Comment by jdthedisciple
4 days ago
It's incredible how negative and dismissive the comments in here are while here I am thinking the model actually looks impressively capable.
But then again I heard the downers have always been the first to leave their dung comments here so let's see...
It would be interesting to see some time-series sentiment analysis of HN. Subjectively it feels like there's much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong.
You may like this old comment by dang who did this type of analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 (2020)
Bunch of software engineers are worried about their future employment prospects.
IMO it’s best to just stop worrying and embrace it as the end of days for the field.
These are the last good ol’ days you will have before it’s all over. Worrying about it won’t change the future. Just try to focus on all the good AI does.
A lot of us spent substantial parts of our careers automating other folks out of jobs. But now that it's come for us, we're upset.
It's not that as much as the usual something new, complain about rapid change.
s/software engineers/filmmakers/
4 replies →
[flagged]
Add in time zone of the commenter and potentially some really interesting data emerges.
Such as?
> time-series sentiment analysis [...] much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong
Depending on the members, there certainly is. Put aside the "dismissers", those who have a habit or a hormonal reliance to cast a "meh". Those who objectively assess according to the input that the development of facts provide may bend their "apparent mood" accordingly. This may be more evident here because in brighter times we may be more inclined to post and submit about more idle intellectual beauty ("complications in ancient clocks"), and in darker times it makes sense that we are more focused on the problems.
Personally I'm just bored of AI releases. I kinda dread it because it'll hog the front page of HN for a couple of days and it's just the same comments every time: people showing what it generated, people signalling that they aren't luddites etc.
For me this is like announcing a slightly more efficient form of coal-powered steam engine. Great, but it's still running on coal. I'm excited about moving beyond coal to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. Current "AI", based on machine learning, is just recycling existing human works: books, films, code, forum posts etc. But those works, like the coal, is going to run out. We've decided to stop making new things and just burn the coal that's already been deposited.
It's probably actually good, but after this stuff with Qwen-Image-3 and it's ability to things like render images that look like they were rendered with LaTeX or compose many things side by side or in depth, maybe it's perhaps not totally in the right direction to only focus on visual stuff.
I'm a person who is making extensive use of current-gen "smart" LLM for coding tasks and building automation tools, doing some of the drudge work of gluing disparate open source things together into new projects. I'm fairly optimistic about that. Particularly when you have a good harness setup and you know enough about the subject matter to understand when a model has gone into some dead-end of reasoning or has built something that's not quite right.
At the same time, I can see social media is being flooded with absolutely horrid AI slop images and video. I'm much more pessimistic about the practical beneficial real world use of totally artificial image and video generators. It seems the uses that these things are put to when they get into the hands of millions of people are detrimental to society and not a benefit.
Only the enlightened tech elite should have access to such sophisticated technology - we can’t expect the uneducated masses to not misuse them
/s
Yeah, really, masses are fine. I mean gross and boring mostly, but fine. Problem is when entrepreneurs get their hands on such tech, because they invariably put it to use for scamming and cheating people (read: marketing). It's the business people who are flooding social media with AI slop, for example.
1 reply →
none of this is exciting compared to holodeck in star trek
> in star trek
Heh. On the other hand, we are seeing so much negativity around "AI", while we have access to something as close as possible to the "universal communicator" from trek. There are now several CotS things you can buy that basically serve this purpose. You can walk into a mall, buy one, and travel to the most remote place on Earth, speak in your own language, and almost anyone else can speak in their own language, and through technomagic the two of you can communicate. And yet there's so much pessimism...
Yup. People still don't believe when I say that we've cracked universal translation with LLMs. That's despite the proof being in their hands; anyone with any SOTA multimodal LLM app (read: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini) with "advanced voice" / "live mode" can test it on the spot: just launch it and tell it will hear multiple languages and its task is to translate what it hears in one language to the other, and vice versa.
Advertisers love these sorts of reactions.
I see nothing here but them TELLING us how great it is. Not showing us.
> Not showing us
Have you watched the 46s video full screen on a monitor and not marvelled at the incredible 4K detail of the FPV motorcycle racing clip?
Given that Martin Scorsese is now an "advisor", I suspect BFL will continue to position itself as the research lab for filmmakers. This video model, if comparable to Seedance 2.0 won't really make sense as a slop generator, as it's too expensive for that, but it would be part of a projects VFX pipeline.
It's possible it's because some people care about the consequences of what we're doing as a society beyond the mindless satiation of curiosity. Nothing wrong with curiosity in my books by the way, but I do think isolating it the way we've done in the technical fields is a dangerous and irresponsible attitude.
As I understand it HN is a community for hackers to discuss interesting and curious topics.
Pessimistic opinions on the labor market, views about society and politics that border on the dystopian, as well as exaggerated concerns about datacenter environmental impacts, all seem like a poor fit for this website.
It would be a very uninformed world view and naive to say that the people who build and implement cutting-edge technology shouldn't be thinking about its societal implications and dangers. Or even considering more basic things like making sure it doesn't hurt anyone. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you always should do a thing.
Anyone ever taken a CS course that includes extensive discussion of the Therac-25?
11 replies →
It is precisely those people who have abdicated such concerns who most need the discussion. You can not compartmentalize reality, even if you can compartmentalize your own mind. These discussions lead one closer to a relationship with reality as-it-is than as your mind would like it to be.
You must expand the view to: members here form a community of people with aggregage special skills (which the "intellectual curiosity" part itself suggests) and are operators in a real world, which we assess and discuss.
There are urgent matters, important matters, and nice matters - all relevant to us.
There are less things to talk about on HN today than ever before!
2 replies →