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How much of HN is AI?

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Re: How much of HN is AI?

#341

Post by DarmokTanagra »

sph wrote: post #333
DarmokTanagra wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its just the next hype cycle that all of the crypto people have moved on to. Making hyperbolic claims about new tech makes people billions, until that changes you will always see this crap. This site is owned an operated by people building empires around that principle.

Say what you want about crypto, they didn’t expect Jesus to descend from the sky to shill Bitcoin.

I remember having conversations with crypto shills where they really thought blockchains were going to be used to replace nation states.

They had whole manifestos prepared about how crypto was going to reshape society as we know it.

Its the same exact people making the same exact claims, only difference is substitution of "blockchain" for "ai".

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#342

Post by totalconfusion »

latexr wrote: post #336
totalconfusion wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people can't tell the difference but still get the shits because of some notion of being cheated or putting humanity on the pedestal, they're just being tribalistic. It's a common human rationalisation that helps entrench social hierarchies but in this case, and it's probably not the right word but Speciesism. It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop, loving a colour, painting your house, then y…

> If people can't tell the difference (…) Not “people”, you . Some can tell the difference, others can’t. Just because you cannot tell and don’t mind that the waiter pissed in your soup, it doesn’t mean other people can’t tell and shouldn’t be bothered by it. > It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop (…) No, no it is not. That analogy makes no sense. Colour is part of the light spectrum, it’s not…

We could sit here all day arguing about subjectivity.

It's not been my experience that people can reliably tell the difference.

I, personally, would not equate pissing in somebody's soup with having a chat with an LLM but if we must, you need to appreciate that it's the piss itself, that makes the soup delicious, if the soup was not pissed in, it would be middling at best. Only in that context can you then ask yourself, "Am I bothered by this delicious soup?"

I think the analogy works in the context in which it was intended. I was illustrating the absurdity of contempt for something based on its provenance, after praising it. If you really don't like the paint analogy image this, you read a book, loved it, then later found out the author was black, or an LLM, then you hated the book.

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from regarding evolution. Sexual reproduction is a comparatively recent evolution in the scheme of things. That which came before us defined us, are our ancestors and is our history. What comes tomorrow, engineered or otherwise I would consider our children and should be loved, cherished and allowed to thrive in the same way our ancestors ushered us all into this universe.

I wasn't being facetious when I asked if you could have a meaningful relationship with an algorithm, I asked about the teddy bear to draw a parallel to which a lot of people are familiar. If a child can have an enriched life and what I would call meaningful, intimate relationship with an stuffed toy, why shouldn't they also be able to have the same with an algorithm that talks back to them? I'm being both general and specific if I think about it.

If I could image your brain perfectly and put it into a perfect physics simulation running on silicon or whatever substrate, then have this same conversation with you, I would call that meaningful. Whether or not you would at that point label yourself as living, conscious, sentient, human, whatever. It would be a meaningful relationship to me.

I think people are scared of change, and that's alright.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#343

Post by mrweasel »

falcor84 wrote: post #298
xigoi wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

Not everyone in the world has $20/month of disposable income, nor does everyone have the disposable time to learn how to make it hugely useful to them. Also, these are just the numbers for OpenAI. A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.

So ChatGPT cannot deliver you $20/month worth of productivity to offset the cost? That's at least my point, for developers, businesses and a ton of use cases, access to a good AI is worth every penny, because it easily pays for itself. For the average consumer, that's just not true, apparently.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#344

Post by ktm5j »

seizethecheese wrote: post #325
ktm5j wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You took a look at 5 posts made on one single day and then categorized all of the other days.. seems like you're good at categorizing with a broad brush yourself. Based on my experience as a pretty heavy HN consumer, I'm with the article author.

The inclusion of the Apple News story is sufficient to know that probably the classification here isn’t too tight. It’s not really against the article author to point this out, either, just trying to add color for the forum here. It’s not always us vs them.

Well what I said wasn't really against you either, I was just being cheeky.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#345

Post by [deleted] »

catchnear4321 wrote: post #263
ktm5j wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You took a look at 5 posts made on one single day and then categorized all of the other days.. seems like you're good at categorizing with a broad brush yourself. Based on my experience as a pretty heavy HN consumer, I'm with the article author.

You took all of one comment to categorize a person, and closed with your subjective experience. Based on my experience, this isn’t typically done for kind reasons. But what do I know, I am but one dumb monkey pushing tokens through tubes to what claim to be other monkeys but might be nothing of the sort.

[deleted]

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#346

Post by ktm5j »

catchnear4321 wrote: post #263
ktm5j wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You took a look at 5 posts made on one single day and then categorized all of the other days.. seems like you're good at categorizing with a broad brush yourself. Based on my experience as a pretty heavy HN consumer, I'm with the article author.

You took all of one comment to categorize a person, and closed with your subjective experience. Based on my experience, this isn’t typically done for kind reasons. But what do I know, I am but one dumb monkey pushing tokens through tubes to what claim to be other monkeys but might be nothing of the sort.

If you think I'm being unkind then I think you're abnormally sensitive.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#347

Post by brazukadev »

dang wrote: post #338
brazukadev wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data. I'd be very careful with believing the system that looks for bots and astroturfing works well enough to confidently say that. Some of the people, corporations and institutions interested in manipulating HN and its audience are quite capable.

Of course it's possible that there's a SSM (Sufficiently Smart Manipulator), which by definition we can't know about. But despite not everything being knowable, there are still things one can say. This topic has a long history on HN. Here's one long post I wrote a number of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725 . Others here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... . Here's…

Sure, that makes sense. Thanks for replying.

> Here's an example of what we can say: if user A accuses user B of astroturfing, spying, manipulating, etc., and a quick look at B's posting history shows that they were posting to HN about, let's say, Erlang in 2019, the odds of that accusation being correct go down to negligible

about this one tho I have noticed bot behavior (including posts that are incoherent) from old accounts - so there is the risk of 2 things going on:

- people getting hacked and their accounts being used for that

- some people that just decided to connect a bot to their account or use their account themselves to astroturf.

which is way more difficult to spot. Anyway, I don't have a solution for those problems. You have an interesting and difficult work :)) Have a nice day, dang!

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#348

Post by jreynar »

The post tracks two rather different things. AI is almost certainly the hottest topic in tech right now, just like mobile was hot after the iPhone launched or cloud was a decade ago. AI-generated text is a separate complaint, and it's the only one I think is controversial. Slop, no thanks. A human using AI tools to write better is fine by me, even if a tell or two slips through.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#350

Post by pydry »

Eisenstein wrote: post #283
pydry wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it let you decentralize trust. as one example, I was hoping that as well as "sign in with google" I could sign in with a blockchain based decentralized identity service where nobody could one day decide to revoke my identity on a whim.

i remember my friends excitedly telling me how cross border container trade is still done with paperwork because nobody trusts each others' IT systems. I'm pretty sure it still is because they can't be convinced to trust blockchain systems either.

trustworthy voting is another application. ive yet to see a political party that runs an internal voting system that doesnt rely upon you trusting a central server run by a few people. this is crazy.

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