As an aside, the variety of examples in that other thread is impressive. Here are some that I noticed:

Fixing my furnace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417845

New software for a retro keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418158

Customizing my camper van: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417379

Porting my astronomy app from an old Nokia phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419242

Fixing my kid’s science fair project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419364

Unborking the family printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419480

Learning to draw anatomy (!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418716

Lowering my electrical bill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417949

Making classic guitar pedals programmable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418006

Avocado armchair guy victory lap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417658 (<-- oops, wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418274)

Putting an overlay on enemies in a video game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420635

It just goes on and on. I was a little nervous when I saw that post originally, but it's amazing what happens when a title is somehow just right.

Thanks for putting it this way. I have to admit I was really astonished by the question as I feel like HN is very much pro-AI at least in the sense that there is more AI promotion on HN than there is AI acceptance among people in the real world. It's been months if not years since most of the posts are about genAI, and in a largely favorable way. It's actually quite fascinating that for some people it feels like the opposite.

While I agree that it's "divided", I wouldn't say "simply". Mentioning AI brings out a sharply negative side of HN that I had not seen before 2023. It is the only subject where, when I have shared that I built something with it, I have gotten derogatory comments claiming I am inexperienced, unintelligent, and that the thing I built (a hobby project) is unimpressive or embarrassing. This has never happened in the decade+ I have previously been on HN, happily sharing other things I built with other interesting technology -- and many of those things were much worse than what I built with AI!

I did see your thread earlier today and I admit was pleasantly surprised. Maybe HN is turning over a new leaf? I hope so. I honestly considered switching to X it was getting so bad :P

It’s not even a dichotomy, A vs B, especially when you consider “AI” is incredibly poorly defined. There are many new technologies available, and I have nuanced opinions about all of them.

I’m happy that my friend who works in plastics manufacturing can move his monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet to something more predictable and maintainable. I’m deeply annoyed by my coworker who’s trying to put a chatbot in our UI.

Thanks for pointing it out. I guess HN is at worst ( or best ) 70% Anti AI. I personally put it roughly 50/50. There are plenty of post and comments suggest how AI is good for something and but also pointing out its flaws, rather than simply just Anti AI.

I can tell what HN is Anti though, in 80/ 90%+ if not higher. Ads, Oracle, Facebook, MPEG Codec, MySQL,

Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.

And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?

HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is.

EDIT: And now it's back.

Also, "AI good" and "AI bad" are very silly camps to describe a topic.

You might have seen some comments by me receiving votes lately that some might classify as anti-AI. I'm not for banning it, I use it at work and at home, I learn about it.

Here a few positions I hold, for example:

- There is a fundamental deviation between what we should be seeing if we were surrounded by 100x enabled engineers and reality. We're not seeing previously untackable, complete open source projects pop up everywhere like someone coding an open-source, iphone-compatible OS in a year, or companies providing 10x more. Just POCs and small apps. LLMs have been around enough that this is pointing towards inflated claims of success, even if they are actually useful, which I'm not denying.

- LLMs provide users with a strong psychological reward (making mental workload disappear). They do so only sometimes, in a chance-based outcome. Anyone with a passing interest in psychology should realize how similar that is to the mechanics of gambling, and thus how risky it is that a user misjudges when it is reasonable to use them. Mind that I'm not saying that the tool isn't worth it, just pointing at a source of major deviation between perceived and actual outcomes that few people consider.

- There are a lot of signals that humans rely on that are broken by LLMs. "Well formatted text -> text written with careful consideration" no longer works. "Large document -> significant effort" does not hold. "Good grammar -> educated speaker" is broken as well. "decent code practices -> the PR is safeish to approve" no longer true. Some of these barriers being broken can be enablers for people, but on the whole this is going to disrupt society in fundamental and unpredictable ways.

- I think the industry is drawing unreasonable and dangerous conclusions from the advent of AI. As some commenters pointed out, if code generation is now cheap we should be seeing engineers freed to deal with non coding tasks like automated QA, user research, architecture or design, and being more able to handle bug resolution for example. We are instead seeing a push for _creating code faster_, and proposing ignoring tasks like review and quality control in pursue of speed, which is fundamentally inconsistent with speed being less of a problem. To use a flawed analogy, if your car is now 10x as fast you should be putting way more attention to how you steer, rather than asking everyone to go pedal to the metal.

- LLMs products have the potential to be extremely user hostile if enshittified. We could have probabilistic insertion of promoted material. We could have subtle political steering of people. We could have a model's performance reduced without much SLA recourse. We are not tackling those issues before they appear when it is obvious that they will appeare, and society will pay the price.

If you read with attention you'll see that no point of mine is arguing against AI usage. I don't want to bury my head in the sand and pretend LLM's don't exist or are useless. I don't want to ban them. I'm just not willing to fully allign with marketing speech and turn my brain off.

Saying that society is divided on AI therefore HN, being society, should also be divided is an absurd take.

I expect the people in here to be domain experts, understand simple concepts like closed loop water cooling, deterministic vs non-deterministic systems, maybe some basic concept of how a GPU and vector math works and most notably the exponential pace that it’s becoming both more capable and more efficient.

Unfortunately, like OP that’s not the case and it’s the same talking points I could read in my local paper. Then everyone’s talking points change in unison like they are waiting on the latest instructions from headquarters.

HN crowd is quite pro-AI. Many reddit forums like r/programming have simply banned AI topics.

  "Content about AI and LLMs are considered off-topic with the sole exclusion of deeply technical content about implementation."

Except on one side, it's apparently perfectly acceptable for folks to fulminate, make llm generation accusations, and brigade with minimal to no moderation attempts.

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