Comment by PaulHoule
7 days ago
This post is turning up at least every other day. The last few times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the front page, it's not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.
I am wondering what the ratio is for VC and angel dealflow in the valley right now.
Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.
> Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.
Fully agree, and I in fact am finding that I actually find more stories I'm interested in that way than looking at the front page. For whatever reason, I'm increasingly getting out of sync (interests-wise) with broader HN. So many stories I think are great HN material (and would have been a few years ago) languish with almost no activity.
So there are two reasons IMHO to browse new: Surface better stories to front page for engagement, and find better stories
As you age your interests and curiosity change, in ways you often don't see until later.
Very common in computer science contexts. Young undergraduates always pick up the new tech and make something that seems alien and wrong first. It's not even the masters students.
Possibly the same Kiro - Agentic IDE post would have been as interesting to you as the launch of Atom or something related to VS Code, etc.
>This post is turning up at least every other day.
Res ipsa loquitur
>Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.
I hang out in /ask and /asknew for my part.
PS: Hey, Paul... When are you going to close my 2021 issue[0], you already merged the pull request[1] :D
Come on, man!
[0]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/issues/10
[1]: https://github.com/paulhoule/gastrodon/pull/11
I will take a look at it.
Will "circle back" in a few years.
Buy my AI/LLM RAG Agentic bot to handle pull-requests and follow-ups based on HN conversations.
> The last few times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the front page, it's not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.
A bigger impact for me has been the number of mentions of AI in the comments. It's not just that a large part of the front page is dominated by LLM hype posts, it's that every single post has a least one guy near the top somehow bringing AI into the discussion. I don't even care if it's "AI will fix this" or "haha, AI sucks at this too". I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again.
> I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again.
Genuinely curious: Why?
Don’t get me wrong, I upvoted this post, and would love to see AI separated out, or at least tagged (like a root comment suggests) so that I can filter them out if I want.
But I can’t say I’d never want to hear anything about AI ever again (though I’m headed in that direction).
What field are you in, and what are your interests, such that you’d want to visit HN without ever seeing mentions of AI?
That is a wonderful question, but it's very hard to answer without essentially knowing me, and that may be a little bit ambitious for a comment.
I'm a software engineer. I consider this some of the most important work of our generation. The hardware we've made today has unlocked an until now impossible control over the world. We don't have to mechanically devise a way to make a clock that tracks the stars. We can just program it into a microchip, and it'll just do it. We don't have to manage an untold thousands of people to calculate our taxes. We can write it into a computer and it can just do it. Forever and perfectly. We're just not applying it.
I've reached the point of despair. It's not a AI doom kind of despair, where I believe that AI is going rogue or whatever. It's a much more pedestrian of despair. We have tremendous problems ahead of us. Both when it comes to the climate, but also when it comes to just doing the things that society always has to do and AI doesn't offer anything to any of the actual problems of society.
While people are dying of Ebola in Africa and Americans are dying because they can't pay for healthcare, we are talking about automating software development for ad-tech companies. It's embarrassing. This is my field, these are my people, and this is the best we have to offer.
I try to abstain from that despair by just not engaging with it. Either AI will happen and we'll take it from there, or it wont and then we'll have wasted a lot of effort and will hopefully never had any credibility as an industry again. I can't make a difference in either of those outcomes, so I just want it to go away.
Let me make it clear though. I too love the math behind recent AI. I even love the engineering behind how we do fast GEMM on GPU's. The challenges are really fun technically. That just can't be what decides our direction.
I hope that somewhat answered it a little. It's a bit hard to get such a large topic rooted so deeply in me into a comment. Thinking about the future in relation to these billion dollar companies and what they make does actually make me emotional.
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Not your parent, and not anti-AI, but I’ve seen similar things to this thread in smaller spaces I’m in.
There are some people who are having genuine crises over this stuff, some of it existential, and some of it “wow I thought my friends had some basic agreements about the world that we actually don’t,” and seeing this stuff on the regular just fans these sorts of issues.
Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of homepage spots, and if you don’t want to see a topic, it effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five stories to me it would be less useful than it is now.
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Not the OP, but I'm sick to death of hearing about AI
The hype around it is ridiculous. I don't personally find it nearly as useful as people are saying, so everything feels like people are trying to gaslight me
Don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. Amazing stuff. I just personally don't have much interest in it until it's much more reliable for the things I want to use it for
And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now
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I noted that too, to the point where I'm suspecting that "that guy" (obviously not just one user) is being paid to do so.
I've started downvoting them, the same way I always downvote "I fed this to an LLM and here's what it spat out".
I have had that same thought when I see them as one of the first comments on a post. I can't do anything with that suspicion, how would I prove it, but it's definitely there.
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