Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?"

> The last few times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the front page, it's not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.

A bigger impact for me has been the number of mentions of AI in the comments. It's not just that a large part of the front page is dominated by LLM hype posts, it's that every single post has a least one guy near the top somehow bringing AI into the discussion. I don't even care if it's "AI will fix this" or "haha, AI sucks at this too". I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again.

I noted that too, to the point where I'm suspecting that "that guy" (obviously not just one user) is being paid to do so.

I've started downvoting them, the same way I always downvote "I fed this to an LLM and here's what it spat out".

> I just don't want to hear anything about AI ever again.

Genuinely curious: Why?

Don’t get me wrong, I upvoted this post, and would love to see AI separated out, or at least tagged (like a root comment suggests) so that I can filter them out if I want.

But I can’t say I’d never want to hear anything about AI ever again (though I’m headed in that direction).

What field are you in, and what are your interests, such that you’d want to visit HN without ever seeing mentions of AI?

Not the OP, but I'm sick to death of hearing about AI

The hype around it is ridiculous. I don't personally find it nearly as useful as people are saying, so everything feels like people are trying to gaslight me

Don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. Amazing stuff. I just personally don't have much interest in it until it's much more reliable for the things I want to use it for

And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now

Not your parent, and not anti-AI, but I’ve seen similar things to this thread in smaller spaces I’m in.

There are some people who are having genuine crises over this stuff, some of it existential, and some of it “wow I thought my friends had some basic agreements about the world that we actually don’t,” and seeing this stuff on the regular just fans these sorts of issues.

Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of homepage spots, and if you don’t want to see a topic, it effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five stories to me it would be less useful than it is now.

That is a wonderful question, but it's very hard to answer without essentially knowing me, and that may be a little bit ambitious for a comment.

I'm a software engineer. I consider this some of the most important work of our generation. The hardware we've made today has unlocked an until now impossible control over the world. We don't have to mechanically devise a way to make a clock that tracks the stars. We can just program it into a microchip, and it'll just do it. We don't have to manage an untold thousands of people to calculate our taxes. We can write it into a computer and it can just do it. Forever and perfectly. We're just not applying it.

I've reached the point of despair. It's not a AI doom kind of despair, where I believe that AI is going rogue or whatever. It's a much more pedestrian of despair. We have tremendous problems ahead of us. Both when it comes to the climate, but also when it comes to just doing the things that society always has to do and AI doesn't offer anything to any of the actual problems of society.

While people are dying of Ebola in Africa and Americans are dying because they can't pay for healthcare, we are talking about automating software development for ad-tech companies. It's embarrassing. This is my field, these are my people, and this is the best we have to offer.

I try to abstain from that despair by just not engaging with it. Either AI will happen and we'll take it from there, or it wont and then we'll have wasted a lot of effort and will hopefully never had any credibility as an industry again. I can't make a difference in either of those outcomes, so I just want it to go away.

Let me make it clear though. I too love the math behind recent AI. I even love the engineering behind how we do fast GEMM on GPU's. The challenges are really fun technically. That just can't be what decides our direction.

I hope that somewhat answered it a little. It's a bit hard to get such a large topic rooted so deeply in me into a comment. Thinking about the future in relation to these billion dollar companies and what they make does actually make me emotional.

I have had that same thought when I see them as one of the first comments on a post. I can't do anything with that suspicion, how would I prove it, but it's definitely there.

Thank you, I feel similarly. We've become gods of computing through global-scale invention, production, supply-chains, and finance, and we're apparently going to use that power to "improve productivity" which in the best case means cheaper apps that make people more money. I've not heard a single actual use-case for the modern AI/LLM that helps us with our actual national and global problems.

That is because those problems aren’t being fixed not because they are not technically fixable, but because as a society we would need to agree on what ‘fixed’ means.

And that triggers the culture war, because Urban/Rural and other major factions have wildly different experiences, incentives, and goals on these fronts. And anyone trying to tackle those real problems who is noticed by one side or the other will inevitably get attacked.

And rather than sit down and really consider what we (as a nation!) want overall, make compromises, and agree to work together, we’d rather sit in our comfortable air conditioned places and stab each other in the back over the internet - or just check out into a comfortable bubble.

And unfortunately that means that the real problems are escalating.

I mean there are plenty of people using AI/LLMs to help with the actual problems, but it's about the same level of proportionality of people generally speaking working on those problems (vs. against or mostly just indifferent). So thus most of AI/LLM use is not in those areas, sadly.

> Also, in a simpler sense, there are a limited number of homepage spots, and if you don’t want to see a topic, it effectively shrinks your homepage. If HN only showed five stories to me it would be less useful than it is now.

Yes, I feel like all these shallow "[Someone] vibe-coded [thing] with AI using [Claud whatever]" articles are hitting the front page and muscling out other, more interesting ones. Just like the "[Common unix utility] re-written in Rust!" articles of years past.

> And I'm really exhausted, tired of hearing about how this is going to replace people like me any minute now

I'm kind of exhausted in general (year after year) of frankly unimaginative engineers who should know better, latching on to whatever is the latest soup of the month, and touting it here as the greatest human achievement since fire.

I wrote this

https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/

years ago but I don't stand by that article because I don't feel that way anymore. I do stand by the sequel

https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

because that's the operating principle of YOShInOn which is something a little more sophisticated applied to RSS feeds and productized.

I do wish that there was a good place to talk about interesting stuff with people online that was a bit more resistant to both the extreme hype and the extreme pessimism

HN threads very often feel like whichever side posted first winds up dominating the thread, it's bizarre

I see the comments on some articles that are massively pro AI all upvoted to the top, then the comments on another article and it's all the negative AI comments upvoted

It's weirdly echo-chambery on a post by post basis

Yeah this has been the worst development in HN culture as HN has grown in my experience. To make things worse the extremity of the hype and pessimism just creates a huge flamewar where each side is dedicated to using the worst strawmen to undermine the other side.

Personally I just started treating this site as a sophisticated shitposting place and started actually talking about tech in group chats with friends who work in the industry. Increasingly I see folks refer to the content here in the same breath as Reddit so I don't think I'm the only one.

It's probably just a scale problem. When a website becomes big enough it becomes dominated by the folks with the most time to post and the most passionate opinions.

> automating software development for ad-tech companies

A lot of technology advancements are automation of human tasks. Its been going on for decades and does eliminate a lot of jobs (or move them to a different continent). There aren’t telephone switch operators anymore, or cashiers adding up items manually in a store checkout or any other countless jobs that are now done with software.

One way to look at it is if you’re an employee at a company you don’t really have any say in what projects/products you work on. If those projects are eliminating or creating jobs or saving lives or whatever, your only choice is really about working for that employer.

> Personally I just started treating this site as a sophisticated shitposting place and started actually talking about tech in group chats with friends who work in the industry

Yeah... I think this is probably smart. I wish I had that, I don't have a lot of friends in the industry

Something to work