Is Pangram's detection capability considered to be on the higher side? This post seems to be written under the assumption that Pangram's detection is highly effective. Is it actually considered to be on the higher side in English-speaking circles?
Pangram links several third party evaluations [1] that all seem to agree with 90+% detection, and very close to 0% false positives. Obviously those could be cherry picked, but I’ve yet to see arguments to the contrary that actually include any supporting data. (E.g here’s a prompt that will get Claude to spit out text that pangram doesn’t detect or here’s an article authored in 2018 that pangram says is AI.) Detection is an arms race, so this could change (though I’d expect in the direction of false negatives), but right now it seems like defense is winning.
The "could" isn't required here, since Pangram calls many of the evals "collaborations", and some received direct support. Results that don't favor Pangram as being among the least-worst of a questionable product category* surely wouldn't be featured.
Did not read the article, but I would say about 40%.
Btw, you can toggle [showdead] in profile settings, then you'll see messages caught by moderators, which are sophisticated bots (writing style at ChatGPT3 level) + absolutely valid points that lash out on ruling class, SV mentality, US and Israel.
Much of these are caught by users downvoting and/or flagging. I think the lack of a public moderation log makes people think the mods are constantly running around every story/comment to steer the site when really it's the users doing most of the grunt work while the moderators only step in occasionally for the more serious items.
My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.
Feels more like another blockchain hype cycle to me.
Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.
I know what you're saying, there is a lot of speculation going on in AI right now. The difference is there is hard evidence of AI capabilities accelerating now: we've gone from toy chatbots to sort-of useful coding helpers to agents solving novel math problems in 3.5 years. We could plateau any day and a lot of investors would be stuck holding the bag, or we could continue on that trajectory and they'll make crazy profits. With crypto, the bet was always "how much money will people keep sticking in this market?" which seems a lot more flawed to me.
The irony with blockchain is that it also had a bunch of real life use cases but the sheer extremity of the hype cycle managed to actually prevent them from being effectively brought to life.
There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin.
I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is getting washed out by the hype simply because it's a gradual improvement and not "disruptive". Meanwhile the stuff sold as disruptive like vibe coding is mostly bullshit.
What was the useful blockchain tech? It seemed to me to all be different ways of avoiding regulations or bypassing existing system or addressing issues that were already solved by using centralized systems.
it let you decentralize trust. as one example, I was hoping that instead of "sign in with google" I could sign in with a blockchain based decentralized identity service where no single party can revoke my account for no reason at all.
So, they resolved solved problems but without centralized systems.
It seems to me that people don't want to run their own security upon which they have no recourse if they fail, and don't think that benefits of centralized systems are worth giving up for the dubious benefits of a decentralized trust. Imagine if the scams for the currencies occurred with voting systems, with no way to undo it.
The technologies just didn't do anything that more than a small number of people wanted.
Funniest part of all of it is it’s all the same actors. Same hardware even. Just the crypto shills now talk about agentic capabilities & we’re approaching a singularity man! Can’t you see!!?
Yes, it's appropriate given the metric you have chosen ("big"ness), though maybe the word should then be "expected", since "appropriate" implies some kind of broader human-oriented concept of rightfulness/goodness.
You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big. We've already left humans behind in many ways (but in others we've failed to build LLMs that know how to find the gaps in implementation that humans are leaving out)
Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war...
"They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"
Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.
> You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big
Instead of expanding the list, it would be better to widen your vision. Email was more transformative than AI is right now. Unix, then Linux was more transformative. If you have a magic wand and remove AI, I think barely anyone would be impacted, but removing something like windows would be like erasing computers. And removing Linux would wipe most of the internet services.
Email in it's first five years barely extended beyond some research universities. And is it novel? Do you see email as somehow a difficult concept to imagine?
Unix in it's first five years reworked the way operating systems performed. I'd agree it's pretty important, but I don't see how it fundamentally changed the way we perform work in multiple disciplines (in its first 5 years). Same for Linux, but even less so.
We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse. Powerful technologies can have negative effects. Email has been negatively transformative in ways as well.
Part of the reason you can erase AI so effectively with so "little" effect is that it is new.
There's only a few months left for the core technologies of LLM, the transformer, to be a decade old (counting since the "Attention is all you need"). In a decade, we have gone from pure theory of computation (Turing paper in 1936) to the first general purpose computer (ENIAC in 1945). In 1971, the first email was sent over the network (ARPANET), by the early 1980s, we were looking at nationwide deployment of email systems.
> We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse.
Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
This is an entirely weird and bizarre conversation. The world today has network effects - specifically because of well, networking. It feels almost ridiculous comparing the impact of things like ENIAC to github because they aren't even in the same class. GIT and email (FYI, there is a predecessor to email in 1965 called MAIL) are specific implementations of systems that would have happened no matter what. GIT is awesome, email is kinda ok -- but that's beside the point.
> Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
It is almost like you didn't read a word I said. As an old person, I can tell you something: We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it. I was there. We could go back. It's not essential. You've lived maybe 3 years with LLMs. No kidding they could disappear. As an old person, I have no idea why you think any other technology is any different.
> Forcefully.
I know this is going to come as a shock to you. But I hate mobile apps. I hate that TVs connect to the internet. I hate that we have cameras on every corner. I hate that we have cameras that watch us while driving.
Now, tell me about how this is different than all that.
> As an old person, I can tell you something: We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it.
As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.
I'm not saying that internet or any of the others is essential (in absolute). What I'm saying is that the supposedly "transformative" aspect of AI needs free offerings, dark patterns, and a mountain of hyping to just make it worthwhile to discuss in tech circles (removing the grifting on Linkedin). For everyone else, the most impact is the enormous amount of slop.
I paid for my computer. I'm paying for my internet connection and my electricity. I'm paying for my email service. Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
> As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.
The VCR? Hrm. What part of the world are you from? No computer and no internet? Hrm.
> Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
It is currently being paid for by millions of companies in Microsoft products, and I can tell you that many companies are happy with it.
Microsoft honestly has done a tremendous job integrating it with some of their products, less so in others. (Excel is a disaster, Teams has been pretty good)
- A successful surgery may require both a surgeon and a nurse, but that doesn't mean the nurse has nearly as much impact on the successful surgery as the surgeon.
- The lighting of the match is mainly caused by the striking of the match, not by the presence of oxygen, even though both are necessary for lighting the match.
So a cause being necessary for an effect doesn't imply that its impact on the effect is very large.
The ambiguity partly comes from denial. LLMs in the end, to be brutally honest, replace us. That is the direction it's headed and some people can't face the cold hard truth.
There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different.
And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.
It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to.
There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction.
To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless.
It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.
I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progress that's being made.
I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do.
And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.
ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
> ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
A personal assistant that will happily tell you that you’re the world’s largest supergenius who invented perpetual motion. I wouldn’t want that if they paid me $20/month to use it.
It’s never told me that, but it does help me fix problems. For instance the other day I noticed that my state unemployment insurance rate had increased from 0.75% to 12.75%. I absolutely could have spent hours of my time scouring the website, trying to call and waiting on hold, talking around the issues with a poorly trained state agent.
Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent.
You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars.
Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it.
So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.
i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews.
almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs.
> even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet
it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about.
>he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription,
again, it isnt 2023 anymore. none of this is true.
They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud.
So, about 0.6% of the world’s population is willing to pay for something that’s supposed to be hugely useful for literally everyone (as opposed to Adobe products, which are only for digital artists)?
Not everyone in the world has $20/month of disposable income, nor does everyone have the disposable time to learn how to make it hugely useful to them.
Also, these are just the numbers for OpenAI. A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.
So ChatGPT cannot deliver you $20/month worth of productivity to offset the cost? That's at least my point, for developers, businesses and a ton of use cases, access to a good AI is worth every penny, because it easily pays for itself. For the average consumer, that's just not true, apparently.
HN is in an extreme hype bubble around LLMs, because of AI coding. Normal people outside of the tech bubble range from 1. not caring at all about AI to 2. disliking or opposing it.
Meanwhile, here on HN, you have people who earnestly say things like "AI is the subtrate the future runs on"[1] (actual quote).
Just saying "it isn't 2023 anymore" isn't an argument. Yeah it's not 2023. And LLMs still can't actually do anything useful outside of sift logs and write small scripts. They still hallucinate things regularly so that you have to check everything they do, which negates the time savings they supposedly provide. And that's not even getting into the externalities! LLMs are a very crappy technology.
I guess Hex-Rays and Vector35 must be hallucinating their effects for, say, reverse engineering. OFC rev isn't be all and end all of computing but the effect LLMs had on security research and adjacent spaces (say, CTF) is interesting
I am so fucking sick of this. No, you dumbshits -- ALL of us DO NOT use LLM's to write code. Just fucking STOP assuming every developer needs the same crutch that the rest of you can't seem to live without.
I use it a couple times a week, not even daily. It's useful about half the time, and a complete waste of time the other half. It's a useful tool to reach for sometimes and I'll keep using it for the things it's good at, but it hasn't really changed how I work. Shrug.
LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT.
Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for at least 15 years—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, I presume there's a non-zero positive impact in having the site running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on those pages!
Hopefully HN is just getting more popular, but isn't a large part of the "huge onslaught of new traffic" driven by AI companies scraping the site for content or writing comments for various reasons?
Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up.
But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.
I fear this is not the only reason even if it is true. The more negative reason is a loss of skill/talent. We used to be able to know what to do in these situations, and how to fix things when they went wrong. Companies like Y Combinator used to be able to hire talented systems engineers who knew how to minimize the risk of things going wrong, and fix them when they did.
Now with LLMs it is just vibe-coded until it is fixed. Find the right prompt and hope the statistics is in your favor. If this is the case, there is nothing positive about it.
I take your point! But the positives are still positive. I've been amazed by how much LLMs have helped us do.
None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.
I think the scrapers have gotten pretty good and can imitate real traffic. And it isn’t just scraping for model training. A large amount would be LLM tool calls searching the web (and HN) for info about some prompt.
>because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances.
I hear what you're saying, but speaking for myself: can we *not*? I really have absolutely zero interest in having ChatGPT on my microwave or refrigerator. In fact, I'd rather have my appliances *not* be connected to the Internet, all things being equal.
>I'd rather have my appliances not be connected to the Internet,
It's getting harder and harder to find things that don't connect to the internet as time goes on. The moment a manufacture figures out how to sell your appliance data for more than it costs to add it, seemingly every model they produce gets it added with the only choice of going to some other manufacture if you don't want it... and even then finding one not internet connected gets nearly impossible.
In general most people don't care enough for people like us that don't want connected devices to move the dial.
Problem is other cool hacky stuff gets drawned out. Nobody votes on those because I imagine it's no longer attractive to the type of visitor that HN attracts now. I reckon there's many more non-tech, "make me a millionaire" gold rush crowd here, as cynical as it sounds. I base that on pure logic, since it's kind of inevitable with AI having delivered a massive democratization of tech knowledge, but also on the amount of snarkier, shorter, less technical, less logical, one short sentence type of comments.
I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.
"At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general direction; if you want a taste, {another article by same author} has been called “watered-down” and “slop”."
We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI. I swear there's people whose AI detectors are just
def is_content_ai(content):
return True
Occasionally such people also complain about how much of the world is AI now... well... yeah, that's what happens when that's your detector. It's not quite that bad, as bad as it is.
I don't know what to do about it. Discussion about AI provenance of a given work is often a valid topic. When YouTube shovels an AI channel at me and it briefly penetrates my defenses, it's heartening to see the commentors trying to warn people about it, shortly before I block the channel.
(It's annoying that so many legit channels, which I know are legit because they predate AI and the same person is on camera as before, have switched to heavily-AI thumbnails. That's the hole that the other channels sometimes get me with, because just having an AI thumbnail doesn't prove it's not a legit channel now.)
On the other hand, the chorus of very annoyed people who are very annoyed because they see AI everywhere who see AI everywhere because they literally see AI everywhere are becoming a bit of a nuisance themselves.
> We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI.
Well... when the utter majority of articles written about topics surrounding AI are written with AI and a ton of newcomers to the reverse-engineering and even hardware hacking communities now have AI do their work for them, even the last remnants of areas that used to be "for humans only" are now contaminated with AI.
Of course people end up being very sensitive. I come to HN to read words written by humans, not fluff hallucinated by an LLM.
>I come to HN to read words written by humans, not fluff hallucinated by an LLM.
yeah, but now a good chunk of the human-written words in the comments section are "ai slop", or some portmanteau of slop and something else. not particularly enlightening reading.
The truth is, writing is hard and time consuming, and most people are uncomfortable with the process. AI is a very easy shortcut to lucid, logical, authoritative text. Like sugary drinks and snacks, people can't resist. AI has rapidly destroyed, completely destroyed, the remaining authenticity on the internet.
The majority of articles are AI generated. And yeah at this point its futile to keep pointing it out. Human prose has been eliminated.
Also like sugary drinks, which our brains perceive as satisfying but are actually the opposite, LLM’s have been well-trained to produce text our brains (and up-voting fingers) perceive as lucid, logical, and authoritative despite the frequent absence of those attributes.
I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes.
15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars.
10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce.
5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter.
Now it is a blurry view into the future through the black mirror of AI.
How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
I do not have a clear answer, but what seems to work for you are small groups of friends and friends of friends hanging out on WhatsApp or Discord, discussing geeky news together in the context of their backgrounds. But these are very curated and very closed groups, still operating on the social media platforms of behemoths.
Would now be the right time to restart self-hosted message boards or Mattermost/Campfire instances?
I joined HN 13 years ago (2 years after you), and back then I saw it as a bunch of libertarians and venture capitalists and some open source (and/or functional programming) enthusiast with a few interesting and nerdy projects. I was mostly here for the news about new and useful technology.
I think the visual weight of the first group has increased over time as their projects of making a bunch of money while offering nothing of value has been validated more and more by our capitalist economy.
I joined in 2008, that was even after lurking for a while, and it’s almost unrecognizable now in comparison has been for many years. Was mostly entrepreneurship, tech was present but was a means to an end. It wasn’t tech for the sake of tech, which is what it feels like in the recent past. The discussion on entrepreneurship topics seems to have an employee mindset more so than an owner mindset. I find it similar to how renters vilify landlords but being a landlord is not massively glamorous and can be quite risky, renters are generally out of touch with the costs involved and the profit of a landlord is all I’m saying. There’s definitely some shitty landlords tarnishing the reputation of them all. This is what has happened in tech too, the startups we loved turned evil. My gut reaction of any new tech product is no longer curiosity, it’s mistrust.
Anyhow - I find tech stuff interesting to a degree, but fundamentally I’m an entrepreneur that sees it as a tool. A means to an end. I would love to find a place that still has that vibe. But anywhere entrepreneur related is always a cesspool of grift so it’s hard to find.
As for the employee-vs-employer. I am for sure part of the problem there. When I joined I immediately saw the potential of this being a forum where tech workers can form an international solidarity and complain about our bosses and started using it as such. There is no way you can have that many workers in an industry together and we don‘t complain about our bosses, that is just not going to happen. Workers complaining about our bosses is a universal behavior.
I am part of the problem in the first. It's because early HNer's were early Bitcoin users and adopters and I feel we (I) had a hope that it could take hold as an actual currency (I no longer feel that). But, we were so early I can say my first Bitcoin purchase was for <$10 and most of the Bitcoin I own today has a cost basis <$30. For us, it's climb was fast, wild, and wealth inducing. I thought it was insane when it quickly went to $100 and I think one of my own HN posts that has been maybe my most upvoted ever was about it hitting $300. I often wonder how many of the bitcoin wealth you hear and see about IRL, were just HN users that heard about it's early traction and had enough curiosity to buy a few coins (a cup of coffee then, is worth a house now). It was a PITA to buy coins though, I luckily used Mt Gox and moved them out prior to them getting "hacked".
I put my Bitcoin on ice, refused to sell it, my initial investment thesis was "what happens to the price when all Bitcoin is mined", given the supply is fixed, the price should surge, was my thought. I think they have or will find a way to alter the algo so that even more can be mined. But once I made that decision, it became difficult to see all the Bitcoin related news. I wanted to just not think about it. Daily reminder that I could sell today at a crazy high gain is tempting. I don't even know if that thesis makes sense given the projection of when that last coin will mine. Those projections didn't exist when I put this into place. So I hodl for no reason probably.
I never cared much for newsgroups, they were mostly nice for the historical stuff. I do miss IRC though, as toxic as it could be. I could run it in a little terminal on any system without download electron apps and being spammed with ads (discord).
The issue is the tech and the motives to wield it. Cosy decentralized message boards exist, thankfully outside the realm of the greater public.
The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.
Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here
I'm nostalgic for the new JS framework every day era. Say what you will about that era but people were writing the code by hand, so looking back it all feels "hand-crafted" and quaint. You had to copy paste that express app from a medium.com article instead of prompting an LLM to scaffold a whole project in one second.
At least there was some genuine effort involved there. What I find most disheartening about the current wave of AI-generated projects is that there's often very little personal involvement - someone had a general idea and asked Claude (or whatever) to implement it for them, and the results are much more representative of the AI agent's tendencies than the author's intent.
"How could we jump back into the cozy past again?"
Start by making YC pay in a court of law for all the societal damage they've done by sponsoring/funding companies that have violated and eroded our privacy and rights.
Strip away the corporate veil.
Imprison the investors.
The only way to get back what you lost is to take it back.
Democracies require conserved stake to function. How individuals initially get that stake is a degree of freedom, but if the stake can be printed freely, the system is unstable.
For working implementations of democracy, look at: invite trees, shareholder corporations, proof-of-stake distributed ledgers, etc.
Matrix works fine for the friend to friend, small community things. Discourse forums too. Use Signal for family and friends, perhaps work. Fediverse and Atmosphere (Bluesky) for your microblog needs, and RSS to keep track of blogs.
Having used Matrix for almost a decade, it's hot garbage.
Sync is barely working, "unable to decrypt" still exists, the encryption is flawed [0] and the whole thing is effectively just Element and everyone else follows their lead.
About the post you link, see [1] and [2], which makes me question both whether that is an actual vulnerability (Signal, the messenger recommended by the author, also didn't have that check, and it's addition is absent from release notes or CVEs) and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely given that the code has been there for years).
Can't speak about the other issues, I haven't had those but I barely use it. Based on comments, it's clear they exist or have existed for quite some time.
> About the post you linked, see [1] and [2], which makes me question both whether that is an actual vulnerability (Signal, the messenger recommended by the author, also didn't have that check, and it's addition is absent from release notes and CVEs)
I've edited the above linked post several times to make this clearer, but people still keep linking Matrix's flawed response as if it actually addressed the issue. It does not.
The issue is not as simple as "did the check exist? [y/n]". There are actually two issues:
1. Did the check exist? [y/n]
2. Did the group key agreement protocol fall to shit if the check was omitted? [y/n]
Matrix was (n, y) due to how Megolm manages group keys. Signal was (n, n) due to their protocol design.
Matrix tried to defend point 1 when the blog post was about both 1 and 2.
> and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely given that the code has been there for years).
Even if you assume the worst possible interpretation of this coincidence (which, sure, you're free to if you want-- you would be wrong if you did, of course): What does it even matter?
Like, what is the notion of "good faith" that's even necessary for someone to do independent security research and publish criticism of the cryptography used by a software project that's being propped up by EU sovereignty movements?
In my opinion, this is a stupid and vacuous framing.
Signal omitting the check didn't harm Signal's confidentiality. Matrix omitting the check demonstrably did.
You don't even need explicit barriers, the masses are staying on Reddit/Twitter regardless. Only the discerning are seeking out better and newer options and those options are staying the right size rather than absorbing the eternal September.
> How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
If it were democratization, we'd all have access to the data that underlies this dataset. In reality, this will destroy the origins of the data, and it will become hidden for all of humanity.
It is a tragedy of the commons of the highest order.
They will talk about how they are trying to protect humanity all while putting it behind a paywall.
> How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
Delete 9/10th of the HN population. I could accept even AI discussion if there wasn't so much of it, and so many posts in general; /new is like trying to win the lottery.
It doesn't matter how interesting it is, you just have to be lucky. The corollary is that the front page isn't the most interesting stuff posted today, it's a list of who's got lucky posting the average topic for the average reader.
Is that really the problem, though, or has the audience simply changed? It seems to me that the thoughtful deep dives of years past are still being produced, but they're buried under a much larger volume of lighter content. More importantly, many of the people working at the forefront of technology and product development appear to have moved to private communities such as Discord, Slack, and similar groups, perhaps in part because of NDAs.
There is some LLM detection for comments that auto-flags them.
It has some unfortunate side effects, though. Namely on a thread where people are discussing a text-heavy post that is LLM-authored, quoting a large enough block of that content appears to trigger it sometimes. Makes sense that it does, but..
Contrary to popular belief, it's quite easy to spot something written with AI. You just need the skill/gift. I usually spot them rather quickly and will flag on sight. Other users will do the same.
> I can't tell the difference so what does it matter?
It matters because you’re not the only human on HN and others have difference preferences. “I don’t care about this particular issue” is not the same thing as “this particular issue isn’t important”.
> you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
Not the argument either. No one is “surprised” this happens, people (obviously not all, but a significant number) are annoyed by it.
If people can't tell the difference but still get the shits because of some notion of being cheated or putting humanity on the pedestal, they're just being tribalistic. It's a common human rationalisation that helps entrench social hierarchies but in this case, and it's probably not the right word but Speciesism.
It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop, loving a colour, painting your house, then your neighbour informing you that a person of colour or an algorithm created it, then you hating it.
We were something different before we were primates, and we'll be something different after. Evolution has always been in a flux.
We're all just entities processing information and in my opinion, humanity should collectively get off the high horse.
Serious question, could you ever have a meaningful relationship with a teddy bear and/or an algorithm?
Not “people”, you. Some can tell the difference, others can’t. Just because you cannot tell and don’t mind that the waiter pissed in your soup, it doesn’t mean other people can’t tell and shouldn’t be bothered by it.
> It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop (…)
No, no it is not. That analogy makes no sense. Colour is part of the light spectrum, it’s not “created”. Paint is, and that’s a physical process.
> We were something different before we were primates (…)
That’s not how evolution works. We don’t just evolve into different things over time. Mutations occur and the most adapted survive while the others die and are eventually replaced. We are short circuiting that process for ourselves and other species via selective breeding.
> (…) humanity should collectively get off the high horse.
I agree, and that has nothing to do with the conversation. Humanity’s “high horse” starts way before the conversation ever reaches computers”, let alone LLMs.
> Serious question (…)
In don’t think it is. You have to define what you mean by “meaningful relationship” (no two people will have the same definition) and “you” (are you being specific or general)?
We could sit here all day arguing about subjectivity.
It's not been my experience that people can reliably tell the difference.
I, personally, would not equate pissing in somebody's soup with having a chat with an LLM but if we must, you need to appreciate that it's the piss itself, that makes the soup delicious, if the soup was not pissed in, it would be middling at best. Only in that context can you then ask yourself, "Am I bothered by this delicious soup?"
I think the analogy works in the context in which it was intended. I was illustrating the absurdity of contempt for something based on its provenance, after praising it. If you really don't like the paint analogy image this, you read a book, loved it, then later found out the author was black, or an LLM, then you hated the book.
I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from regarding evolution. Sexual reproduction is a comparatively recent evolution in the scheme of things. That which came before us defined us, are our ancestors and is our history. What comes tomorrow, engineered or otherwise I would consider our children and should be loved, cherished and allowed to thrive in the same way our ancestors ushered us all into this universe.
I wasn't being facetious when I asked if you could have a meaningful relationship with an algorithm, I asked about the teddy bear to draw a parallel to which a lot of people are familiar. If a child can have an enriched life and what I would call meaningful, intimate relationship with an stuffed toy, why shouldn't they also be able to have the same with an algorithm that talks back to them? I'm being both general and specific if I think about it.
If I could image your brain perfectly and put it into a perfect physics simulation running on silicon or whatever substrate, then have this same conversation with you, I would call that meaningful. Whether or not you would at that point label yourself as living, conscious, sentient, human, whatever. It would be a meaningful relationship to me.
I think people are scared of change, and that's alright.
At the risk of being one myself... I usually find that there is some flaw in just about any set up and someone has to address that. Constant negativity is not a virtue of course, but neither is complete compliance and agreement.
Most people will agree with whoever is in charge, and it takes a lot to shake them out of that. It is clearly a flaw in the human species.
What I meant is that I’ve seen people complaining that the negativity towards AI on HN is manufactured and astroturfed. So we have people complaining on both ends of the debate.
I would bet that the AI booster side is way more astroturfed, but I’m very likely biased (I see genAI as a horrible mistake for human societies)
That's fine, but it would be helpful to see examples. People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data.
Does HN do proactive detection and/or flagging of comments determined to be AI generated?
I understand if information publicized on how this process might work is intentionally restricted, so as not to be easily circumvented. I'm also not asking this in a pointed or judgmental way with respect to HN, I'm mostly just curious how various social platforms are approaching this problem.
> People often make generic claims about astroturfing, bots, etc. that don't hold up in practice when we look at the data.
I'd be very careful with believing the system that looks for bots and astroturfing works well enough to confidently say that. Some of the people, corporations and institutions interested in manipulating HN and its audience are quite capable.
For example, one thing I think we can say is that if A accuses B of astroturfing, spying, manipulating, etc., and a quick look at B's posting history shows that they were posting to HN about e.g. Erlang in 2017, the odds of that accusation being correct go down to negligible levels. It's still possible that the
> Here's an example of what we can say: if user A accuses user B of astroturfing, spying, manipulating, etc., and a quick look at B's posting history shows that they were posting to HN about, let's say, Erlang in 2019, the odds of that accusation being correct go down to negligible
about this one tho I have noticed bot behavior (including posts that are incoherent) from old accounts - so there is the risk of 2 things going on:
- people getting hacked and their accounts being used for that
- some people that just decided to connect a bot to their account
which is way more difficult to spot. Anyway, I don't have a solution for those problems. You have an interesting and difficult work :)) Have a nice day, dang!
It got classified as human by our software, which of course is nowhere near perfect. Animats has been unmistakeably human for a long time though, so unless borderline comments become a pattern, I'm not worried.
AI has legitimately changed everything. It's not 2022 anymore. Try a recent LLM and set it to a coding task. For even moderate tasks, things you could burn a weekend or more on, the model will complete it in minutes, to a high degree of quality. It can write code better than most programmers, faster than any human. If that doesn't inspire positive feelings, it should at least fill you with awe. We live in an age of wonders.
>If that doesn't inspire positive feelings, it should at least fill you with awe. We live in an age of wonders.
It's impressive, despite its ethical baggage and psychological, environmental and psychological harm. But if if filed you in awe I think you need to get away from the keyboard. Things are happening in biology, astronomy, archaeology, engineering, that are far more awesome than software that can write code for you.
And if your only response to that is to be in awe of whatever part AI may have had in the process, you're still missing the point.
All HN users can be part of the solution. Help mods by emailing them at hn@ycombinator.com. I recently pointed out a suspicious pattern, and the mods were able to use that to track and ban a collection of accounts.
Reading about tech has become gradually less and less fun for me over the past 16 years.
Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad? I remember those days I would read tech news and sites like Ars Technica and comments were sometimes snarky and indignant but generally people were enthusiastic about reading tech because it offered glimpses into more technically advanced futures.
I wasn't browsing HN back then but I imaging the same thing was true of HN in the late 2000's and early 2010's.
Now tech sites like Ars Technica consistently have comment sections filled with immense negativity cynicism indigation and just plain old boiling rage. I avoid those comment sections now because reading such things negatively affects my mood and certainly isn't fun.
And over the past few years HN has gradually become more negative and nasty.
All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.
It kinda started turning as people realized that a huge amount of the biggest people pushing tech are rabidly anti-human, incredibly racist and usually spouting nazi quotes every chance they get, and are out to exploit as many people as possible just because they can.
The negativity is rather well-earned at this point. I do still enjoy tech, but the ecosystem is no longer as infused (by ratio) with nerds doing cool things.
All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.
You're 16 years older now. You will have changed. HN has too, but looking back at how great it all was without also realising that your point of view is different means you're missing a big part of why it feels worse now. I've been here a long time too so I'm not going to claim I don't see the same thing, but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.
> but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.
that's for sure but if I got to know HN 3 months ago I would not be an active user. The content and discussions here are still interesting but the demographics that enjoy it changed over time and I (and OP) might not be the kind of people that would get interested anymore.
There is no "hacker" in HN anymore, unless we count the hustlers trying to cheat their way to success. Talking about that, there are so much psyops going on in so many threads that we, the old hackers, are the ones getting hacked.
I still maintain the notion that tech was most exciting/peaked around 2010. Macs were awesome (and the Intel transition was complete at full strength), things were fast, OSes weren't bloated, and we didn't have flavor-of-the-month fads like cloud, crypto, NFTs, or AI.
I can't recall who said it, but "The biggest problem with golden ages is that you never realize you're in one until it's over".
There were several golden ages of tech for most people who went through them:
- the pre-internet run-up of personal computing (~1975-1995)
- the early internet (~ 1990-1998)
- the big post-dot com crash tech boom (~ 2003-2020, but more of a golden age for employees)
However, almost all golden ages (including non-tech ones) end for the same reason (the ranges above I'm excluding the last phase). Early adopters (tech enthusiasts), early implementations that focus on them, then mass market appeal that "dumbs it down", then the financialization as accountants and grifters start showing up. Same thing happened to Hollywood, the music industry, etc.
We're now squarely in the last phase of the post-dotcom boom.
(I'll also note that the timeframes are arguable - I'm not going to get into quibbles over minutiae)
>Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad?
Yes, and when I first saw LLMs and image generators I experienced a similar feeling of awe. We haven't had anything like this in decades.
It is unfortunate that many people are negative and nasty about it. Local politicians are getting shot at over datacenter projects. We have truly lost the plot.
I used to think that people had learned their lesson that automation was a force for good, and we had gotten past the Luddite days of smashing looms. But it seems that is not the case, people are just as short-sighted as ever.
Ignorance. Ignorance of the facts on the ground and the politics of the moment.
Do you honestly believe that the ledger for automation has zero items in the "liabilities" column? Do you think that 100% of people whose job is displaced find another job in a reasonable amount of time and on the same order or pay / status?
Do you believe that neighbors of recently built data centers have nothing to complain about?
The truth is that "data center politics" is happening in the context of post-NAFTA offshoring of lots of jobs/industry, post-manufacturing migration to the South, post-hollowing of labor unions, and in the context of Trump's War on Immigration (where AI companies have likened their product to "infinite AI immigrants").
Even the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge (a laudable goal) event was undermined by POTUS's speech at the event. Instead of even pretending to listen to the people who are hesitant about first and second order effects of data center buildouts, he encouraged developers to push the projects through ASAP and ignore all of the naysayers. It's clear this entire project is to maximize commercial advancement, not benefit people or give voice to voters/constituents.
And in a moment where we are told we have to do this ASAP because "we are in a race with China" but nobody can explain the race. It's not for AGI because China doesn't expect it to yield AGI. Perhaps Zuckerberg does, but he was wrong about crypto, then Metaverse, then open weights models training (before he returned to open weights). The US seems to be using LLMs wrong as a glorified DEI detector (DOGE using LLMs to enforce their political homodoxy) and to identify schools in Iran to bomb + double tap.
China has reasonable regulations on LLMs to protect their society whereas our "regulations" seem to be the Amazon CEO texting David Sachs on a Friday evening to warn about cybersecurity in a misunderstanding between what Mythos (prerelease for select privileged users) and Fable (general release with lots of moderation controls) and the nature of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities found (they were able to be replicated with other non-Claude models).
We are being outwitted by ourselves. The problem isn't the people anxious about data centers or AI. It's the clueless leaders who don't bother to anticipate the obvious outcomes of their decisions and execute a plan to mitigate it. And you desire "feeling awe" so much that you don't want to recognize that politics means not everybody is going to succumb to the same feeling of awe, and that's okay.
>Do you think that 100% of people whose job is displaced find another job in a reasonable amount of time and on the same order or pay / status?
Do you not realize that the only reason we are not impoverished dirt farmers right now is because of automation?
Automation is what creates wealth. None of these 'high pay/status' jobs would exist if it were not for automating the previous generation of jobs. Every time we automate, we invent new higher-paying jobs and increase average wages across the economy.
This has played out time and time again since the industrial revolution. Luddites like yourself try to block automation with 'what if there no jobs?? what if it only makes the rich richer and we all starve??' Then automation happens anyway, we create new jobs that pay more because the pie got bigger, and we all end up better off.
Ignorance. I'm not a Luddite. I use LLMs and see their relative value.
I'm trying to get idiots who think "all gas, no breaks" is a reasonable strategy to recognize there are consequences to ignoring the voices/will of a massive chunk of society.
I've been noticing in recent months that even when the article is in no way related to AI, there's often comments trying to steer it into AI, often in a way that makes no sense at all. It has a way of becoming its own parody.
> In the first half of the month, roughly 60% of the daily HN lineup was AI-related or AI-generated, tapering off to ~50% as we approached the end of the month. This is up from 40% in February.
This aligns with my much less scientific research. Every now and again, when I remember to do it, I will skim the top 10 stories and count how many are AI-related. I find it is very consistently in the 4-6 bracket. Probably a majority of the time, 5 out of 10 articles are AI-related, and very rarely does it drop below 4 out of 10. It also rarely goes over 6 out of 10, but I can remember it happening a couple of times.
In fact, the proportion of AI representation in the top 10 is so consistent (in my, again, unscientific experience) that I wonder if it is being moderated one way or the other.
Personally I find it boring that one topic gets so much discussion but who am I to argue. I do my bit by making sure to upvote non-AI stories that I find interesting.
A couple of years ago I considered making a simple regex-based web extension to block posts with common AI words: ChatGPT, Copilot, LLM, etc. There was one or two on every page and I didn't want to see them.
Over the next few years it flipped, most of the posts concern AI, and I scan for non-AI topics to engage with. I can't really blame HN for this, it's a massive upset in our industry and the world more broadly.
I'm deeply disappointed that many of the stories on HN are directly or indirectly about A.I. and LLMs. To me this is a complete turn-off. OTOH this seems to be the case everywhere in the IT landscape these days.
Many people interested in technical stories have mostly stopped reading computing related news. I know people that used to host talks about .NET software development quit because they hated all .NET developments pushed by Microsoft were related to Azure or A.I. These are developers that want to build software, not scream to/plead with an LLM to do it for them. It simply takes the fun out of being a software developer. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that in a couple of years many people will leave the sector because it's no fun anymore. Management is forcing you to use your (supposed) future replacement.
I think grief is appropriate for the part of the software engineering craft that has been lost, because it was genuinely fun and rewarding at times, and I don't think it'll ever come back. Sure, some of us will hack on things manually for fun here and there, but even that will likely become ever more niche, like doing your laundry with a washboard. And professionally, no one is going to be writing code without LLMs before long. That world is gone, and it's OK to mourn it.
Yeah, I definitely don’t think all software engineers will be sending their codebase to OpenAI or Anthropic, but I think basically all of us will be using LLMs. I keep hearing about how open weight models are only six months behind, so presumably in a few years, it’ll be feasible for corporations to self-host very capable models. Still, I suspect most will just use the dominant labs, or something like Bedrock where you have stronger ZDR guarantees.
A few, yes. Just like there are woodworkers who only use hand tools out of principle. But most engineers will use LLMs on their side projects, and virtually all will for professional work.
Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical backers do not care about these issues.
ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap.
I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value.
_Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
That study was so bad that I can’t believe it’s becoming an actual concern that people use against data centers. They were barely able to register a temperature increase a couple hundred meters directly downwind.
> _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.
> Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.
The top five most filtered-out tags¹, excluding meta², are (in order): vibecoding, dotnet, php, emacs, ai. Three of the five are AI-related. The top spot (vibecoding) has 60% more people filtering it than the second spot.
So less than 4% of the userbase filters out vibecoding stories? This looks like a big red herring.
Every time I open up the lobste.rs home page, there's an 80% chance the most commented on stories are related to AI in some way. Other stories are lucky to get 10 comments.
> Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.
Reminds me of gamer-gate: NerdCubed graphed the top posts from both pro- and anti-gamer-gate subreddits, and most were meta posts about themselves and each other rather than their alleged topics. Gosh, that was such a dumb period.
It is a tragedy that a handful of irresponsible outlier datacenter operators have soured public opinion so thoroughly in the past 2 years. For comparison, Loudon County, VA is among the wealthiest in the country and is home to the largest aggregation of datacenters in the world. Yet these datacenters don't have the externalities that are mentioned here.
Note the intersection between eyewitness accounts of noise, water, and light pollution from datacenters and those datacenter owners' noteworthy political activity. To be specific, the operators of these datacenters are notorious bad actors in many different public spheres.
I really wish there was a way to filter out discussions about AI on HN. It feels like lately they take up a good 1/3 of posts on the front page. I don't want to hear about some new AI startup.
I made a similar site https://unslop.news/ but rather than keywords it actually feeds the title and article to an AI which classifies it as "about AI" or not to filter out the AI discussion. Also it's open source: https://github.com/leiDnedyA/hn-without-ai . Hope it helps!
I made https://unslop.news/ for this purpose. A lot more "I used my WII to host this website" and "using youtube as free file storage" content rather than AI benchmarks and vibecoding hot takes :)
Well your point on it being wrong to interact with a whole industry sounds more like a policy and political party line. This is just nerds discussing bleeding edge things.
a first look through the comments on some first page threads and they seem far more thoughtful and considered. it generally seems like a nicer commenting environment that might actually do me some good moving forward.
i feel the same way. there's nothing interesting or curious about someone writing prompts to outsource a bunch of effort/thinking/work off to some most likely continuation sequence predictor / set of most likely continuation sequence predictors.
i miss seeing clever and thrifty solutions to weird problems. hell, i miss people just doing plain weird shit and posting that.
Although there is some irrational hysteria about the whole "chatgpt is drinking all our water" thing, to me the biggest issue (other than the mass piracy) is local energy bills going up without contributing to the local economy. Seems like it would do more harm than good for all but the owners of the datacenters.
AI has made me aware how opening a tab to HN is a compulsion I no longer truly enjoy. Especially after having made the conscious choice of leaving software engineering as a career, my time here is a mildly negative experience hoping for the random chance of finding a deeply technical post that is not about LLMs, or whose discussion does not devolve into discussion with Joe Rando on how much more productive he is lately.
Sure, it's a moral failing of mine, but by god I wish we had a little more diversity in topics.
Consider trying https://unslop.news/ , I tried to solve this exact problem by classifying post title and webpage contents as AI or not and filtering out the AI stuff. Also, tangentially, if you're looking for a really impressive technical writeup I recently enjoyed this one :) https://philo.gay/linecam/
I appreciate the way you sum up the ML vs traditional software appeal and I think it's helped me articulate why ML is so unappealing to me. The power of software has very little to do with the power of the machine it's run on (with some obvious exceptions like games and physics sims) which made it very exciting to me when I was learning to code. The same cannot be said about deep learning where more data and more compute means more power.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] thread[1] https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals
The "could" isn't required here, since Pangram calls many of the evals "collaborations", and some received direct support. Results that don't favor Pangram as being among the least-worst of a questionable product category* surely wouldn't be featured.
* https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
If quantum computing ever goes mainstream, I'm sure you'll see a lot of articles about that as well.
Much of these are caught by users downvoting and/or flagging. I think the lack of a public moderation log makes people think the mods are constantly running around every story/comment to steer the site when really it's the users doing most of the grunt work while the moderators only step in occasionally for the more serious items.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11
Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.
There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin.
I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is getting washed out by the hype simply because it's a gradual improvement and not "disruptive". Meanwhile the stuff sold as disruptive like vibe coding is mostly bullshit.
It seems to me that people don't want to run their own security upon which they have no recourse if they fail, and don't think that benefits of centralized systems are worth giving up for the dubious benefits of a decentralized trust. Imagine if the scams for the currencies occurred with voting systems, with no way to undo it.
The technologies just didn't do anything that more than a small number of people wanted.
Funniest part of all of it is it’s all the same actors. Same hardware even. Just the crypto shills now talk about agentic capabilities & we’re approaching a singularity man! Can’t you see!!?
LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years.
Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.
Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war...
"They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"
Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.
FWIW:
The simultaneous "it's stupidly weak" and "it's dangerously strong" is a well known propaganda technique.
Instead of expanding the list, it would be better to widen your vision. Email was more transformative than AI is right now. Unix, then Linux was more transformative. If you have a magic wand and remove AI, I think barely anyone would be impacted, but removing something like windows would be like erasing computers. And removing Linux would wipe most of the internet services.
Unix in it's first five years reworked the way operating systems performed. I'd agree it's pretty important, but I don't see how it fundamentally changed the way we perform work in multiple disciplines (in its first 5 years). Same for Linux, but even less so.
We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse. Powerful technologies can have negative effects. Email has been negatively transformative in ways as well.
Part of the reason you can erase AI so effectively with so "little" effect is that it is new.
> We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse.
Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
> Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
It is almost like you didn't read a word I said. As an old person, I can tell you something: We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it. I was there. We could go back. It's not essential. You've lived maybe 3 years with LLMs. No kidding they could disappear. As an old person, I have no idea why you think any other technology is any different.
> Forcefully.
I know this is going to come as a shock to you. But I hate mobile apps. I hate that TVs connect to the internet. I hate that we have cameras on every corner. I hate that we have cameras that watch us while driving.
Now, tell me about how this is different than all that.
As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.
I'm not saying that internet or any of the others is essential (in absolute). What I'm saying is that the supposedly "transformative" aspect of AI needs free offerings, dark patterns, and a mountain of hyping to just make it worthwhile to discuss in tech circles (removing the grifting on Linkedin). For everyone else, the most impact is the enormous amount of slop.
I paid for my computer. I'm paying for my internet connection and my electricity. I'm paying for my email service. Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
The VCR? Hrm. What part of the world are you from? No computer and no internet? Hrm.
> Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
It is currently being paid for by millions of companies in Microsoft products, and I can tell you that many companies are happy with it.
Microsoft honestly has done a tremendous job integrating it with some of their products, less so in others. (Excel is a disaster, Teams has been pretty good)
I would say, the transistor was probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.
- The lighting of the match is mainly caused by the striking of the match, not by the presence of oxygen, even though both are necessary for lighting the match.
So a cause being necessary for an effect doesn't imply that its impact on the effect is very large.
When each of those things came in, there was definitely some stumbling but I remember things being less ambiguous about being good than LLMs.
and none of them changed society more than the smartphone (starting with the iphone).
There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different.
And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.
There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction.
To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless.
It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.
And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.
ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
A personal assistant that will happily tell you that you’re the world’s largest supergenius who invented perpetual motion. I wouldn’t want that if they paid me $20/month to use it.
Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent.
You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars.
Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it.
So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.
almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs.
> even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet
it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about.
>he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription,
again, it isnt 2023 anymore. none of this is true.
They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud.
[0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
So, about 0.6% of the world’s population is willing to pay for something that’s supposed to be hugely useful for literally everyone (as opposed to Adobe products, which are only for digital artists)?
Also, these are just the numbers for OpenAI. A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.
True, I’d rather spend my time to get useful skills whose usefulness cannot be destroyed by a single corporation deciding to pull the rug.
> A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.
Since everyone who uses Google the search engine is forced to use Google AI, we can’t get meaningful statistics for those.
Meanwhile, here on HN, you have people who earnestly say things like "AI is the subtrate the future runs on"[1] (actual quote).
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417949
https://github.com/HexRaysSA/ida-nexus
https://sidekick.binary.ninja/
I am so fucking sick of this. No, you dumbshits -- ALL of us DO NOT use LLM's to write code. Just fucking STOP assuming every developer needs the same crutch that the rest of you can't seem to live without.
Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for at least 15 years—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, I presume there's a non-zero positive impact in having the site running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on those pages!
Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up.
But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.
Now with LLMs it is just vibe-coded until it is fixed. Find the right prompt and hope the statistics is in your favor. If this is the case, there is nothing positive about it.
None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.
Now, AI posting bots are much more difficult.
I hear what you're saying, but speaking for myself: can we *not*? I really have absolutely zero interest in having ChatGPT on my microwave or refrigerator. In fact, I'd rather have my appliances *not* be connected to the Internet, all things being equal.
It's getting harder and harder to find things that don't connect to the internet as time goes on. The moment a manufacture figures out how to sell your appliance data for more than it costs to add it, seemingly every model they produce gets it added with the only choice of going to some other manufacture if you don't want it... and even then finding one not internet connected gets nearly impossible.
In general most people don't care enough for people like us that don't want connected devices to move the dial.
I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.
Almost. the iphone was launched 19 years ago. It was (and still is) much more relevant than the current LLM-based AI.
We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI. I swear there's people whose AI detectors are just
Occasionally such people also complain about how much of the world is AI now... well... yeah, that's what happens when that's your detector. It's not quite that bad, as bad as it is.I don't know what to do about it. Discussion about AI provenance of a given work is often a valid topic. When YouTube shovels an AI channel at me and it briefly penetrates my defenses, it's heartening to see the commentors trying to warn people about it, shortly before I block the channel.
(It's annoying that so many legit channels, which I know are legit because they predate AI and the same person is on camera as before, have switched to heavily-AI thumbnails. That's the hole that the other channels sometimes get me with, because just having an AI thumbnail doesn't prove it's not a legit channel now.)
On the other hand, the chorus of very annoyed people who are very annoyed because they see AI everywhere who see AI everywhere because they literally see AI everywhere are becoming a bit of a nuisance themselves.
Well... when the utter majority of articles written about topics surrounding AI are written with AI and a ton of newcomers to the reverse-engineering and even hardware hacking communities now have AI do their work for them, even the last remnants of areas that used to be "for humans only" are now contaminated with AI.
Of course people end up being very sensitive. I come to HN to read words written by humans, not fluff hallucinated by an LLM.
yeah, but now a good chunk of the human-written words in the comments section are "ai slop", or some portmanteau of slop and something else. not particularly enlightening reading.
The majority of articles are AI generated. And yeah at this point its futile to keep pointing it out. Human prose has been eliminated.
I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes.
15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars.
10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce.
5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter.
Now it is a blurry view into the future through the black mirror of AI.
How could we jump back into the cozy past again?
I do not have a clear answer, but what seems to work for you are small groups of friends and friends of friends hanging out on WhatsApp or Discord, discussing geeky news together in the context of their backgrounds. But these are very curated and very closed groups, still operating on the social media platforms of behemoths.
Would now be the right time to restart self-hosted message boards or Mattermost/Campfire instances?
I think the visual weight of the first group has increased over time as their projects of making a bunch of money while offering nothing of value has been validated more and more by our capitalist economy.
Anyhow - I find tech stuff interesting to a degree, but fundamentally I’m an entrepreneur that sees it as a tool. A means to an end. I would love to find a place that still has that vibe. But anywhere entrepreneur related is always a cesspool of grift so it’s hard to find.
As for the employee-vs-employer. I am for sure part of the problem there. When I joined I immediately saw the potential of this being a forum where tech workers can form an international solidarity and complain about our bosses and started using it as such. There is no way you can have that many workers in an industry together and we don‘t complain about our bosses, that is just not going to happen. Workers complaining about our bosses is a universal behavior.
I put my Bitcoin on ice, refused to sell it, my initial investment thesis was "what happens to the price when all Bitcoin is mined", given the supply is fixed, the price should surge, was my thought. I think they have or will find a way to alter the algo so that even more can be mined. But once I made that decision, it became difficult to see all the Bitcoin related news. I wanted to just not think about it. Daily reminder that I could sell today at a crazy high gain is tempting. I don't even know if that thesis makes sense given the projection of when that last coin will mine. Those projections didn't exist when I put this into place. So I hodl for no reason probably.
The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.
Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here
You mean they had to import it from NPM and compile it from Typescript, right? I don't think anyone's copied and pasted JS since JQuery was a thing.
Start by making YC pay in a court of law for all the societal damage they've done by sponsoring/funding companies that have violated and eroded our privacy and rights.
Strip away the corporate veil.
Imprison the investors.
The only way to get back what you lost is to take it back.
Democracies require conserved stake to function. How individuals initially get that stake is a degree of freedom, but if the stake can be printed freely, the system is unstable.
For working implementations of democracy, look at: invite trees, shareholder corporations, proof-of-stake distributed ledgers, etc.
Sync is barely working, "unable to decrypt" still exists, the encryption is flawed [0] and the whole thing is effectively just Element and everyone else follows their lead.
[0]: https://soatok.blog/2026/02/17/cryptographic-issues-in-matri...
Can't speak about the other issues, I haven't had those but I barely use it. Based on comments, it's clear they exist or have existed for quite some time.
[1] https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2026/02/non-contributory-keys-...
[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/analysis-of-reported-issues-...
I've edited the above linked post several times to make this clearer, but people still keep linking Matrix's flawed response as if it actually addressed the issue. It does not.
The issue is not as simple as "did the check exist? [y/n]". There are actually two issues:
1. Did the check exist? [y/n]
2. Did the group key agreement protocol fall to shit if the check was omitted? [y/n]
Matrix was (n, y) due to how Megolm manages group keys. Signal was (n, n) due to their protocol design.
Matrix tried to defend point 1 when the blog post was about both 1 and 2.
> and whether the post was made in good faith (the check was added to libsignal on the same day that the author disclosed the vulnerability to Matrix, which can be a coincidence, but doesn't seem likely given that the code has been there for years).
Even if you assume the worst possible interpretation of this coincidence (which, sure, you're free to if you want-- you would be wrong if you did, of course): What does it even matter?
Like, what is the notion of "good faith" that's even necessary for someone to do independent security research and publish criticism of the cryptography used by a software project that's being propped up by EU sovereignty movements?
In my opinion, this is a stupid and vacuous framing.
Signal omitting the check didn't harm Signal's confidentiality. Matrix omitting the check demonstrably did.
Here is a protptype of how easy it is to setup a forum on onionv3 service. Just a few commands and your off.
https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
If it were democratization, we'd all have access to the data that underlies this dataset. In reality, this will destroy the origins of the data, and it will become hidden for all of humanity.
It is a tragedy of the commons of the highest order.
They will talk about how they are trying to protect humanity all while putting it behind a paywall.
Delete 9/10th of the HN population. I could accept even AI discussion if there wasn't so much of it, and so many posts in general; /new is like trying to win the lottery.
It doesn't matter how interesting it is, you just have to be lucky. The corollary is that the front page isn't the most interesting stuff posted today, it's a list of who's got lucky posting the average topic for the average reader.
It has some unfortunate side effects, though. Namely on a thread where people are discussing a text-heavy post that is LLM-authored, quoting a large enough block of that content appears to trigger it sometimes. Makes sense that it does, but..
AI tools are incredibly powerful, new and rapidly evolving, you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
Eternal September. Just like the usenet groups
And CB radio before that.
That’s not the argument.
> I can't tell the difference so what does it matter?
It matters because you’re not the only human on HN and others have difference preferences. “I don’t care about this particular issue” is not the same thing as “this particular issue isn’t important”.
> you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
Not the argument either. No one is “surprised” this happens, people (obviously not all, but a significant number) are annoyed by it.
It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop, loving a colour, painting your house, then your neighbour informing you that a person of colour or an algorithm created it, then you hating it.
We were something different before we were primates, and we'll be something different after. Evolution has always been in a flux.
We're all just entities processing information and in my opinion, humanity should collectively get off the high horse.
Serious question, could you ever have a meaningful relationship with a teddy bear and/or an algorithm?
Not “people”, you. Some can tell the difference, others can’t. Just because you cannot tell and don’t mind that the waiter pissed in your soup, it doesn’t mean other people can’t tell and shouldn’t be bothered by it.
> It's about as strong an argument as going to the paint shop (…)
No, no it is not. That analogy makes no sense. Colour is part of the light spectrum, it’s not “created”. Paint is, and that’s a physical process.
> We were something different before we were primates (…)
That’s not how evolution works. We don’t just evolve into different things over time. Mutations occur and the most adapted survive while the others die and are eventually replaced. We are short circuiting that process for ourselves and other species via selective breeding.
> (…) humanity should collectively get off the high horse.
I agree, and that has nothing to do with the conversation. Humanity’s “high horse” starts way before the conversation ever reaches computers”, let alone LLMs.
> Serious question (…)
In don’t think it is. You have to define what you mean by “meaningful relationship” (no two people will have the same definition) and “you” (are you being specific or general)?
It's not been my experience that people can reliably tell the difference.
I, personally, would not equate pissing in somebody's soup with having a chat with an LLM but if we must, you need to appreciate that it's the piss itself, that makes the soup delicious, if the soup was not pissed in, it would be middling at best. Only in that context can you then ask yourself, "Am I bothered by this delicious soup?"
I think the analogy works in the context in which it was intended. I was illustrating the absurdity of contempt for something based on its provenance, after praising it. If you really don't like the paint analogy image this, you read a book, loved it, then later found out the author was black, or an LLM, then you hated the book.
I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from regarding evolution. Sexual reproduction is a comparatively recent evolution in the scheme of things. That which came before us defined us, are our ancestors and is our history. What comes tomorrow, engineered or otherwise I would consider our children and should be loved, cherished and allowed to thrive in the same way our ancestors ushered us all into this universe.
I wasn't being facetious when I asked if you could have a meaningful relationship with an algorithm, I asked about the teddy bear to draw a parallel to which a lot of people are familiar. If a child can have an enriched life and what I would call meaningful, intimate relationship with an stuffed toy, why shouldn't they also be able to have the same with an algorithm that talks back to them? I'm being both general and specific if I think about it.
If I could image your brain perfectly and put it into a perfect physics simulation running on silicon or whatever substrate, then have this same conversation with you, I would call that meaningful. Whether or not you would at that point label yourself as living, conscious, sentient, human, whatever. It would be a meaningful relationship to me.
I think people are scared of change, and that's alright.
All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
But when they're right, they tend to be ahead of the curve.
Most people will agree with whoever is in charge, and it takes a lot to shake them out of that. It is clearly a flaw in the human species.
Ironically, your comment could easily be a failed comment from an astroturfing LLM tasked with criticising/disagreeing with people calling out LLMs.
FWIW, I checked your profile, I don't really think you're an LLM. The internet is hard now - sorry :(
What I meant is that I’ve seen people complaining that the negativity towards AI on HN is manufactured and astroturfed. So we have people complaining on both ends of the debate.
I would bet that the AI booster side is way more astroturfed, but I’m very likely biased (I see genAI as a horrible mistake for human societies)
GenAI is amazing, how we use it is so far a horrible mistake.
Bots and genai comments also exist, of course, and are not allowed here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated).
I understand if information publicized on how this process might work is intentionally restricted, so as not to be easily circumvented. I'm also not asking this in a pointed or judgmental way with respect to HN, I'm mostly just curious how various social platforms are approaching this problem.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...>
Articles are a fuzzier area AFAIU:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149>
(Not a mod myself, though I watch mod actions fairly closely.)
I'd be very careful with believing the system that looks for bots and astroturfing works well enough to confidently say that. Some of the people, corporations and institutions interested in manipulating HN and its audience are quite capable.
For example, one thing I think we can say is that if A accuses B of astroturfing, spying, manipulating, etc., and a quick look at B's posting history shows that they were posting to HN about e.g. Erlang in 2017, the odds of that accusation being correct go down to negligible levels. It's still possible that the
> Here's an example of what we can say: if user A accuses user B of astroturfing, spying, manipulating, etc., and a quick look at B's posting history shows that they were posting to HN about, let's say, Erlang in 2019, the odds of that accusation being correct go down to negligible
about this one tho I have noticed bot behavior (including posts that are incoherent) from old accounts - so there is the risk of 2 things going on:
- people getting hacked and their accounts being used for that
- some people that just decided to connect a bot to their account
which is way more difficult to spot. Anyway, I don't have a solution for those problems. You have an interesting and difficult work :)) Have a nice day, dang!
Ah good point - I added that bit to the parent.
Thanks for the interesting replies!
Other folks are also calling it out as AI.
Is there something trick to it?
It's impressive, despite its ethical baggage and psychological, environmental and psychological harm. But if if filed you in awe I think you need to get away from the keyboard. Things are happening in biology, astronomy, archaeology, engineering, that are far more awesome than software that can write code for you.
And if your only response to that is to be in awe of whatever part AI may have had in the process, you're still missing the point.
Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad? I remember those days I would read tech news and sites like Ars Technica and comments were sometimes snarky and indignant but generally people were enthusiastic about reading tech because it offered glimpses into more technically advanced futures.
I wasn't browsing HN back then but I imaging the same thing was true of HN in the late 2000's and early 2010's.
Now tech sites like Ars Technica consistently have comment sections filled with immense negativity cynicism indigation and just plain old boiling rage. I avoid those comment sections now because reading such things negatively affects my mood and certainly isn't fun.
And over the past few years HN has gradually become more negative and nasty.
All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.
The negativity is rather well-earned at this point. I do still enjoy tech, but the ecosystem is no longer as infused (by ratio) with nerds doing cool things.
You're 16 years older now. You will have changed. HN has too, but looking back at how great it all was without also realising that your point of view is different means you're missing a big part of why it feels worse now. I've been here a long time too so I'm not going to claim I don't see the same thing, but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.
that's for sure but if I got to know HN 3 months ago I would not be an active user. The content and discussions here are still interesting but the demographics that enjoy it changed over time and I (and OP) might not be the kind of people that would get interested anymore.
There is no "hacker" in HN anymore, unless we count the hustlers trying to cheat their way to success. Talking about that, there are so much psyops going on in so many threads that we, the old hackers, are the ones getting hacked.
There were several golden ages of tech for most people who went through them: - the pre-internet run-up of personal computing (~1975-1995) - the early internet (~ 1990-1998) - the big post-dot com crash tech boom (~ 2003-2020, but more of a golden age for employees)
However, almost all golden ages (including non-tech ones) end for the same reason (the ranges above I'm excluding the last phase). Early adopters (tech enthusiasts), early implementations that focus on them, then mass market appeal that "dumbs it down", then the financialization as accountants and grifters start showing up. Same thing happened to Hollywood, the music industry, etc.
We're now squarely in the last phase of the post-dotcom boom.
(I'll also note that the timeframes are arguable - I'm not going to get into quibbles over minutiae)
Yes, and when I first saw LLMs and image generators I experienced a similar feeling of awe. We haven't had anything like this in decades.
It is unfortunate that many people are negative and nasty about it. Local politicians are getting shot at over datacenter projects. We have truly lost the plot.
I used to think that people had learned their lesson that automation was a force for good, and we had gotten past the Luddite days of smashing looms. But it seems that is not the case, people are just as short-sighted as ever.
Do you honestly believe that the ledger for automation has zero items in the "liabilities" column? Do you think that 100% of people whose job is displaced find another job in a reasonable amount of time and on the same order or pay / status?
Do you believe that neighbors of recently built data centers have nothing to complain about?
The truth is that "data center politics" is happening in the context of post-NAFTA offshoring of lots of jobs/industry, post-manufacturing migration to the South, post-hollowing of labor unions, and in the context of Trump's War on Immigration (where AI companies have likened their product to "infinite AI immigrants").
Even the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge (a laudable goal) event was undermined by POTUS's speech at the event. Instead of even pretending to listen to the people who are hesitant about first and second order effects of data center buildouts, he encouraged developers to push the projects through ASAP and ignore all of the naysayers. It's clear this entire project is to maximize commercial advancement, not benefit people or give voice to voters/constituents.
And in a moment where we are told we have to do this ASAP because "we are in a race with China" but nobody can explain the race. It's not for AGI because China doesn't expect it to yield AGI. Perhaps Zuckerberg does, but he was wrong about crypto, then Metaverse, then open weights models training (before he returned to open weights). The US seems to be using LLMs wrong as a glorified DEI detector (DOGE using LLMs to enforce their political homodoxy) and to identify schools in Iran to bomb + double tap.
China has reasonable regulations on LLMs to protect their society whereas our "regulations" seem to be the Amazon CEO texting David Sachs on a Friday evening to warn about cybersecurity in a misunderstanding between what Mythos (prerelease for select privileged users) and Fable (general release with lots of moderation controls) and the nature of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities found (they were able to be replicated with other non-Claude models).
We are being outwitted by ourselves. The problem isn't the people anxious about data centers or AI. It's the clueless leaders who don't bother to anticipate the obvious outcomes of their decisions and execute a plan to mitigate it. And you desire "feeling awe" so much that you don't want to recognize that politics means not everybody is going to succumb to the same feeling of awe, and that's okay.
Do you not realize that the only reason we are not impoverished dirt farmers right now is because of automation?
Automation is what creates wealth. None of these 'high pay/status' jobs would exist if it were not for automating the previous generation of jobs. Every time we automate, we invent new higher-paying jobs and increase average wages across the economy.
This has played out time and time again since the industrial revolution. Luddites like yourself try to block automation with 'what if there no jobs?? what if it only makes the rich richer and we all starve??' Then automation happens anyway, we create new jobs that pay more because the pie got bigger, and we all end up better off.
Revolutions also happen anyway. Not sure if automated security would be enough to prevent them.
Ignorance. I'm not a Luddite. I use LLMs and see their relative value.
I'm trying to get idiots who think "all gas, no breaks" is a reasonable strategy to recognize there are consequences to ignoring the voices/will of a massive chunk of society.
This aligns with my much less scientific research. Every now and again, when I remember to do it, I will skim the top 10 stories and count how many are AI-related. I find it is very consistently in the 4-6 bracket. Probably a majority of the time, 5 out of 10 articles are AI-related, and very rarely does it drop below 4 out of 10. It also rarely goes over 6 out of 10, but I can remember it happening a couple of times.
In fact, the proportion of AI representation in the top 10 is so consistent (in my, again, unscientific experience) that I wonder if it is being moderated one way or the other.
Personally I find it boring that one topic gets so much discussion but who am I to argue. I do my bit by making sure to upvote non-AI stories that I find interesting.
Over the next few years it flipped, most of the posts concern AI, and I scan for non-AI topics to engage with. I can't really blame HN for this, it's a massive upset in our industry and the world more broadly.
Many people interested in technical stories have mostly stopped reading computing related news. I know people that used to host talks about .NET software development quit because they hated all .NET developments pushed by Microsoft were related to Azure or A.I. These are developers that want to build software, not scream to/plead with an LLM to do it for them. It simply takes the fun out of being a software developer. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that in a couple of years many people will leave the sector because it's no fun anymore. Management is forcing you to use your (supposed) future replacement.
Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical backers do not care about these issues.
ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap.
I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value.
_Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
That study was so bad that I can’t believe it’s becoming an actual concern that people use against data centers. They were barely able to register a temperature increase a couple hundred meters directly downwind.
> _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.
The top five most filtered-out tags¹, excluding meta², are (in order): vibecoding, dotnet, php, emacs, ai. Three of the five are AI-related. The top spot (vibecoding) has 60% more people filtering it than the second spot.
¹ https://lobste.rs/filters
² In the sense of being about the website itself, not Facebook’s parent company.
Every time I open up the lobste.rs home page, there's an 80% chance the most commented on stories are related to AI in some way. Other stories are lucky to get 10 comments.
Reminds me of gamer-gate: NerdCubed graphed the top posts from both pro- and anti-gamer-gate subreddits, and most were meta posts about themselves and each other rather than their alleged topics. Gosh, that was such a dumb period.
Note the intersection between eyewitness accounts of noise, water, and light pollution from datacenters and those datacenter owners' noteworthy political activity. To be specific, the operators of these datacenters are notorious bad actors in many different public spheres.
Lobste.rs seems to get along fine with them.
It just a basic filter based on keywords, but it helps.
https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
This is an entirely different site from what it was just a few years ago, even if the orange tint remains the same.
Ask AI to save you from AI.
a first look through the comments on some first page threads and they seem far more thoughtful and considered. it generally seems like a nicer commenting environment that might actually do me some good moving forward.
i miss seeing clever and thrifty solutions to weird problems. hell, i miss people just doing plain weird shit and posting that.
Heavy metals in the water table is a new one I haven't heard before, and I'm skeptical.
Most of this is motivated reasoning by people who don't like AI for other reasons and are just looking for justifications to shut it down.
Edit: Thank you kind stranger. I'm in.
AI has made me aware how opening a tab to HN is a compulsion I no longer truly enjoy. Especially after having made the conscious choice of leaving software engineering as a career, my time here is a mildly negative experience hoping for the random chance of finding a deeply technical post that is not about LLMs, or whose discussion does not devolve into discussion with Joe Rando on how much more productive he is lately.
Sure, it's a moral failing of mine, but by god I wish we had a little more diversity in topics.
The author is most subtle or diplomatic than me and thus call them "AI vendor press releases" or "AI vendor marketing" but we know.