4 ms·

I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. Learning to hack something together in high school using the latest technology (vacuu

I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. Learning to hack something together in high school using the latest technology (vacuum tubes, radios, microprocessors, web/javascript) has been a common theme in the tech world for generations. With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion. Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort?

embedding-shape 1mo ago
> I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. I can't recall or point out exactly when, but there is a stark before/after moment where the opinions of anything pg went from "Interesting and maybe true in some ways" to what we see today, lots of knee-jerk reactions and hardly any comments about the actual content. Hazarding a guess, I think the moment Altman became the CEO and later during COVID, the sentiment seemed to have been shifting towards what we see today. But this is all based on hazy memory, rather than looking at the data. I'm sure there is a blog post waiting to be written about analyzing the sentiment of comments to PGs articles on HN, and you'll see a shift somewhere.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- trentor 1mo ago
  Because at some point in life everyone gets tired of fairytales. He started mending the anecdotes to his content which always rubs people the wrong way.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    So, this comment of yours obviously isn't in the "knee-jerk reaction" category of comments, I suppose? What exactly from the linked tweet(s) are fairytales here? There is hardly any text at all, so strikes me as a comment about previous pg content, but then this would be one of those comments I talk about? Very confusing.
    - trentor 1mo ago
      Your hand waving doesn't make it knee-jerk. It's just what happened to his writing since COVID. He goes for more of a shock and awe style and not everybody likes it. He's been writing for over 20 years now, hasn't he? His style has clearly changed, and an changing style attracts a different audience so it's no surprise his original readers might not connect with his newer work...
- latexr 1mo ago
  > I can't recall or point out exactly when, but there is a stark before/after moment where the opinions of anything pg went from "Interesting and maybe true in some ways" to what we see today, lots of knee-jerk reactions and hardly any comments about the actual content. Hard disagree. This submission is still being highly upvoted, while another recent post[1] on the harms caused by Graham’s fellows[2], with a fairly tame comment section, has been flagged. That is a constant on HN. It’s not a fluke, it’s as predictable as the sunrise and getting more pronounced. I’m sure we’re both biased in our perceptions. Mine is that HN in general (certainly more than any other website) used to worship[3] everything he wrote, together with others like Musk, until things started to really go to shit and many eyes have been opened to the effects of the unfettered greed of rich tech guys out of touch with reality.[4] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411762 [2]: A better English word is escaping me. [3]: That word I choose hyperbolically but deliberately. It definitely was not “interesting and maybe true in some ways”, it was much more hardcore than that. [4]: That is not “knee-jerk” but a slow realisation still ongoing.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    > Mine is that HN in general (certainly more than any other website) used to worship[3] everything he wrote [...] It definitely was not “interesting and maybe true in some ways”, it was much more hardcore than that. I guess it depends on what submission you look at, previous comment of mine solely based on memory. Now I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/paulg https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/paulg, clicked "More" a bunch of times, and seems my memory was more or less correct, none of the submissions I clicked on are "pg worship" (hyperbolic or not). Just one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418701 Maybe you need to enable "Show Dead" or something? Pgs articles on HN definitely never was free of any critique in the HN comments, just like any article. Although I do agree with you that it used to be different than it is today, and same with Musk too, and Altman, and probably more individuals, where they were lauded before but now pretty much just mentioning them poisons the conversation.
    - latexr 1mo ago
- captainbland 1mo ago
  Imo it's a breakdown of trust of the startup ecosystem as a whole. Repeatedly startups have enshittified and it's become undeniable that the investment apparatus around startups is partly responsible. We have seen a great driver of uncreative destruction, industries undermined, small businesses undermined just to drive masses of money into few pockets - less fairness for the people working in what is now the gig economy and ultimately prices and other costs that end up as high or higher than they were before for consumers. Not to mention the whole AI/OpenAI situation which many perceive as threatening their skillset per se, essentially tearing up the social contract that existed on this site. The sycophancy on HN is starting to break down because there is a higher proportion of users sceptical towards the outputs of the VC and wider investment world than ones who believe they're potential beneficiaries of it. Tech industry people are becoming less interested in HN as a warm handshake into the startup world because, frequently, they're disgusted by it. And this reflects on the sentiments people post on PG's articles. Increasingly if those at YC want the same kind of low-bar praise they got before, they will need to get it from machines.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- s1artibartfast 1mo ago
  If you did a data analysis, I expect you would see an uptick with the 2023 Reddit API controversy. HN got a big influx of redditors with different sociopolitical perspectives and discussion norms. This might be hard to disentangle from the tech correction layoffs of 2023 and 2024, but my perception is that most of the spite comes from Tech Outsiders opposed to jaded Developers.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
raincole 1mo ago
If he has said "to learn the math and programming skills needed to understand how to build LLMs" it'd have been much more positively received.
- dang 1mo ago
  He did say that. That's what "from scratch" means, along with actually going ahead and building one.
mcmoor 1mo ago
Now I'm curious, do people actually tried to hack vacuum tubes or other big servers that's barely 1MB RAM? It seems like another thing that needs big investment to work properly, unlike those other techs where results can be shown even with little materials.
- JuniperMesos 1mo ago
  Yeah, there are retrocomputing hobbyists who mess around with sometimes-physically-large computers that were important many decades ago. I don't know if anyone is hacking on vacuum tubes of the kind that you could in principle build a computer with - there's a reason they became obsolete for digital computation almost as soon as the transistor was invented. On the other hand, I personally think it would be neat to try to build a CRT in a garage, which is of course a type of vacuum tube. I don't think this would be an easy garage project, but it does seem like might be tractable for someone who understand physical manufacturing and electronics well, has access to glassblowing equipment, etc.
  - alnwlsn 1mo ago
    There are indeed! Vacuum tube computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlnJnYt5do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlnJnYt5do Making vacuum tubes in a garage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UEfqAWb3fE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UEfqAWb3fE
- BeetleB 1mo ago
  > Now I'm curious, do people actually tried to hack vacuum tubes or other big servers that's barely 1MB RAM? "Barely?" It's insane to lump vacuum tubes together with servers with 1 MB RAM. My first PC, which I used for a decade, had 640KB RAM. And that was an upgrade from 512 KB RAM. My other PC had only 128KB RAM. None of these were considered the equivalent of (by then long dead) vacuum tubes in their day. You can get a lot done in 1 MB.
  - mcmoor 1mo ago
    Yeah 1 MB is too big for my part. But I mean is there anyone hacking with computers in 50s when it's still vacuum tubes and to get 100KB RAM you already need "supercomputer".
globular-toast 1mo ago
> With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion. Don't many of the commercial ones prevent you from using them to build LLMs? I would say the reason for the negativity is not because it's a bad idea for a project, or that doing projects in general is a bad idea (it's not!), it's because it's a very specific thing that is not for everyone. The best thing about computing is the low barriers to entry. You can basically work on anything that takes your fancy. So those who are interested in ML will be drawn to learn about LLMs. They don't need anyone to tell them to do it. Telling everyone to do it reminds me of the "just learn to code" stuff of a decade ago. No, please don't, please find something you enjoy.
kalms 1mo ago
Completely agreed. The point is the knowledge, the learning and the journey. If a kid has a passion for building or toying with LLMs, then of course, by all means, please start tearing them apart or even build and train your own model. You'll learn a ton, even if you won't necessarily end up using it here and now. The learning experience will compound and of course that will be useful. The above is, after all, the whole genesis of the word 'hacker'. We should celebrate that.
- rdedev 1mo ago
  How exactly does one go about "tinkering" with an LLM? Any architectural change you introduce needs fine tuning. That needs data and compute I tried to modify the embedding output of bert to make it generate box embeddings instead of point ones. At the time I had access to university provided A100 gpus but even with all that a training run took half a day. Models these days I don't think I can train it in any reasonable time with that much compute.
  - alexgartrell 1mo ago
    https://thinkingmachines.ai/tinker/ https://thinkingmachines.ai/tinker/ https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/tinker-cookbook https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/tinker-cookbook (As a TML person, I'm obviously biased, but I couldn't resist because of "tinkering"). TBF it's hard to imagine a real architecture change that wouldn't require a ton of compute, but you could certainly fine tune and play with different recipes, loss functions, etc. And Claude can carry you a lot of the way through doing this. One fun task is to invent a tool and then train a small model to use it. You could export that small model and run it locally for free forever to do your thing. I think this is what a lot of Software Engineering will look like later. There are a lot of other high level abstractions here to look at. Prime Intellect has one. The other thing to play with is self-hosting small models, but IMO most of the interesting stuff is actually related to multi-gpu or multi-node inference so there's not necessarily a ton to learn here.
  - danielmarkbruce 1mo ago
    You can build a model with 100m parameters..... the first L in LLM is not meaningful anymore. So, you build one from scratch.
keybored 1mo ago
> Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort? No. But funnily enough that is a promise by some of the AI cretins and their boosters. Oh yeah best case scenario you learn how to build LLMs for us. We’ll employ you. And then ultimately that just becomes training data for the LLMs to do it themselves. But why are people cynical? they ask.
WhompingWindows 1mo ago
His writing was overrated: It's that simple. People now see his blog posts for what they are: decent blog posts.
mda 1mo ago
I think it is more about people are a bit sick of filthy rich people giving this kind of advice. I would also not read anything he preaches.
- ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
  Hacker News is a Y Combinator (which PG co-founded) sponsored website whose original code was created by PG and whose guidelines were originally formed by PG. For those who are "sick"(sic) of rich people, VCs, or capitalism in general, you've come to the wrong place.
  - mda 1mo ago
    I stand by what I said, are you gatekeeping HN now? This is a tech news site, I don't care if he once was a co founder.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
rstuart4133 1mo ago
It is indeed puzzling. Back in the day, I built myself a music playing device using TTL gates, eagerly studied what CPU's looked like inside and in general wanted to know how everything worked - even though it had no hope of replicating most of it. Looking back, it was an ideal start to a 40 year career as a software engineer. And of course currently I'm reading "Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI" because the urge to understand the machines I want to master and control hasn't gone away.
wanderingmind 1mo ago
I like the hacking spirit suggestion. But my disagreement is the specificity of it. The suggestion here seems more inline with not tinkering and hacking but first principles learning typical of science and math curriculum. What made hacking radios and JS cool was the short feedback loops to see the progress you made. Unfortunately for LLMs starting from scratch doesnt give a good feedback loop on improvement, although starting from pre-trained model to quantising, fine-tuning might be more aligned with the hacking culture
ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
The hacker ethos and "information wants to be free" of the '80s-'90s was drowned out by a flood of coders in the '10s-early '20s whose only creed was FYPM and "what's the minimum career effort for the fattest paycheck?"
- jorisw 1mo ago
  FYPM — Fuck You Pay Me
- piltdownman 1mo ago
  // whose only creed was FYPM Good. It took a long while for ICs to be paid more than 'management' in the US. It's still a hard-fought battle here. // a flood of coders in the '10s-early '20s whose only creed was FYPM and "what's the minimum I wonder what possibly could have happened in that timeframe? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-google-settle-antitrust-lawsuit-hiring-collusion https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
conartist6 1mo ago
No, but there's a WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD of tech that isn't LLMs. LLMs aren't the future or anything. Sure they'll keep existing. Right now though all the opportunities exist for people looking literally anywhere else
- wao0uuno 1mo ago
  So you're saying that LLMs are a dead end technology? Do you have anything to back up that claim?
  - conartist6 1mo ago
    Let's be very, very generous and say that an LLM is intelligent. Does intelligence eliminated the need for tools? If you have an executive assistant and your executive assistant has ten executive assistants, does that mean that Microsoft Excel is obsolete? Why the everliving fuck has everyone stopped building tools?
chickenuggies69 1mo ago
This is essentially most discussion here. I close the HN tab so often after seeing the people that just came to disagree with someone on the internet. There are too few discussions here that come from a place of "That's a great perspective and I can see it being useful when applied in X, just trying to solicit a discussion here, I wonder how this could work or break down in condition Y?"
shelled 1mo ago
I have also noticed a general drop in fawning over and deification of 'made a billion, must be a visionary' figures, and a receding tolerance for every sundry kind of hot take and proclamation. Mustn't be related.
aryehof 1mo ago
> I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. Sadly, I attribute this to a decline in having “good will” towards others, and an increase in cynicism, prejudice, and meanness.
gofreddygo 1mo ago
Keep your friends close, enemies closer.
gofreddygo 1mo ago
That would be true in the 80s, maybe 90s. The world changed. Tech's role in society changed. Its greedy. People in power in tech have made it clear they are here for the money and anything that supports it works. What you see (even here on hn) reflects that common knowledge that any new tech will only end up screwing people. This isn't my opinion but a summary of what I conclude people think of tech.

embedding-shape 1mo ago

> I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. I can't recall or point out exactly when, but there is a stark before/after moment where the opinions of anything pg went from "Interesting and maybe true in some ways" to what we see today, lots of knee-jerk reactions and hardly any comments about the actual content. Hazarding a guess, I think the moment Altman became the CEO and later during COVID, the sentiment seemed to have been shifting towards what we see today. But this is all based on hazy memory, rather than looking at the data. I'm sure there is a blog post waiting to be written about analyzing the sentiment of comments to PGs articles on HN, and you'll see a shift somewhere.

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
trentor 1mo ago
Because at some point in life everyone gets tired of fairytales. He started mending the anecdotes to his content which always rubs people the wrong way.
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  So, this comment of yours obviously isn't in the "knee-jerk reaction" category of comments, I suppose? What exactly from the linked tweet(s) are fairytales here? There is hardly any text at all, so strikes me as a comment about previous pg content, but then this would be one of those comments I talk about? Very confusing.
  - trentor 1mo ago
    Your hand waving doesn't make it knee-jerk. It's just what happened to his writing since COVID. He goes for more of a shock and awe style and not everybody likes it. He's been writing for over 20 years now, hasn't he? His style has clearly changed, and an changing style attracts a different audience so it's no surprise his original readers might not connect with his newer work...
latexr 1mo ago
> I can't recall or point out exactly when, but there is a stark before/after moment where the opinions of anything pg went from "Interesting and maybe true in some ways" to what we see today, lots of knee-jerk reactions and hardly any comments about the actual content. Hard disagree. This submission is still being highly upvoted, while another recent post[1] on the harms caused by Graham’s fellows[2], with a fairly tame comment section, has been flagged. That is a constant on HN. It’s not a fluke, it’s as predictable as the sunrise and getting more pronounced. I’m sure we’re both biased in our perceptions. Mine is that HN in general (certainly more than any other website) used to worship[3] everything he wrote, together with others like Musk, until things started to really go to shit and many eyes have been opened to the effects of the unfettered greed of rich tech guys out of touch with reality.[4] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411762 [2]: A better English word is escaping me. [3]: That word I choose hyperbolically but deliberately. It definitely was not “interesting and maybe true in some ways”, it was much more hardcore than that. [4]: That is not “knee-jerk” but a slow realisation still ongoing.
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  > Mine is that HN in general (certainly more than any other website) used to worship[3] everything he wrote [...] It definitely was not “interesting and maybe true in some ways”, it was much more hardcore than that. I guess it depends on what submission you look at, previous comment of mine solely based on memory. Now I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/paulg https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/paulg, clicked "More" a bunch of times, and seems my memory was more or less correct, none of the submissions I clicked on are "pg worship" (hyperbolic or not). Just one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418701 Maybe you need to enable "Show Dead" or something? Pgs articles on HN definitely never was free of any critique in the HN comments, just like any article. Although I do agree with you that it used to be different than it is today, and same with Musk too, and Altman, and probably more individuals, where they were lauded before but now pretty much just mentioning them poisons the conversation.
  - latexr 1mo ago
captainbland 1mo ago
Imo it's a breakdown of trust of the startup ecosystem as a whole. Repeatedly startups have enshittified and it's become undeniable that the investment apparatus around startups is partly responsible. We have seen a great driver of uncreative destruction, industries undermined, small businesses undermined just to drive masses of money into few pockets - less fairness for the people working in what is now the gig economy and ultimately prices and other costs that end up as high or higher than they were before for consumers. Not to mention the whole AI/OpenAI situation which many perceive as threatening their skillset per se, essentially tearing up the social contract that existed on this site. The sycophancy on HN is starting to break down because there is a higher proportion of users sceptical towards the outputs of the VC and wider investment world than ones who believe they're potential beneficiaries of it. Tech industry people are becoming less interested in HN as a warm handshake into the startup world because, frequently, they're disgusted by it. And this reflects on the sentiments people post on PG's articles. Increasingly if those at YC want the same kind of low-bar praise they got before, they will need to get it from machines.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
s1artibartfast 1mo ago
If you did a data analysis, I expect you would see an uptick with the 2023 Reddit API controversy. HN got a big influx of redditors with different sociopolitical perspectives and discussion norms. This might be hard to disentangle from the tech correction layoffs of 2023 and 2024, but my perception is that most of the spite comes from Tech Outsiders opposed to jaded Developers.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

raincole 1mo ago

If he has said "to learn the math and programming skills needed to understand how to build LLMs" it'd have been much more positively received.

dang 1mo ago
He did say that. That's what "from scratch" means, along with actually going ahead and building one.

mcmoor 1mo ago

Now I'm curious, do people actually tried to hack vacuum tubes or other big servers that's barely 1MB RAM? It seems like another thing that needs big investment to work properly, unlike those other techs where results can be shown even with little materials.

JuniperMesos 1mo ago
Yeah, there are retrocomputing hobbyists who mess around with sometimes-physically-large computers that were important many decades ago. I don't know if anyone is hacking on vacuum tubes of the kind that you could in principle build a computer with - there's a reason they became obsolete for digital computation almost as soon as the transistor was invented. On the other hand, I personally think it would be neat to try to build a CRT in a garage, which is of course a type of vacuum tube. I don't think this would be an easy garage project, but it does seem like might be tractable for someone who understand physical manufacturing and electronics well, has access to glassblowing equipment, etc.
- alnwlsn 1mo ago
  There are indeed! Vacuum tube computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlnJnYt5do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAlnJnYt5do Making vacuum tubes in a garage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UEfqAWb3fE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UEfqAWb3fE
BeetleB 1mo ago
> Now I'm curious, do people actually tried to hack vacuum tubes or other big servers that's barely 1MB RAM? "Barely?" It's insane to lump vacuum tubes together with servers with 1 MB RAM. My first PC, which I used for a decade, had 640KB RAM. And that was an upgrade from 512 KB RAM. My other PC had only 128KB RAM. None of these were considered the equivalent of (by then long dead) vacuum tubes in their day. You can get a lot done in 1 MB.
- mcmoor 1mo ago
  Yeah 1 MB is too big for my part. But I mean is there anyone hacking with computers in 50s when it's still vacuum tubes and to get 100KB RAM you already need "supercomputer".

globular-toast 1mo ago

> With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion. Don't many of the commercial ones prevent you from using them to build LLMs? I would say the reason for the negativity is not because it's a bad idea for a project, or that doing projects in general is a bad idea (it's not!), it's because it's a very specific thing that is not for everyone. The best thing about computing is the low barriers to entry. You can basically work on anything that takes your fancy. So those who are interested in ML will be drawn to learn about LLMs. They don't need anyone to tell them to do it. Telling everyone to do it reminds me of the "just learn to code" stuff of a decade ago. No, please don't, please find something you enjoy.

kalms 1mo ago

Completely agreed. The point is the knowledge, the learning and the journey. If a kid has a passion for building or toying with LLMs, then of course, by all means, please start tearing them apart or even build and train your own model. You'll learn a ton, even if you won't necessarily end up using it here and now. The learning experience will compound and of course that will be useful. The above is, after all, the whole genesis of the word 'hacker'. We should celebrate that.

rdedev 1mo ago
How exactly does one go about "tinkering" with an LLM? Any architectural change you introduce needs fine tuning. That needs data and compute I tried to modify the embedding output of bert to make it generate box embeddings instead of point ones. At the time I had access to university provided A100 gpus but even with all that a training run took half a day. Models these days I don't think I can train it in any reasonable time with that much compute.
- alexgartrell 1mo ago
  https://thinkingmachines.ai/tinker/ https://thinkingmachines.ai/tinker/ https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/tinker-cookbook https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/tinker-cookbook (As a TML person, I'm obviously biased, but I couldn't resist because of "tinkering"). TBF it's hard to imagine a real architecture change that wouldn't require a ton of compute, but you could certainly fine tune and play with different recipes, loss functions, etc. And Claude can carry you a lot of the way through doing this. One fun task is to invent a tool and then train a small model to use it. You could export that small model and run it locally for free forever to do your thing. I think this is what a lot of Software Engineering will look like later. There are a lot of other high level abstractions here to look at. Prime Intellect has one. The other thing to play with is self-hosting small models, but IMO most of the interesting stuff is actually related to multi-gpu or multi-node inference so there's not necessarily a ton to learn here.
- danielmarkbruce 1mo ago
  You can build a model with 100m parameters..... the first L in LLM is not meaningful anymore. So, you build one from scratch.

keybored 1mo ago

> Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort? No. But funnily enough that is a promise by some of the AI cretins and their boosters. Oh yeah best case scenario you learn how to build LLMs for us. We’ll employ you. And then ultimately that just becomes training data for the LLMs to do it themselves. But why are people cynical? they ask.

WhompingWindows 1mo ago

His writing was overrated: It's that simple. People now see his blog posts for what they are: decent blog posts.

mda 1mo ago

I think it is more about people are a bit sick of filthy rich people giving this kind of advice. I would also not read anything he preaches.

ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
Hacker News is a Y Combinator (which PG co-founded) sponsored website whose original code was created by PG and whose guidelines were originally formed by PG. For those who are "sick"(sic) of rich people, VCs, or capitalism in general, you've come to the wrong place.
- mda 1mo ago
  I stand by what I said, are you gatekeeping HN now? This is a tech news site, I don't care if he once was a co founder.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]

rstuart4133 1mo ago

It is indeed puzzling. Back in the day, I built myself a music playing device using TTL gates, eagerly studied what CPU's looked like inside and in general wanted to know how everything worked - even though it had no hope of replicating most of it. Looking back, it was an ideal start to a 40 year career as a software engineer. And of course currently I'm reading "Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI" because the urge to understand the machines I want to master and control hasn't gone away.

wanderingmind 1mo ago

I like the hacking spirit suggestion. But my disagreement is the specificity of it. The suggestion here seems more inline with not tinkering and hacking but first principles learning typical of science and math curriculum. What made hacking radios and JS cool was the short feedback loops to see the progress you made. Unfortunately for LLMs starting from scratch doesnt give a good feedback loop on improvement, although starting from pre-trained model to quantising, fine-tuning might be more aligned with the hacking culture

ThrowawayR2 1mo ago

The hacker ethos and "information wants to be free" of the '80s-'90s was drowned out by a flood of coders in the '10s-early '20s whose only creed was FYPM and "what's the minimum career effort for the fattest paycheck?"

jorisw 1mo ago
FYPM — Fuck You Pay Me
piltdownman 1mo ago
// whose only creed was FYPM Good. It took a long while for ICs to be paid more than 'management' in the US. It's still a hard-fought battle here. // a flood of coders in the '10s-early '20s whose only creed was FYPM and "what's the minimum I wonder what possibly could have happened in that timeframe? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-google-settle-antitrust-lawsuit-hiring-collusion https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

conartist6 1mo ago

No, but there's a WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD of tech that isn't LLMs. LLMs aren't the future or anything. Sure they'll keep existing. Right now though all the opportunities exist for people looking literally anywhere else

wao0uuno 1mo ago
So you're saying that LLMs are a dead end technology? Do you have anything to back up that claim?
- conartist6 1mo ago
  Let's be very, very generous and say that an LLM is intelligent. Does intelligence eliminated the need for tools? If you have an executive assistant and your executive assistant has ten executive assistants, does that mean that Microsoft Excel is obsolete? Why the everliving fuck has everyone stopped building tools?

chickenuggies69 1mo ago

This is essentially most discussion here. I close the HN tab so often after seeing the people that just came to disagree with someone on the internet. There are too few discussions here that come from a place of "That's a great perspective and I can see it being useful when applied in X, just trying to solicit a discussion here, I wonder how this could work or break down in condition Y?"

shelled 1mo ago

I have also noticed a general drop in fawning over and deification of 'made a billion, must be a visionary' figures, and a receding tolerance for every sundry kind of hot take and proclamation. Mustn't be related.

aryehof 1mo ago

> I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN. Sadly, I attribute this to a decline in having “good will” towards others, and an increase in cynicism, prejudice, and meanness.

gofreddygo 1mo ago

Keep your friends close, enemies closer.

gofreddygo 1mo ago

That would be true in the 80s, maybe 90s. The world changed. Tech's role in society changed. Its greedy. People in power in tech have made it clear they are here for the money and anything that supports it works. What you see (even here on hn) reflects that common knowledge that any new tech will only end up screwing people. This isn't my opinion but a summary of what I conclude people think of tech.