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How much of HN is AI?

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Re: How much of HN is AI?

#31

Post by techjamie »

nemomarx wrote: post #19
mgl wrote: post #14

Democratization of access has its victims. I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes. 15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars. 10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce. 5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter. Now it is a blurry view into the future…

Run a self hosted forum or instance of whatever you like, and just only let people sign up if they are recommended by someone or can argue their way in, basically. xenforo and some add ons can do that, and I'm sure there's a few self hosted messaging apps like you mention but I'm not as familiar

IRC is small and niche enough to be a good place for more ephemeral discussion if you have a bouncer to stay connected for you. Chat on it tends to move slowly, and the userbase trends more towards actual nerds.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#32

Post by gibspaulding »

jdw64 wrote: post #2

Is Pangram's detection capability considered to be on the higher side? This post seems to be written under the assumption that Pangram's detection is highly effective. Is it actually considered to be on the higher side in English-speaking circles?

Pangram links several third party evaluations [1] that all seem to agree with 90+% detection, and very close to 0% false positives. Obviously those could be cherry picked, but I’ve yet to see arguments to the contrary that actually include any supporting data. (E.g here’s a prompt that will get Claude to spit out text that pangram doesn’t detect or here’s an article authored in 2018 that pangram says is AI.) Detection is an arms race, so this could change (though I’d expect in the direction of false negatives), but right now it seems like defense is winning.

[1] https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#33

Post by mgl »

nemomarx wrote: post #19
mgl wrote: post #14

Democratization of access has its victims. I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes. 15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars. 10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce. 5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter. Now it is a blurry view into the future…

Run a self hosted forum or instance of whatever you like, and just only let people sign up if they are recommended by someone or can argue their way in, basically. xenforo and some add ons can do that, and I'm sure there's a few self hosted messaging apps like you mention but I'm not as familiar

I do not think this is a technology problem.

I think it is a problem of how we changed: shorter attention spans, and a much larger volume of information to process.

Short forms win, long forms vanish, which is a tragedy in itself as good writing requires good understanding, and understanding is impossible without attention.

I'm in my 40s. I remember lcamtuf from pl.comp.security when I was just getting started playing with FreeBSD and other fun stuff.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#34

Post by brabel »

falsemyrmidon wrote: post #3

It's not just HN, have you seen mainstream news recently? It's just a hot topic and I think it's normal for people to talk about those a lot. If quantum computing ever goes mainstream, I'm sure you'll see a lot of articles about that as well.

The programming Reddit forbade AI posts. Unfortunately the result is NOT better level posts, but a wasteland instead.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#35

Post by netdevphoenix »

fcanesin wrote: post #21
jrflo wrote: post #10

My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.

Upvoted: I was going to write this exact reply. Everyone is a bit tired of hearing about AI, but it's advancing fast and it's the most important thing right now. As Demis says, if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it.

> it's advancing fast

Actually, it (LLM models) has been advancing slower for a while. This is pretty much in the mainstream. And the current approach is facing all sorts of obstacles that are not exclusively technological. The compute needs are no longer sustainable. Financially, big labs are drowning in debt and backlash against data centres has grown so much that it has become an electoral topic in at least one major country.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#36

Post by tetris11 »

mgl wrote: post #14

Democratization of access has its victims. I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes. 15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars. 10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce. 5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter. Now it is a blurry view into the future…

The issue is the tech and the motives to wield it. Cosy decentralized message boards exist, thankfully outside the realm of the greater public.

The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.

Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#37

Post by ViktorRay »

Reading about tech has become gradually less and less fun for me over the past 16 years.

Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad? I remember those days I would read tech news and sites like Ars Technica and comments were sometimes snarky and indignant but generally people were enthusiastic about reading tech because it offered glimpses into more technically advanced futures.

I wasn't browsing HN back then but I imaging the same thing was true of HN in the late 2000's and early 2010's.

Now tech sites like Ars Technica consistently have comment sections filled with immense negativity cynicism indigation and just plain old boiling rage. I avoid those comment sections now because reading such things negatively affects my mood and certainly isn't fun.

And over the past few years HN has gradually become more negative and nasty.

All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#38

Post by sejje »

pydry wrote: post #23
jrflo wrote: post #10

My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.

Feels more like another blockchain hype cycle to me. Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.

We're not on the cusp, we're in the process.

World-changing doesn't happen overnight. The internet didn't, either.

This is like 1991 internet.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#39

Post by int32_64 »

mgl wrote: post #14

Democratization of access has its victims. I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes. 15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars. 10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce. 5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter. Now it is a blurry view into the future…

I'm nostalgic for the new JS framework every day era. Say what you will about that era but people were writing the code by hand, so looking back it all feels "hand-crafted" and quaint. You had to copy paste that express app from a medium.com article instead of prompting an LLM to scaffold a whole project in one second.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#40

Post by netdevphoenix »

totalconfusion wrote: post #18

Not everyone here is AI. I can't tell the difference so what does it matter? If I learn something or get inspired by a person or a bot, great. AI tools are incredibly powerful, new and rapidly evolving, you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.

> I can't tell the difference so what does it matter?

Eternal September. Just like the usenet groups

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