I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years.
I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there.
And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years).
But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient.
I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools.
we need entirely new communities where "contributors" all share a common understanding that they will not publish AI for other contributors to consume.
They can all individually create and consume AI outside of this community of course.
I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years.
I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there.
And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years).
But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient.
I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools.
Not only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention...
I agree.
The worst part about it is like 80% of the conversation is motivated speech.
That's worse than the technology itself.
What do you mean by “motivated speech?”
Do you mean it’s puffery or scammy?
I haven't heard that exact expression before, but basically agenda-driven speech, for commercial or ideological persuasion or whatever. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
You’ve hit the nail on the head of what is the smoking gun of today’s tech sites — no doubt about it.
https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude
You can also exclude github repos posted here that contain ai attribution. Filters are updated daily to catch exceptions.
Now that's what's up.
This topic is just naturally controversial — AI and the internet are so intertwined with it that there’s really no way to avoid the conversation.
And here’s a conversation.
There’s Elijah Potter’s HN sans AI: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai
I fully expected that to be a blank page :) Not too far off.
we need entirely new communities where "contributors" all share a common understanding that they will not publish AI for other contributors to consume.
They can all individually create and consume AI outside of this community of course.