Comment by rzz3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rzz3 | Hacker News Reader

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More and more Hacker News seems to be the contrarians and the “get off my lawn”s when it comes to AI and social media alike. I feel like there was a time in the late 2000s to early 2010s where we were still young and our skills were sharp and the tech was new and shiny, but the technology world kept moving and kept evolving and a lot of people…didn’t. Every day I see another post like “AI isn’t really smart, it’s just hype and I don’t like it!” or “I don’t use social media and here’s why!” or “Look at this phone I started using that isn’t a smartphone, I’m so much happier now”, all without realizing that this is just the “I don’t use the internet, it’s dangerous! My kids aren’t allowed to use it either!” or “I don’t need a cellphone, people can wait to call me when I’m home!” or “Why would I send a text message when I can just call?” of our time. People age and get set in their ways, and in my opinion in this rapidly evolving world of technology, it’s something that has to be actively avoided or we’ll get left behind.

I disagree. I think back in the late 2000s to early 2010s, many of us were eager to adopt the bleeding edge of technology because we were in the middle of tangible year-over-year progress. Twitter was a great way to broadcast updates to mobile devices with fledgling data plans. Instagram rode the wave of camera development in smartphones, allowing people to do something the increasingly higher quality photos they were taking. But in our rush to adopt these user experiences and stretch our wings, we ignored all of the potential pitfalls of creating these large, centralized repositories of heuristic and tracking data. We sold our single family homes on the open web for the opportunity to rent an apartment in a massive building with a few nice amenities like a gym with a heated pool.

Ten to fifteen years later and the rent has been increasing by huge amounts every year on that apartment, our maintenance requests go unanswered, and the neighborhood outside has gone downhill. Meanwhile, the same property management company is trying to get us to sign a perpetual lease in their new building just down the block. Is it really a surprise why people aren't jumping at that the opportunity?

We are very much still in the middle of tangible year over year progress. LLMs are changing the world in big ways, and the progress has never been faster. On the programming side of things, the libraries and frameworks and languages have never been better and yet still have a long way to go. Consumer hardware has never been better and continues to rapidly evolve.

TikTok has changed the way people communicate and interact more than Twitter or Instagram ever did. I agree that not all things have gotten better and some have gotten worse, but it’s mostly just that the world has changed and it’s required a lot of adaptation. The same could have been said 20 years ago too.

We have become less social as a result of social media, when I walk outside almost every single person has earbuds or headphones in, and people won't even look at me when I walk past, let alone say hi or anything. There's just too much going on, people are drained by these opaque algorithms that does not care about us, created by people who do not care about us.

How do LLM's assist us in this regard? It creates more content, but it's not even made by anyone, whilst guzzling up resources that we actually need (this applies to physical things like water as well as our own attention/time).

It feels like technology gets put out to the world and then humanity gets dragged "forward" by it, when there's nothing inherently wrong with resisting change if the current evidence points towards further problems.

I think it's a bit much to criticize being contrarian, when being a conformist is basically the same thing.

A conformist does exactly what the public does, and a contrarian does exactly what the public doesn't do.

Either way the public decides.

If you independently decide that you don't like social media, then that's not being a contrarian. Just as independently deciding that you do want to engage in social media doesn't make you a conformist.

Sure and I don’t disagree with anything you said related to social media. It’s the pattern I see that I’m commenting on. The public has largely decided, but this community’s opinions are not really reflective of larger society.

Is that larger society actually healthy?

Or perhaps people mature, take stock in what actually matters to them rather than what is being forced onto them by the economy. If being left behind means I have real relationships with real humans in the real world, I'm good with that.

Sure, but we were _right_ back then on the bleeding edge of technology, whereas our parents simply didn’t get it. They were closed off to new ideas and the rapidly changing world. Or were they more mature, and the internet and texting and cellphones were bad ideas?

Being a hacker was never about unquestioningly lapping up every new thing that was pushed out.

It's clear we've pretty much completely lost the spirit of the hacker ethos to Silicon Valley.

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