If quantum computing ever goes mainstream, I'm sure you'll see a lot of articles about that as well.
Much of these are caught by users downvoting and/or flagging. I think the lack of a public moderation log makes people think the mods are constantly running around every story/comment to steer the site when really it's the users doing most of the grunt work while the moderators only step in occasionally for the more serious items.
Actually, it (LLM models) has been advancing slower for a while. This is pretty much in the mainstream. And the current approach is facing all sorts of obstacles that are not exclusively technological. The compute needs are no longer sustainable. Financially, big labs are drowning in debt and backlash against data centres has grown so much that it has become an electoral topic in at least one major country.
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.
Well... when the utter majority of articles written about topics surrounding AI are written with AI and a ton of newcomers to the reverse-engineering and even hardware hacking communities now have AI do their work for them, even the last remnants of areas that used to be "for humans only" are now contaminated with AI.
Of course people end up being very sensitive. I come to HN to read words written by humans, not fluff hallucinated by an LLM.
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?
I think it is a problem of how we changed: shorter attention spans, and a much larger volume of information to process.
Short forms win, long forms vanish, which is a tragedy in itself as good writing requires good understanding, and understanding is impossible without attention.
I'm in my 40s. I remember lcamtuf from pl.comp.security when I was just getting started playing with FreeBSD and other fun stuff.
It has some unfortunate side effects, though. Namely on a thread where people are discussing a text-heavy post that is LLM-authored, quoting a large enough block of that content appears to trigger it sometimes. Makes sense that it does, but..
AI tools are incredibly powerful, new and rapidly evolving, you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
Eternal September. Just like the usenet groups
And CB radio before that.
That’s not the argument.
> I can't tell the difference so what does it matter?
It matters because you’re not the only human on HN and others have difference preferences. “I don’t care about this particular issue” is not the same thing as “this particular issue isn’t important”.
> you shouldn't be surprised that everyone on HN is all over it.
Not the argument either. No one is “surprised” this happens, people (obviously not all, but a significant number) are annoyed by it.
That is why many users here realized that there are protected accounts that can do that and everyone else cannot. Even in rare circumstances, the moderators sometimes unbeknownst to them, may also be indirectly allowing it.
It is far more complicated and one of the reasons why users here are fed up of the constant AI deluge on this orange site and nothing is changing other than there is more of it.
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.
The negativity is rather well-earned at this point. I do still enjoy tech, but the ecosystem is no longer as infused (by ratio) with nerds doing cool things.
You're 16 years older now. You will have changed. HN has too, but looking back at how great it all was without also realising that your point of view is different means you're missing a big part of why it feels worse now. I've been here a long time too so I'm not going to claim I don't see the same thing, but I imagine someone who signed up 3 months ago won't have the same opinion as us old timers.
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.
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.
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.
That study was so bad that I can’t believe it’s becoming an actual concern that people use against data centers. They were barely able to register a temperature increase a couple hundred meters directly downwind.
> _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.
Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.
The author is most subtle or diplomatic than me and thus call them "AI vendor press releases" or "AI vendor marketing" but we know.
How can you be surprised it's up-ending a geek forum first?
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.
FUCK THAT
Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.
World-changing doesn't happen overnight. The internet didn't, either.
This is like 1991 internet.
LLMs went from a toy to highly capable (along many dimensions) in just a few years.
Which makes it very likely that in a few years more, we will be seeing crazy capabilities that leave us humans increasingly behind.
Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war...
"They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"
Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.
FWIW:
The simultaneous "it's stupidly weak" and "it's dangerously strong" is a well known propaganda technique.
I would say, the transistor was probably the biggest thing to happen in tech, full stop.
When each of those things came in, there was definitely some stumbling but I remember things being less ambiguous about being good than LLMs.
There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different.
And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.
There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction.
To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless.
It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.
I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.
The majority of articles are AI generated. And yeah at this point its futile to keep pointing it out. Human prose has been eliminated.
It's a community issue, not a technical one, but you have to intentionally create the community.
I think the visual weight of the first group has increased over time as their projects of making a bunch of money while offering nothing of value has been validated more and more by our capitalist economy.
I find tech stuff interesting to a degree, but fundamentally I’m an entrepreneur that sees it as a tool. A means to an end. I would love to find a place that still has that vibe. But anyway entrepreneur related is always a cesspool of grift so it’s hard to find.
The moment that the greater public sees these high trust networks and tries to join them, all the bad actors and their armies of bots will follow and I mourn for the recreation time of any admin who has to suddenly deal with that.
Private walled gardens seem to be the only way forward for now. If you love something, do not share it here
Start by making YC pay in a court of law for all the societal damage they've done by sponsoring/funding companies that have violated and eroded our privacy and rights.
Strip away the corporate veil.
Imprison the investors.
The only way to get back what you lost is to take it back.
Democracies require conserved stake to function. How individuals initially get that stake is a degree of freedom, but if the stake can be printed freely, the system is unstable.
For working implementations of democracy, look at: invite trees, shareholder corporations, proof-of-stake distributed ledgers, etc.
Sync is barely working, "unable to decrypt" still exists, the encryption is flawed [0] and the whole thing is effectively just Element and everyone else follows their lead.
[0]: https://soatok.blog/2026/02/17/cryptographic-issues-in-matri...
Here is a protptype of how easy it is to setup a forum on onionv3 service. Just a few commands and your off.
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
jdw64•1h ago
bigfishrunning•1h ago
jrflo•57m ago
gibspaulding•47m ago
[1] https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals
CharlesW•21m ago
The "could" isn't required here, since Pangram calls many of the evals "collaborations", and some received direct support. Results that don't favor Pangram as being among the least-worst of a questionable product category* surely wouldn't be featured.
* https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
tiagod•39m ago