Comment by microtonal
25 days ago
What's up with all the new accounts astroturfing AI? There are multiple in these threads. People from the 'foundation model' companies having to keep up the AI hype?
Usually they provide grandiose claims (like the top-level comment) without any evidence or just anecdotal evidence that is not verifiable.
Elsewhere I called it akin to Bannon's "flood the zone" marketing strategy.
HN is lousy with new accounts (created in the past year) that are overwhelmingly excited for the so-called AI revolution.
Just woke up from half my nights sleep to see what HN is talking about at 1 am pst on a Friday.
Oh look more useless arguing.
People who do things care about the doing more than how the sausage was made.
I do not care how software gets built. Only that it works. Results is the only thing that matters and I hope everyone in this thread internalizes that fact.
> People who do things care about the doing more than how the sausage was made.
Then do it. Be successful. Be wonderful. Show us all the great results.
If you only care about results, then go do the things.
Why are you complaining? Whats wrong with differing views?
When people cannot accept other people critiquing AI; that is literally AI psychosis.
Heres a trick: what is AI bad at? Stop and ask yourself what it really sucks at.
Nothing come to mind?
You're living AI psychosis.
If you can't accept that anything it does is wrong or bad, that you are only successful when you use AI you are, flat out, gas lighting yourself.
Now go read the comments by recent new accounts about AI.
Yeah.
Either there are a lot of bots, or a lot of really really troubled people out there right now.
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>I do not care how software gets built. Only that it works.
I mean, I agree on a very high level of abstraction. But my problem is that I need to understand how software gets built so that I can have confidence in my ability to maintain and evolve the project.
I need to understand whether a feature is easy to add or requires a wholesale rewrite of the entire codebase, which comes with risks. I need to understand how new features affect existing users.
I also need to understand the economics of the process and the economics of my industry. That means I have to care to some degree about how software gets made, not just whether some specific program works at the present moment.
If you give me a choice between an implementation that is 100 LOC I can understand and an implementation that is a million LOC that I can never understand, I'm going to chose the former, even if both implementations pass all tests.
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Can usually sniff them out because their comments are long and give lots of (vague) examples.
There's good money to be made in prolonging the hype.
Just what kind of evidence do you suppose they could have?
Showing actual improved products and features. Showing actual code. etc.
Not a bot (although I have been accused of it, due to my activity here, and on GitHub, but I’ve been this way for longer than LLMs have been a thing. I’m retired, “on the spectrum,” and don’t participate in any other social media).
I’m currently working on a rewrite of an app that originally took two years. It’s been about three months, and I’m probably about 70% done. It’s a total “from scratch” rewrite; both client and server (two versions of each, as I also have administrative code). It’s a pretty big system, for one guy. I couldn’t do it, without the LLM.
It’s not been a cakewalk. I’ve needed to toss out large swaths of LLM-generated code, and rewrite by hand, but, for the most part, it’s been a huge help.
But I’m also not doing it in a manner that eats tokens. I just use the standard $20/month subscription as a chat. I suspect my workflow is not one that Anthropic or OpenAI really wants out there.
But I also bet that many HN accounts are bots; although I think many may be ones run by enthusiasts, not some AI cabal.
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I shipped a project at work in 3 months instead of the estimated original 6-9 months.
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Please read what the HN guidelines say about insinuations of astroturfing, because it very much applies here.
Crucially, those rules were written before the invention of the new astroturfing machine which makes it more trivial than ever. HN had to impose restrictions around new amounts already, such as limitations on Show HN, so clearly something is going on and being recognised as such.
If you think the guidelines should be changed you can mail dang, but unless they change the civil thing would be to follow them.
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not an astroturf and didn’t want to be associated with my main which has identifying info. Wanted to offer a perspective aside from the majority skeptic view on HN
Also I provided the list of actual hype ha
Real inventions don't need hype they speak for themselves.
Financial incentives