Comment by dang
6 hours ago
The personal attacks I saw were against different people, not just one. In a lot of cases it's just routine internet cynicism, which is always amplified against unusually successful or prominent people.
There's also a lot of fear and anger about the AI tsunami these days, among certain user cohorts, and that's an amplifier as well.
On HN, personal attacks aren't allowed regardless of who's being attacked, and comments are asked to make their substantive points thoughtfully and not be cynical or snarky. Here's one guideline:
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
Okay I see. Are people being attacked for engaging in AI research/dev irrespective of their character or other personal attributes?
I saw simonw getting attacked for sharing his bloglink about it, only it was not even simonw who shared the link here.
Saw that, too, but at some point one cannot just stand like sheep in the slaughterhouse, the reaction was to be expected (even though it could have happened in a more civilized way, not via personal-ish attacks, I agree with that).
More generally, there are now literally trillions of dollars being invested in this madness/tsunami/whatever-one-wants-to-call-it, which means that it has now become impossible to follow said money so as to follow the conflicts of interests (it’s easy to assume a conflict of interest for a guy like Karpathy given his past and recent employment history, but I do think that Simon is more on the genuine side), so this is why that counter-reaction is now manifesting itself so chaotically, hitting left and right with not necessarily any logic behind it, which means that there are going to be collateral “casualties” during it all (such as Simon in this case).
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