7 ms·
Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN
Loved this site for a long time, always felt like I could come to learn something interesting and find niche topics and experts.
Feels like posts have overwhelmingly been on LLMs for the past few years and I've just lost interest.
Makes me sad, this was really my favorite site.
- TheMongoose 2y agoIt's not just here, it's everywhere. I'm excited for the day the hype bubble collapses.
- geerlingguy 2y agoHonestly this. Every product on the market today also shoehorns in AI somewhere, it feels worse than the heyday of CloudToButt in the Cloud frenzy.
- TheMongoose 2y agoI'm really interested to watch the train wreck that every "we are replacing developers with AI" company is setting themselves up for currently. At least the cloud has SOME merits, even if it is still vastly overused. Saw an Upwork post the other day looking for someone to fix merge conflicts in 20 Devin created PR's. =) P.S. I enjoy your content, keep hacking away at funky projects!
- bediger4000 2y agoThis too shall pass, just like NFTs and blockchain for everything.
- TheMongoose 2y agoTell that to the half dozen blockchain job descriptions I read today and closed as soon as they admitted to being blockchain companies.
- virginwidow 2y agoKool nick. keyword BUBBLE. I beg fresher minds PLEASE carefully disect? What we (easily) see correlates with the cliche' "Tip of the Iceberg". Sentient souls natrually grasp this metaphor, analogy, simile... Better: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_Denmark https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/something_is_rotten_in_the_st... Kind reader. When this bubble bursts what takes place afterward?
- andsoitis 2y agoLet's be the change we want to see. It will pass.
- nahnahno 2y agoYes, likewise.
- thallavajhula 2y agoIt's the current hotness in tech. HN has always included trending tech topics. Ever since HN started, I've seen - * Explosion of social media * JavaScript libraries and the frontend revolution to modernizing the web and browsers * Mobile apps * Crypto * Machine Learning and now, AI & LLMs. The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating. edit: formatting
- 3vidence 2y agoFor me the LLM topic is just all enveloping in a way the other trends haven't been. Obviously there was a a million crypto posts and it was annoying but crypto covered a specific niche of overall software stuff (payment processing). With LLMs it feels like every topic somehow has to come back to LLMs. I currently work as a ML Eng at FAANG so maybe it adds to my exhaustion on the topic.
- TheMongoose 2y agoIt's deeply funny that they hit you with the ole "you don't understand AI" when it's your day job though. So you've got that going for you.
- incanus77 2y ago> For me the LLM topic is just all enveloping in a way the other trends haven't been. Same here, for sure. I just try to dodge it all as best I can. Seems like every question has the possible answer of LLMs, and nearly always, someone provides it.
- somenameforme 2y agoThere's also this annoying dissonance between 'evangelists' and reality. Evangelists often feign that we're on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, while in practice LLMs remain stupid, error prone, and unreliable for anything beyond tasks that have a vast number sources for highly relevant training. Which also somewhat dilutes the utility, because I could just as well find those sources! Oh right, that must just be because I'm not giving it the magic prompt that makes them magically turn into geniuses.
- not_your_vase 2y agoLol tell me about it. My problem isn't only that it's LLM, but the same 3-5 topics over and over and over and over again: > This is how I use ChatGPT to write my program. > Here is a cool SaaS that will generate a CV for you with state of the art AI > AGI is happening in 5 minutes! (If it wouldn't happen, read the previous statement again) > LLMs are going to kill/save humanity > Show HN: we worked on this revolutionary next step in AI in the past 12 years. It's 100% open source, come! (Narrator: it's a 200 lines python wrapper over OpenAI api)
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago> Here is a cool SaaS I think it's the most annoying one. We are spammed by Bootstrap/Tailwind-styled closed-source wrappers around the API currently hyped (with Google login, and pricing page, all the time). We would be legitimately angry if we were flooded with "Here is some random ClosedSource.exe application, run it on your computer" because that would not improve anything, but for some reason web sites are OK.
- virginwidow 2y agobingo
- jimbob45 2y agoI’d rather have this for the rest of my life than have any more of the cryptocoin/NFT flood we had prior to this. Even better if we get a C/Zig/Odin bone thrown our way every once in a while.
- atoav 2y agoThe blockchain-people needed to go somewhere once people realized that thekr solution in search of a problem isn't gonna stick. Not saying that there is interesting bits in LLM research, it is just completely drowned out by the hype chasers whl smell the next gold rush.
- scojjac 2y agoVery meta post. ;) I need a filter on all web browsing so that I never hear about LLMs ever again. They're a scourge on critical thinking, on workers, on the environment, on the internet. If they are the future, leave me behind.
- 3vidence 2y agoI wrote my own front end for HN using Flutter (just a pet project) specifically so I could have dark mode and a topic filter. But I just got tired of adding new AI topics to the filter.
- bookofjoe 2y agoMaybe HN needs to fork (not like Wordpress, though...) into 3 sites: 1) Wordpress Original 2) Wordpress no AI/LLM/ML 3) Wordpress ONLY AI/LLM/ML I would choose 2) in a heartbeat.
- on_the_train 2y agoIt's mostly "ai" and politics, which mirrors my real life experience that no one is actually interested in doing actual software dev anymore
- 3vidence 2y agoYes! I actually forgot to add the politics point in my post which really doubles the exhaustion. I really loved seeing what things people were up to, not the latest headline from trillion dollar company or the US government.
- dialecticae 2y agoYes. The hype, lies and more lies.
- minimaxir 2y agoThe LLM posts that get upvoted on HN tend to be demos, learnings, and open-source projects: the complete opposite of the baseless hype.
- jcgrillo 2y agoBut then the comments are a deluge of breathless hype about "agi" and "changing the world". Just like it was for the fake internet money people--decentralized banking is gonna change everything!!!11oneeleven.
- runjake 2y agoNo, on the contrary, I like it. It’s a huge emerging technology that is changing the world. I suppose if it wasn’t wanted it wouldn’t be upvoted to the front page.
- oidar 2y agoOpenAI is valued at ~150 billion. Anthropic is valued at ~60 billion. nvidia was valued at $15/share in 2023 and is now valued at $150/share. It might seem that LLMs have sucked all the air out of the room, this is why. If you find LLMs boring, you are in for a very boring couple of decades - because it's not going away.
- 3vidence 2y agoI do currently work on ML projects at FAANG. Idk I just always found HN my escape into more interesting topics, now it's just my day job.
- shermantanktop 2y agoI’m not sure…the hype cycle of fads has its own momentum which is somewhat independent of the actual subject. LLMs may not go away but once people realize their thin wrapper scripts won’t result in a 10B valuation, the HN discussion will change.
- M2Ys4U 2y agoAnd if this doesn't prove that valuations are bullshit, nothing will.
- loveparade 2y agoCrypto market cap is trillions of dollars, and how many crypto posts do you see these days? Not really a strong argument.
- jcgrillo 2y agoImpressive numbers, but have you ever tried to use one of these things to get actual work done? They're terrible at it! Until these companies start demonstrating some actual value this is merely a hype bubble. Nvidia is slightly different categorically because they're selling the picks and shovels in this hype gold rush--but they were also in the last one (web3/crypto/nfts). At some point if these folks don't actually start delivering the value they're hyping it's all coming crashing down.
- 2y ago
- daft_pink 2y agoNot really, I think it’s interesting coverage and reading people opinions and comments about emerging technology ai or not ai is fantastic.
- mediumsmart 2y agoThat is sad that you come for the posts and not the comments.
- 3vidence 2y agoShouldn't these be related? If the posts are on LLMs the comments are going to be on LLMs. But I agree with the notion the comments are the valuable part of HN, the topic is just a jumping off point.
- sensanaty 2y agoThe problem is even in posts unrelated to the AI hype, someone will inevitably mention AI and somehow those threads always blow up to be the largest ones in any post.
- codr7 2y agoIt's becoming a major issue when getting hired. I have no good answers to AI bullshit, none they want to hear at least. Can't remember the last time I saw a company that wasn't hyping AI to hell and back.
- null_deref 2y agoI actually do like the LLM posts occasionally, and very much like the “good old content” you talk about and that content I can’t find anywhere else, so what can you do?
- pseudosavant 2y agoIf this is a poll, my answer is no. I enjoy the discussions around a lot of the HN LLM/AI especially. Most other places are to surface level.
- singularity2001 2y agosame, this is the most interesting development of our time may be of humankind, and it's not that news is just repeating: there is significant progress almost every week (recently R1 and byte latent tokenization)
- bookofjoe 2y agoI would nominate recent surge in UAP developments as equally interesting. Perhaps they're not unrelated.
- tt52738 2y agoActually I'm mostly demotivated by the amount of politics and "agenda pushing" posts. They seem somewhat alien to the spirit of hacking, and prefabricated to shift HN's audience's values and preferences. This post included (or a consequence of).
- 65 2y agoWe gotta put AI Blockchain in the Metaverse!
- jcgrillo 2y agoRun it on Computerless for maximum DevSecCloudOps!
- dalton_zk 2y agoI ignore and focus in post more interesting, and every week I find posts which I like
- robwwilliams 2y agoNo, even these first-gen LLM are transforming how I do science. Today DeepSeek tests. Great interactions. Without HN I would have been a few weeks late to the party.
- 3vidence 2y agoI appreciate your positive experience with the tech / content. It's helpful for me to understand the other side of the coin.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoI'm kinda tired of seeing the first comment to a totally unrelated topic be, "you know, LLMs these days can actually..." Where is the creativity? Are we doomed to solve every problem, technological, social, and political with an LLM now? Is this the slow descent into Idiocracy?
- geor9e 2y agoAre you boycotting LLMs or something? They're one of the best hacker tools around lately. Tasks I would have frustratedly scoured stack overflow to solve in three hours I'm solving in 30 seconds using cursor in agent mode and just letting it run whatever it wants as root on my MacBook. Maybe your sadness is rooted in the fact that we interacted with computers one way for a few decades and some of that's becoming quite obsolete as the months whizz by on this tech freight train.
- 3vidence 2y agoI work on ML at FAANG I use LLMs a couple of times a week (daily if you count line auto complete) It's not that LLMs are bad, but they are just one topic in the vast world of different things. There have been so many amazing insights on HN from users with such interesting backgrounds (nuclear engineering, bakers, musicians, etc). And it just feels like that's all collapsed into "have you tested model-version-quant-subversion-domain? If you haven't you can't say anything"
- 65 2y agoSilicon Valley is full of techno-religious, socially awkward people trying to find God in technology. AGI promises to understand them in a way normies never could. A dream that will never happen, just like proof in God is impossible... but people believe anyways. Hope in finding an answer to the unanswerable. The human brain processes information in narrative form, lovers of a good story are the ones most enamored with AI, with hype and trends, because it's a vision of the future where the unanswerable questions about existence are answered, finally. Well, let's speculate and burn our sacred planet down one computing plant at a time. And yet, we'll find ourselves still questioning, still trying to answer the unknowable.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- teej 2y agoI have been on HN for 16.5 years and I don’t plan to stop now. It’s been worse. Trends come and go. The stories and comments come and go. HN is constantly changing. You can’t attach yourself to how something was before. It will change again. Thats just life.
- 3vidence 2y agoAppreciate the perspective. I'm on year 9ish of HN, maybe I'm just hitting my first introspective point on the whole space.
- jamil7 2y agoPut the no procrastination setting on to short value with a long interval and take a break for a few months. I do the same from time to time and it stops the muscle memory of hitting compile in my IDE and then opening a tab with hn.
- virginwidow 2y agonoted
- nickthegreek 2y agoAgreed. I came here during the JS library hype fad when everyone was using query and waiting for the next best thing. JS libraries felt like 30% of all posts til they weren’t. I can see how the AI posts can get overbearing if you are in the /new trenches. I’d recommend stepping back and just view the top post rss for a bit.
- Kelvin506 2y agoFor me it's that it's all so obviously a grift. With crypto there was at least some legitimate value to blockchains. ML is a valid science and has led to major breakthroughs in other sciences. But AGI/genAI LLMs come across like just another scam from the Worst Guys You Know who were all cryptobros in the 2010s. The output integrity problems get dismissed. The traceability/repeatability problems get dismissed. The data ownership problems get dismissed. There's the endless problems with aggressive feeder bots causing real (financial/operational) harm to others. All of the people selling it have the smell of timeshare salesmen. And now with China releasing open source models that seemingly embarass their U.S. counterparts, it makes the whole thing feel even more like a ponzi scheme. LLMs as a whole have a severe credibility problem.
- jcgrillo 2y agoIt's infecting everything. The other day I overheard someone saying "we don't need to expose a query interface, we'll just give users a text box and let them use natural language". Total brain rot.
- sensanaty 2y agoMy PM has been talking about converting half our product into a "conversational UI", meaning what used to be buttons would be turned into a textbox that sends a request to an AI API that will in turn trigger the same action as before. Of course, it shits itself 80% of the time, but AI!!!11! It's total lunacy, I feel like I'm in a mental asylum sometimes.
- 000ooo000 2y agoI've lost interest in HN because it's seemingly only 50% posts about tech on any given day, and most of those are just one of the Thunderbongs of HN reposting some GitHub URL, or a half baked article from 2017. It wouldn't be so bad if the comments remained reasonable, but even those have tended towards the kind of fodder you get on Reddit, over the last year. I browse Lobsters instead if i'm thinking, but the HN habit is strong.
- robjan 2y agoI do the same. You can also use tags to filter out categories you aren't interested in such as politics, AI, late stage capitalism or other stuff that keeps getting posted here.
- virginwidow 2y agoThis is extremely useful. Sincere thanks. I consult HN to learn how something became broken and what mitigation is offered. Then I trip over AI or LLM which are (personally) disturbing & end up saying something foolish.
- 3vidence 2y agoI've been looking for a new space to lurk on for a bit now (hard to replace HN). Hadn't heard of Lobsters might check it out. Appreciate the post.
- what 2y ago>the kind of fodder you get on reddit That’s because a ton of them migrated here during the reddit api fiasco. You’ll notice a pattern between that kind of content and account age.
- graycat 2y agoIn the 1990s there was another big AI push, rules, the RETE algorithm, etc., and, in the middle of it, gave talks at Wharton, Stanford, etc. First cut, could think of it as a generalization of Select-When. The code had a problem, and one afternoon had an idea, got a pizza, and in the morning had some running, innovative code that saved much of the project. Gee, I got $1000. Soon that AI flopped, no surprise. Current AI? Even if it were, really is, 99% hype and the rest nonsense, and can't tell for sure, still it's the loudest sound, involves really big server farms, electric power sources, data collections, attention from media, investors, and even the POTUS, and can't give a solid argument that it will never amount to much, sooooo, can't just ignore it and have to pay attention, e.g., see if the balloon will keep rising or spring a leak and fall. Here at HN, when see AI, LLM, GANs, AGI, easy enough mostly just to skip them, but can't just ignore all of it. Besides, if want to pay some attention, HN is one of the best places to do that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- virginwidow 2y agoNOTED And following. n0 suprise Being Autistic I've no perception "what THEY think" only what tools work TODAY Allegiance or affinity beyond IT WORKS or it FAILS please pardon, I need only tools which work NOW Your NICK, noted. Don't hesitate to vet mine.
- doright 2y agoI feel like LLMs are inextricably tied to topics like politics which fuels the exhaustion and fatigue. There is also the general pessimism around technology and overvaluation. I see billboards advertising out in the world mentioning some AI service with a bland catchphrase and I'm already thinking, "no more." It's like someone having to consume an entire buffet by themselves. I have never thought about any other type of technology this way before, not even crypto. The word that comes to mind is "Ouroboros". Maybe it is a coincidence with recent global events also causing an influx of globally broadcast textual information, but this may not bode well for any future advancements in technology that only make certain activities more efficient than they already are. How will this sentiment about technology change in a year? In five?
- jagira 2y agoI have not jumped on to the AI / LLM bandwagon yet. I love writing code and I don't want to outsource that to an AI agent. I guess I also love the process of going through the docs or Googling for answers, when I am stuck or have questions about something. That process has lead to some other learning / discoveries.
- myboidaedae 2y agoI posted about genocide and nobody gave a fuck. Your website was never there, sorry. It's just old school reddit
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- tayo42 2y agoThere's only 6 ai posts on the front page right now, out of 30 and 2 or 3 are becasue the deepseek model is a hot topic right now. Tbh that doesn't seem very overwhelming?
- snapplebobapple 2y agoThat's why you load the feed into an rss reader and just scroll past fast....
- vrtx0 2y agoAbsolutely. Truly innovative research and projects are always fascinating to me. But even generalized to AI/ML, I can’t think of anything more recent than GANs (2015), Transformers (2017), and maybe AlphaFold 2 (2021)… Just my personal taste though; I don’t mean to knock LLMs.
- mat-erdem 2y agoYes! thank you, a big yes. This is not just HN for me, it's every online platform youtube, LinkedIn, twitter(yeah not x elon shitface). I've just lost interest in tech talks all together because of overwhelming LLM and AI takes and topics.
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoI'm in my 40s, and not working in any AI tech. Seeing it absorb everything and being hyped over the moon makes me understand the folks 20 years my senior around the .com bubble. We are the dinosaurs now.
- serverlessmania 2y agoI hate to say it, but this is likely just the beginning. Those dismissing this as mere hype might not fully grasp the magnitude of what’s unfolding. The implications of LLMs extend far beyond trends—they’re reshaping how we interact with information, build tools, and solve problems. It’s hard to ignore their transformative potential, even if it feels like they’re dominating the conversation right now, LLM-backed apps and agents are creating new millionaires every other day.
- 3vidence 2y agoHonestly it's the opposite. WEVE BEEN THROUGH THIS BEFORE. I like many people find LLMs a useful tool. I also have not seen a transformative impact on actually quality /cutting edge products being created. Every new technology creates new millionaires every day. Crypto is still creating new billionaires every week and nobody cares.
- mrcsharp 2y agoMy big annoyance with all the LLM talk on HN is that the majority of things discussed simply amount to being glorified HttpClient wrappers yet advertised or talked about as it is this big advancement that everyone should be excited about. Then you have people that drank the LLM kool-aid and their hyper-inflated expectations and how they will all be met within the year. I am starting to simply ignore such threads altogether.
- virginwidow 2y agoNow that I've wiped off my screen & keyboard THANK YOU for > kool-aid
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y agono, i find this subject very interesting. the discussion could be a little more competent and practical.
- dwb 2y agoYeah, it's really really boring. LLMs are not quite nothing, I believe they have some decent uses and will probably come to have more, but I find the breathless hype very depressing. Engineering (as that is what many software developers want to be called these days) should consist of sober judgements on the merits of the components you're evaluating, and this mostly isn't that. I've used LLMs enough to see for myself that they're impressive for certain jobs and more generally up to a point, but worse than useless after that.
- dazzaji 2y agoHonestly, LLM-related posts are usually a topic I’m more likely to click on, depending on the article. I find some of the discussions pretty interesting and useful, though I get why the saturation might feel like too much for others.
- throwaway519 2y agoWhy do you feel compelled to omit the subject from each sentence? > Loved this site for a long time >> I loved this site for a long time
- relaxing 2y agoIt’s a quick way to get out your thoughts without making it sound like you’re telling a story as a first person narrative.
- wduquette 2y agoYes. But this too shall pass when the bubble bursts.
- peterashford 2y agoI would say no, but I am certainly skipping a lot of content
- 3vidence 2y agoI always felt like part of the magic of HN was it's signal to noise ratio compared to sites. Just feels a lot closer to my Reddit feed these days and I'm trying to stop reading that too.
- macshaggy 2y agoI've stopped listening to Data Science podcasts because they only talk about LLMs as AI and those items. There are so many DS problems and topics that I would love to learn and read about but if it isn't about LLM or how an LLM might solve the problem it seems there is zero discussion about them.
- johnea 2y agoGiven that HN is fundamentally a venture capital organization, I think it's typical that it emphasizes the latest hype cycle. That's were VC is active (for better or worse). But HN has also evolved into a more general tech news aggregator. In this use case, the over emphasis of the latest "hotness" is annoying. For myself, I'm not an LLM fanboy, and just skip those posts. What I find most annoying at HN lately is the flagging of an increasing number of articles that someone somewhere doesn't agree with. I would ask them to simply skip those post, like I do for LLM articles, and let people who are interested in discussing those topics have their discussion. Shutting down other peoples conversations is a disturbing trend that I feel it is giving HN more of a one sided echo chamber feel.
- fithisux 2y agoYes, me.
- kirubakaran 2y agoYou could just exclude all ai stories: https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+all-ai https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+all-ai More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988 (disclosure: mine)
- cannibalXxx 2y ago[dead]
- virginwidow 2y ago^5 ^5 ^5 Posts like this are precisely why I took interest in HN I'm so old Stanley Kubric '2001, Space Odyessy' made an indelible imprint: "DAVE, I CAN'T D0..." Chilling, indeed. Decades later movies like 'Blade Runner' & 'Bi-Centenial Man' casting sympathetic light on Artificial LIFE. Now we've this BUZZWORD (oops, SEO 'Keyword'?) of these 2 uppercase letters... LLM (Tip of what iceber, begs the question?) choking bandwidth. Call Pizza-Hut for pickup & this elegantly crafted BOT takes the order Is this really (total cost) less expensive than employing a human? Yet I've not found any projects using this tool to aid dementia, blind, deaf or etcetera.