How much of HN is AI?

This is categorizing with a pretty broad brush, it seems. I took a look at a random day, and the articles that are claimed to be AI are Waymo publishing a model for self driving cars and a post about scams in Apple News ads.

Sure, Waymo’s model is AI and the scams in Apple News are often AI generated, but this isn't some sort of monoculture of LLM articles.

Ironically, this article could have been improved by using an LLM to categorize things and also publishing the prompt, so we could inspect what it means to “be AI”.

AI has turned me away from HN more and more.

Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical backers do not care about these issues.

ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap.

I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value.

_Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.

Democratization of access has its victims.

I miss the old newsgroups. I wish we could land again in that weird, colorful oceans of geeky individuals with their quirks and interesting nerdy takes.

15 years ago, HN was about bootstrapping and early YC stars.

10 years ago, HN was in full VC-enterprise sauce.

5 years ago, it was crypto and NFTs, and how I switch jobs every quarter.

Now it is a blurry view into the future through the black mirror of AI.

How could we jump back into the cozy past again?

I do not have a clear answer, but what seems to work for you are small groups of friends and friends of friends hanging out on WhatsApp or Discord, discussing geeky news together in the context of their backgrounds. But these are very curated and very closed groups, still operating on the social media platforms of behemoths.

Would now be the right time to restart self-hosted message boards or Mattermost/Campfire instances?

Reading about tech has become gradually less and less fun for me over the past 16 years.

Does anyone remember the awe that was felt the first time we encountered an iPhone. Or an iPad? I remember those days I would read tech news and sites like Ars Technica and comments were sometimes snarky and indignant but generally people were enthusiastic about reading tech because it offered glimpses into more technically advanced futures.

I wasn't browsing HN back then but I imaging the same thing was true of HN in the late 2000's and early 2010's.

Now tech sites like Ars Technica consistently have comment sections filled with immense negativity cynicism indigation and just plain old boiling rage. I avoid those comment sections now because reading such things negatively affects my mood and certainly isn't fun.

And over the past few years HN has gradually become more negative and nasty.

All this sucks. This isn't why I became interested in tech. This isn't why I used to spend time reading about technology and science.

> In the first half of the month, roughly 60% of the daily HN lineup was AI-related or AI-generated, tapering off to ~50% as we approached the end of the month. This is up from 40% in February.

This aligns with my much less scientific research. Every now and again, when I remember to do it, I will skim the top 10 stories and count how many are AI-related. I find it is very consistently in the 4-6 bracket. Probably a majority of the time, 5 out of 10 articles are AI-related, and very rarely does it drop below 4 out of 10. It also rarely goes over 6 out of 10, but I can remember it happening a couple of times.

In fact, the proportion of AI representation in the top 10 is so consistent (in my, again, unscientific experience) that I wonder if it is being moderated one way or the other.

Personally I find it boring that one topic gets so much discussion but who am I to argue. I do my bit by making sure to upvote non-AI stories that I find interesting.

I swear that the amount of astroturfing in the comment field by AI bots being positive towards AI is at an all time high as well.

My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.

It's not just HN, have you seen mainstream news recently? It's just a hot topic and I think it's normal for people to talk about those a lot.

If quantum computing ever goes mainstream, I'm sure you'll see a lot of articles about that as well.

HN really needs an AI filter. Most posts are AI company promotion now.

I've been noticing in recent months that even when the article is in no way related to AI, there's often comments trying to steer it into AI, often in a way that makes no sense at all. It has a way of becoming its own parody.

there was one glorious day years ago when every story on the hn front page was about erlang. that was fun. (anyone else remember that?)

Reading these comments it seems that meta-discussion of AI is the most hot button topic of all in HN.

HN is a reflection of the industry and you'd have to be living under and rock (or in denial) to ignore LLMs. People who complain about it give off a real "kids these days"-vibe that has been present on HN for the entire time I've been here. There are _always_ people complaining about the current infatuation (and I'm sure I've been one of them).

I find the posts/comments bemoaning the pervasiveness of LLMs on HN to be more tiring than even some of the more annoying LLM posts.

If HN didn't feature LLM-related content there would be people, rightful so, complaining that we are ignoring a huge thing happening in the industry.

I'm deeply disappointed that many of the stories on HN are directly or indirectly about A.I. and LLMs. To me this is a complete turn-off. OTOH this seems to be the case everywhere in the IT landscape these days.

Many people interested in technical stories have mostly stopped reading computing related news. I know people that used to host talks about .NET software development quit because they hated all .NET developments pushed by Microsoft were related to Azure or A.I. These are developers that want to build software, not scream to/plead with an LLM to do it for them. It simply takes the fun out of being a software developer. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that in a couple of years many people will leave the sector because it's no fun anymore. Management is forcing you to use your (supposed) future replacement.

I like this but next do how much of HN is astroturfing for Chinese AI.

I think its very easy to note and come to the conclusion that this is the most disruptive tech of our industry. HN is full of people from all walks of life, but people from all walks of life are using AI (or LLMs). The way I hear people describe using AI is the way people used to talk about Google.

As much as I am one of the "In Betweeners" of AI (not hyper loving, nor hyper hating it) I do wish HN wasn't flooded with it, but its just the nature of LLMs currently, they are the new thing that has taken over our society in a drastic way, those who pretend otherwise will be surprised to know that the rest of society has moved forward with it.

Upvoted obviously just to counterbalance how often I got downvoted for stating how popular posts from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are just ads.

The author is most subtle or diplomatic than me and thus call them "AI vendor press releases" or "AI vendor marketing" but we know.

The thing is, the AI-related topics are pretty easy to skip. Sure, you may have to go to the second page to see the same number of non-AI stories that you used to see on the front page alone, but you can just not click on them. (Same with politics, BTW.)

But AI-generated content is harder, both stories and comments. HN does moderately (heh) well at filtering them out, but I would like better.

Someone made an HN without AI filter and it front paged here a bit ago.

https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai

(That's the first one I found, maybe there were others)

So...are you complainers all using it? If not, why not?

Spoiler -- because when someone says "I'm tired of reading about {X}", they're really saying "I want everyone else to stop talking about {X}". This has happened repeatedly over HN's life, and it just betrays how emotional people get when they feel that they can't control the narrative.

If HN doesn't work for you, stop coming to it?

It’s sad; on the one hand, it’s true, and on the other, this story is also about AI. (translated from german by AI)

Not everyone here is AI. I can't tell the difference so what does it matter? If I learn something or get inspired by a person or a bot, great.

AI tools are incredibly powerful, new and rapidly evolving, you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.

the most annoying thing, for me, brought on by llms is that almost every HN submission now has the exact same conversation on it.

without fail, if the submission has text, someone says it is ai generated. other people concur. someone says it probably isn't. someone else says that it shouldn't matter if the content is good. small argument about the accuracy of ai detection tools.

rinse and repeat on every damn submission. often times this is the dominant comment chain regardless of what the actual submission topic is. it bugs me more than the fact that half of the front page is ai promotion.

Compare to the 2010s when 90% of the front page was about NoSQL

Would be interested to see this compared to past trends, crypto and NFTs for example

"At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general direction; if you want a taste, {another article by same author} has been called “watered-down” and “slop”."

We have gotten to the point where it is virtually guaranteed that some commenter to almost any given article will have an oversensitive AI detector and accuse the author of it being AI. I swear there's people whose AI detectors are just

    def is_content_ai(content):
        return True

I don't know what to do about it. Discussion about AI provenance of a given work is often a valid topic. When YouTube shovels an AI channel at me and it briefly penetrates my defenses, it's heartening to see the commentors trying to warn people about it, shortly before I block the channel.

(It's annoying that so many legit channels, which I know are legit because they predate AI and the same person is on camera as before, have switched to heavily-AI thumbnails. That's the hole that the other channels sometimes get me with, because just having an AI thumbnail doesn't prove it's not a legit channel now.)

On the other hand, the chorus of very annoyed people who are very annoyed because they see AI everywhere who see AI everywhere because they literally see AI everywhere are becoming a bit of a nuisance themselves.

Too much. And most of the posts are slop or low quality syncophantic drivel.

All of it, it's time to move away, go to https://outspeaker.com/, it doesn't censor nor remove anti-ai content

Surely you're aware of the various theories that AI is going to up-end the entire world.

How can you be surprised it's up-ending a geek forum first?

Sometimes there's an obvious AI comment, how is it auto-hidden/downvoted?

holy shit I've been here since 2013, I need to get a job

And what will it be in another 10 years?

Is Pangram's detection capability considered to be on the higher side? This post seems to be written under the assumption that Pangram's detection is highly effective. Is it actually considered to be on the higher side in English-speaking circles?

As someone who has been posting here since 2010, I don't blame AI. The exodus started long ago and continues to evolve over time. It is unfortunate what this place has become due to poor quality of moderation. Lobste.rs just hits better, and Reddit isn't half-bad as purported.

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Did not read the article, but I would say about 40%. Btw, you can toggle [showdead] in profile settings, then you'll see messages caught by moderators, which are sophisticated bots (writing style at ChatGPT3 level) + absolutely valid points that lash out on ruling class, SV mentality, US and Israel.

100% of the comments that I disagree with are AI-generated bots and paid shills. All of mine are human-generated.

Far less than the constant whining about AI.