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Comment by sigmar | Hacker News Reader

>My recommendation is also to not choose an extreme approach (e.g. by completely banning LLM-related discourse) unless you feel very strongly about it.

Organizers are allowed to ban the mention of certain programming topics? I could understand if it was a topic that was adjacent to violence/harassment/sensitive stuff, but come on... are anti-AI groups becoming a cult?

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Yes, organizers can do whatever they want. Their event, their rules. If you put in the work to run a Python meetup, you are free to ban discussion of tomatoes if you really want to. Conversely, those with tomato psychosis are free to avoid your event if they truly can't survive a few hours without talking about tomatoes.

Given your example, how exactly would tomatoes be relevant to Python?

That's the point. They aren't.

A broken point, as LLMs on the other hand are very relevant to coding, which is done via programming languages. And it's use in other - particularly knowledge dependent - areas is rapidly exploding.

Let me introduce you to the HomeAssistant gardening community, and note that the very first Dashboard screenshot shown opens with two separate entire beds of tomato plants:

https://www.briandorey.com/post/pi-pico-lora-remote-soil-mon...

If one is leading a Python (or a Zig!) meetup and has an aversive reaction to tomatoes, and said meetup has been all up about gardening for the past three events, it’s very plausible to imagine them soft-banning people from bringing tomato plants to show and tell. Sure, they’ll be teased mercilessly about it at first, and some jerk might troll them about it and get the boot, but ultimately it’s just an outlier human foible that will be accommodated with mostly grace and humor. And then there will almost certainly also, immediately, form a Tomato Cabal who goes out of their way to farm tomatoes with Python/Zig while specifically keeping it a wink-nod secret that they’re doing so, and someday the organizer will discover this and laugh in spite of their disgust and give the cabal an honorary Tomato Day event where the cabal leads that day’s proceedings and the usual leader stays home and watches desert movies and eats chips and salsa with secret, vicious glee and never tells another living soul.

Healthy human BOFs are the best form of social ever :D

That's going pretty far out on a limb (hah!) to create some artificial relevance given the context. Meanwhile LLMs are easily relevant in almost every way that matters to programming languages, more than even IDEs.

That doesn’t limit formation of a subcommittee to concentrate their discussion for the health of the group. Any topic is eligible based on group impact regardless of its perceived breadth by those avidly discussing it.

(There is no cabal.)

Subcommittees/subgroups are perfectly fine of course. But, again, given the context, this isn't that case. This is a core person in the ecosystem making a strong suggestion about how general groups should operate. Doesn't take much imagination to see things get to a point where only groups that seriously discourage or outright ban anything re LLMs are considered "legitimate". It's their prerogative of course but... lol.

I was once in a hackerspace that held regular "show and tell" nights for people to present interesting technology projects. We eventually hit a rash of non-regulars bringing in "projects" that were essentially sales-pitches for devices sold through multi-level marketing scams. Figuring out how to ban those without blocking someone who intended to monetize their projects was tricky.

Point being: just because a thing technically fits the genre does not mean it is something that the audience wants to listen to.

Generative AI has and their providers have become an implicitly political subject. It shouldn't come as a surprise.

I think you misread that. He's recommending not completely banning the subject.

the part the parent appears to be commenting on is:

"[...] unless you feel very strongly about it."

i.e. complete ban is okay if the organizer feels very strongly about it.

Ahhh in yes, that makes sense. I get it now

> are anti-AI groups becoming a cult?

I would say that they're more becoming a vocal minority of intolerant people towards some ideas. Some have good reasons, others just love to be on the counter culture bandwagon.

I predict that we will soon have a group like PETA that is primarily anti ai. I also predict that we're going to have for some time a schism in the developer community, which we already see in hn today, but it will grow wider.

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