What has happened to HN the past few months? So much AI, Superconductors and open source air quality monitoring.
It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this.
1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic demotion of software engineers. And if you think AI isn't to blame here: you're probably right! There was other stuff going on, e.g. the end of ZIRP. But AI will keep those jobs away.)
2. Clean air seems pressing, as (if you'll recall) we just had this little pandemic thing happen, and in case you missed it, a vast chunk of my country (Canada) is currently ablaze, choking the United States with smoke, and other places are experiencing similar pressures (thanks, 2023 Thermal Pulse.)
3. RTAP Superconductors are literally the stuff of sci fi, and their advent interacts directly with trends 1 and 2, as RTAPS would make climate change more easily addressed (dramatic efficiency improvements across the board) and also would make AI silicon work much, much faster as part of that. It might also open the door to efficient quantum computing, which in turn would drive AGI even faster/further.
You're living through some seriously bonkers stuff, and your newsfeed is understandably preoccupied with it.
They're aware of the actors/writers strike and the association AI has with it, but AI in this context is a vague speculative thing rather than a specific type of AI or brand of AI made by some company.
Implicit in this counterargument is the idea that judging what is of genuine importance is a matter of opinion, as though we could get a sense of what to pay attention to by polling a large enough sample set.
It is not. Expertise matters. Who is interested in the topic matters.
Put another way: from the Fundamental Attribution Error alone, it does not follow that identity is completely meaningless; it does, however imply that anyone with such-and-such a set of concerns and knowledge would behave in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions.
And those conditions obtain. And so, with a flourish: I give you, 2023 "Superconduct my clean-air-monitoring AI, please!" Hackernews