How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator

I think the most important self-driving car company is Waymo, apparently founded as the Stanford Self-Driving Car Team in 2004, somehow became the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, the renamed Waymo in 2016.

All that is pretty long ago now and doesn't really have much connection to the SV "startup community" (Google ceased being meaningfully described as a "startup" a long, long time ago).

And anyway, I don't care about self-driving cars. Don't have one, don't particularly want one.

The direct benefits to me of OpenAI are nearly negligible. I use it (and others) now and then for various things but if it disappeared tomorrow, my life and work would not be meaningfully impacted.

You can always fault the supply side.

There's an enormous amount to discuss about "open source," and it's neglected enough that the bro generation of programmers doesn't even understand it, or the difference between it and Free software, and what those differences materially mean to developers and the public at large.

The reason that HN is eaten up by LLMs is because it's eaten by any trendy topic that's in the mainstream news. HN used to be directed by an active and opinionated mind in pg, and it's been left to salaried, caretaking censors whose primary job is to make sure the site doesn't become an embarrassment. This mainly consists of artificially excluding discussions that may lead to energetic debate; debate that usually becomes swamped with low-quality comments by people speaking outside of their expertise, and can make the place look like a cesspool.

But energetic debate is where all of the energy is. The problem isn't those topics, the problem is that those topics also take a lot of energy to moderate the problems out of. We're experiencing an abandoned place, not a place driven by anything internal. It's an old barn that is kept clean just so it doesn't catch on fire.

We don't talk about FOSS because it isn't a general topic that is in the mainstream news, not because it isn't an important topic that is more vital to discuss than ever, in the face of monopoly, walled-gardens, verified signatures and centralization.

A positive editor like pg was aware of this, and treated the site as his personal playground. It partially revolved around what were essentially his journal entries. I only ever ended up on this site because he decided one day to have every front page article be about Erlang, of all things.

edit: and to add to the penultimate paragraph, an energetic discussion of FOSS that lead to productive projects and statements by people of influence would influence the mainstream. This place used to make stories, not just Digg them. The purpose of the site (other than to run something on Arc) seemed to me to be to juice new YC startups in a way that would leak into the general media. It doesn't even seem useful for YC any more.

It worries me a lot what are those devs without jobs now, will do next? Do they change to the dark side and start battling AI startups and technologies?

That is an insight that my age simply didn't bring.

I am not sure about the accuracy of it as I was there after the AI era and I have only seen the slow but steady creep of it.

> This place used to make stories, not just Digg them

This does give me goosebumps.

Honestly, I like this place because it has a lot of nice people and we are more alike and different and it's just that this seems to be the place I have decided to call a home to all of my ramblings/thoughts on essentially everything.

The only other social media that I operate is maybe discord and a very small dose of reddit.

it does seem to me that somewhere along the internet, we might have lost it, or atleast its hidden, waiting to be discovered.

I can't help but share things like julia evan's zines and how he inspired one day when I messaged him on mail about being worried about AI when he shared me somebody who had created a better UI for the man pages and so many other interesting pages which really reflected personality that I didn't know exist.

I don't really think that we can do over hackernews but there is certainly a possibility of atleast having niche discussions like erlang and discussing them could lead to more people exposure's to it... which can benefit them or the community!

I can maybe think of that we might need to use something like matrix to atleast create a public community with better moderation if that's the issue.

I think the HN mods are also trying their best but if we want opinions, the best way I right now could think of to fixing this as an issue might be to creating a hackernews but not for AI which I had actually suggested once but everybody just said to me to block posts about AI or to create a tracker which removes all AI references at most, the post is definitely lost in my comments but I definitely remember it.

I can understand where you are coming from and I think that this place isn't a substitute for a place like that and we still might need a place like that too if we become too pessimistic of y-combinator.

Never give up hope I suppose :)