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Simon, this HN post didn't need to be about Gen AI. This thing is really inescapable those days.
by jraph 7mo ago
Simon, this HN post didn't need to be about Gen AI.
This thing is really inescapable those days.
- simonw 7mo agoParallel thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47311484#47312829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47311484#47312829 - "I've always been fascinated by this, but I have never known what it would be useful for." I should have replied there instead, my mistake.
- darig 7mo ago[dead]
- stavros 7mo agoI don't know man, I didn't see anyone say "this post didn't need to be about <random topic>", HN has just become allergic to LLMs lately. I'm excited about them and I think discussion on how to combine two exciting technologies are exactly what I'd like to see here.
- bakugo 7mo agoHas there ever been any other topic that was not only the subject of the majority of submissions, but also had a subset of users repeatedly butting into completely unrelated discussions to go "b-but what about <thing>? we need to talk about <thing> here too! how can I relate this to <thing>? look at my <thing> product!"? You can't just roll in to a random post to tell people about your revolutionary new AI agent for the 50th time this week and expect them not to be at least mildly annoyed.
- stavros 7mo agoI'm with you, but he wasn't telling us about his agent, he was saying "this is a cool technology and I've been wanting to use it to make a thing". The thing just happened to be LLM-adjacent.
- bakugo 7mo agoAlmost all of his comments "just happen" to be LLM-adjacent. At some point it stops "just happening" and it becomes clear that certain people (or their AI bots) are frequenting discussion spaces for the sole purpose of seeking out opportunities to bring up AI and self-promote.
- stavros 7mo agoSimon has been here since way before LLMs were a thing, and it's fairly obvious (to me, at least) that he's genuinely excited about LLMs, he's not just spamming sales or anything.
- yokoprime 7mo agoYou are not reading his material i suppose? It’s really one of the better sources for informed takes on llms
- bakugo 7mo agoI just went and read one of his recent posts at: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/chardet/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/5/chardet/ The entire thing is just quotes and a retelling of events. The closest thing to a "take" I could find is this: > I have no idea how this one is going to play out. I’m personally leaning towards the idea that the rewrite is legitimate, but the arguments on both sides of this are entirely credible. Which effectively says nothing. It doesn't add anything the discussion around the topic, informed or not, and the post doesn't seem to serve any purpose beyond existing as an excuse to be linked to and siphon attention away from the original discussion (I wonder if the sponsor banner at the top of the blog could have something to do with that...?) This seems to be a pattern, at least in recent times. Here's another egregious example: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/claws/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/claws/ Literally just a quote from his fellow member of the "never stops talking about AI" club, Karpathy. No substance, no elaboration, just something someone else said or did pasted on his blog followed by a short agreement. Again, doesn't add anything or serve any real purpose, but was for some reason submitted to HN[1], and I may be misremembering but I believe it had more upvotes/comments than the original[2] at one point. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099160 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096253
- purerandomness 7mo agoYou haven't been around here in the Blockchain/NFT/Smart Contract dark ages, have you?
- stavros 7mo agoNaw man I just signed up.
- yokoprime 7mo agoI chuckled. Everything on earth is recent if you look at it from a cosmic timeframe I guess
- fsloth 7mo agoTBH I’ve been here a while, never felt what the point with the above is but do feel LLM:s are a new valuable affordance in computer use. I mean I don’t have to remember the horrible git command line anymore which already improves my exprience as a dev 50%. It’s not all hype bs this time.
- dang 7mo ago> HN has just become allergic to LLMs lately. It's very much a bimodal distribution: an enthusiast subset and an allergic subset. It's impossible to satisfy both, but that's the dynamic of HN anyhow: guaranteed to dissatisfy everybody! It's a strange game; the only to win is to complain.
- stavros 7mo agoYeah, but I don't know, a bit more intellectual curiosity would be good. Ah well, what can you do.
- yokoprime 7mo agoWhat topics are allowed in your opinion? I very much enjoyed Simon’s comment as it is a use case I also was thinking of.
- grimgrin 7mo agoa bit cute that you interacted with the 1 AI thread. there are other threads!
- brumar 7mo agoWhy not leting upvotes do their thing? I enjoyed this comment.
- dang 7mo agoIt's normal for HN to be preoccupied with the major technical trend of the moment, and this is unquestionably the biggest technical trend in many years. People can argue about where to insert it in the list, but it is certainly in the top 5 of many decades (smartphones, web, PCs, etc.) That's why it's inescapable. Your complaint isn't really about simonw's comment, but rather the fact that it was heavily upvoted - in other words, you were dissenting from the community reaction to the comment. That's understandable; in fact it's a fundamental problem with forums and upvoting systems: the same few massive topics suck in all the smaller ones until we get one big ball of topic mud: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....