I can very clearly remember how this kind of mystification looked like back in "hacker era", "web", then "Web 2.0", then "Web 3.0", then "crypto / crypto flavor of Web 3.0" - during all of those waves hackernews and, earlier, slashdot communities stayed mostly sober and grounded. It was most often the non-engineering crowd mystifying things right and left, opening doors to "societal changes" level of interpretations and guesswork. I remember how any hype creating or mystic news were rejected at the level of basic engineering intuition: that's bull, because that's not how this works.

This is totally not the case with LLMs. We get links like "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?" going viral, we have discussions in every second thread about who gets replaced and in what exact way, we get fear mongering posts upvoted that preach AGI and call for AI regulations. Which is the same exact content we had during Web etc times about "dangers of the machine" from people who have no idea how "the machine" works.

But we do.

What is happening, HN? Has society changed? Has the engineering part of this community been diluted so much? Are engineers intentionally or unintentionally being manipulated into this kind of reactive and mystical thinking?