4 ms·

There are plenty of us. Before AI, it was blockchain and web3. Before that, it was virtual reality. Before that, it was 3D printing. Before that... you get the

There are plenty of us. Before AI, it was blockchain and web3. Before that, it was virtual reality. Before that, it was 3D printing. Before that... you get the idea. HN has always reflected the latest hype train. It's always been that way.

Timwi 2y ago
Thanks for that! That gives me more hope that this hype train is going to die down like the others did.
- pera 2y ago
  The way I see it is that HN usually follows the VC money, and since there is a *lot* of money being invested on anything with the tag "AI" nowadays there is a lot of interest in the topic.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    This is the actual answer. The staged-up "we replaced 30% of our employees with AI" narrative is concocted for two reasons: - To garner VC money - To drive down wages and make employees more fungible It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. As long as enough people believe it, that’ll become the new baseline.
fidotron 2y ago
In fairness, if you imagine the current tech landscape with AI removed it isn’t exactly a wellspring of optimism or good ideas.
- weego 2y ago
  it seems to mostly be heated debates on whether servers can handle rending entire webpages, or that's ridiculous and we need to use react.
  - fidotron 2y ago
    That or yet another k8s homelab experiment to deploy something rewritten in rust. We seem to be stuck in a tarpit of reinventing tactics, but there hasn’t been a major strategic shift for over a decade. I am part of the problem, posting links to the obsessive recreation (not by me) of old arcade machines.
    - rednafi 2y ago
      Oh, I’m glad this Rust fad has died down. Rust is great, but it’s not replacing C or C++. The most annoying part of this fanaticism, though, was that people were legitimately proposing Rust as an alternative to Go or Python. Those two solve completely different sets of problems. Also, there are startups that failed because the founders decided to ditch Go, Python, or JavaScript for Rust. Now, they can’t hire people, and no one wants to deal with the mess.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Arguably that's part of the problem; the industry almost _requires_ there to be a new thing at all times, to justify lavish forward valuations. In the absence of a concrete New Thing, _something_ is still required, and LLMs, for now, fit the bill.
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
Also the "programming language of the week". "<a well established C/C++ program, existing for many years> written in ruby" (or whatever the language was that week, so replace that with go, rust, etc.)
- kichimi 2y ago
  Don't forget another stuck in the past minimal semantic css based web framework that's almost unusable on anything more complex than its own demo. Complaints about react too, because its new (its 13 years old).
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Take me back to the ancient past where we discussed the 1000th postmortem of python 2->3 and the truly bleeding edge users argued about whether this interesting new language should be referred to as ‘go’ or ‘golang’. Oh and the occasional Flutter or Elixir development update. And the weirdo technical shamans debating functional programming patterns. When was the last time someone recommended “Learn You…”? Besides the exaggeration of the first sentence, I’m actually deadly serious about the rest.
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    When was the last time we all had an honest to goodness editor war? It doesn’t even have to be text editors, let’s rhetorically fistfight about IntelliJ versus Visual Studio. Other nostalgic prompts: - For competent power users, tiling window managers are better than desktop metaphor WMs - Is Java finally dead? - Is my manager a bitchass for not promoting me to the senior role (SF/GOOG/M/24) - If you don’t use the trackpoint on your Thinkpad your mom’s a hoe Good morning to all.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    "Weirdo technical shamans"—lmao, I’m borrowing this. The whole FP community is like that. It’s all fun and games until you ask, "But what did you build with it?"
marginalia_nu 2y ago
I feel it's gotten worse over time, with crypto came a new sort of grifter that was far more aggressively pushing their grift with nearly religious overtones. Some of those people seem to have abandoned ship and moved to AI instead, largely taking the playbook with them. With short term flash in the pan hype cycles like that superconductor one, prediction markets astroturfing also seems involved. Basically the more hype you drum up, the more people you can lure into betting on room temperature superconductors, the more money you stand to win when it turns out to be nothing of the sort.
1oooqooq 2y ago
but not paying attention to the ramifications is troublesome. for example, web3 was exclusively a scam, but it shifted power and economies because it was entrenched in high places (mostly oligarchs evading sanctions and with that, politicians). now you may have ignored it and not lost money like 90% who joined the hype... but now you have a president bound by support of that very money and they already made promises to clear the way even further for those people. likewise with AI, even if you ignore it, there are proxy wars happeing with little more reason than to showcase the viability of autonomous robots in trench warfare for the next round of arms sales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrrXNZyoc8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrrXNZyoc8k
jstummbillig 2y ago
I think the less wrong way of thinking about it is that things do emerge and hn is fundamentally about thinking about what those might be in the realm of technology. Just like yc, most things will not work out. Some will. You can read about all of them here. The noise around the thing is one of many signals.
stabbles 2y ago
It would be interesting to see when these trends started and how long they lasted, to see if the current trend is any different.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  'AI' is kind of the perennial tech fad. The first 'AI winter' (period of diminished interest in 'AI') is usually reckoned to have started in _1966_. It is, in some sense, the _default_ state of the tech industry to be overly excited about AI; the periods when it is _not_ are the exceptions. The current one is unusually extreme, mind you.
tetris11 2y ago
At least with VR and 3D printing there was a sense of wonder and whimsy about it: that we were living in magical times. There's always has and always will be a "Vulture Culture" on HN that rubs my FSF sensibilities somewhat the wrong way from time to time, but with this latest AI and crypto bubble it really feels like that shared sense of wonderment is being greatly usurped by the vulture crowd to a toxifying degree. They don't want to grow money in 10 years. They want to make money now. It really hasn't always been this bad.
jsheard 2y ago
The way people talked about Blockchain/Web3 in particular was very similar to how a lot of people talk about AI now. It's going to take over the world any day now, we just need to fix [fundamental issue]. Get on board right now or you'll be left behind, especially if you're in a creative field. The business model is definitely-maybe-kinda legal but we just need to bend all governments to our will and then it'll be fine. It may use as much energy as a small country but trust us it's totally worth it.
- rednafi 2y ago
  The tech itself works, unlike blockchain, but the narratives are way overblown. I know a few small companies that have legitimately let people go without even having a proper replacement. The leadership then hyped up Devin or whatever, only to find the whole workplace in chaos after a few months. All this was done to attract VC money, and now they're hiring for the same position again.
  - franktankbank 2y ago
    What about blockchain tech doesn't work? It's a relatively more tame technical problem than any GenAI.
    - rednafi 2y ago
      Usability. The use case of GenAI is pretty clear at this point. With blockchain, the big question was, "Okay, we have this cool tech, but what do we do with it now?" If you have to think about what problem a tool solves, it's not a good tool at all.
      - sshine 2y ago
        To some extent, usability. But since the target audience was always technical (although gullible) people, the incentive to make it useful beyond coin purchases never manifested. But moreso: scalability. The blockchains that are worth anything don’t scale to the level of total worldwide transactions per second. I’ve heard “But Lightning!” — sure, so before I can send any money, I have to find a fellow to relay my transactions against.
soneca 2y ago
I agree, but I find that useful. There are a lot of info, developments, and opinions that I can go through and inform and update my view on the topic. It was on HN that I was able to very quickly realize web3 was a scam. It was also good to teach that if enough people believe cryptocurrency is a way to invest money, it becomes as legitimate a way to invest money than any other. Also informed me of all the nuances and how naive ideology, even if misplaced and bad at forming the future, and money from illegal activities can become a legitimate investment option and become part of the mainstream where all of its past can be mostly ignored by current cryptocurrency owners. Anyway, right or wrong, that is my current view on it and it was informed by what I chose to read about it on HN. Even the current flood of AI content I find useful to gradually understand how to use it or not, bring attention around ethical dilemmas, what is the useful for and what is not useful for. And since I can chose what I read very easily on HN, it doesn’t bother me at all the hype-driven subject of HN submissions.
- rednafi 2y ago
  Oh, I like LLMs and use them all the time. But that doesn't change the fact that CEOs are lying to get more VC money. No one is replacing 30% of their workforce with AI. This whole narrative is spun to attract fad investments. I don’t like this part. But I guess it’s just like programming languages: either people rant about them or no one uses them.

Timwi 2y ago

Thanks for that! That gives me more hope that this hype train is going to die down like the others did.

pera 2y ago
The way I see it is that HN usually follows the VC money, and since there is a *lot* of money being invested on anything with the tag "AI" nowadays there is a lot of interest in the topic.
- rednafi 2y ago
  This is the actual answer. The staged-up "we replaced 30% of our employees with AI" narrative is concocted for two reasons: - To garner VC money - To drive down wages and make employees more fungible It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. As long as enough people believe it, that’ll become the new baseline.

fidotron 2y ago

In fairness, if you imagine the current tech landscape with AI removed it isn’t exactly a wellspring of optimism or good ideas.

weego 2y ago
it seems to mostly be heated debates on whether servers can handle rending entire webpages, or that's ridiculous and we need to use react.
- fidotron 2y ago
  That or yet another k8s homelab experiment to deploy something rewritten in rust. We seem to be stuck in a tarpit of reinventing tactics, but there hasn’t been a major strategic shift for over a decade. I am part of the problem, posting links to the obsessive recreation (not by me) of old arcade machines.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Oh, I’m glad this Rust fad has died down. Rust is great, but it’s not replacing C or C++. The most annoying part of this fanaticism, though, was that people were legitimately proposing Rust as an alternative to Go or Python. Those two solve completely different sets of problems. Also, there are startups that failed because the founders decided to ditch Go, Python, or JavaScript for Rust. Now, they can’t hire people, and no one wants to deal with the mess.
rsynnott 2y ago
Arguably that's part of the problem; the industry almost _requires_ there to be a new thing at all times, to justify lavish forward valuations. In the absence of a concrete New Thing, _something_ is still required, and LLMs, for now, fit the bill.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago

Also the "programming language of the week". "<a well established C/C++ program, existing for many years> written in ruby" (or whatever the language was that week, so replace that with go, rust, etc.)

kichimi 2y ago
Don't forget another stuck in the past minimal semantic css based web framework that's almost unusable on anything more complex than its own demo. Complaints about react too, because its new (its 13 years old).
DiggyJohnson 2y ago
Take me back to the ancient past where we discussed the 1000th postmortem of python 2->3 and the truly bleeding edge users argued about whether this interesting new language should be referred to as ‘go’ or ‘golang’. Oh and the occasional Flutter or Elixir development update. And the weirdo technical shamans debating functional programming patterns. When was the last time someone recommended “Learn You…”? Besides the exaggeration of the first sentence, I’m actually deadly serious about the rest.
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  When was the last time we all had an honest to goodness editor war? It doesn’t even have to be text editors, let’s rhetorically fistfight about IntelliJ versus Visual Studio. Other nostalgic prompts: - For competent power users, tiling window managers are better than desktop metaphor WMs - Is Java finally dead? - Is my manager a bitchass for not promoting me to the senior role (SF/GOOG/M/24) - If you don’t use the trackpoint on your Thinkpad your mom’s a hoe Good morning to all.
- rednafi 2y ago
  "Weirdo technical shamans"—lmao, I’m borrowing this. The whole FP community is like that. It’s all fun and games until you ask, "But what did you build with it?"

marginalia_nu 2y ago

I feel it's gotten worse over time, with crypto came a new sort of grifter that was far more aggressively pushing their grift with nearly religious overtones. Some of those people seem to have abandoned ship and moved to AI instead, largely taking the playbook with them. With short term flash in the pan hype cycles like that superconductor one, prediction markets astroturfing also seems involved. Basically the more hype you drum up, the more people you can lure into betting on room temperature superconductors, the more money you stand to win when it turns out to be nothing of the sort.

1oooqooq 2y ago

but not paying attention to the ramifications is troublesome. for example, web3 was exclusively a scam, but it shifted power and economies because it was entrenched in high places (mostly oligarchs evading sanctions and with that, politicians). now you may have ignored it and not lost money like 90% who joined the hype... but now you have a president bound by support of that very money and they already made promises to clear the way even further for those people. likewise with AI, even if you ignore it, there are proxy wars happeing with little more reason than to showcase the viability of autonomous robots in trench warfare for the next round of arms sales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrrXNZyoc8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrrXNZyoc8k

jstummbillig 2y ago

I think the less wrong way of thinking about it is that things do emerge and hn is fundamentally about thinking about what those might be in the realm of technology. Just like yc, most things will not work out. Some will. You can read about all of them here. The noise around the thing is one of many signals.

stabbles 2y ago

It would be interesting to see when these trends started and how long they lasted, to see if the current trend is any different.

rsynnott 2y ago
'AI' is kind of the perennial tech fad. The first 'AI winter' (period of diminished interest in 'AI') is usually reckoned to have started in _1966_. It is, in some sense, the _default_ state of the tech industry to be overly excited about AI; the periods when it is _not_ are the exceptions. The current one is unusually extreme, mind you.

tetris11 2y ago

At least with VR and 3D printing there was a sense of wonder and whimsy about it: that we were living in magical times. There's always has and always will be a "Vulture Culture" on HN that rubs my FSF sensibilities somewhat the wrong way from time to time, but with this latest AI and crypto bubble it really feels like that shared sense of wonderment is being greatly usurped by the vulture crowd to a toxifying degree. They don't want to grow money in 10 years. They want to make money now. It really hasn't always been this bad.

jsheard 2y ago

The way people talked about Blockchain/Web3 in particular was very similar to how a lot of people talk about AI now. It's going to take over the world any day now, we just need to fix [fundamental issue]. Get on board right now or you'll be left behind, especially if you're in a creative field. The business model is definitely-maybe-kinda legal but we just need to bend all governments to our will and then it'll be fine. It may use as much energy as a small country but trust us it's totally worth it.

rednafi 2y ago
The tech itself works, unlike blockchain, but the narratives are way overblown. I know a few small companies that have legitimately let people go without even having a proper replacement. The leadership then hyped up Devin or whatever, only to find the whole workplace in chaos after a few months. All this was done to attract VC money, and now they're hiring for the same position again.
- franktankbank 2y ago
  What about blockchain tech doesn't work? It's a relatively more tame technical problem than any GenAI.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Usability. The use case of GenAI is pretty clear at this point. With blockchain, the big question was, "Okay, we have this cool tech, but what do we do with it now?" If you have to think about what problem a tool solves, it's not a good tool at all.
    - sshine 2y ago
      To some extent, usability. But since the target audience was always technical (although gullible) people, the incentive to make it useful beyond coin purchases never manifested. But moreso: scalability. The blockchains that are worth anything don’t scale to the level of total worldwide transactions per second. I’ve heard “But Lightning!” — sure, so before I can send any money, I have to find a fellow to relay my transactions against.

soneca 2y ago

I agree, but I find that useful. There are a lot of info, developments, and opinions that I can go through and inform and update my view on the topic. It was on HN that I was able to very quickly realize web3 was a scam. It was also good to teach that if enough people believe cryptocurrency is a way to invest money, it becomes as legitimate a way to invest money than any other. Also informed me of all the nuances and how naive ideology, even if misplaced and bad at forming the future, and money from illegal activities can become a legitimate investment option and become part of the mainstream where all of its past can be mostly ignored by current cryptocurrency owners. Anyway, right or wrong, that is my current view on it and it was informed by what I chose to read about it on HN. Even the current flood of AI content I find useful to gradually understand how to use it or not, bring attention around ethical dilemmas, what is the useful for and what is not useful for. And since I can chose what I read very easily on HN, it doesn’t bother me at all the hype-driven subject of HN submissions.

rednafi 2y ago
Oh, I like LLMs and use them all the time. But that doesn't change the fact that CEOs are lying to get more VC money. No one is replacing 30% of their workforce with AI. This whole narrative is spun to attract fad investments. I don’t like this part. But I guess it’s just like programming languages: either people rant about them or no one uses them.