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And here I take a moment to express gratitude that I found an oasis of safe recommendations in the form of HN comments. I discovered the ecobee thermostat in t

And here I take a moment to express gratitude that I found an oasis of safe recommendations in the form of HN comments. I discovered the ecobee thermostat in the comment section of a post about home automation yesterday. It’s nice to know (based on my assumed wisdom of HNers on these subjects) that it’s a solid product. That kind of thing has gotten to be next to impossible to produce organically with Google.

hansworst 4y ago
That's a very big assumption you're making. Not saying it's necessarily false, but I think it's probably wise to remember you're literally commenting on a platform run by a venture capital company. It doesn't take that much effort to create an account here. Who's to say the comment you're replying to wasn't written by ChatGPT?
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I’m pulling from experience at this point. I’ve picked up at least one Emacs package, for example, from an HN comment that has changed my life for the better. Regarding the ecobee, I’ll provide another assumption that I’m working with. On the post yesterday, it was mentioned in multiple places by multiple accounts, and all mentions were received positively by the community. Here I’m assuming that the community at large is savvy when it comes to detecting blatant malicious scheming. I guess I’m relying very heavily on the community in a way that could be manipulated, but I’ll give you some of my logic. I enjoy some of Joey Diaz’s comedy. He’s got a joke about how he likes being lied to. The context of the joke is that the lie (fake posts/comments here) actually ends up getting him what he wants (even if it wasn’t exactly what was said in the lie). I’ve had a bad experience with the Nest thermostat and don’t want to go back. Now that I’ve started looking at the ecobee, it looks like a safe product to try instead. Even if it was lies that got me to start investigating further, it now looks to me like a reasonable decision to make.
  - xorcist 4y ago
    I think the point the above poster is trying to make is that "the community" could very well be a couple of thousand GPT states. We will see more of this in the future, not less. What scares me a little is that the venture capital behind both ChatGPT and similar products is going to want a return on their investment, and morally questionable "content" is the obvious low hanging fruit here. Any betterment of mankind type of outcome is much further in the future. A coming recession would make this inevitable as early capital dries up first. The real twist of this story would be if GPT-style automatons are used on both sides of the consumer divide. It's easy to imagine building more sophisticated ad watchers, thereby creating a closed loop of advertisements slowly sucking the economic value out of the system.
toyg 4y ago
> based on my assumed wisdom of HNers on these subjects) You should assume that HN is popular enough to have astroturf in it, by now. Maybe not as much as reddit, but still.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  See my response to the other similar comment. I definitely do what you say. It’s still an oasis in the sense that it’s much better than any alternative that I’ve found.
- ageitgey 4y ago
  I can tell you from experience that VCs think of "front page of hacker news" as a positive signal for a prospective investment. There probably isn't much product recommendation comment spam here (reddit has more reach), but I'm sure there is incentive to game the front page to get a start-up noticed.

hansworst 4y ago

That's a very big assumption you're making. Not saying it's necessarily false, but I think it's probably wise to remember you're literally commenting on a platform run by a venture capital company. It doesn't take that much effort to create an account here. Who's to say the comment you're replying to wasn't written by ChatGPT?

comfypotato 4y ago
I’m pulling from experience at this point. I’ve picked up at least one Emacs package, for example, from an HN comment that has changed my life for the better. Regarding the ecobee, I’ll provide another assumption that I’m working with. On the post yesterday, it was mentioned in multiple places by multiple accounts, and all mentions were received positively by the community. Here I’m assuming that the community at large is savvy when it comes to detecting blatant malicious scheming. I guess I’m relying very heavily on the community in a way that could be manipulated, but I’ll give you some of my logic. I enjoy some of Joey Diaz’s comedy. He’s got a joke about how he likes being lied to. The context of the joke is that the lie (fake posts/comments here) actually ends up getting him what he wants (even if it wasn’t exactly what was said in the lie). I’ve had a bad experience with the Nest thermostat and don’t want to go back. Now that I’ve started looking at the ecobee, it looks like a safe product to try instead. Even if it was lies that got me to start investigating further, it now looks to me like a reasonable decision to make.
- xorcist 4y ago
  I think the point the above poster is trying to make is that "the community" could very well be a couple of thousand GPT states. We will see more of this in the future, not less. What scares me a little is that the venture capital behind both ChatGPT and similar products is going to want a return on their investment, and morally questionable "content" is the obvious low hanging fruit here. Any betterment of mankind type of outcome is much further in the future. A coming recession would make this inevitable as early capital dries up first. The real twist of this story would be if GPT-style automatons are used on both sides of the consumer divide. It's easy to imagine building more sophisticated ad watchers, thereby creating a closed loop of advertisements slowly sucking the economic value out of the system.

toyg 4y ago

> based on my assumed wisdom of HNers on these subjects) You should assume that HN is popular enough to have astroturf in it, by now. Maybe not as much as reddit, but still.

comfypotato 4y ago
See my response to the other similar comment. I definitely do what you say. It’s still an oasis in the sense that it’s much better than any alternative that I’ve found.
ageitgey 4y ago
I can tell you from experience that VCs think of "front page of hacker news" as a positive signal for a prospective investment. There probably isn't much product recommendation comment spam here (reddit has more reach), but I'm sure there is incentive to game the front page to get a start-up noticed.