[Dalewyn]

One of the most common bit of wisdom I've heard from older folks is to ignore the news. Don't read the newspaper, don't watch TV news, don't listen to radio news, etc.; they all say nothing in them is worth our time.

It's among the most useful piece of advice I've ever had.

[nomilk]

I feel like we're failing to accurately name 'news'.

The vast majority of what is offered as 'news' isn't news at all, it's gossip, schadenfreude, arbitrary drama, and frivolous feel-good stories.

'News' has a ring of plausible importance. I wish we had a more accurate name reflecting its mostly unimportant, worthless, and destructive nature.

[GuardianCaveman]

100% Agree. It's an entire article written about a celebrity or politician's tweet reacting to another celebrity or politician. It's an entire article that talks about some filler setting up the background, the actual embedded tweet, a paragraph or two quoting that tweet with filler in it, then perhaps a second reaction tweet or a bunch of tweets that random people responded with either positive/negative or both depending on what the author is trying to achieve or influence.

[lynx23]

I think you are drawing an arbitrary line to defend an industry that doesnt deserve it at all.

In my book, even the supposedly important news are pure poison for the individual, and at the end of the day, unimportant as well.

People that need to push a new or current narrative will likely disagree, but that is predictable. They dont want their hate-channel to be closed down.

[labster]

But if we take all of those stories out of the news cycle, the only national news we’d have left is The Onion.

[Dalewyn]

I unironically and sincerely believe The Onion is one of, if not the, the best sources of journalism in our time.

[Gigachad]

I’ve observed that so much of the news is published before the facts are even out. In a race to be first, they present half a story that hasn’t been verified yet. So you are left to either be outraged preemptively or just ignore the story entirely as it’s currently useless.

[wolverine876]

Could you give some recent examples, especially from news organizations with leading reptuations (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.)?

To a degree, that's what journalists should do: They are not writing a history book. They can't wait until all the facts are out or we'd never know if someone was arrested or accused until the trial was over.

[lynx23]

reptuations, that was a freudian slip, right? Reputation is obviously in the eye of the beholder... What is one persons reputable source, is a money making machine without conscience for others.

[wolverine876]

People can fabricate whatever they want. They can call a leading newspaper a child kidnapping ring. But reputation refers to something else - there is truth and people do tend strongly toward it; people make functional (not optimal) decisions as a group - that's how democratic self-governent has worked far, far better than any other form of government.

It's philosophical theory that human judgment could be just completely arbitrary and that all these arbitrary opinions have equal weight. But it's cheap theory - not good enough for the first day of philosophy class - and transparently wrong, and has nothing to do with reality. We (you included) make imperfect but not random judgments all day every day, using many skills and inputs.

> that was a freudian slip, right?

Your assertion isn't about Freudian slips.

[lynx23]

I ment "you likely typoed that word because you unconsciously dont believe in what you said", which is, stretching the coloquial meaning a bit, a "freudian slip".

But reading your text, it is probably useless to talk to you about humorous viewpoints...

[vachina]

Yeah, they use words like “allegedly” or “according to unnamed sources” to free themselves from liability in the event when what they report turns out to be inaccurate. In that case might as well not report the news then if they’re not sure.

[MandieD]

As the tagline for one of HN’s self-consciously frivolous ancestors says, “It’s not news, it’s Fark!”

[Dalewyn]

>I wish we had a more accurate name

Propaganda.

[lynx23]

This!

[haimez]

News is just what’s “New”. It’s name is already prefectly descriptive :)

[siva7]

Very true but does HN count? Would you be happier without your daily influx of GPT news and tech layoffs?

[pdimitar]

Over the course of the last 3 years I found myself clicking on less and less HN stories. This place definitely feels like it lost the inventor spirit and the clever "how to" articles. A lot of stuff is either political or has very close political outcomes, and the rest is blind hype (ChatGPT won't revolutionize almost anything, and I'll stand by my words, bookmark this comment and show it to me in 5 years, I dare you). Let's not forget the yet-another-500-comments thread arguing pointlessly about whether startups are a good format or not. Or office vs. remote. And several others (but they are not many and it does feel like a tool a la ChatGPT could have generated them).

Today I've gotten much bigger value for my time when reading about various CLI tools that process and ingest / export data (recent thread about `miller`) than all of the above, combined.

HN, I feel, became more popular, and that has hurt its quality. So yes, I started reducing my consumption of it as well. I treat it like all other news sites 99% of the time, and I am right to do so at least 90% of them. I barely find 2-3 good articles per week these days.

Soon I might start checking HN biweekly because the value proposition is just not there.

[robswc]

>ChatGPT won't revolutionize almost anything, and I'll stand by my words, bookmark this comment and show it to me in 5 years, I dare you

1. I'll actually take you up on this, because I'm interested to re-visit the discourse around launch, 5 years from now :)

2. I do agree it's overhyped to a degree. I think it will revolutionize _some_ things but it could turn out like VR. I do use it every day and I don't see a reason not to... I guess we'll see what the future holds!

[pdimitar]

My problem with the hyped up stuff, ChatGPT in particular, is that AI actually does not exist.

The practitioners of the area of course have a vested interest to argue until the end of days that ACTUALLY AI does equal ML/DL and stuff but I am like "I see no Skynet so get off my back, we have no AI and that's that". :D

But, I guess in 5 years we could argue whether certain progresses are indeed attributed to ChatGPT or is it something else entirely!

[CamperBob2]

If you don't know how your program works, in the sense that you don't know how it arrived at the answer it gave you, IMHO that's as good a reason as any to call it "AI."

The days of understanding our own code are rapidly coming to an end. As developers, we now have the same problem that the mathematical community has had to deal with for some time, as proofs become complex enough to demand large chunks of peoples' careers to comprehend and evaluate.

Prompts may or may not be the next revolution in the graphic arts, but they will be the next revolution in programming languages. I've seen more than enough to conclude that.

[pdimitar]

> The days of understanding our own code are rapidly coming to an end.

That's one possible development of events, yes. The other one is inventing DSLs on top of popular languages so we're spared tons of boilerplate; but then we'll need experts on the actual underlying languages (say C++, Rust, Lua, Erlang or anything with a good VM and/or statically strongly typed and compiled to native code) when sh1t hits the fan, which... actually can work just fine.

[netsroht]

This is why I prefer the term "weak AI". Weak AI is specifically trained to solve tasks whereas strong AI can teach itself to solve new tasks.

Whether humans are able to create strong AI is a philosophical question: While some argue that's not possible (can we be Gods?), others argue that this is the next logical evolutionary step.

Let's see if we can at least mimic strong AI when we let LLMs connect to external systems (internet, money, more energy, etc) and specifically allow themselves to fine-tune or train new NNs in general.

Time will tell.

[pdimitar]

Well comments like yours are the ones truly deserving discussion on the topic, just so you know my opinion. <3

> This is why I prefer the term "weak AI". Weak AI is specifically trained to solve tasks whereas strong AI can teach itself to solve new tasks.

Yes, we can call it a spectrum, though I'd think it's more like a multi-dimensional space. Wouldn't contest your definition though, it's as valid as all the others really.

And yeah I agree/think that the ultimate general AI is the one that can teach itself new tasks, utilize past experience even if the patterns don't match perfectly, and have some sort of sentience. And let's not forget that it must have actual goals and motivation (otherwise it'll just conclude that the best course of action is to not expend any effort and just put itself in an infinite idle loop).

> Whether humans are able to create strong AI is a philosophical question: While some argue that's not possible (can we be Gods?), others argue that this is the next logical evolutionary step.

IMO people romanticize these topics too much. The true AI will be "born" as a hyper-optimizing recursive machine (and collection of algorithms) and it will eventually get limited by the physical reality it inhabits so it'll self-balance quite fine. It's strange how much spiritual value people put into these things, though I somewhat understand; that'll be the second truly intelligent and sentient "life form" that we will know beside ourselves so some metaphysical hand-waving seems unavoidable and maybe even desirable (in terms of moral correction mechanism, maybe).

> Let's see if we can at least mimic strong AI when we let LLMs connect to external systems (internet, money, more energy, etc) and specifically allow themselves to fine-tune or train new NNs in general.

I have no doubt we'll eventually get there but my feeling is that the current "AI" area is in a local maxima and it won't crawl out of it easily.

[galaxyLogic]

It's very artificial you know. There's this connotation with the word "artificial" that it is not real, but artificial.

[username3]

Can you favorite the 2-3 good articles you find, so we can follow your recommendations?

https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=pdimitar

[pdimitar]

Eh, favorites to me really means favorites, meaning I don't want too much in there.

[IIAOPSW]

Replying here so I have a url for the remindme bot. see you in 5 years.

[x49asvk]

See you in 5 years! Though I almost agree with ChatGPT not revolutionalizing anything.

[IIAOPSW]

Depends how loosely we interpret this. Do we mean online AI language models which are part of a continuous lineage tracing back to the present chatGPT will not have revolutionized anything, or do we mean that OpenAI and their product line known as chatGPT in particular will not have revolutionized anything? Let's disambiguate now so no one says we are equivocating in 5 years. I'm understanding it to mean the former.

[pdimitar]

I mean the latter. Science progresses with big steps every now and then so it would be crazy for me to claim "AI will never exist". It's clear that eventually we'll get there.

It's a fact that somebody somewhere thought of making better bearings for their horse-pulled carriages centuries ago. That person does not get credit for modern cars' suspension systems however.

[Dalewyn]

Yup. I ignore 99% of the threads that come by here, and I wish I could do that without bothering to read the clickbaity (and generally sensationally false) headlines.

[hot_gril]

I ignore a lot of the big topics. Layoffs don't concern me beyond just knowing that they're happening.

[hot_gril]

(and of course, not getting laid off)

[collinvandyck76]

Not as much in my opinion. True, there are spikes of negative and cynical HN threads, but it's not nearly as consistently sustained as general news media.

[RockRobotRock]

HN definitely counts

[flippinburgers]

HN has changed a lot. As others have stated there is a lot of politics injected that I couldn't care less about.

[LoganDark]

Going too far in the other direction can be pretty annoying, too, though.

I'm autistic and vehemently ignore and reject most pieces of news, especially political, and that causes tons of terrible things to happen whenever some sort of spoiler gets out and I happen to see it.

It's like I'm proud of my great ignorance and having that threatened with mere knowledge sends me into a panic of some sort.

It's not just news. If I say "I don't know what that is lol" to someone, 9 times out of 10 their default response to tell me what it is (if it is some cultural/media thing) is the complete opposite of what I want, which is usually just for the other person to move on without telling.

Knowing things can't be undone, so I strive not to know most things, apparently.

[ianai]

Reply with a response that will get the response you want. If you want them to leave the topic, say something non-engaging like “ok”.

You’re likely to come across not entirely socially acceptable in either case, but that’s probably impossible to counter.

[LoganDark]

> Reply with a response that will get the response you want.

This is something that I understand, but unfortunately can't really perform for some reason. I always have to be... "honest", for lack of a better word. I will always say something that makes things worse for me because it's... just how I feel.

I used to be a pathological liar, and from a young age I had this one friend who was a living lie detector, and they trained it out of me so hard that I now obsessively tell the truth in all situations even when it would be detrimental. ;-;

[ianai]

That’s not quite lying. It’s just not being interested in a topic and being clear but polite about it.

[LoganDark]

...Maybe I didn't do a good enough job of trying to avoid that implication, but the point is not "I don't lie anymore" (implying "that would be a lie"), but rather "I now obsessively tell the truth in all situations even when it would be detrimental" (meaning "that would be omitting things I Absolutely Must Say").

In other words, even if I know just saying "ok" would probably work, I feel the need to somehow "brag" or otherwise disclose my proud ignorance, even if that only results in the literal opposite of what I want.

[whitemary]

I don't think the reason to be informed is to feel good.