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Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?

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Re: Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?

#44

I think the interesting thing is that if you look at /new, actually the community and moderation system is already holding back a fantastic volume of AI slop and “slop about AI”. It would be fair to say “HN has too much stuff about AI” and “the HN community is hostile/skeptical of AI”, in fact you hear both in the comments all the time.

Thankfully we (as humans) don't have the same brain and the same interests :) Some people are excited about all that stuff, and I can understand. But, personally, I am just getting bored of having an anthropic news per day, two from openai, and another one that claims "eeeh, developers are dead!". Actually, Hackernews feels more anxious for me now, that's why I wanted to take a look elsewhere... I remember the time w…

People have been saying this for the longest time, like I wrote this essay

https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/

funny thing is I don't even agree with it anymore, like most of the trends I didn't like have mainly blown over, and funny enough when I wrote the sequel

https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

articles I liked were "mostly about AI!"

Myself I find the AI thing exhausting because I was involved in three efforts to make a breakthrough in natural language understanding in the 2010s and even gave this talk which went from "trendy" to "cringe" to "prophetic" over the course of the last 10 years

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...

So when I see all these people standing on their tip toes and screaming "LOOK AT ME! I'M AN EARLY ADOPTER" I can't help think they're a bunch of laggards at best, NPCs at worst, as much as I know that's an unconstructive attitude. I'm looking for the "last mover advantage" as I use a good model now, and will use a better model in six months, but I don't rot my brain doomscrolling X to see what Andrej Karpathy wrote at 2:37am last night.

For years I've felt like HN is home because it embraces both technology and business, compare that to Progitt which is a bunch of communists [1] who will pounce on you if you admit that you are in it for the money, even just a little bit. Compared to something hardcore, HN is vulnerable to takeover from (for lack of a better term) posers.

It's what it is, I skip past it. If I really want to feel out-of-touch with current trends I go to LinkedIn which flooded by AI slop articles about "what AI all means" from people who don't know what they are talking about in the least. To their credit, if you smash "I'm not interested" consistently their recommender does eventually learn from that and you see less of it.

[1] ... y'all know I'm one of the leftists of HN!

Re: Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?

#45

Good luck with that. If something is easily accessible, it will be accessed by easy people, and if it can flood a platform, it will. Easy people don't care. Easy people will never care.

I can see I've made the easy people angry ^_^ Go ahead and take those points off, it will not change my life the slightest.

Re: Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?

#46
post #32

There are very few sites such as Hacker News around. Looking for one that is similar in quality, but with a slightly different focus is going to be disappointing. Perhaps it helps to consider why you'd exactly want this? You may be better off not visiting any such site, and instead focus on real human-in-the-loop activities with a group of local hackers.

I don't do web stuff, but I wonder if one could easily create a browser extension that hides AI-centric submissions?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?

#47
I've noticed myself and several colleagues have all taken to making little SaaS's for sport -- I'm not sure WHY we've all done that, but it's totally a thing.

Maybe if there was a monthly "Show us your (project/vibe/slop)" thread, it would provide a centralized spot for it all, then you could ignore it, once, at leisure, instead of the filters working overtime. :)

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