri wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about you don't cheat and actually study? No sympathy. Glad it's dying.

Good luck with that, academic cheating is a massive market. No matter the crackdown, the demand is always so high that someone will inevitably find a way to market services (such as Chegg or essay-for-hire services). The best counter against it is designing courses so that cheaters get minimal benefit while students that study get rewarded (such as closed note exams and lowering the value of homework assignments). Ot…

The discipline in question matters.

I get that this may happen for an arts degree, or something like that, it's wrong on a moral level, slap on the wrist no biggie.

But if we are talking physicians or lawyers, it becomes a criminal matter for me.

Computer science I feel is on a gray area, and Engineering in the US doesn't have the same protections as it does in other countries.

I'm starting to think we'll have to license computer programming in the following decade, there's so many quacks and shit software going around, something is gonna go horribly wrong.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#293

Post by arp242 »

greazy wrote: post #289
arp242 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason Note that most of these are just regular people with close-to-vote powers, not elected or appointed moderators with special powers. I think one major problem is that there is an entire class of people who rarely or never ask or answer questions, or even comment, and all they do is "moderate" the site by closing questions. L…

My specific work community has a Slack with a few thousand people and a few active hundred people. We've come to the conclusion that slacks 90day retention message policy is a good thing. It allows new and old to reask and reiscussion topics. SO should do something similar. Throw out all the mods, all the questions and start fresh every X number of years. No idea if it will work but tossing out the current mods to br…

So that's the other extreme end, and that would get repetitive for the people answering questions. Because in spite of the overzealousness of marking questions as duplicate from some people, some questions really do get asked over and over and over again.

Also: Stack Overflow is intended to be a long-term useful repository of question and answers. You enter "how do I frob a baz in foo?" in $search_engine, and the idea is you'll end up on Stack Overflow which answers that exact question. I have sometimes ended up on some of my own answers from years ago like this.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#294

Post by dredmorbius »

ipaddr wrote: post #278
dredmorbius wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather (in)famously, /r/xkcd, which was overtaken (for a time) by militant Muslim anti-semite neo-nazi holocaust deniers. The subreddit was eventually reclaimed, but it took some months. There's an account of the hostile takeover and clawback here: https://old.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1xdwba/the_history_of... > (2014).

I read the discussion. What does unrelated views not expressed on your subreddit matter. Why the need to get rid of a mod who at worst has a sidebar to other subreddits they control. If the mod is black, white, Asian, wears fur coats or believes in a flat earth; none of that should matter unless it's affecting your subreddit. Let people be themselves you would be surprised by many of your co-worker real life.

Put mildly, the moderation was affecting not only the subreddit, but the referenced site (xkcd) itself. And then some.

There is a reason that commercial and noncommercial organisations are so absolutely obsessed with brand management, identity, and reputation, much as I generally find that to be a somewhat absurd concern. Moderators have an absolutely vast impact on how a discussion proceeds, and ultimately on impressions going far beyond just that discussion, including the rest of Reddit (or whatever platform is involved); commercial, social, and political impacts; and the idea of a general online communications themselves.

HN would be a very different place if, say, /u/soccer were mod rather than dang, and I suspect much of its present status and value would be lost in very short order.

We've had plenty of experience, over many decades and much scale, of poorly-functioning moderation, and in general it ends quite poorly. As I've noted many times, one of the most surprising things about HN is that it's retained its status and value as a forum for as long as it has. Far longer than the original and revered Usenet (of which I was a small participant, pre-eternal-September), or Slashdot, Friendster, Digg, or even Reddit (itself a YC launch, slightly pre-dating HN, but unlike HN retaining far less of its original spirit and quality).

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#295

Post by dredmorbius »

brookst wrote: post #246
ForTheKidz wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This also holds for my favorite community on the internet, /r/AskHistorians on reddit. It's the mod team that holds it all together despite the rest of the site being a general dumpster fire. (Curiously, the least competent moderation I've ever witnessed on the internet is on the front page of reddit, specifically /r/worldnews)

/r/AskHistorians is a case study in well-managed community at scale. Sadly I don’t think it would work for standalone business that had to pay the bills.

As good as AH is, and it is, it's still got some grave issues.

I'd bailed after links to LibGen / SciHub were getting my comments moderated.

Which incidentally points at a problem with moderation: no matter how well-intended, or overall effective, people take issue with their contributions being penalised and removed, especially if they sense unfairness. (Also, especially, if there's a social- or political-group bias detected, again, regardless of merits, but that be 'nother can of worms.)

I'm left with David Weinberger's observation: "Conversation doesn't scale".

https://dweinberger.medium.com/the-social-web-before-social-...>

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#296

Post by dredmorbius »

literalAardvark wrote: post #270
dredmorbius wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/ >? Care to enlighten us heathens?

There's a lot and I'm no expert. If you can find expired memes your can find how to prompt for programming. Karpathy has a new intro series that I think puts one into the correct mindset. As others have said, it's not AGI yet, so holding it right is, in fact, critical.

The point of the original YHIW, and in this context, is that providing specific guidance is more useful than the vague victim-blaming criticism.

I have experimented with prompts, and in fact the case in point was one of those experiments. The highly non-deterministic and time-variable nature of LLM AIs makes any kind of prompt engineering at best a black art.

If you'd at least offer a starting point there'd be some basis to assessing the positive information we're discussing here, rather than do multiple rounds on why victim-blaming is generally unhelpful. And if those starting points are as easy to surface as you're suggesting, that would be a low ask on you.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#297

Post by [deleted] »

nitwit005 wrote: post #69
staticautomatic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. The old way of doing SEO blogspam is dead, and good riddance. Well curated, high quality content written by humans, with information and insights you can’t get from LLMs, will reign. Long live curation.

I'm sure I can make a couple of surprising or insightful articles for my current industry, and then I'll run dry. Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.

[deleted]

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#298

Post by ViktorRay »

yalogin wrote: post #291
ViktorRay wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned Perplexity because their service focuses pretty much only on using LLMs for searching and summarizing. It doesn’t do creative stuff like some of the other services do. I mainly also just use AI for searching and summarizing like you seem to do as well so that’s why I recommended it.

Cool will give it a try. This is motivation enough :)

As a free user you get a few “Pro” searches a day which are more detailed and extensive in terms of summarizing. With a subscription you get more of those.

The regular basic searches you get in there for free are also good but less detailed.

Just putting this here in case anyone else is interested. I’m sharing this stuff for Perplexity because the Pro searches helped me study for an exam I was taking recently so maybe it might help someone else. Of course the regular non-pro searches in Perplexity were fine too.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#299

Post by card_zero »

brookst wrote: post #249
dingnuts wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it won't work for anything that requires a novel synthesis of ideas because Gen AI is incapable of novelty

Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? Is it wishful thinking, or a genuine technical misunderstanding, or intentional disinformation? LLMs absolutely can create novel syntheses. It’s very easy to test this yourself. From creating sentences that do not appear in Google to creating unique story outlines, it’s super easy to prove this wrong.

I think it's a matter of perception. There's regurgitation. There's recombination. There's advanced recombination through layers of prestidigitation. And then there's actual human creativity, which you might deny is special, leaving us at an impasse because we can't provide you with a tool to measure it with. It just comes down to a philosophical face off, high noon with hand-waving instead of six-guns.

But anyway the point is that LLMs produce a lot of novel stuff that we feel already tired of because it seems like we've seen it before.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#300

Post by ehnto »

AznHisoka wrote: post #208
ehnto wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I get next to no value from the personal website these days. Certainly not worth being exposed to the harsh realities of the web in 2025. A sad state of affairs, but it was predicted decades ago that commercial interests would turn the internet into what it is today, even without AI. Layer on the dead internet theory slowly coming true, and walled gardens almost feel like the last bastion of free internet, rath…

What devices are you making?

Nothing too innovative, I've made some chained, LAN connected lighting for around the house. Some button boxes for sim racing. I built a small CNC machine and a 3D printer, which have let me build various things for the car and the bike. Last week I made a very specialised splint/cover for an injury on my shin, shhh don't tell the healthcare industry about 3D printing.
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