I Am An AI Hater

It's interesting to see the trend of the attitude towards GenAI in Hacker News through out the years. This is totally vibe based and I don't have numbers to back it up, but back in 2022-2023, the site was dominantly people who mostly treat GenAI as a curious technology without too much attachment, and some non-trivial amount of folks who are very skeptical of the tech. More recently I see a lot more people who see themselves as evangelists and try very hard to boost/advocate the technology (see all the "LLM coding changes my life" posts). It seems that the tide has turned back a little bit again since we now see this kind of posts surfacing.

For me, I kind of wish this site to go back to the good old days where people just share their nerdy niche hacker things and not filling the first page with the same arguments we see on the other parts of the internet over and over again. ; ) But granted I was attracted by the clickbait title too, so I can't blame others.

If anything, it reminds me of crypto - lots of investment seemed to attract a lot of users to HN that I highly suspect had some sort of...let's just call it motivated reasoning.

This does not feel anything like crypto to me.

Crypto always had hard to understand and abstract use cases. It became popular because the value was going up.

LLMs are different. There are an endless amount of use cases that people can easily understand. Now, just how well it does things is debatable but there is a very clear value gain.

Hell, I got it give me a list of recipes for the week based on my preferences and dietary needs then created a grocery list in 2 minutes. Did I need an LLM for this? No, but it made it so much faster and this is what I am finding with a lot of tasks.