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How much of HN is AI?

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Re: How much of HN is AI?

#81

Post by yndoendo »

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 backers do not care about these issues.

ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap.

I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value.

_Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#83

Post by jrflo »

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…

I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progress that's being made.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#84

Post by zamadatix »

bewareofscams wrote: post #4

Did not read the article, but I would say about 40%. Btw, you can toggle [showdead] in profile settings, then you'll see messages caught by moderators, which are sophisticated bots (writing style at ChatGPT3 level) + absolutely valid points that lash out on ruling class, SV mentality, US and Israel.

> you'll see messages caught by moderators

Much of these are caught by users downvoting and/or flagging. I think the lack of a public moderation log makes people think the mods are constantly running around every story/comment to steer the site when really it's the users doing most of the grunt work while the moderators only step in occasionally for the more serious items.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#85

Post by utopiah »

Upvoted obviously just to counterbalance how often I got downvoted for stating how popular posts from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are just ads.

The author is most subtle or diplomatic than me and thus call them "AI vendor press releases" or "AI vendor marketing" but we know.

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#86

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #11

"At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general direction; if you want a taste, {another article by same author} has been called “watered-down” and “slop”." We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI. I…

[deleted]

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#87

Post by KellyCriterion »

mgl wrote: 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…

You forgot to mention the "JS-framework-of-the-month" years :-D

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#88

Post by onion2k »

ViktorRay wrote: post #37

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

Re: How much of HN is AI?

#89

Post by smalltorch »

mgl wrote: 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…

On the topic, I agree smaller groups are the only way to achieve this.

Here is a protptype of how easy it is to setup a forum on onionv3 service. Just a few commands and your off.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum

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