Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone else find LLM related posts causing them to lose interest in HN

147 points3vidence122 comments

Loved this site for a long time, always felt like I could come to learn something interesting and find niche topics and experts.

Feels like posts have overwhelmingly been on LLMs for the past few years and I've just lost interest.

Makes me sad, this was really my favorite site.

View on HN

It's the current hotness in tech. HN has always included trending tech topics. Ever since HN started, I've seen -

* Explosion of social media

* JavaScript libraries and the frontend revolution to modernizing the web and browsers

* Mobile apps

* Crypto

* Machine Learning

and now, AI & LLMs.

The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve. The others, one could easily hop on the trend. With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.

edit: formatting

For me the LLM topic is just all enveloping in a way the other trends haven't been.

Obviously there was a a million crypto posts and it was annoying but crypto covered a specific niche of overall software stuff (payment processing).

With LLMs it feels like every topic somehow has to come back to LLMs.

I currently work as a ML Eng at FAANG so maybe it adds to my exhaustion on the topic.

It's deeply funny that they hit you with the ole "you don't understand AI" when it's your day job though. So you've got that going for you.

> For me the LLM topic is just all enveloping in a way the other trends haven't been.

Same here, for sure. I just try to dodge it all as best I can. Seems like every question has the possible answer of LLMs, and nearly always, someone provides it.

There's also this annoying dissonance between 'evangelists' and reality. Evangelists often feign that we're on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, while in practice LLMs remain stupid, error prone, and unreliable for anything beyond tasks that have a vast number sources for highly relevant training. Which also somewhat dilutes the utility, because I could just as well find those sources!

Oh right, that must just be because I'm not giving it the magic prompt that makes them magically turn into geniuses.

Sometimes I wish I had the drugs that would make me believe in things like "we're on the cusp of AGI", everything would be so much more exciting.

The current trend in LLMs is synthetic data and inference-time reasoning. They're past data sources.

The new problem is this only works when you can verify the answers.

> covered a specific niche of overall software stuff (payment processing)

At the time it was everything blockchain. Not just payments. Decentralized, smart contracts and the like.

It's true it did get pretty rediculous and somewhat collapsed (at least in public interest).

I just don't see why every time we need to go through the incredible hype / death cycle.

LLMs are a useful tool if used properly, I hope I start seeing them used to create distinct value.

"Replicants are either a benefit or a hazard."—Deckard

Crypto currencies became purely speculative asses and their volatility ensured that they wouldn’t be useful for payment processing. Has block chain in general made any progress in payment processing?

I very much agree, just that if you were talking about idk something like compilers people wouldn't barge in about crypto.

Any HN topic now just feels like a small jump to LLMs.

I recognize my above is a bit of a strawman, hard to recall exact posts / comments over the years.

>With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.

I find it to be the exact opposite. The idea of "Artificial Intelligence" as a thinking machine is fascinating. However, now that i learned a certain amount about this current neural network paradigm, the marketing magic of it as an intelligent system is gone, it is no longer interesting to me. These models are just some dry big-data statistical machinery to me.

I think many people find it interesting precisely because they dont understand it and think there is some magic in there. Of course when hype is stupid and people think the singularity is coming then it sounds a lot more interesting

The human brain is also dry big data statistical machinery.

The frontier models (of which R1 is an example) « think » in much the same way a human would - look at their chain of thought output). I think if you shut down LLMs in your head because you think you « understand » them and there’s nothing interesting there, then you’re blinded by hubris.

You literally have no proof for either of your statements.

This is the kind of current rhetoric that has me not coming to HN as often.

Any neurobiologist would laugh at the notion that the brain is a big dry statistical machinery.

Classic case of engineers talking outside of their expertise.

>I think if you shut down LLMs in your head because you think you « understand » them and there’s nothing interesting there, then you’re blinded by hubris.

I am no expert, and I am well aware that even experts have much to learn about it. It is interesting in its own way, like statistics is too. I don't feel like that changes anything.

I am quite sure I do not « think » by generating a wall of text word by word, thankyouverymuch.

> The only difference LLMs have with the others is the learning curve

Half the post about AI are telling us how good prompts should make me a 10x engineer, or I made this app in 5 minutes and I don't know how to code. At least for JS and, god forbid, crypto, there was some effort required.

It's interesting that every entry in your bullet list is a tech that I find to have had an overall negative impact on society.

Every one of those examples is a genereal tech that could be used for better or worse, but that have almost exclusively been used to more effectively exploit users.

As is always the case, what's good for the VC investor is not necessarily good for everyone...

It's not just here, it's everywhere. I'm excited for the day the hype bubble collapses.

Honestly this. Every product on the market today also shoehorns in AI somewhere, it feels worse than the heyday of CloudToButt in the Cloud frenzy.

I'm really interested to watch the train wreck that every "we are replacing developers with AI" company is setting themselves up for currently. At least the cloud has SOME merits, even if it is still vastly overused.

Saw an Upwork post the other day looking for someone to fix merge conflicts in 20 Devin created PR's. =)

P.S. I enjoy your content, keep hacking away at funky projects!

This too shall pass, just like NFTs and blockchain for everything.

Tell that to the half dozen blockchain job descriptions I read today and closed as soon as they admitted to being blockchain companies.

Kool nick.

keyword BUBBLE. I beg fresher minds PLEASE carefully disect?

What we (easily) see correlates with the cliche' "Tip of the Iceberg". Sentient souls natrually grasp this metaphor, analogy, simile...

Better: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/something_is_rotten_in_the_st...

Kind reader. When this bubble bursts what takes place afterward?

Very meta post. ;) I need a filter on all web browsing so that I never hear about LLMs ever again. They're a scourge on critical thinking, on workers, on the environment, on the internet. If they are the future, leave me behind.

I wrote my own front end for HN using Flutter (just a pet project) specifically so I could have dark mode and a topic filter.

But I just got tired of adding new AI topics to the filter.

Clearly the answer is to throw an LLM to filter AI posts.

Was something I thought about haha

Maybe HN needs to fork (not like Wordpress, though...) into 3 sites:

1) Wordpress Original 2) Wordpress no AI/LLM/ML 3) Wordpress ONLY AI/LLM/ML

I would choose 2) in a heartbeat.

Lol tell me about it. My problem isn't only that it's LLM, but the same 3-5 topics over and over and over and over again:

  > This is how I use ChatGPT to write my program.
  > Here is a cool SaaS that will generate a CV for you with state of the art AI
  > AGI is happening in 5 minutes! (If it wouldn't happen, read the previous statement again)
  > LLMs are going to kill/save humanity
  > Show HN: we worked on this revolutionary next step in AI in the past 12 years. It's 100% open source, come! (Narrator: it's a 200 lines python wrapper over OpenAI api)

> Here is a cool SaaS

I think it's the most annoying one. We are spammed by Bootstrap/Tailwind-styled closed-source wrappers around the API currently hyped (with Google login, and pricing page, all the time).

We would be legitimately angry if we were flooded with "Here is some random ClosedSource.exe application, run it on your computer" because that would not improve anything, but for some reason web sites are OK.

bingo

If this is a poll, my answer is no. I enjoy the discussions around a lot of the HN LLM/AI especially. Most other places are to surface level.

same, this is the most interesting development of our time may be of humankind, and it's not that news is just repeating: there is significant progress almost every week (recently R1 and byte latent tokenization)

I would nominate recent surge in UAP developments as equally interesting. Perhaps they're not unrelated.

It's becoming a major issue when getting hired.

I have no good answers to AI bullshit, none they want to hear at least.

Can't remember the last time I saw a company that wasn't hyping AI to hell and back.

Are you boycotting LLMs or something? They're one of the best hacker tools around lately. Tasks I would have frustratedly scoured stack overflow to solve in three hours I'm solving in 30 seconds using cursor in agent mode and just letting it run whatever it wants as root on my MacBook. Maybe your sadness is rooted in the fact that we interacted with computers one way for a few decades and some of that's becoming quite obsolete as the months whizz by on this tech freight train.

I work on ML at FAANG I use LLMs a couple of times a week (daily if you count line auto complete)

It's not that LLMs are bad, but they are just one topic in the vast world of different things.

There have been so many amazing insights on HN from users with such interesting backgrounds (nuclear engineering, bakers, musicians, etc). And it just feels like that's all collapsed into

"have you tested model-version-quant-subversion-domain? If you haven't you can't say anything"

OpenAI is valued at ~150 billion. Anthropic is valued at ~60 billion. nvidia was valued at $15/share in 2023 and is now valued at $150/share.

It might seem that LLMs have sucked all the air out of the room, this is why. If you find LLMs boring, you are in for a very boring couple of decades - because it's not going away.

I do currently work on ML projects at FAANG. Idk I just always found HN my escape into more interesting topics, now it's just my day job.

I’m not sure…the hype cycle of fads has its own momentum which is somewhat independent of the actual subject. LLMs may not go away but once people realize their thin wrapper scripts won’t result in a 10B valuation, the HN discussion will change.

Crypto market cap is trillions of dollars, and how many crypto posts do you see these days? Not really a strong argument.

Impressive numbers, but have you ever tried to use one of these things to get actual work done? They're terrible at it! Until these companies start demonstrating some actual value this is merely a hype bubble. Nvidia is slightly different categorically because they're selling the picks and shovels in this hype gold rush--but they were also in the last one (web3/crypto/nfts). At some point if these folks don't actually start delivering the value they're hyping it's all coming crashing down.

The thing is, it's mostly managers and the like getting wow'd by how cool it seems initially, and they're the ones driving the hype. I can ask it in plain English and it answers with flowery language that reads like a professional wrote it, wow!

Of course, once you actually try to use it for any real work that isn't a toy project with a trillion examples online, you very quickly run into the myriad of flaws. But they're not using it deeply like that, they're just interested in how they can cut costs or prop up their own product by wow-ing other managers with AI features even if they don't make a lick of sense from an end-user perspective.

This isn't even to say it's completely useless, just that the hype and marketing is so insanely divergent from the reality, it's shocking. For me, it's at best a 5% productivity boost for very specific tasks like formatting structured text or something like that, but I wouldn't say that justifies a 500 billion dollar investment...

Your opinion, like many others, is wildly misinformed.

It’s not “just managers”. People are legit using copilot and it is saving time and helping develop better code. There are 100+ engineers in my company using it. And it’s not just copiloting, it is better than Wikipedia for explaining RFCs or academic papers. That is very important for ramping people when they can interactively ask hundreds of questions to learn about something without bothering top engineers.

You really need to actually get some real world experience as not just pop off.

Anyone who refers to LLMs as “stochastic parrots” has made their choice and is not interested in understand what areas can benefit and what areas cannot. They’re just scared and ignorant.

Copilot? I personally found Copilot pretty useless. And very distracting trying to constantly incorrectly guess what I was doing.

I do use chatgpt/claude for quickly creating first draftw of frontend pages as I find it quicker, but I have to do extensive edits to get it right. But anything non-boiler plate I am faster writing it myself.

I have also quickly found it is a stochastic parrot but that's ok for boilerplate stuff. It is useless at anything complicated and quickly starts hallucinating methods, parameters and functions when you point out problems with the code.

I am beginning to believe that anything niche, where it can't steal from its training data, and it will always be utterly useless.

I am curious how you feel it's so important to 100+ engineers, how do you use it that makes it effective for you?

Thank you! Maybe there is just a divide between engineers working on deep complex topics and those trying to setup their 17th Django app.

LLMs are a totally useful tool! They definitely help me write all the bash scripts I consistently forget.

But the deep stuff where the value lies? It starts to fall apart quickly.

You put this better than I could have. I am really impressed by LLMs' ability to respond to a prompt with code which compiles and runs. That's a hugely impressive result. But it doesn't mean the technorapture is just around the corner. There's a vast gulf between what LLMs can do currently and what skilled people do, and it's not "obvious" that there's some path from here to a world in which LLMs become some kind of superintelligent engineer-gods. It could be physically impossible, for all we know. That's why the pseudoreligious twaddle gets under my skin so much--it's the naive assumption that progress is linear, instead of a jumpy "fits and starts" process of accidental discoveries building on one another (or encountering dead ends). There's no way to know whether these things can be improved enough to be truly useful for real work and pretending it's "right around the corner" won't necessarily make it happen.

Yeah yeah, I've heard all of this a million times. Yet, I open up Claude and it keeps forgetting to not give me React code after I remind it multiple times to not give me React code. It still randomly drops all context of the conversation at some point and enters a loop where it regurgitates the same answers it already gave me. It still gets basic facts wrong, even when the reference/factsheet is provided to it a sentence ago. The code the juniors and mediors are shitting out with the help of LLMs is all dogwater that doesn't pass the sniff test, and the worst part is they themselves can't explain half the lines they're shoveling.

I suspect the next refrain is gonna be along the lines of me using it wrong, or using the wrong model, or the wrong prompt, or this or that. At the end of the day, if even after arduously trying to use it pretty much daily I still find all the models so far useless for real work, then no amount of fanboyism is going to convince me to disregard the reality of it as I experience it.

I can write the most insanely in-depth prompt on the planet (wasting 10 minutes of my time in the process), and 9 times out of 10 the reply I get is barely any more coherent than a single sentence along the lines of "Give me X" would've given me back.

> it is better than Wikipedia for explaining RFCs or academic papers.

I dread the future we're creating where people are relying on LLMs to parse RFCs or papers.

> Anyone who refers to LLMs as “stochastic parrots” has made their choice and is not interested in understand what areas can benefit and what areas cannot.

You're arguing with a strawman as I haven't used the word stochastic or parrot anywhere in the comment you're replying to or have implied anything of the sort about LLMs, and I'm even saying that I don't think it's completely useless, just not nearly as useful as the hype would lead one to imagine. Did you perhaps put my comment through an LLM and thus were arguing against imaginary points that I never made?

NOTED (Sincere thanks)

> I dread the future we're creating where people are relying on LLMs to parse RFCs or papers.

Amen & Hallelujah (forgive) We're ALL Jock Tamshun's bairns ...

Hit yer FLAGGIT... I amn Scot's Arysh, that means "G__ Children"

Sad fact, this "future" got ahead of us.

Still, this story is far from over.

It is not we were sleeping only that AI / LLM has no need to.

Run THIS though whatever "DAVE I CAN'T DO... " boogalooz

Make WE understand.

How can this AI / LLM do" (PLz Follow along)

#1 slake THIRST ~ no drinking water, living beings? SHOW US put a water tank in a truck? What profit will ye' boogz gain there?

Please show verifiable proof AI has mitigated this NEED.

#2 How does said AI / LLM feed those STARVING rain Manna -food- (please forgive Western ref) for starved refugees? Wilderness?

Please present tangible proof.

#3 Explain (like I AM 5) how's this Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot BOOGALOO able to concieve a child?

Eaux dear, & hayell yeah I forkin went there but MANY would be grateful to see verifiable evidence this has been accomplished.

WE'll wait but we DO NEED TO KNOW

MAKE US UNDERTAND

Provide verifible tangible physical evidence.

What's 'AI' (et alia) bring to mitigate NEED.

Water,

Food.

Survival?

For Human LIFE?

Riddle US that, AI?

H-Sapiens (?) is no "Special species" What doth AI offer to ALL life on this 3r'd rock from the sun?

SHOW US HOW YOU CAN

Sincere Respects,

Virginwidow

AKA An0n.1984 AKA Ånne Äůghnimax

P.S. (post script, kids)

Per GBNF Teacher:

G__ Forgives. OUTLAWS DON'T. We simply help make certain nobody misses their interview

NOTED (with Gratitude)

> I dread the future we're creating where people are relying on LLMs to parse RFCs or papers.

Amen & Hallelujah (plz allow western reference)

Arseh0lez in the mix? go ahead, Hit yer FLAGGIT

We're ALL Jock Tamshun's Bairns ... Meanin' "ALL G__ Children"

Myself are Scot's Arysh. Readers might be in China, Iraq, N. Korea. It still stands ~ ALL meanin' ALL Jock Tamshun's bairn. All means ALL, ya see?

That said, this story is far from over.

'AI' don't know peanut butter from cat poop

How'd AI / LLM do for IRL (in real life) Jeopardy - NO play on words.

Let's try THIRST (no water) for $100, Alex.

Has AI / LLM ever slaked THIRST ~ no drinking water? Living beings?? Did ever 'AI/LLM' put a water tank on a pickup truck? SHOW US (or What profit will ye' boogaloo's gain there?) We're open minded, simply SHOW US

How about Starvation for $500, Alex? WHOOPEE The Daily Double!

Has AI / LLM EVER fed the STARVING Or rain Manna (overlook Western ref) upon starving refugees? Wilderness? Please, (please?) show factual examples? PLEASe show us what AI/LLM has done to remedy this NEED

Let's try immaculate conception for $700 - Invoke our absent SArCASM flag -

Explain how's this Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot BOOGALOO AI might approximate companionship much less intimacy never mind concieve life. Merely curious

This is a Genuine need of all life forms (cockroaches included) even P. Dorov (telegram) ~ end snarkasm ~

Does there exist ANY verifiable evidivence supporting how this "AI / LLM" provides any HELP for the needs of ALL life, including even primates?

MAKE US UNDERTAND

Exactly (and be specific)

What does 'AI' (et alia) bring to mitigate fundamental NEED.

Water,

Food.

Company.

LIFE?

HOW DOES tHIS HELP

Genuinely & with Deep Sincerety we ask?

Sincere Respects,

Virginwidow

AKA An0n.1984 AKA Ånne Äůghnimax

And... While we're at it kids (acronyms baffle old folks) try GFOD. Try Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia. Giggle

> Impressive numbers, but have you ever tried to use one of these things to get actual work done? They're terrible at it!

If you mean "have you tried using an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude for doing development work", then you're wrong.

I'm very confident in saying this, both because I personally use AI for programming and get a lot of value from it, and also because almost everyone else I know in real life also uses AI for programming.

But also because there are dozens/hundreds of accounts of very good developers getting a lot of value from AI in their work.

So at this point, insisting AI products are terrible doesn't say much about the AI products, so much as it says something about your ability to get value out of them.

you should probably disclose what you work on as this makes you not exactly impartial, it would be quite bad for you to criticize value of what you sell:

> I'm the CEO of Hipposys Ltd, a boutique Data & AI Engineering shop (www.hipposys.com). We specialize in building RAG systems, Data Warehouses, and anything else related to the intersection between Data & AI. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at edan@hipposys.com, and we can see if we are a good fit!

First of all, I'm not sure what you mean by "disclose" - you took that from my HN profile which is a click away. Do you think I should mention this in every comment I make about LLMs?

Secondly, you're confusing cause and effect. I've been in the industry for more than twenty years working on many different things, and my company has done mostly data engineering work for most of its existence, the AI engineering is a relatively-new (past year or so) shift.

I don't think highly of AI because I work in AI - I work in AI because I think highly of it!

there are MANY of us who have not only tried it but using it daily to do amazeballs shit. you can read numerous other posts here of people saying how indispensible they have become in their day-to-day work. just like with any other tool, some will learn its strengths and limitations and take them to the limit while others will say “this is no good…”

if I was in the first cohort I would think long and hard how to move to the second…

And if this doesn't prove that valuations are bullshit, nothing will.

I have been on HN for 16.5 years and I don’t plan to stop now. It’s been worse.

Trends come and go. The stories and comments come and go. HN is constantly changing. You can’t attach yourself to how something was before. It will change again.

Thats just life.

Appreciate the perspective.

I'm on year 9ish of HN, maybe I'm just hitting my first introspective point on the whole space.

Put the no procrastination setting on to short value with a long interval and take a break for a few months. I do the same from time to time and it stops the muscle memory of hitting compile in my IDE and then opening a tab with hn.

noted

Agreed. I came here during the JS library hype fad when everyone was using query and waiting for the next best thing. JS libraries felt like 30% of all posts til they weren’t.

I can see how the AI posts can get overbearing if you are in the /new trenches. I’d recommend stepping back and just view the top post rss for a bit.

I've lost interest in HN because it's seemingly only 50% posts about tech on any given day, and most of those are just one of the Thunderbongs of HN reposting some GitHub URL, or a half baked article from 2017. It wouldn't be so bad if the comments remained reasonable, but even those have tended towards the kind of fodder you get on Reddit, over the last year. I browse Lobsters instead if i'm thinking, but the HN habit is strong.

I do the same. You can also use tags to filter out categories you aren't interested in such as politics, AI, late stage capitalism or other stuff that keeps getting posted here.

This is extremely useful. Sincere thanks. I consult HN to learn how something became broken and what mitigation is offered. Then I trip over AI or LLM which are (personally) disturbing & end up saying something foolish.

I've been looking for a new space to lurk on for a bit now (hard to replace HN). Hadn't heard of Lobsters might check it out.

Appreciate the post.

>the kind of fodder you get on reddit

That’s because a ton of them migrated here during the reddit api fiasco. You’ll notice a pattern between that kind of content and account age.

In the 1990s there was another big AI push, rules, the RETE algorithm, etc., and, in the middle of it, gave talks at Wharton, Stanford, etc. First cut, could think of it as a generalization of Select-When. The code had a problem, and one afternoon had an idea, got a pizza, and in the morning had some running, innovative code that saved much of the project. Gee, I got $1000. Soon that AI flopped, no surprise.

Current AI? Even if it were, really is, 99% hype and the rest nonsense, and can't tell for sure, still it's the loudest sound, involves really big server farms, electric power sources, data collections, attention from media, investors, and even the POTUS, and can't give a solid argument that it will never amount to much, sooooo, can't just ignore it and have to pay attention, e.g., see if the balloon will keep rising or spring a leak and fall.

Here at HN, when see AI, LLM, GANs, AGI, easy enough mostly just to skip them, but can't just ignore all of it. Besides, if want to pay some attention, HN is one of the best places to do that.

NOTED

And following. n0 suprise

Being Autistic I've no perception "what THEY think" only what tools work TODAY

Allegiance or affinity beyond IT WORKS or it FAILS please pardon, I need only tools which work NOW

Your NICK, noted. Don't hesitate to vet mine.

I feel like LLMs are inextricably tied to topics like politics which fuels the exhaustion and fatigue. There is also the general pessimism around technology and overvaluation. I see billboards advertising out in the world mentioning some AI service with a bland catchphrase and I'm already thinking, "no more." It's like someone having to consume an entire buffet by themselves. I have never thought about any other type of technology this way before, not even crypto. The word that comes to mind is "Ouroboros".

Maybe it is a coincidence with recent global events also causing an influx of globally broadcast textual information, but this may not bode well for any future advancements in technology that only make certain activities more efficient than they already are. How will this sentiment about technology change in a year? In five?

I’d rather have this for the rest of my life than have any more of the cryptocoin/NFT flood we had prior to this. Even better if we get a C/Zig/Odin bone thrown our way every once in a while.

There's only 6 ai posts on the front page right now, out of 30 and 2 or 3 are becasue the deepseek model is a hot topic right now. Tbh that doesn't seem very overwhelming?

No, even these first-gen LLM are transforming how I do science. Today DeepSeek tests. Great interactions. Without HN I would have been a few weeks late to the party.

I appreciate your positive experience with the tech / content.

It's helpful for me to understand the other side of the coin.

No, on the contrary, I like it. It’s a huge emerging technology that is changing the world. I suppose if it wasn’t wanted it wouldn’t be upvoted to the front page.

My big annoyance with all the LLM talk on HN is that the majority of things discussed simply amount to being glorified HttpClient wrappers yet advertised or talked about as it is this big advancement that everyone should be excited about.

Then you have people that drank the LLM kool-aid and their hyper-inflated expectations and how they will all be met within the year.

I am starting to simply ignore such threads altogether.

Now that I've wiped off my screen & keyboard

THANK YOU for

> kool-aid

I'm kinda tired of seeing the first comment to a totally unrelated topic be, "you know, LLMs these days can actually..."

Where is the creativity? Are we doomed to solve every problem, technological, social, and political with an LLM now? Is this the slow descent into Idiocracy?

You could just exclude all ai stories: https://histre.com/hn/?tags=+all-ai

More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904988

(disclosure: mine)

I've stopped listening to Data Science podcasts because they only talk about LLMs as AI and those items. There are so many DS problems and topics that I would love to learn and read about but if it isn't about LLM or how an LLM might solve the problem it seems there is zero discussion about them.

I have not jumped on to the AI / LLM bandwagon yet. I love writing code and I don't want to outsource that to an AI agent. I guess I also love the process of going through the docs or Googling for answers, when I am stuck or have questions about something. That process has lead to some other learning / discoveries.

We gotta put AI Blockchain in the Metaverse!

Run it on Computerless for maximum DevSecCloudOps!

Absolutely. Truly innovative research and projects are always fascinating to me. But even generalized to AI/ML, I can’t think of anything more recent than GANs (2015), Transformers (2017), and maybe AlphaFold 2 (2021)…

Just my personal taste though; I don’t mean to knock LLMs.

Yes! thank you, a big yes. This is not just HN for me, it's every online platform youtube, LinkedIn, twitter(yeah not x elon shitface). I've just lost interest in tech talks all together because of overwhelming LLM and AI takes and topics.

Actually I'm mostly demotivated by the amount of politics and "agenda pushing" posts. They seem somewhat alien to the spirit of hacking, and prefabricated to shift HN's audience's values and preferences.

This post included (or a consequence of).

I'm in my 40s, and not working in any AI tech. Seeing it absorb everything and being hyped over the moon makes me understand the folks 20 years my senior around the .com bubble. We are the dinosaurs now.

I actually do like the LLM posts occasionally, and very much like the “good old content” you talk about and that content I can’t find anywhere else, so what can you do?

It's mostly "ai" and politics, which mirrors my real life experience that no one is actually interested in doing actual software dev anymore

Yes! I actually forgot to add the politics point in my post which really doubles the exhaustion.

I really loved seeing what things people were up to, not the latest headline from trillion dollar company or the US government.

Let's be the change we want to see. It will pass.

For me it's that it's all so obviously a grift. With crypto there was at least some legitimate value to blockchains. ML is a valid science and has led to major breakthroughs in other sciences.

But AGI/genAI LLMs come across like just another scam from the Worst Guys You Know who were all cryptobros in the 2010s. The output integrity problems get dismissed. The traceability/repeatability problems get dismissed. The data ownership problems get dismissed. There's the endless problems with aggressive feeder bots causing real (financial/operational) harm to others. All of the people selling it have the smell of timeshare salesmen.

And now with China releasing open source models that seemingly embarass their U.S. counterparts, it makes the whole thing feel even more like a ponzi scheme.

LLMs as a whole have a severe credibility problem.

It's infecting everything. The other day I overheard someone saying "we don't need to expose a query interface, we'll just give users a text box and let them use natural language". Total brain rot.

My PM has been talking about converting half our product into a "conversational UI", meaning what used to be buttons would be turned into a textbox that sends a request to an AI API that will in turn trigger the same action as before. Of course, it shits itself 80% of the time, but AI!!!11!

It's total lunacy, I feel like I'm in a mental asylum sometimes.

That's why you load the feed into an rss reader and just scroll past fast....

I ignore and focus in post more interesting, and every week I find posts which I like

The blockchain-people needed to go somewhere once people realized that thekr solution in search of a problem isn't gonna stick.

Not saying that there is interesting bits in LLM research, it is just completely drowned out by the hype chasers whl smell the next gold rush.

I hate to say it, but this is likely just the beginning. Those dismissing this as mere hype might not fully grasp the magnitude of what’s unfolding. The implications of LLMs extend far beyond trends—they’re reshaping how we interact with information, build tools, and solve problems. It’s hard to ignore their transformative potential, even if it feels like they’re dominating the conversation right now, LLM-backed apps and agents are creating new millionaires every other day.

Honestly it's the opposite. WEVE BEEN THROUGH THIS BEFORE.

I like many people find LLMs a useful tool. I also have not seen a transformative impact on actually quality /cutting edge products being created.

Every new technology creates new millionaires every day.

Crypto is still creating new billionaires every week and nobody cares.

I would say no, but I am certainly skipping a lot of content

I always felt like part of the magic of HN was it's signal to noise ratio compared to sites.

Just feels a lot closer to my Reddit feed these days and I'm trying to stop reading that too.

That is sad that you come for the posts and not the comments.

Shouldn't these be related?

If the posts are on LLMs the comments are going to be on LLMs.

But I agree with the notion the comments are the valuable part of HN, the topic is just a jumping off point.

The problem is even in posts unrelated to the AI hype, someone will inevitably mention AI and somehow those threads always blow up to be the largest ones in any post.

Yes. But this too shall pass when the bubble bursts.

Silicon Valley is full of techno-religious, socially awkward people trying to find God in technology. AGI promises to understand them in a way normies never could. A dream that will never happen, just like proof in God is impossible... but people believe anyways. Hope in finding an answer to the unanswerable. The human brain processes information in narrative form, lovers of a good story are the ones most enamored with AI, with hype and trends, because it's a vision of the future where the unanswerable questions about existence are answered, finally. Well, let's speculate and burn our sacred planet down one computing plant at a time. And yet, we'll find ourselves still questioning, still trying to answer the unknowable.

no, i find this subject very interesting. the discussion could be a little more competent and practical.

Yes, likewise.

Yeah, it's really really boring. LLMs are not quite nothing, I believe they have some decent uses and will probably come to have more, but I find the breathless hype very depressing. Engineering (as that is what many software developers want to be called these days) should consist of sober judgements on the merits of the components you're evaluating, and this mostly isn't that. I've used LLMs enough to see for myself that they're impressive for certain jobs and more generally up to a point, but worse than useless after that.

Yes. The hype, lies and more lies.

The LLM posts that get upvoted on HN tend to be demos, learnings, and open-source projects: the complete opposite of the baseless hype.

But then the comments are a deluge of breathless hype about "agi" and "changing the world". Just like it was for the fake internet money people--decentralized banking is gonna change everything!!!11oneeleven.

On Hacker News, those get downvoted very quickly.

I must be on the wrong site :/ where can I find this Hacker News?

Honestly, LLM-related posts are usually a topic I’m more likely to click on, depending on the article. I find some of the discussions pretty interesting and useful, though I get why the saturation might feel like too much for others.

Why do you feel compelled to omit the subject from each sentence?

> Loved this site for a long time

>> I loved this site for a long time

It’s a quick way to get out your thoughts without making it sound like you’re telling a story as a first person narrative.

Given that HN is fundamentally a venture capital organization, I think it's typical that it emphasizes the latest hype cycle. That's were VC is active (for better or worse).

But HN has also evolved into a more general tech news aggregator. In this use case, the over emphasis of the latest "hotness" is annoying.

For myself, I'm not an LLM fanboy, and just skip those posts.

What I find most annoying at HN lately is the flagging of an increasing number of articles that someone somewhere doesn't agree with.

I would ask them to simply skip those post, like I do for LLM articles, and let people who are interested in discussing those topics have their discussion.

Shutting down other peoples conversations is a disturbing trend that I feel it is giving HN more of a one sided echo chamber feel.

Yes, me.

Not really, I think it’s interesting coverage and reading people opinions and comments about emerging technology ai or not ai is fantastic.

I posted about genocide and nobody gave a fuck. Your website was never there, sorry. It's just old school reddit

^5 ^5 ^5

Posts like this are precisely why I took interest in HN

I'm so old Stanley Kubric '2001, Space Odyessy' made an indelible imprint:

"DAVE, I CAN'T D0..."

Chilling, indeed. Decades later movies like 'Blade Runner' & 'Bi-Centenial Man' casting sympathetic light on Artificial LIFE.

Now we've this BUZZWORD (oops, SEO 'Keyword'?) of these 2 uppercase letters... LLM (Tip of what iceber, begs the question?) choking bandwidth.

Call Pizza-Hut for pickup & this elegantly crafted BOT takes the order

Is this really (total cost) less expensive than employing a human?

Yet I've not found any projects using this tool to aid dementia, blind, deaf or etcetera.

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