Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

Welp, I officially have AI fatigue. I think I need to take a break from it, which I guess means HN. See you all later this year, if everything still exists by then!

View on HN

Really? I'm loving this topic. I'm not upvoting all these posts or anything but this feels like HN at its best. Everyone is sharing snippets of their experiments, trading notes, and generally having constructive fun. SMEs are dipping into the occasional thread. The folks who are scared of AI on these threads are all discussing the topic quite reasonably. Is some of it derivative or low-effort, probably for some karma farming? Sure. But, this is a welcome change from the usual "hyperbolic anger about latest tech drama" content (cough Musk cough) that starves the oxygen on tech sites so frequently and imparts a tabloid-y feel, IMO.

The stories I can live with, it's the people posting chatgpt output that are killing me. It's one thing to see advances in a technology, even if it's devolved to "llama port to C++ now loads slightly faster!!". It's another to have to wade through people posting garbage that they for some reason assume adds to a discussion and for some reason don't realize that anyone who wants to could also generate it.

The interesting thing is that for all the hype, other than provide some fleetingly interesting example of "look what a computer did on it's own" it has only subtracted from public discourse.

Have you been to Github's trending page in the last few months? It's like Chatgpt turned conscious and is using humans to take over the world!

It's getting to be too much. Has anything else ever dominated HN's front page before?

SVB collapse last week, SBF earlier this year, death of Steve Jobs

you want technology and automation practices to remain stagnant or incremental in technology fields?

I already think they are stagnant but I don't see what that has to do with HN. For every story posted here there are probably 100+ projects we don't see. If your only source of information is HN you're missing out on 99% of the projects.

Not really, but I can't think about any bigger technology transition in the IT world since the rise of Internet.

I think smartphones, google produced more impact. Chatgpt impact is still unproven. Many cute demos but no much businesses and products created.

But before iPhone there were other smartphones and before google was altavista. We might still be in altavista phase but I think even if ChatGPT won’t be a leader 5 years later, 10 years from now will look back at LLM having the same big impact as smartphones and search engines

> 10 years from now will look back at LLM having the same big impact as smartphones and search engines

that's hypothesis. So far I see high chances of internet to be flooded with junk autogenerated text with hallucinations and code bases be polluted with buggy unmaintainable auto-generated code, and businesses spend significant money on products which goal is to detect autogenerated content.

>Many cute demos but no much businesses and products created.

I can vouch that my department will be running a bit smoother in a few weeks once I get a chance to modernize our testing setup with the help of gpt4.

I can write python but terribly and the need is so sparse that every time I have to go relearn a bunch of shit.

But having a go with GPT4 it seems capable enough to quickly rewrite all our basic procedures that have been done on an ancient computer running a long deprecated program (with the scripts written in a long dead language).

It causes us a lot of headache, but never enough at once that I can justify dropping everything for a week or two and respining it with python (and even adding network monitoring!)

... may I dare "javascript" after firsts jQuery releases ?

You got a lol out of me with that one, but I'll take it as a sign that we might be doing a partly reasonable job of mitigating this when it happens.

One classic case from a decade ago:

Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5932645 - June 2013 (155 comments)

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-06-22

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-06-23

Unfortunately, the public only agrees to forget things that would be good for them to remember. Since this is going to be bad for a lot of people, it's definitely here to stay.

We can forget some bad things too!

I remember that. It was my first thought. This userscript blocking snowdenposts got wiped from the list of posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929494 and you couldn't find it on HN or AskHN.

That one fell in rank because it was flagged by users at the time.

Right, not over administrative action, just that despite there being lots of people who liked it, the majority usually wants this content.

A good one might be:

Ask HN: can we please stop allowing cherry-picked examples of AI on the front page?

I'd say that's more or less covered by the general rule we've developed over the years for major ongoing topics (MOTs), which is to downweight followups unless they contain significant new information (SNI). Most likely yet-another-cherry-picked-AI-example posts don't qualify as SNI. If people see those on the front page they can flag them and/or let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The tech itself is moving so fast that there is a lot of SNI, plus a lot of good articles/blog posts/reflections on what's happening. I guess the goal would be to keep the highest quality stuff and filter out the copycat stuff. Which is which that is open to interpretation, of course, but it's not completely subjective either.

No. The iPhone or anything Apple made fades in comparison.

The front page almost always had at least a few articles about some cryptocurrency for months just this last year.

In all likelihood AI will only become more and more of a household term. First South Park, but I'm sure other pop culture like SNL and The Simpsons will feature GPT or LLM in some way soon.

I am not saying to embrace it, more indicating that we haven't seen nothin yet.

South Park did weeks ago. Catch up old man.

Yeah the frontpage is getting ruined for months with this.

It has gotten utterly boring seeing the same dystopia-inducing shit application someone came up with this week getting thousands upvotes, there is much cooler research taking place in other disciplines right now that gets minimal attention. HN has unfortunately become the influencer-equivalent for tech.

What are examples of the much cooler research? Let's post some of those!

Ruined? That seems like hyperbole. Maybe 10-20% of posts that make the front page are LLM/GPT related, more on days when a big feature or model is released. Tons of other topics are getting upvoted and discussed.

If you're biased against something or some group, you are more likely to overestimate how prevalent it is.

>there is much cooler research taking place in other disciplines right now that gets minimal attention

Such as...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com