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How much of HN is AI?

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Re: How much of HN is AI?

#281

Post by xigoi »

mattmaroon wrote: post #209
jrflo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progre…

I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do. And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years. ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month

> ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month

A personal assistant that will happily tell you that you’re the world’s largest supergenius who invented perpetual motion. I wouldn’t want that if they paid me $20/month to use it.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#282

Post by xigoi »

falcor84 wrote: post #214
mrweasel wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license. And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?

> why aren't people buying? They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud. [0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

> more than 50 million consumer subscribers

So, about 0.6% of the world’s population is willing to pay for something that’s supposed to be hugely useful for literally everyone (as opposed to Adobe products, which are only for digital artists)?

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#283

Post by Eisenstein »

pydry wrote: post #127
jrflo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you're saying, there is a lot of speculation going on in AI right now. The difference is there is hard evidence of AI capabilities accelerating now: we've gone from toy chatbots to sort-of useful coding helpers to agents solving novel math problems in 3.5 years. We could plateau any day and a lot of investors would be stuck holding the bag, or we could continue on that trajectory and they'll make crazy pr…

The irony with blockchain is that it also had a bunch of real life use cases but the sheer extremity of the hype cycle managed to actually prevent them from being effectively brought to life. There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin. I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is g…

What was the useful blockchain tech? It seemed to me to all be different ways of avoiding regulations or bypassing existing system or addressing issues that were already solved by using centralized systems.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#284

Post by jerhewet »

anthonypasq wrote: post #174
mrweasel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits…

i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews. almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs. > even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about. >he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn…

> they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs

I am so fucking sick of this. No, you dumbshits -- ALL of us DO NOT use LLM's to write code. Just fucking STOP assuming every developer needs the same crutch that the rest of you can't seem to live without.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#286

Post by xigoi »

recursive wrote: post #167
yndoendo wrote: post #81

AI has turned me away from HN more and more. Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical b…

I might migrate if I could could an invite, but I haven't been able to find anyone on the inside. Edit: Thank you kind stranger. I'm in.

I used to use Lobsters, but I was banned for making a stupid joke about emojis.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#287

Post by coldpie »

anthonypasq wrote: post #174
mrweasel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits…

i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews. almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs. > even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about. >he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn…

I use it a couple times a week, not even daily. It's useful about half the time, and a complete waste of time the other half. It's a useful tool to reach for sometimes and I'll keep using it for the things it's good at, but it hasn't really changed how I work. Shrug.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#288

Post by dredmorbius »

cljacoby wrote: post #213
dang wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but it would be helpful to see examples. People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data. Bots and genai comments also exist, of course, and are not allowed here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated ).

Does HN do proactive detection and/or flagging of comments determined to be AI generated? I understand if information publicized on how this process might work is intentionally restricted, so as not to be easily circumvented. I'm also not asking this in a pointed or judgmental way with respect to HN, I'm mostly just curious how various social platforms are approaching this problem.

Yes, to the extent that mods will admonish what appear to be AI-generated comments:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...>

Articles are a fuzzier area AFAIU:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149>

(Not a mod myself, though I watch mod actions fairly closely.)

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#289

Post by xigoi »

senordevnyc wrote: post #147
hn_submit wrote: post #73

I'm deeply disappointed that many of the stories on HN are directly or indirectly about A.I. and LLMs. To me this is a complete turn-off. OTOH this seems to be the case everywhere in the IT landscape these days. Many people interested in technical stories have mostly stopped reading computing related news. I know people that used to host talks about .NET software development quit because they hated all .NET developme…

I think grief is appropriate for the part of the software engineering craft that has been lost, because it was genuinely fun and rewarding at times, and I don't think it'll ever come back. Sure, some of us will hack on things manually for fun here and there, but even that will likely become ever more niche, like doing your laundry with a washboard. And professionally, no one is going to be writing code without LLMs b…

If using a washing machine required you to send your laundry to an evil corporation, the washboard would start to get some appeal…

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#290

Post by coldpie »

Rendello wrote: post #162
NoboruWataya wrote: post #66

> In the first half of the month, roughly 60% of the daily HN lineup was AI-related or AI-generated, tapering off to ~50% as we approached the end of the month. This is up from 40% in February. This aligns with my much less scientific research. Every now and again, when I remember to do it, I will skim the top 10 stories and count how many are AI-related. I find it is very consistently in the 4-6 bracket. Probably a…

A couple of years ago I considered making a simple regex-based web extension to block posts with common AI words: ChatGPT, Copilot, LLM, etc. There was one or two on every page and I didn't want to see them. Over the next few years it flipped, most of the posts concern AI, and I scan for non-AI topics to engage with. I can't really blame HN for this, it's a massive upset in our industry and the world more broadly.

I did exactly this: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn
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