191–200 of 397 posts
Look at the world Google is molding. Here's a guy who has had an online business dependent on ranking well in organic searches for ~20 years and has 2.5 million subs on YouTube. Traffic to his site was fine to sustain his business this whole time up until about 2-3 years where AI took over search results and stopped ranking his site. He used Google's AI to rewrite a bunch of his articles to make them more friendly to…
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> That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping "Gatekeeping" became a trendy term for a while, but in the post-LLM world people are recognizing that "gatekeeping" is not the same as "having a set of standards or rules by which a community abides". If you have a nice community where anyone can come in and do whatever they want, you no longer have a community, you have a garbage dump. A gate to keep out the…
I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage newcomers by making their field seem mysterious and only able to be done by super special people, and intimidating or making fun of newbies who come along and ask naive questions. "Gatekeeping" is NOT when you require someone to be willing lear…
But you could learn these new perspectives from AI too. It already has all the thoughts and perspectives from all humans ever written down.
At work, I still find people who try to put together a solution to a problem, without ever asking the AI if it's a good idea. One prompt could show them all the errors they're making and why they should choose something else. For some reason they don't think to ask this godlike brain for advice.
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Right, so it's about the person and how they've qualified themselves, and not about what they've built. I feel like I've been around these parts for a while, and that is not my experience of what Show HN was originally about, though I'm sure there was always an undercurrent of status hierarchy and approval-seeking, like you suggest.
It's not about status. It's about interest. A joiner is not going to have an interesting conversation about joinery with someone who has put some flatpak furniture together.
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> But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do). It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how hard it is to get people to use software they aren’t effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain access to something or ‘network effects’ or whatever). Most people’s time…
probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need Sure... to a point. But realistically, the "use an LLM to write it yourself" approach still entails costs, both up-front and on-going, even if the cost may be much less than in the past. There's still reason to use software that's provided "off the shelf", and to some extent there's reason…
Absolutely, but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human. I guess it’s usually just ongoing validation that the software is headed down a path of usefulness which is hard to specify up-front and by definition something only the user (or a very good proxy) can do (and even they are usually bad at it).
That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…
That may be, but it's also exposing a lot of gatekeeping; the implication that what was interesting about a "Show HN" post was that someone had the technical competence to put something together, regardless of how intrinsically interesting that thing is; it wasn't the idea that was interesting, it was, well, the hazing ritual of having to bloody your forehead of getting it to work. AI for actual prose writing, no que…
While at first glance LLMs do help expose and even circumvent gatekeeping, often it turns out that gatekeeping might have been there for a reason. We have always relied on superficial cues to tell us about some deeper quality (good faith, willingness to comply with code of conduct, and so on). This is useful and is a necessary shortcut, as if we had to assess everyone and everything from first principles every time t…
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Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too? I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?
I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding. The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one…
It's about being oblivious, I suppose. Not too different to claiming there will be no need to write new fiction when an LLM will write the work you want to read by request.
Whether it is the guy reporting on his last year of agentic coding (did half-baked evals of 25 models that will be off the market in 2 years) or Steve Yegge smoking weed and gaslighting us with "Gas Town" or the self-appointed Marxist who rails against exploitation without clearly understanding what role Capitalism plays in all this, 99% of the "hot takes" you see about AI are by people who don't know anything valuable at all.
You could sit down with your agent and enjoy having a coding buddy, or you could spend all day absorbed in FOMO reading long breathless posts by people who know about as much as you do.
If you're going to accomplish something with AI assistants it's going to be on the strength of your product vision, domain expertise, knowledge of computing platforms, what good code looks like, what a good user experience feels like, insight into marketing, etc.
Bloggers are going to try to convince you there is some secret language to write your prompts in, or some model which is so much better than what you're using but this is all seductive because it obscures the fact that the "AI skills" will be obsolete in 15 minutes but all of those other unique skills and attributes that make you you are the ones that AI can put on wheels.
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> or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding You might be on to something. Maybe its self-selection (as in people who want to engage deeply with a certain topic but lack domain expertise might be more likely to go for "vibecodable" solutions).
I compare it to a project I worked on when I was very junior a very long time ago - I built by hand this complicated harness of scripts to deploy VM's on bare metal and do stuff like create customizable, on-the-fly test environments for the devs on my team. It worked fine, but it was a massive time sink, lots of code, and was extremely difficult to maintain and could have weird behavior or bad assumptions quite often…
> I made it because at that point in my career I simply didn't know that ansible existed
Channels Mark Twain. "Sorry for such a long letter, i didn't have the time to make it shorter."