[jdthedisciple]

It's incredible how negative and dismissive the comments in here are while here I am thinking the model actually looks impressively capable.

But then again I heard the downers have always been the first to leave their dung comments here so let's see...

[ra]

It would be interesting to see some time-series sentiment analysis of HN. Subjectively it feels like there's much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong.

[speff]

You may like this old comment by dang who did this type of analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 (2020)

[roenxi]

Bunch of software engineers are worried about their future employment prospects.

[deadbabe]

IMO it’s best to just stop worrying and embrace it as the end of days for the field.

These are the last good ol’ days you will have before it’s all over. Worrying about it won’t change the future. Just try to focus on all the good AI does.

[ryanchants]

A lot of us spent substantial parts of our careers automating other folks out of jobs. But now that it's come for us, we're upset.

[indymike]

It's not that as much as the usual something new, complain about rapid change.

[rclkrtrzckr]

s/software engineers/filmmakers/

[deadbabe]

filmmakers have the most to gain here, now anyone with a good idea for a story can just prompt out their own full length movie or tv show.

[CamperBob2]

Before AI: 90% of everything was crap

After AI: 99% of everything is crap

... but there will be >10x more of it, so we'll ultimately end up with more good stuff.

[taneq]

But since our capacity to experience stuff can't keep up with the sheer quantity of stuff, 99% of the stuff we see will be crap, even if there's technically a larger amount of good stuff in absolute terms.

[grosswait]

Add in time zone of the commenter and potentially some really interesting data emerges.

[azinman2]

Such as?

[mdp2021]

> time-series sentiment analysis [...] much negativity on HN these days, I hope I'm wrong

Depending on the members, there certainly is. Put aside the "dismissers", those who have a habit or a hormonal reliance to cast a "meh". Those who objectively assess according to the input that the development of facts provide may bend their "apparent mood" accordingly. This may be more evident here because in brighter times we may be more inclined to post and submit about more idle intellectual beauty ("complications in ancient clocks"), and in darker times it makes sense that we are more focused on the problems.

[globular-toast]

Personally I'm just bored of AI releases. I kinda dread it because it'll hog the front page of HN for a couple of days and it's just the same comments every time: people showing what it generated, people signalling that they aren't luddites etc.

For me this is like announcing a slightly more efficient form of coal-powered steam engine. Great, but it's still running on coal. I'm excited about moving beyond coal to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. Current "AI", based on machine learning, is just recycling existing human works: books, films, code, forum posts etc. But those works, like the coal, is going to run out. We've decided to stop making new things and just burn the coal that's already been deposited.

[impossiblefork]

It's probably actually good, but after this stuff with Qwen-Image-3 and it's ability to things like render images that look like they were rendered with LaTeX or compose many things side by side or in depth, maybe it's perhaps not totally in the right direction to only focus on visual stuff.

[walrus01]

I'm a person who is making extensive use of current-gen "smart" LLM for coding tasks and building automation tools, doing some of the drudge work of gluing disparate open source things together into new projects. I'm fairly optimistic about that. Particularly when you have a good harness setup and you know enough about the subject matter to understand when a model has gone into some dead-end of reasoning or has built something that's not quite right.

At the same time, I can see social media is being flooded with absolutely horrid AI slop images and video. I'm much more pessimistic about the practical beneficial real world use of totally artificial image and video generators. It seems the uses that these things are put to when they get into the hands of millions of people are detrimental to society and not a benefit.

[icantevenhold]

Only the enlightened tech elite should have access to such sophisticated technology - we can’t expect the uneducated masses to not misuse them

/s

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, really, masses are fine. I mean gross and boring mostly, but fine. Problem is when entrepreneurs get their hands on such tech, because they invariably put it to use for scamming and cheating people (read: marketing). It's the business people who are flooding social media with AI slop, for example.

[icantevenhold]

Yea but that’s a fad - people are already fed up with the obvious slop. I don’t think it’s something we will see a lot in ~1-2 years. Marketers will continue to hop on the next big trend just like they always did and all the current slop will become a different flavour slop.

[drsalt]

none of this is exciting compared to holodeck in star trek

[NitpickLawyer]

> in star trek

Heh. On the other hand, we are seeing so much negativity around "AI", while we have access to something as close as possible to the "universal communicator" from trek. There are now several CotS things you can buy that basically serve this purpose. You can walk into a mall, buy one, and travel to the most remote place on Earth, speak in your own language, and almost anyone else can speak in their own language, and through technomagic the two of you can communicate. And yet there's so much pessimism...

[TeMPOraL]

Yup. People still don't believe when I say that we've cracked universal translation with LLMs. That's despite the proof being in their hands; anyone with any SOTA multimodal LLM app (read: Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini) with "advanced voice" / "live mode" can test it on the spot: just launch it and tell it will hear multiple languages and its task is to translate what it hears in one language to the other, and vice versa.

[muppetman]

Advertisers love these sorts of reactions.

I see nothing here but them TELLING us how great it is. Not showing us.

[jdthedisciple]

> Not showing us

Have you watched the 46s video full screen on a monitor and not marvelled at the incredible 4K detail of the FPV motorcycle racing clip?

[jarjoura]

Given that Martin Scorsese is now an "advisor", I suspect BFL will continue to position itself as the research lab for filmmakers. This video model, if comparable to Seedance 2.0 won't really make sense as a slop generator, as it's too expensive for that, but it would be part of a projects VFX pipeline.

[vouaobrasil]

It's possible it's because some people care about the consequences of what we're doing as a society beyond the mindless satiation of curiosity. Nothing wrong with curiosity in my books by the way, but I do think isolating it the way we've done in the technical fields is a dangerous and irresponsible attitude.

[user43928]

As I understand it HN is a community for hackers to discuss interesting and curious topics.

Pessimistic opinions on the labor market, views about society and politics that border on the dystopian, as well as exaggerated concerns about datacenter environmental impacts, all seem like a poor fit for this website.

[walrus01]

It would be a very uninformed world view and naive to say that the people who build and implement cutting-edge technology shouldn't be thinking about its societal implications and dangers. Or even considering more basic things like making sure it doesn't hurt anyone. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you always should do a thing.

Anyone ever taken a CS course that includes extensive discussion of the Therac-25?

[user43928]

My issue with comments around the impact of AI is that often they are just not interesting.

What substance is there beyond "I don't like it, and I think it is a negative for society", typically delivered with what I perceive as a self-righteous attitude?

[ryandrake]

> My issue with comments around the impact of AI is that often they are just not interesting.

To quote the movie, that’s just your opinion, man. To me, the impact of technology on society is 100X as interesting and important than the technology itself. Tech does not exist in a vacuum. And we don’t invent it for its own sake. The major point of AI (maybe the only point of it) is what humans will do to each other with it. And like it or not, not all of those things are positive.

[user43928]

That not all of the tech's applications are positive seems obvious, and hardly makes for interesting discussion.

Is there something in particular that you think would be interesting to discuss here?

[walrus01]

My criticism is specifically with the use of text-to-image and text-to-video generators that will create fully artificial video and image content. I've seen the uses that these tools are being put to in 2025/2026 for electoral manipulation, social issue manipulation and it leaves me with a very distasteful impression.

You will not see me leaving comments such as this, for example, on the release of a "strong in coding tasks" tool like GLM5.2.

I actively go out of my way to avoid patronizing businesses that advertise with AI slop generated images now, AI slop restaurant menus, and so forth.

Whether you want to interpret a desire for authenticity as some sort of self-righteous attitude is up to you. There's a lot of people that share my opinion, and a lot of them that don't. There is also clearly a lot of money behind pushing AI slop images everywhere. Facebook and the various 'pages' and 'groups' that are near 90% AI slop content are a fine example of that. I'm sure a great many advertising impressions and click-throughs have been served, much revenue has been earned. Great success.

[TeMPOraL]

> electoral manipulation

That must be the poster child of the most boring and meaningless accusation thrown around new technologies (after the data center water scare, which was just plain bogus). We've heard this non stop since Cambridge Analytica nothingburger. It's all noise distracting from the one meaningful aspect of it: marketing to people is electoral manipulation, and since that's unquestionably allowed, the horses have left the barn long time ago, and futzing over the AI barn door control makes no sense at this point.

If anything, the problem that this is effective in the first place is the one to address - this translates to people still believing anything politicians say, despite decades of continued proof all the campaign promises are just plain bullshit, and stated beliefs are situational and not principled.

[lostmsu]

I bet you even Windows built-in Pinball game hurt somebody and had social implications.

[walrus01]

I reserve my opinions on microsoft fuckery for more practical and immediate concerns like the recent LG monitors and device drivers auto-installing adware.

[lostmsu]

The point is inclusion criteria are too broad

[popalchemist]

It is precisely those people who have abdicated such concerns who most need the discussion. You can not compartmentalize reality, even if you can compartmentalize your own mind. These discussions lead one closer to a relationship with reality as-it-is than as your mind would like it to be.

[mdp2021]

You must expand the view to: members here form a community of people with aggregage special skills (which the "intellectual curiosity" part itself suggests) and are operators in a real world, which we assess and discuss.

There are urgent matters, important matters, and nice matters - all relevant to us.

[Fricken]

There are less things to talk about on HN today than ever before!

[user43928]

I disagree.

We live in a time where artificial intelligence begins to rival humans in some areas.

We can now really automate things.

How interesting is that? There is so much to talk about.