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How much of HN is AI?

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111–120 of 370 posts

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#111

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…

Do you have lobsters invites?

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#112
This is categorizing with a pretty broad brush, it seems. I took a look at a random day, and the articles that are claimed to be AI are Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars and a post about scams in Apple News ads.

Sure, Waymo’s model is AI and the scams in Apple News are often AI generated, but this isn't some sort of monoculture of LLM articles.

Ironically, this article could have been improved by using an LLM to categorize things and also publishing the prompt, so we could inspect what it means to “be AI”.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#114
post #88

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 advan…

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. You're 16 years older now. You will have changed. HN has too, but looking back at how great it all was without also realising that your point of view is different means you're missing a big part of why it feels worse now. I've been here a long time too so I'm not going to claim I don't…

> but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.

that's for sure but if I got to know HN 3 months ago I would not be an active user. The content and discussions here are still interesting but the demographics that enjoy it changed over time and I (and OP) might not be the kind of people that would get interested anymore.

There is no "hacker" in HN anymore, unless we count the hustlers trying to cheat their way to success. Talking about that, there are so much psyops going on in so many threads that we, the old hackers, are the ones getting hacked.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#115
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…

> How could we jump back into the cozy past again? "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

Well sometimes you can

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#116
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.

Bigger than the Metaverse or monkey NFTs?

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#117

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 don't even care about the environmental aspect- it's just so...un-hackerlike and boring. Where are all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels?

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#118

I swear that the amount of astroturfing in the comment field by AI bots being positive towards AI is at an all time high as well.

For me, I'm surprised to see people proposing conformist views and trying to push whatever the establishment is pushing.

I dunno, I was a contrarian with blockchain and now am conformist with AI. Being contrarian for its own sake is pretty stupid.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#119

HN really needs an AI filter. Most posts are AI company promotion now.

If you're interested in a solution, I maintain a reader that performs client-side filtering from a given view. Here's a view with an AI filter I try to keep up to date: https://logicnow.io/hn/index.html?view=https://raw.githubuse...

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#120

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…

Well your point on it being wrong to interact with a whole industry sounds more like a policy and political party line. This is just nerds discussing bleeding edge things.

Bleeding something, alright.

I'm sure some of the career chemists et al at IG Farben and BASF felt similarly in 1945.

There is no amoral middle ground where any of this is detached from its context. Context is everything.

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