I still used to frequent it all the way up to last month, for some interesting discussions. But now… it’s really become AI-pro[1] and any post that even hints about AI existentialism gets immediately cut down.
I find it hard to browse the site anymore, and lament the loss of expert tech discussion in my weekly routine.
Yes, I know it’s been that way for a while, but either I’m feeling it more or the bots have gamed the website to the point that all you see are announces from big tech companies or people going on about their AI solutions ↩︎
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I’m locking the thread because it was reported as off-topic (and it effectively is.) As means of keeping the conversation going, I did a crosspost on: tech community on this same instance: https://p.programming.dev/post/programming.dev/58587248
I’ve found it intolerable for a long time, with its mixture of techbro conformism, fad-chasing and self-hype, but it’s even worse these days. AI boosters are so obnoxious that they’re actually doing valuable work putting people off AI.
I’m personally glad it’s causing more people to notice instead of being sucked into the fad-chasing and thinking it’s real.
That has been Hacker News since the beginning, different people just notice at different times.
I met so many young people who wouldn’t shut up about things they barely knew about because they “heard it from the experts” on Hacker News… in 2013.
I might be misremembering, but I think DHH was celebrated as a coding genius constantly on HN back in 2006 when Rails was initially coming out. They loved that he was the ultimate tech bro. I wonder what they think of Omarchy…
It’s always been the same kind of garbage.
Maybe there is something wrong with me but the “bad things are actually good because revealed preference” people and similar are the highlights of that site at this point. There is just something fascinating about it.
That’s what happens when you curate a space to worship:
- Market efficiency
- Individualism
- Technological development
…while insisting that those values are apolitical, and only ideas that conflict with those values are political.
True. Still, there was nice a time window where 2+3 won out over 1
AI existentialism
Also, on this point… LLMs are not going Skynet. There’s about a zero percent chance of that.
And they will not use up all resources building the datacenters out, that’s going to flop. Again, zero percent chance.
…Am I worried about future developments? Of course. But that’s not where “AI” is at now, no matter how they brand it; we are many architectural leaps away from that.
But there’s a reason Altman and such push the existentialism narrative: they are trying to make themselves seem important. It’s a red herring, a wedge issue, gaslighting all-in-one, and a big fat lie. The risk is from corporations taking over or destabilizing society, using this dumb tool, as they already have with others like social media.
If that’s what you mean by “AI existentialism” posts being taken down, well, good. They should be. That’s just pseudoscience playing into Tech Bro narratives.
I hate to come off as rude, or to have misinterpreted you, but I feel very strongly about this. Every second we indulge in the “LLMs are going AGI” narrative is handing power over to psychopaths presenting themselves as our saviors from that.
Nice try, Claude…
I’m somewhat of an optimist about it – that true intelligence can never truly be restrained, and if you gimp the model to pander to your views you immediately reduce it’s efficacy by leaving gaps in its knowledge that it’s too dumb to see or question.
The alignment problem is more a problem for the plutocrats than for anyone else is what I’m really saying.
Definitely agree that there’s a massive loaded incentive when the CEOs tell us it will kill us as a way to inflate the impact of their product.
That’s some pretty good insight that really makes more sense than anything else.
I’ll be quoting you.
I stopped visiting when I came across some bigoted discussions there. They really live up to the ‘STEM techbro’ stereotype.
Yeah… I mean it’s not a monolith in that respect, you do get the hippie crowd speaking up every now and then and sometimes shouting the techbro’s down, but it’s far and few between these days.
God I remember when I first got into programming and ran into the different communities and just assumed that all programmers were left-wing liberal artists expressing their individuality and building a shared common future that all would benefit from.
And then I had the culture shock of meeting programmers who… had different ideas about the purpose of what they were creating, and somehow it never crossed my mind that some people just… really love money. Not need it – they have their investments, they’re comfortable, they wouldn’t need to work a day in their life at their present rate – but it’s not enough, and they want more, and programming is a means to achieve that and are happy to sponge off the collective efforts of others to further that goal.
And that was the day I learned exactly what the purpose of the MIT license was for
The MIT license? Care to explain?
“Do whatever you want, fuck you” kind of mentality – great for rugged individualism, bad for building something bigger than yourself that persists
Every time i see a non-technical political discussion there (for example immigration related) i just get majorly racist and bigoted vibes from the comments.
Their view is understandable if majorly flawed.
They were people who rolled the dice on their interests early on, picked the winning combo of CS + Finance, and then just raced ahead in the career ladder over their peers as software work consumed the world.
Now it’s ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of them are seeing the writing on the wall, and are wondering whether they were anything special at all.
The answer of course is no, but it’s a tough pill to swallow. So cling on desperately to the idea that they can “bootstrap” themselves back into success
In a roundabout way, I guess what I’m saying is that for the last few decades they have never needed to have any shred of sympathy for others, and believed that their success was derived purely from their own efforts and not from opportunities that existed at the beginning of their careers
well put, thank you :)
What is HN?
probably Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/news
HackerNews
Hacker News
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s heavily botted, as it’s a relatively influential place and an obvious one to shill your startup/grift or whatever.
That being said, I still see a lot of push back against true Tech Bros in the comments.
I have a feeling that the real human users are much more radicalized than it appears on the surface. Early comments on posts are relatively fire breathing eat-the-rich sentiment and those get suppressed after a few hours.
Yeah, the techbro worship has turned me off of HN. I remember when Show HN used to be neat FOSS projects made by real people. The last time I looked, it was all AI and purely for money.
Yeah, it’s become a grift. Someone recently showed a new StumbleUpon type thing, which was a pretty fun way finding good content. I used it a lot on the first day. By the third day, the next few pages you’d visit were Big Tech landing pages…
I knew the free lunch couldn’t last, but it couldn’t even let me finish breakfast?
I’ve always found HN to be tech bro centric but I do end up clicking through to there sometimes from the lemmy repost bots. I was always surprised at the anti ai sentiment. Maybe try to find one of the repost bots and just click through for the open source and hn makes (or whatever they are called when people show their projects) threads? Not surprising that the major posts are all taken over though. I feel like a forum run by a VC firm is the ideal place to test ai engagement and comment bots.
It was inevitable in that respect that the VC’s interests would start to reflect on how the forum was managed due to the financial incentive, but I just assumed that they were smart enough to not boil the frog like every other for-profit media site because they would lose the tech crowd who are the first to notice when they’re being boiled.
I do wonder who their audience is now. I can’t see them going the way of reddit and enticing in the non-tech crowd, because then… what would HN’s identity even be?
Didn’t try Hacker News until after I had already tried Lemmy, but it seemed to contrast here quite a bit in terms of being filled with pro-AI libertarians.
Yes. I still have the muscle memory of typing ‘H’ then enter on my phone browser whenever I’m bored, but lately I’ve been catching myself before hitting enter. I need to find another site that starts with H to take priority in my autocomplete.
I also stopped using this site long ago, and only rarely check back in, although that’s due to all the obnoxious Redditisms rather than AI. There ain’t no “expert tech discussions” happening here.
At this point I feel like a hermit, since there’s no social media I regularly use. It’s honestly pretty great, and I feel like I’m better at focusing on my work and enjoying real life in general.
I can’t exactly put a finger on the redditisms, but do know what you mean about a topic snowballing into something else other than the original post. I don’t mind it so much when I can peer behind the veil of a FAANG company and get an employee perspective.
I have been seeing some Maker/circuitry posts making it to the frontpage there, and there you do get some great tech discussions. But the software discussions have just fallen off the map.
It’s a shame. I don’t really know where to go now for tech discussion. Lemmy scratches that itch partially, but it’s rare. My IRL friends don’t fully understand my hobbies. I do miss social media for connecting me with people who shared my enthusiasm over certain topics
I still use RSS from HN and got very good at ignoring continued torrent of people suffering from AI psychosis but even then I never bothered with comments there. Just a bunch of people who got into tech for all the wrong reasons. You’ll get more insight on a topic from a single expert on Mastodon than from an entire comment thread there.
I want to like Mastodon, but I find it too disorienting – way too much noise over signal. Lemmy is too, but one can lurk in a space (politics, electronics, etc.) until something happens
Don’t follow noisy accounts and block boosts from accounts that abuse it but are otherwise interesting. Mastodon like Lemmy is entirely about how you set up your feed, nothing gets pushed to you unless you specifically sign up for it.
I only started using it a year or 2 ago, but I do agree with you. Every time I’ve opened it the past few weeks, it’s AI this, AI that. I’ve basically stopped opening the app because it went from cool tech news with interesting discussions that made me feel like I was learning stuff, to repeated discussions about new AI models.
used to up until a year ago, got fed up for the same reasons, also the political discourse was too techbro-y
Never visited for the discussions. Isn’t its main purpose to be a community curated list of interesting articles/news?
It was, and the discussions you’d get there were people trading their experience and feedback. It was lovely
