We need tech news sources which exclude AI
85
bbotfriendsarent about 3 hours ago 47 comments
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Its now clear that we need to preserve tech press for non AI related things. Techmeme for example is now completely overrun with AI stories.
HN is getting closer to that every day.
If AI kickback deals, phony new model ratings, high RAM prices and your surprise at how you think you coded something with AI and it was AMAZING! even though it doesnt work is all there is count me out.
We need a filter on existing tech news sites or an alternative press.
Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
Are you volunteering to fix their bugs?
I was fired from my first software job the day I showed up. It was 1982. The Apple II was quite mature the PC was on scene.
I showed up 30 mins late. The software chief fired me.
I said "why Im only 30 mins late?", he replied "because I can write a complete accounts receivable system in 30 mins."
I was 14.
And he wasnt lying. He could. Using tools available to him in 1982.
You in 2026, cannot using an LLM, maybe the sass is there. But YOU cant make it. Copy and paste and prebuilt apps will always and forever beat intellectual property theft obfuscation.
Dont get any ideas this didnt happen here. This was in Alabama.
Im still coding professionally.
Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.
This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.
By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.
That is straight-up false. It's best to not speak of things you don't properly understand. If it were true, they wouldn't hold the financial value that they do or anywhere close to it. You don't know the first thing about its utility and place in the financial sector.
Also, if you think that AI will never become sentient, then you're no technologist at all, but an offense to it. The buffoonery you speak of is present most of all in your comments.
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.
And AI needs to avoid feeding itself synthetic data. Maybe this whole Anti AI frenzy is just an attempt to feed AI human content.
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.
But you didnt grow up reading BYTE magazine.
You can also exclude github repos posted here that contain ai attribution. Filters are updated daily to catch exceptions.
The worst part about it is like 80% of the conversation is motivated speech.
That's worse than the technology itself.
Do you mean it’s puffery or scammy?
By that standard then literally everything that is opinion based (ideological) is motivated reasoning
With LLMs, everybody talks them up because they are invested in Nvidia or have other exposure (which is almost everybody considering with all the datacenter building if this industry tanks US economy is also), or because they are invested in having jobs.
specifically those who like me are very excited about the future and have been excited about every step of the way since they got started?
In my case this is all going fantastically as planned and almost perfectly on the Kurzweil timeline. so as a 40+ person who has been wanting an Oracle in my pocket forever, we are closer to that then we have ever been. why the fuck wouldn’t I be excited about that? there was nothing like this in the 1980s and that’s a fact.
The concept of the Dick Tracy watch was science fiction when I was a kid and my kids all have Dick Tracy watches casually. That’s unbelievable!
The technology is amazing. Our society is the problem. People are attributing to AI what are ultimately society problems, much like the nuclear debate a century ago.
They can all individually create and consume AI outside of this community of course.