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”.

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.

At the moment, half of this site on a given day is terrible ads with a swarm of the same people defending each other's attempts at either becoming or staying relevant - utilizing the latest gold rush topic to do so.

___

I'm not quite sure what could be done about this. The moderation does do a good job, so it's not that.

I also see that not everyone feels repulsed by the self-promotion. So maybe there is no problem and/or the problem is me. But I kinda doubt that too.

Maybe the time of voting systems for ... uh.. "social media" is somewhat over-ish? Though if I was truly signed up on that thought, I would not be commenting here but on I guess lobsters?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Eventually it will stop being novel, at which point people will stop calling it “AI”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

That said it would be interesting to have a AI flagging so you can just filter the just AI topics. Its very different from people harping on crypto or VC focus. I dislike reading the AI output when someone says they have an opinion the original source material the AI ripped content from to me is more valuable flaws in all than a normalized AI output

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

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

That's an odd thing to conflate with " written by AI".

I've posted several stories "about AI".

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.

The shape of the current Hacker News experience certainly implies an abundance of AI generated content.

A quiet approach to testing this insight is to ask the HN community itself, then assess the resulting replies for the load-bearing surface features.

But at the end of the day, aren't we all waiting to unpack our throughlines?

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.

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

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.

See also: jwz's referral redirect.

Bro, NFTs and crypto nolonger being front page is proof of a decline since 2018?

This story appears to be written by a human, and is watered down human-slop.

The Magnasanti that we call "Tech" is a little swimming pool that we first leapt into as kids, trying to splash the befuddled saps standing outside the pool. As we splashed and dunked and sprayed each other, a thrilling, unceasing mania began to build within us, and so we splashed all the harder, forcing enormous waves that slapped against the world, shocking it into noticing us. As more jumped in (or were pushed) we demanded and they forced upon us more and more and more water, until we no longer had to entice or push, the waves swept through the whole world, eating at the foundations of entire societies, once solid land crumbling into ravenous waters and spilling their hapless citizens into the vortex, spinning them head over heels, forcing them to cling to the shattered debris of their lives, and try to just-stay-above-water frantically with the rest of us, the billions and billions bobbing in the froth.

And how goddamn nice is it.... that in that raging omniflux, maybe not quite at the center, but maybe also not far from it, is a little sheltered swim up bar, its orange sign still cheerily showing the Y of Y Combinator, which used to BE one of the first kids, one of the ones that pushed and pulled and flooded and floated. They still do, of course.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this little bar, is that in all this swirling, foaming, madness, it is an oasis of stability. Absolute stability: This is from the first snapshot on Feb 21st 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb.... Look familiar? See pg's post getting knocked off the top already? Shelley might have approved.

Sometimes you get to chat with the people forcing the great devouring waves that reshape the earth, sometimes you just chat about what's new in JS tooling. If you are particularly lucky that day, you will find yourself enraptured by some hacker with the mad gleam of triumph in their eye, recounting in excruciating detail their monomaniacal pursuit of some utterly pointless pet project, and you will not consider one second of it wasted. Not even on your deathbed. Not even when compared to spending more time with your beloved.

I think it would be difficult to find an example of a community that has been stewarded as well, for as long, as hacker news, and while you do get commenters of all ages, interests, walks of life, politeness levels, and hyper-fixations upon irrelevant minutia, I've often found that for the most part you are all a lovely bunch of humans and/or AI bots.

Lest you accuse me of labiogluteal angling (a classic!), I am too old and too wet and too cold and too tired to want or need anything from anyone here, beyond a pleasant place to read.

But... I thought that just once over these decades, I'd tell you this how very grateful I am to be able to swim up to this bar, sit on the familiar stools, take a moment of respite from the tempest, and read what any of you might have to share, even -- or perhaps if I am being honest, especially -- when I think I think its absolute bollocks.

Thank you all, and may Tech continue to spin you, right round, right round, like a...