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> I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again. Genuinely curious: Why? Don’t get me wrong, I upvoted this post, and would love to see AI separated

> I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again. Genuinely curious: Why? Don’t get me wrong, I upvoted this post, and would love to see AI separated out, or at least tagged (like a root comment suggests) so that I can filter them out if I want. But I can’t say I’d never want to hear anything about AI ever again (though I’m headed in that direction). What field are you in, and what are your interests, such that you’d want to visit HN without ever seeing mentions of AI?

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Not the OP, but I'm sick to death of hearing about AI The hype around it is ridiculous. I don't personally find it nearly as useful as people are saying, so everything feels like people are trying to gaslight me Don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. Amazing stuff. I just personally don't have much interest in it until it's much more reliable for the things I want to use it for And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now
- ryandrake 1y ago
  > And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now I'm kind of exhausted in general (year after year) of frankly unimaginative engineers who should know better, latching on to whatever is the latest soup of the month, and touting it here as the greatest human achievement since fire.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    I do wish that there was a good place to talk about interesting stuff with people online that was a bit more resistant to both the extreme hype and the extreme pessimism HN threads very often feel like whichever side posted first winds up dominating the thread, it's bizarre I see the comments on some articles that are massively pro AI all upvoted to the top, then the comments on another article and it's all the negative AI comments upvoted It's weirdly echo-chambery on a post by post basis
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      Yeah this has been the worst development in HN culture as HN has grown in my experience. To make things worse the extremity of the hype and pessimism just creates a huge flamewar where each side is dedicated to using the worst strawmen to undermine the other side. Personally I just started treating this site as a sophisticated shitposting place and started actually talking about tech in group chats with friends who work in the industry. Increasingly I see folks refer to the content here in the same breath as Reddit so I don't think I'm the only one. It's probably just a scale problem. When a website becomes big enough it becomes dominated by the folks with the most time to post and the most passionate opinions.
      - bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > Personally I just started treating this site as a sophisticated shitposting place and started actually talking about tech in group chats with friends who work in the industry Yeah... I think this is probably smart. I wish I had that, I don't have a lot of friends in the industry Something to work
steveklabnik 1y ago
Not your parent, and not anti-AI, but I’ve seen similar things to this thread in smaller spaces I’m in. There are some people who are having genuine crises over this stuff, some of it existential, and some of it “wow I thought my friends had some basic agreements about the world that we actually don’t,” and seeing this stuff on the regular just fans these sorts of issues. Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of homepage spots, and if you don’t want to see a topic, it effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five stories to me it would be less useful than it is now.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  > Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of homepage spots, and if you don’t want to see a topic, it effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five stories to me it would be less useful than it is now. Yes, I feel like all these shallow "[Someone] vibe-coded [thing] with AI using [Claud whatever]" articles are hitting the front page and muscling out other, more interesting ones. Just like the "[Common unix utility] re-written in Rust!" articles of years past.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    I wrote this https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ years ago but I don't stand by that article because I don't feel that way anymore. I do stand by the sequel https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ because that's the operating principle of YOShInOn which is something a little more sophisticated applied to RSS feeds and productized.
delusional 1y ago
That is a wonderful question, but it's very hard to answer without essentially knowing me, and that may be a little bit ambitious for a comment. I'm a software engineer. I consider this some of the most important work of our generation. The hardware we've made today has unlocked an until now impossible control over the world. We don't have to mechanically devise a way to make a clock that tracks the stars. We can just program it into a microchip, and it'll just do it. We don't have to manage an untold thousands of people to calculate our taxes. We can write it into a computer and it can just do it. Forever and perfectly. We're just not applying it. I've reached the point of despair. It's not a AI doom kind of despair, where I believe that AI is going rogue or whatever. It's a much more pedestrian of despair. We have tremendous problems ahead of us. Both when it comes to the climate, but also when it comes to just doing the things that society always has to do and AI doesn't offer anything to any of the actual problems of society. While people are dying of Ebola in Africa and Americans are dying because they can't pay for healthcare, we are talking about automating software development for ad-tech companies. It's embarrassing. This is my field, these are my people, and this is the best we have to offer. I try to abstain from that despair by just not engaging with it. Either AI will happen and we'll take it from there, or it wont and then we'll have wasted a lot of effort and will hopefully never had any credibility as an industry again. I can't make a difference in either of those outcomes, so I just want it to go away. Let me make it clear though. I too love the math behind recent AI. I even love the engineering behind how we do fast GEMM on GPU's. The challenges are really fun technically. That just can't be what decides our direction. I hope that somewhat answered it a little. It's a bit hard to get such a large topic rooted so deeply in me into a comment. Thinking about the future in relation to these billion dollar companies and what they make does actually make me emotional.
- saulpw 1y ago
  Thank you, I feel similarly. We've become gods of computing through global-scale invention, production, supply-chains, and finance, and we're apparently going to use that power to "improve productivity" which in the best case means cheaper apps that make people more money. I've not heard a single actual use-case for the modern AI/LLM that helps us with our actual national and global problems.

bluefirebrand 1y ago

Not the OP, but I'm sick to death of hearing about AI The hype around it is ridiculous. I don't personally find it nearly as useful as people are saying, so everything feels like people are trying to gaslight me Don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. Amazing stuff. I just personally don't have much interest in it until it's much more reliable for the things I want to use it for And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now

ryandrake 1y ago
> And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now I'm kind of exhausted in general (year after year) of frankly unimaginative engineers who should know better, latching on to whatever is the latest soup of the month, and touting it here as the greatest human achievement since fire.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  I do wish that there was a good place to talk about interesting stuff with people online that was a bit more resistant to both the extreme hype and the extreme pessimism HN threads very often feel like whichever side posted first winds up dominating the thread, it's bizarre I see the comments on some articles that are massively pro AI all upvoted to the top, then the comments on another article and it's all the negative AI comments upvoted It's weirdly echo-chambery on a post by post basis
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    Yeah this has been the worst development in HN culture as HN has grown in my experience. To make things worse the extremity of the hype and pessimism just creates a huge flamewar where each side is dedicated to using the worst strawmen to undermine the other side. Personally I just started treating this site as a sophisticated shitposting place and started actually talking about tech in group chats with friends who work in the industry. Increasingly I see folks refer to the content here in the same breath as Reddit so I don't think I'm the only one. It's probably just a scale problem. When a website becomes big enough it becomes dominated by the folks with the most time to post and the most passionate opinions.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      > Personally I just started treating this site as a sophisticated shitposting place and started actually talking about tech in group chats with friends who work in the industry Yeah... I think this is probably smart. I wish I had that, I don't have a lot of friends in the industry Something to work

steveklabnik 1y ago

Not your parent, and not anti-AI, but I’ve seen similar things to this thread in smaller spaces I’m in. There are some people who are having genuine crises over this stuff, some of it existential, and some of it “wow I thought my friends had some basic agreements about the world that we actually don’t,” and seeing this stuff on the regular just fans these sorts of issues. Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of homepage spots, and if you don’t want to see a topic, it effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five stories to me it would be less useful than it is now.

ryandrake 1y ago
> Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of homepage spots, and if you don’t want to see a topic, it effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five stories to me it would be less useful than it is now. Yes, I feel like all these shallow "[Someone] vibe-coded [thing] with AI using [Claud whatever]" articles are hitting the front page and muscling out other, more interesting ones. Just like the "[Common unix utility] re-written in Rust!" articles of years past.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I wrote this https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ years ago but I don't stand by that article because I don't feel that way anymore. I do stand by the sequel https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ because that's the operating principle of YOShInOn which is something a little more sophisticated applied to RSS feeds and productized.

delusional 1y ago

That is a wonderful question, but it's very hard to answer without essentially knowing me, and that may be a little bit ambitious for a comment. I'm a software engineer. I consider this some of the most important work of our generation. The hardware we've made today has unlocked an until now impossible control over the world. We don't have to mechanically devise a way to make a clock that tracks the stars. We can just program it into a microchip, and it'll just do it. We don't have to manage an untold thousands of people to calculate our taxes. We can write it into a computer and it can just do it. Forever and perfectly. We're just not applying it. I've reached the point of despair. It's not a AI doom kind of despair, where I believe that AI is going rogue or whatever. It's a much more pedestrian of despair. We have tremendous problems ahead of us. Both when it comes to the climate, but also when it comes to just doing the things that society always has to do and AI doesn't offer anything to any of the actual problems of society. While people are dying of Ebola in Africa and Americans are dying because they can't pay for healthcare, we are talking about automating software development for ad-tech companies. It's embarrassing. This is my field, these are my people, and this is the best we have to offer. I try to abstain from that despair by just not engaging with it. Either AI will happen and we'll take it from there, or it wont and then we'll have wasted a lot of effort and will hopefully never had any credibility as an industry again. I can't make a difference in either of those outcomes, so I just want it to go away. Let me make it clear though. I too love the math behind recent AI. I even love the engineering behind how we do fast GEMM on GPU's. The challenges are really fun technically. That just can't be what decides our direction. I hope that somewhat answered it a little. It's a bit hard to get such a large topic rooted so deeply in me into a comment. Thinking about the future in relation to these billion dollar companies and what they make does actually make me emotional.

saulpw 1y ago
Thank you, I feel similarly. We've become gods of computing through global-scale invention, production, supply-chains, and finance, and we're apparently going to use that power to "improve productivity" which in the best case means cheaper apps that make people more money. I've not heard a single actual use-case for the modern AI/LLM that helps us with our actual national and global problems.