Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.
Everyone is quite worried of their job. Many of us have made coding/IT our personality, what we were proud of, what the society made us feel valued. It's a big change in life... and there is no solution yet.
So everyone feels the needs to talk about it, to either get rid of this anxiety by ranting or trying to prove that it would be an opportunity, or a non-event depending on the point of view, etc
Going off this thought tangent a bit, I think many engineers could be gatekeepers because it's a pretty hard industry to get into and it's just not everybody's cup of tea. Now that AI is assisting people who wouldn't necessarily make it in the old world, it turns out business just cares about results and the gatekeepers don't matter as much anymore. It's creating quite a big split between the old guard and people who just get stuff done even if it creates 10 times the bloat.
I've always been on the get it done side to the chagrin of my peers but I've also never impressed anyone with what I've came up with so who knows.
My personal opinion is that if you don't get with the program, you're probably going to get left in the dust or going to have to split off and do your own thing where you can control what's going on but I think in general in a capitalistic society, the business just wants to get to the next thing to make more money and subpar or middling quality is good enough.
I should caveat my comment that this doesn't apply to pacemaker software and higher end software engineering
Welcome to the club, but remember: you break it, you own it. You will be expected to take part in incident response and explain why it broke and how to remediate it in the post-mortem.
Believe me, I know. I am completely an entirely responsible for a service that receives around 500 requests a second. AI assisted coding has really helped me get through a backlog of things I've wanted to do but never had the time because I was one man.
The tempo of AI development is overwhelming. Within one generation, coding/IT has gone from the most promising career for the young to profound insecurity about the future.
That's true! Even faster, for exemple for young people who started university in September 2022 thinking computer sciences is one of the most promising for job opportunities: they started before ChatGPT was released, and now they haven't yet finished their masters degrees.
Hacker News is like an enclave of soldiers who haven't heard that the war is over. Those who don't make an effort to rejoin society will be left behind after "AI" companies bankrupt all of their customers and "AI" investors move on to the next fad.
The crowd who came for the love of computers either left or switched to be the ones who were fed up with building things out of thin air, and are fine with swiping their credit cards to have someone else do the work for them while they're micromanaging that someone else (AI).
And yet, some of the most important questions that come up with technology is which one should I use, how much does it cost, what are the best practices, what serious risks should I look out for, and that sort of thing. With generative LLms we are being told use the latest, or maybe the full super intelligence expected in a few months, pay whatever, best practices are just emerging but focus on not using it too much and avoiding overload, and the risks are seriously deteriorated skills and focus which don't matter anymore anyway. And while these critical questions lack compelling answers people are seeing kids who can't answer basic questions or think things through, data centers causing massive complications, and theft of intellectual property on a grand scale. Instead we go over and over about what you can do with this technology and what human employees are good for anyway.
... and so was the Big Data! (Remember 3xVs of it? I do – but most people who made a serial promos out of it don't. AI will have its winter. Again. Another one. Soon.)
Very nice HN client and he was responsive to ideas. I was thinking of same to filter out "Democrat" "Republican" "Trump" and "Musk", partly due to upcoming elections in November.
Welcome to the next wave blogspam campaign for LLMs. Plenty of popular HN blogs have gotten good notoriety by writing about LLMs even if the content is a nothingburger. Now everyone is jumping on that trend to try to continue to normalize it.
Part 1 was flood with AI content. Now Part 2 is walk back bold claims made in Part 1 (call it a fast moving landscape) and have the evangelists flood with AI content. Extra points if you can wax on something and try to redefine it as a pro for LLMs. “What is expertise? Did you have it before? Well now it’s faster with LLMs! Forget about all the efficiency claims, expertise is the real benefit you get with statistically incorrect LLMs.”
The poster to whom I was replying was complaining about how the front page is dominated by a single topic. I don't see why this point is relevant to that.
So everyone feels the needs to talk about it, to either get rid of this anxiety by ranting or trying to prove that it would be an opportunity, or a non-event depending on the point of view, etc