Comment by pjerem

15 days ago

I think I have a precise figure : it's a lot.

Yeah. If HN is your primary source of in depth AI discussion, you get a pretty balanced take IMO compared to other channels out there. We (the HN crowd) should take into account that if you take "people commenting on HN" as a group, you are implicitly selecting for people that are able to read, parse and contextualise written comment threads.

This is NOT your average mid-to-high level corpo management exec, who can for more than 80% (from experience) be placed in the "rise of the business idiot" cohort, fed on prime linkedin brainrot. self-reinforcing hopium addicts with an mba.

Nor is it the great masses of random earth dwellers who are not always able to resist excess sugar, nicotine, mcdonalds, youtube, fentanyl, my-car-is-bigger-than-yours credit card capitalism, free pornography, you name it. And now RLHF: Validation as a service. Not sure if humanity is ready for this.

(Disclosure: my mum has a chatgpt instance that she named and I'm deeply concerned about the spiritual convos she has with it; random people keep calling me on the level of "can you build me an app that uses llms to predict Funko Pop futures".)

And we thought having access to someones internet searches was good intel. Now we have a direct feed to their brain stem along with a way to manipulate it. Good thing that narcissistic sociopaths have such a low expression in the overall population.