Maybe I’m naive since most of that was before I was born, but a lot of the past topics you mentioned seem more interesting because the people talking about them (I assume) had interesting knowledge and opinions to share about them. AI is an extremely boring topic because the people most excited about it are “idea people” rather than people with interesting knowledge and expertise. And idea people are pretty draining to listen to for years on end.

Even the top post on HN about ChatGPT’s image generation is full of a bunch of comments just saying “wow this is epic”, “I can make so many mangas with this”, etc. Or a post about a new model where people are saying bland stuff like “this doesn’t write Typescript as well as Nut43-2.1-Max”. Compare those to a post about language design, for instance, and you’d see a lot more interesting discussion and opinions.

Just my opinion though. It seems like the more interesting topics in AI are related to its divisiveness, and even that is getting super old after years of it going on.