Comment by ivcatcher
15 hours ago
Fair call — it did kind of explode from one calculator to 60+ I’m a real person (long-time lurker, finally posting), but I get why it looks sus. Things are changing fast, and I’m just happy to be part of the messy early wave. Thanks for the honesty.
> Thanks for the honesty.
It's impossible to tell if this is AI or not. Another version of Poe's law. The only thing to do is assume everything is AI, just like you must assume all posts have ulterior (generalluy profit-driven) motives, all posters have a conflict of interest, etc.
Maybe the only thing to do is stop trying to understand posters' motivations, stop reading things charitably, stop responding, just look for things that are interesting (and be sure to check sources).
Reader, keep in mind that OP being "a real person" has nothing to do with whether their content is appropriate for HN.
Every spammer and scammer, even a bot, is ultimately controlled by a real person in some sense. That doesn't mean we want their content here.
people are hurt because something which defined them as a person can now be done by a machine; don't let them dissuade you
People are hurt when people turn person-to-person communication into person-to-machine communication. It's dismissive of their use of genuine wall-clock time trying to engage with you.
A fair amount of AI hype traffic is likely to be astroturfed and automated. Just serving AI investors.
Anyone who disagrees with the above are just hurt that their manual hyping has been replaced with machines.
I would add to this: skills mean nothing if you don’t use them.
OP made a site with a bunch of calculators. Their critics didn’t make that!
We're busy building real software, not toys. I routinely write all kinds of calculators in my game development, in addition to having 100x more complex code to contend with. This task is as trivial as it gets in coding, considering computers were literally made to calculate and calculation functions are part of standard libraries. OP definitely didn't use Claude to implement math functions from scratch, they just did the basic copy-and-paste work of tying it to a web interface on a godawful JS framework stack which is already designed for children to make frontends with at the cost of extreme bloat and terrible performance. Meanwhile I actually did have to write my own math library, since I use fixed-point math in my game engine for cross-CPU determinism rather than getting to follow the easy path of floating-point math.
It's cool that ChatGPT can stitch these toys together for people who aren't programmers, but 99% of software engineers aren't working on toys in the first place, so we're hardly threatened by this. I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.
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