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Comment by 128317836 | Hacker News Reader

HN is 70% AI propagandists and bots who flood people's attention so they do not develop independent thoughts. This needs to happen daily, because 48 hours might leave people room to think.

These are talkers who have never produced anything, taken everything from open source while looking down on OSS authors. They one-shot a note taking app and feel they have done something culturally significant.

AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people. All web software got worse, nothing new is being written and everyone just talks about their precious conversations with the clankers like commenting on a football game.

The dumbest people always win temporarily.

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> AI in software is the greatest farce since NFTs and attracts the same people.

People don't talk about this overlap but it is real, remember that SBF lead Anthropic's Series B with stolen customer money from the Bahamas. Caroline Ellison participated too, in individual capacity.

https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/ftx-ceo-leads-580m-serie...

The listed technologies impacted me none whatsoever. AI has fundamentally changed my relationship with my work, my hobbies, my co-workers, likely permanently.

Zero job interviews involved discussion of NFTs, Bitcoin, etc.

100% now discuss AI.

No friends ever asked me about NFTs. Almost all use AI or ask me how to use it.

Terrance Tao was impacted not at all by NFTs.

Maybe "this time is different" only for me, but I suspect it's truly different.

Its the same pyromaniacs lighting things on fire for thrills; last week it was a brushpile, the week before it was some sparklers, this week it was an unexploded 15 inch shell from WWI.

I fear there is a tendency for some people who are against the proliferation of AI to make sweeping gut-reaction comments like this that do more harm to their position than good.

Perhaps everything that you said is 100% correct, but people are easily swayed by things that “sound right” being overly aggressive opens your position (in people’s monkey brains) to “enlightened centrists” that leave the door open for bolder opposition.

Many people have been genuinely helped or feel like they have been genuinely helped by LLMs in coding, they aren’t going to change their opinions based on fiery rhetoric and accusatory tones. Much like I can’t force myself to believe in Santa Claus regardless of how aggressively my nephews claim he is real.

underrated analogy to claiming Santa Claus being real by nephew. lmao

it's hard to be swayed into skeptic camp if you see how it works and it really solves those hard problems that took hours. Genie is out of the bottle

I'm part of the skeptic camp, and I'd argue that we are never going to have LLMs solving all problems. Therefore, we need humans to know and understand how to solve problems. Unfortunately, when "the genie is out of the bottle" and most (but not all!) problems are solved, it becomes very very hard to argue for doing things the hard way.

Furthermore, it becomes practically impossible to argue for doing things the hard way for all of the solved problems, which were and are necessary for being able to learn the craft deeply. At the very least, deeply "enough" to advance the state of the art.

In short: 1) Humans are necessary. 2) Knowledge and experience are necessary. 3) Humans need time and practice to gain knowledge and experience.

When one side argues that one or all of the above points are false, I don't believe them.

Realistically, we are seeing people even in the most pro-AI groups begrudgingly concede #1 and #2, while expecting #3 to just sort itself out.

That’s the hard part with all of this, you’re either of the opinion that there should be some individuals capable of determining if the AI is doing the right thing, and therefore all the previous prerequisites are still necessary, or that we should just let it all ride on the AI, which is probably easier, but certainly more dangerous.

Tbh I think you are right. The problem is now striking the right balance, like we don’t need everybody to know how to build each part of smartphone or chip, but there should be significant group with that ability. This will be a huge challenge

I think it's definitely not accurate to say that these people have not made anything significant. It sounds like coping. How many programmers have made anything culturally significant? How many are just codemonkeys who fulfill someone else's requests, take their cheques, and go home?

In my opinion, the whole anti-LLM coding thing is purely ego preservation. And I get that, who the hell want's to believe their high paying job is going away? To say using LLMs cannot achieve results bigger than 'one-shotting a note taking app' is really just not true.

Comparing it to NFTs is absolutely wild also. NFTs literally were mass psychosis and had no value whatsoever. You're saying someone can't build software, even just for themselves, or otherwise, that doesn't have any value at all? How could that be true?

How many programmers have made anything culturally significant??

You are on an online forum geared towards programmers, using the world wide web created by a programmer. The concept of a video game did not exist before they were being programmed.

You think the world just appeared as it is and everyone only does things for money? Never because, unlike people who use every shortcut possible, they actually care about the details?

Did I say programmers haven't done anything culturally significant? No, clearly not. I'm saying the vast majority of all programmers have not done anything culturally significant

> NFTs literally were mass psychosis

LOL as if AI was a not a mass psychosis ... "AI have 10% of kill us all"

Basically, LLMs have reduced the incentives in doing open source.

If you go with agentic route, randos with money to spare on latest models, beat you. If you go LLM-free, AI corpos say "all the better for us! More free untainted dataset!"

I'm a perfect example. I'm nearing the first functional release of my entirely handwritten Linux-native mod manager, and I'm not sure if I want to open source it or not. I love the concept of FOSS software, and it's nearly the only kind I use when possible, and I would love to give back to other humans. However, I'm not interesting in doing free work for megacorps that simply want to see me out of a job for their benefit, and open source is currently looking more and more like that.

Humans are so lazy and obsessed with cost-cutting, efficiency, and "line go up" that we'll willingly walk ourselves into such a bleak inhuman future.

I fully agree with you, and especially on the 'temporarily' part. The good thing is, they can one-shot as much as they want, but almost any fully LLM-generated project that pops up still has inferior code quality compared to those projects from people who actually know what they are doing, so people who prefer code quality will ignore most of the AI spam anyway, just like we do. People deploying one-shot projects out there also have a very notable lack of common sense, skill, and knowledge on topics like security and/or code optimization (obviously, because they don't code), which is mostly obvious both in their way of argumentation and their published artifacts.

They are happy to have their ads-maximized agreed-to-all Cloudflare/Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Apple/Microsoft accounts so they can one-click deploy that "worker" with all the UI gears spinning automatically, because who needs to know how to configure a web server anyway? :^) And wow, have you heard that Cloudflare offers an operating system now??

I was thinking about this recently. HN is of course much older than the current AI hype cycle, but maybe its time to update HN policies to forbid bots, and start thinking about ways to enforce that. There might not be any 100% tamper-proof way nowadays, but reducing the bots by some percentage will still be a win.

The policy part is already in place

> Please don't put generated text in HN posts. Write your text yourself—HN is for sharing between humans. For the same reason, please don't automate posting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

if you have a good enforcement method you wanna see definitely email them about it please. down voting the obvious ones won't work forever

> HN is 70% AI propagandists

really? i feel like the overwhelming sentiment in every comment section is staunchly anti-ai. it's far more common to see people lamenting their job prospects or complaining about having to review mountains of slop PRs.

I wonder what the ratio of poster sentiment to comment sentiment is. I figure the sentiment of a post is seen broadly as much more authoritative than the sentiment of comments.

for a long time, I was roasted on HN for seeing any capabilities in programing ai. Recently tables turned and more people see that ai is not leaving and will stay with us

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