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We need tech news sources which exclude AI

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#51

Post by botfriendsarent »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #27

I disagree. The problem, if I concede there is a problem , is not new or unique to AI but problematic to the internet -fake news, fake reviews, AstroTurfing, etc. This is not an AI problem. The internet is a bad place with lots of bad actors and no one says anything about malicious state actors who pollute the internet (they might be called xenophobic !) AI merely is another tool for bad actors to be better bad actor…

You are right about being cynical about media.

But you didnt grow up reading BYTE magazine.

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#52

Post by TimXare »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #13

I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years. I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discu…

[dead]

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#53

Post by browningstreet »

Honestly. I want the AI news. I wish HN would add filtering features. I know they want us to all see the same homepage, but it’s time to let us have our tables. Pro-AI-era should be able to have a cohort thread, and anti-AI should be able to avoid it, or have a ring fence for their anti-AI discussions.

We end up with some good threads on HN in both directions, but there’s a weight to early voices that can bend a posts’ comments pro or anti AI which isn’t necessarily reflective of the quality of said post.

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#54

Post by aspenmartin »

zzzeek wrote: post #41
aspenmartin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.

You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.

Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad?

Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#55

Post by kazinator »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #13

I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years. I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discu…

OP does not want to censor AI topics from every news source. They want news sources which provide access to topics that exclude AI. (Without necessarily those same sources excluding AI entirely.)

This is legitimate. There are many topics in computing and tech.

Not wanting to read about AI in every category is much the same like not wanting to see a C++ forum filled with threads about Angular.

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#56

Post by marcus_holmes »

botfriendsarent wrote: post #49
marcus_holmes wrote: post #13

I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years. I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discu…

[flagged]

An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all.

I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful things. I'm sure it had bugs in it.

So I remember this period you're describing. Your software chief was a dick, though turning up 30 mins late on your first day would be a firing offence in any job back then.

We learned how to code when coding was very simple. There were no GUIs, no mice, all professional software was menu-driven. Screens had one resolution. None of these systems were networked, you only ever had to deal with one user. Security was never an issue, there was no external interface at all. Performance was usually not an issue, because everything was so simple. The OS was tiny and did almost nothing [0]. You could write software quickly because everything was much, much, simpler back then.

I'm seeing people who have never coded before write useful apps in 2026, against our modern massively more complex and intricate tech stack, using LLMs. No it's not perfect, but it's improving. There is absolutely zero chance that they could write an app themselves, or learn how to do that in less than a year, like we did back in 80's, because everything is so much more complex now.

[0] yes there were systems that did do all these things, but they weren't on the machines we're talking about here.

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#57

Post by botfriendsarent »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #56
botfriendsarent wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all. I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful thin…

More useful than a working accounting system?

Because of the disaster of screen resolutions, mobile form factors and all the previous dishonesty inherent in the past 30 years of software development?

That must be really useful. The machines are not the problem. UI layout was solved 40 years ago on all windowed and non windowed platforms.

Mobile breakpoints are not special.

How about the browser as a "failed platform"? Seems to fit! Hardware is irrelevant.

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#59

Post by wild_egg »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #47
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.

The difference between compilers and LLMs is that compilers actually work . LLMs do not produce a usable result, no matter how much AI bros try to convince everyone else otherwise.

> LLMs do not produce a usable result

At this point, this is categorically false. Your mental model is very out of date.

The results may not be ideal but I can't say I've had a single output so far this year that wasn't usable.

Re: We need tech news sources which exclude AI

#60

Post by zzzeek »

aspenmartin wrote: post #54
zzzeek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.

Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad? Is t…

I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.
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