We need tech news sources which exclude AI

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.

Honestly. I want the AI news. I wish HN would add filtering features. I know they want us to all see the same homepage, but it’s time to let us have our tables. Pro-AI-era should be able to have a cohort thread, and anti-AI should be able to avoid it, or have a ring fence for their anti-AI discussions.

We end up with some good threads on HN in both directions, but there’s a weight to early voices that can bend a posts’ comments pro or anti AI which isn’t necessarily reflective of the quality of said post.

Look at /r/programming on reddit. They have explicit no AI policies.

There’s Elijah Potter’s HN sans AI: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai

it's called lobsters and it sucks

I disagree. The problem, if I concede there is a problem , is not new or unique to AI but problematic to the internet -fake news, fake reviews, AstroTurfing, etc.

This is not an AI problem.

The internet is a bad place with lots of bad actors and no one says anything about malicious state actors who pollute the internet (they might be called xenophobic !)

AI merely is another tool for bad actors to be better bad actors, but that doesn't mean AI is the problem.

https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude

You can also exclude github repos posted here that contain ai attribution. Filters are updated daily to catch exceptions.

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.

I agree.

The worst part about it is like 80% of the conversation is motivated speech.

That's worse than the technology itself.

You’ve hit the nail on the head of what is the smoking gun of today’s tech sites — no doubt about it.

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 think the problem is concentration. AI now absorbs almost all of the oxygen from every category. A story about new chips becomes an AI story. Cloud pricing becomes an AI story. Even personal projects get pulled into the same orbit.

[flagged]

[dead]