Ask HN: Has HN become too skewed towards AI/LLM?
This is more of a rant rather than a question. I find HN has become overwhelmed with AI and LLM content. For someone who has little interest in this area (I gravitate more towards programming/systems topics), I find myself jaded due to the large number of submissions in this single area. Don't get me wrong, I do like what LLMs can do and find their potential to be on par with inventing the computer itself, but I feel HN has lost the balance of topics it once had.
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What would you rather see instead?
> ChatGPT helps me do something in 2 minutes that might have taken me 30 minutes to figure out
Increasing productivity by 1500% sounds pretty earth-shattering to me.
What would you rather see instead?
A "mere" 20% would be a four day work week with zero productivity loss.
100 * 1,20 * 0,8 = 96
100 * 1,25 * 0,8 = 100
Even if AI is hype, it is more interesting than other hype because it is not just empty. There is nuance to this hype. AI is real, and can do real things. People are hyping it beyond what is real, but finding where that line falls is exactly why it is interesting.
Having been around and in the tech world at the time, the general feeling is reminiscent of the buzz, hype, and cons around the World Wide Web in the mid-to-late 1990s, as people were starting to hear about it, not understanding much of what it might do, and making all kinds of bold predictions of the utopia or dystopia which might result. The reality ... matched little of any of that discussion.[1]
The Web largely addressed distribution, taking the place of both the printing press and various channels (physical and broadcast) of media distribution. Generative AI is more about how content itself is generated and evaluated, and has the added twist that it is very much a black box, including to those who create the models and systems, which will undoubtedly change what its own ultimate effects and impacts are, though again there's a likely wide range of positive and negative factors.
I follow numerous media and podcasts, on a wide range of topics and languages, and AI has been popping up with extreme frequency in many of them.
Whether it's good or bad, this is undeniably big.
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Notes:
1. An exception to the poor predictions is Andrew L. Shapiro's The Control Revolution (1999), which I'd read for the first time a year or two ago. It seems to me to have done a quite good job of exploring both the upsides and downsides of the Web, and remains worth reading, though as a historical document now.
However, I would appreciate a new topic tag/stream in the top menu bar of HN a bit like 'Show', 'Ask' etc... specifically for AI/LLM content while keeping the main page more general. I think this would benefit everyone.