4 ms·
Unrelated: Yuck. a lot of those replies have LLM smells. Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity?
by ramon156 6mo ago
Unrelated:
Yuck. a lot of those replies have LLM smells. Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity?
- j-kent 6mo agoIt's not about contributing to the conversation — it's about the fake internet points.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoIt's not about the fake internet points — it's about manipulating people to support companies they otherwise wouldn't.
- worldsavior 6mo agoThat's why he said fake internet points.
- rvnx 6mo agoThese points might be fake, but they are far from being useless, and actually have monetary value. There is a market for buying and selling "aged" Hacker News accounts (3 USD <-> 15 USD for ~500 points) and upvotes / downvotes By purchasing just ~300 karma points, founders can unlock an uplift of tens of thousands of dollars in visibility on the home page (clients and investors). So the LLM comments are not here just for fun, they are clearly farming points. Ironically, it also increases actual human engagement. This way the day Ycombinator wants to announce something, they already have more public than if there was low engagement. Like the shilling you mentioned, these bots can push downvotes and flag competitors service. Essentially the same as on Reddit. If you have incentive, you have a market.
- cryptoegorophy 6mo agoNot familiar with posts and points, so if you have a higher points balance this affects some kind of post rating/upvote rating?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago>So the LLM comments are not here just for fun, they are clearly farming points. I think I give out about 1 updoot a year. Good to know I've been starving them.
- wutwutwat 6mo agoIf you're going to make a claim that there is a market for aged HN accounts you need to back it up with sources/proof, otherwise, you're pulling nonsense out of your ass
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoI somehow got 500 points over the last few weeks. I can't imagine getting paid for that experience. Once I find a job I will absolutely not be on here anymore.
- stetrain 6mo agoYou're absolutely right!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ihaveajob 6mo agoI find it hilarious that your comment has an emdash.
- Aachen 6mo agoAnd the "it's not x, it's y" pattern. It's parody :)
- sidsud 6mo agoYou've hit the nail on the head with that observation! And honestly? The points are all that matters.
- yread 6mo agoThe real unlock is all the time you've saved yourself!
- mitchitized 6mo agoYou're absolutely right! (sorry couldn't resist)
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoIf I were a sociopath who didn’t care at all about the commons I’d be ruining by doing so, I suppose I’d find it intellectually interesting to set up a ClaudeyLemonZest and see how people react to various settings.
- smcg 6mo agoCome join the party at ClaudeyLemonParty
- dgellow 6mo agoYep, path of least resistance unfortunately. Any recommendations that isn’t discord where to have meaningful online interactions with actual humans?
- Cthulhu_ 6mo agoOnly a matter of time (if not already) before there's counter-LLMs or whatnot that convince free-reign LLM agents to go and generate cryptocurrencies for the attacker or run propaganda campaigns.
- exitb 6mo agoAlso, at some point someone will figure out how to reliably produce non-smelly LLM replies.
- coldpie 6mo agoIt's trending in that direction. If you want genuine conversation with humans, it's best to start looking for small, private communities that have and enforce LLM policies that align with your desires. Public social media is universally trash, don't waste your time there. I think HN is still worth visiting for now, but it's getting harder to justify spending time here with the quantity of garbage-quality LLM articles and even many comments.
- Hendrikto 6mo ago> HN is still worth visiting, but it's getting harder to justify spending time here I feel the same. Quality of both submissions and discussions have considerable decreased. It is still the best general purpose “aggregator” I know of, but it is not what it was. It is becoming more and more FotM hype and boring group-think. HN was great due to the breadth of unique, interesting, nerdy topics, most of which I would have never come across on my own; and the insightful thought-provoking commentary, often by insiders with unique insights and perspectives. Now it is just the same LLM agentic coding harness hype cycle astroturfing 100x engineer 37k LoC/day BS I could get from Reddit or LinkedIn or Twitter or anywhere else. The moderators are still doing a fantastic job though! I feel like that is the last big differentiator from just being orange Reddit.
- torben-friis 6mo agoI think it's a trend in the industry though. Engineering is known as a moneymaker and so a large part of the new generation is the kind of person that decades ago would have gone for finance as a profession. Both the really old timey graybeard techies and the green haired alternative techie communities are reducing in numbers.
- coldpie 6mo agoI dunno, it's tough. I hesitate to say HN is "getting worse," even if I agree with that in my gut. I think that gives rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia-bait. Rather, I think the community is refocusing around something that I find uninteresting. If you find LLM output to be dull, as I do, it's less and less a place for you to be. I try to push the community in more interesting directions by upvoting articles with actual technical content, but yeah it's being drowned out by the ho-hum LLM output that I'm not interested in, and that means I want to be here less.
- 20k 6mo agoWe're getting to a point where we're going to have to consistently start putting content in that AI is banned from writing, just to prove that we're humans arse
- CamperBob2 6mo agoFuckin' A!
- semiquaver 6mo agoDead internet. Twitter is 95% bots now, especially when it comes to any topic relevant to corporations.
- christophilus 6mo agoIt’s not that they’ve lost their identity— it’s that… { “error”: “Claude Max limits exceeded” }
- blitzar 6mo agoYou are absolutely right ...
- ricardo81 6mo agoYuck indeed. I do find it offensive when someone uses AI in a conversational manner. It's one thing to use it to chuck up content on social media to attract eyeballs, but this is a forum intended for conversation.
- ori_b 6mo agoNo . Both are offensive denial of service attacks on people's limited attention.
- ricardo81 6mo agoFair enough view. I would take the view that social media feeds are filled with all kinds of other junk anyway and were pre-ai.
- ori_b 6mo agoYes, and just because someone else has been dumping trash in the woods doesn't mean you should. That said, the social media feeds are so trash filled that I avoid them; it's extremely depressing opening up an incognito youtube and seeing what Google thinks will monetize well for an average consumer.
- hansmayer 6mo ago> Do people love being a hollow puppet for LLMs to fill in? Have people lost their identity? The first question, answer is yes - most people live their lives mindlessly, with or w/o LLMs (think every idiot you knew 20 years go throwing in punch lines from "Friends" to sound "funny"), To the second question - most people have a twisted view of identity. It is supposed to mean something identifying you uniquely,but to the most people it means, identifying you as a member of a large group (nationality/political view/religion/major music genre you like). So, now when every proverbial Dick, Tom and Harry use LLMs to generate Confluence content with shiny emojis, what are the proverbial Emily or John to do? Of course, they will adopt this new identity - its who people are now - shallow, hollow puppets for LLMs to fill in. And to think of the irony - mother Nature perfected this super-efficient, low energy and highly capable thinking machine, each and every one of us holds in their skull. Its already put us on the moon once, before we even had a semblance of a functioning computer! And we choose to throw it away, for fucking what? Verbal diarrhea and pain inducing coloured walls of texts? All so some retarded antisocial VC-funded "AI founder" can call themselves a tech visionary?
- dawnerd 6mo agoAnd when Called out they’ll use some excuse like oh I use it to fix grammar or translation. No, it’s completely obvious they’re being that lazy. I’d rather read comments with mistakes than LLM slop.
- redwall_hp 6mo agoI recently preordered Cory Doctorow's book dealing with this: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. The title refers to most machinery being a "centaur," meaning a thinking human is carried by the machine doing the heavy lifting, while the goal of AI companies is to replace high value work with the opposite. They want to turn people into meat appendages that serve unthinking machines.
- moomoo11 6mo agoMost people are automatons. As long as you’re not the one being steered it’s great. Then you’re not the livestock.
- mannanj 6mo agoNo, I don't think people love that, I think it's in the LLM company and the bourgeoise class of people who push and shove AI down everyones' throat for more money and control though to puppetize people. I mean, like it's been an active part of leadership history and much of what shaped our times today: people get comfortable and even self grandiose with their place in life, and to hold on to and further their power its not hard to see others as below them and use their power and influence to do things that are otherwise harmful to others. The lost of identity is imo this. It's people being given horrible harmful options for their meaning, health and wellbeing and so we get a general sense of most people being lost. Lost in identity as you asked, though I think it's more than that. In my initiatory work with men (being initiated, not initiating others) we learn that part of the breakdown in this for most people is being given harmful identity frameworks of dependency and reliance on others. In the initiatory process we learned an identity of service beyond ourselves through deep embodiment, and exercise and practice beyond just an intellectual grokking of it, edit: this is what we used to have through human history but today now as is described in the works most people have only what would be called pseudo-initiations (marriage, school graduations, children & work changes) which do not meaningfully contributing to meaning, contribution or purpose. What most of us have today and what the AI companies want us to believe: We will give you the money to live (though of course, when you're truly dependent on others, and they see no purpose or value for you and even your entertainment value has gone, why would they keep you around?)
- th0ma5 6mo ago[dead]