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How much of HN is AI?

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Re: How much of HN is AI?

#331

Post by seizethecheese »

culi wrote: post #307
catchnear4321 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You took a look at all of one comment of a user and categorized them as unkind. Som'n som'n broad brush bad Fwiw I think Waymo's self-driving AI model blog post and the piece about people using AI to mass produce ads on Apple News are fairly categorized. And the "50% of HN is or is about AI" tagline feels accurate enough. There is so much more to tech than artificial intelligence (for that matter, there's is so much…

The Waymo one definitely is AI, the original point here was that it was AI not just LLMs. The Apple News one really is about fraud and AI as the mechanism is just a sign of the times.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#332

Post by cubefox »

lovich wrote: post #317
cubefox wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ignored my previous explanation.

Which previous explanation did I ignore? The only one I saw upon review was > Extrapolation of the extreme AI progress we have seen in the last few years. I don’t think that’s a viable extrapolation hence my mockery about a 3 month old being trillions of pounds by the time they were 10 years old. If there was another explanation please let me know so I can evaluate it.

> AI is not limited to the rigid construction plan of an organism. A model also doesn't have to fit inside a small skull or be limited to the daily energy intake of a human.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#333

Post by sph »

DarmokTanagra wrote: post #326
sph wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it Jesus Christ this has to be bait. Added to the favourites to laugh about it when the lunacy and hype has died down in 5 years and the trough of disillusionment has truly settled in. Or to laugh about it when ASI actually has arrived and we're waiting in line to be turned into biofuel for the Greater Good. Everybody is literally pinning their hopes that God its…

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.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#334

Post by someguynamedq »

mrweasel wrote: post #60
jrflo wrote: 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.

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…

What are you doing in tech that has not been impacted by AI?

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#335

Post by nephihaha »

krapp wrote: post #168
seizethecheese wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Being contrarian for its own sake is pretty stupid. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Got to say I agree with this. Contrarians can be an annoyance, but someone's got to point out the Emperor's got no clothes on.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#336

Post by latexr »

totalconfusion wrote: post #297
latexr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everyone here is AI. That’s not the argument. > I can't tell the difference so what does it matter? It matters because you’re not the only human on HN and others have difference preferences. “I don’t care about this particular issue” is not the same thing as “this particular issue isn’t important”. > you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it. Not the argument either. No one is “surprised” th…

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 “created”. Paint is, and that’s a physical process.

> We were something different before we were primates (…)

That’s not how evolution works. We don’t just evolve into different things over time. Mutations occur and the most adapted survive while the others die and are eventually replaced. We are short circuiting that process for ourselves and other species via selective breeding.

> (…) humanity should collectively get off the high horse.

I agree, and that has nothing to do with the conversation. Humanity’s “high horse” starts way before the conversation ever reaches computers”, let alone LLMs.

> Serious question (…)

In don’t think it is. You have to define what you mean by “meaningful relationship” (no two people will have the same definition) and “you” (are you being specific or general)?

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#337

Post by dang »

mrweasel wrote: post #217
dang wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT. Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely…

Hopefully HN is just getting more popular, but isn't a large part of the "huge onslaught of new traffic" driven by AI companies scraping the site for content or writing comments for various reasons? Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up. But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a c…

I take your point! But the positives are still positive. I've been amazed by how much LLMs have helped us do.

None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#338

Post by dang »

brazukadev wrote: post #265
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 ).

> 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 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. It's possible, of course, that B was already working for "people, corporations and institutions interested in manipulating HN" 7 years ago. It's also possible that malefactors came along later and found a way to pay or coerce B into doing their dirty work (edit: or hack their account). But at this point one becomes unmoored from any evidence at all. The far more likely explanation is that A is slinging cheap accusations because they disliked something B said and are resorting to the internet's favorite trope ("you're a shill!").

When I say "People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data", what I mean is that the vast majority of such claims boil down to cases like the one I just described or something similar.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#339

Post by xigoi »

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.

> nor does everyone have the disposable time to learn how to make it hugely useful to them.

True, I’d rather spend my time to get useful skills whose usefulness cannot be destroyed by a single corporation deciding to pull the rug.

> A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.

Since everyone who uses Google the search engine is forced to use Google AI, we can’t get meaningful statistics for those.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#340

Post by tim333 »

sph wrote: post #254
fcanesin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted: I was going to write this exact reply. Everyone is a bit tired of hearing about AI, but it's advancing fast and it's the most important thing right now. As Demis says, if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it.

> if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it Jesus Christ this has to be bait. Added to the favourites to laugh about it when the lunacy and hype has died down in 5 years and the trough of disillusionment has truly settled in. Or to laugh about it when ASI actually has arrived and we're waiting in line to be turned into biofuel for the Greater Good. Everybody is literally pinning their hopes that God its…

I'd say it is engineering. There's a Moore's law like steady progress where the effective IQ goes up each year which will result in neither troughs nor biofuel but just smart AI.

Given human nature I also think it'll be kind of undramatic. Like when jet aviation transformed things people moan about check-in queues and maybe with ASI people will probably moan their robot butler is only 200 IQ when their neighbours is 205.

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