alt Hacker NewsThank you.
More money than the GDP 90% of the sovereign countries around the world is hanging in the balance, and people are taking everything OpenAI and Anthropic are saying at face value as if this isn't the financial / marketing equivalent of war, assuming they they wouldn't use every legal and shady tactic, bending every truth available to them to sway the balance of public opinion in their favor. It makes me feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. People need to wake up.
A few months ago a post claiming an amateur deciphered Linear A hit the front page and quickly got almost 500 upvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107
https://aiclambake.com/clamtakes/linear-a/
Despite the announcement originating from a blog named "AI Clambake" covering "weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks". Written by a personal friend of the author. Announced without any corroboration or commentary whatsoever from academics or subject matter experts of any kind. And, of course, not submitted to any peer reviewed journal or even Arxiv.
The author of the purported discovery was described as a "self taught AI engineer and amateur linguist". In the comments the friend insisted several times that a draft of the paper (not posted), was emailed to a top professor at Rutgers, giving it additional credibility that his friend wasn't another one of ten thousand cranks who has made the same claim over the years (seemingly unaware that cold emailing random professors found from a Google search is the first thing basically every crank does).
You would think this should have set of dozens of alarm bells for everyone, making the value of this announcement basically zero. And yet it hit the front page with the bulk of comments ecstatic that some random guy with Claude Code could do something experts in academia who spent their lives devoted to the problem couldn't.
I had become accustomed to the toxic optimism of this hype cycle in which even mild criticism leads to accusations of being a discredited "AI skeptic"/Gary Marcus/Ed Zitron type who was "coping" (?). But this was like something you'd see shared on FB linking to a .xyz domain by an elderly family member who recently drained their accounts buying Xbox gift cards to pay their IRS bill.
It feels a lot like the week or two when HN was overflowing with exuberance from the LK-99 room temperature superconductor "discovery ". You'd see post after post fantasizing about an imminent future with a world full of maglev hovercrafts, MRIs built into every phone, fusion reactors and more. But people pointing out none of that was scientifically plausible and evidence of LK-99 superconductoring was non-existent were accused of knee-jerk negativity and the typical HN cynicism and pessimism.