no, I truly do not want to read IHeartHitler88's opinion on jews, or donttreadonme09's bright opinions about how the economy would be better if we listened to Ayn Rand. I'll be very happy when they're out of my sight. If I want to have a miserable day, sure, I'll turn it off.
Fact of the matter is, most posts on the internet are already dogshit. Now they're also populated by AI, but the point stands. Most of what you will say online is at best useless.
I know, it hurts. Most of what I say in this website doesn't matter. Even if it did, it's about the same thing as screaming into the void. And it applies to you too.
The vast majority of what we post is vapid, useless bullshit.
I've nver seen discussion of politics on forums do anything but turn into hate-filled, dogmatic posts which aren't productive at all. Every political thread here turns into the same takes and HN imagines itself as intellectually better than others. It's not interesting or productive. If talking about politics fixed things, why are politics worse today than they've ever been? There's no costs and no solutions to ranting about politics online.
The vast majority of people do not want to get on a forum to escape their life to see every more or worse content about their daily lives.
You're right, there needs to be some outlet but when people propose this it's because they are sick and tired of politics and the injection of them into everthing is not helping those politics, it just makes it worse.
Tons of people aren't political creatures and want nothing to do with politicians. This notion that more politics will fix thing isn't born out by Reddit, X, the US Congress, Brexit, etc. It's too easy to divide and manipulate people.
"We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall."
It's a mixed metaphor which doesn't make any sense. There are really very few ways in which this can be considered good writing - I guess the grammar is ok even if it is nonsense.
So let's break it down - underestimated the gravitational effects - ok, this is nice, like where it's going talking about these big competitors sucking in users, but then we have the metaphor extended to breaking point:
Network effects are a moat, but not just a moat, they're a wall (which is really not anything like a moat). So which of these 3 things are they, and why are we mixing the metaphors of gravity (pulling in customers), moats (competitive moat) and walls (walled gardens).
It's just all a bit nonsensical and the kind of fuzzy prose that seems superficially impressive without actually saying anything meaningful in which LLMs excel. Go try generating an article from just the heads in this article, and see how similarly it reads.
If you want your gradation to work, the items need to be similar and progressively stronger. That's why it doesn't work. A wall is not "stronger" than a moat. "Not a fence, a rampart" would work.
Compare to the canonical example from Cyrano de Bergerac: ''Tis a rock! ... a peak! ... a cape! -- A cape, forsooth! 'Tis a peninsular!'
That’s the entire point - network effects are commonly discussed as being a moat (people can’t cross without difficulty) but are actually a wall - people can’t cross and can’t view the other side. Seems simple and straightforward to me.
Walls are crossed just like moats, they were also used in tandem, they are not natural opposites.
Also the problems here stem from mixing metaphors between things that attract and repel, and mixing up attracting customers and repelling competitors without clear explanation.
That’s what makes this bad writing and a classic example of LLM slop which people are willing to make post-hoc excuses to try to make sense of. It doesn’t make sense because sense was not involved in the making of it.
In a castle for defence, yes similar in function but not form and often used together not one or the other.
In business metaphors no they are used for different things and also when you create a metaphor you should stick with it, that’s what makes this jarring and weird.
"Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall." is a VERY ChatGPT way to write. It's not proof, but the parent is right that this smells a bit of AI writing.
Not to the same extent at all. If you use ChatGPT for a while, you'll see it writes like that very frequently. Humans do write like that sometimes, but not with anywhere the frequency that ChatGPT does it. That's weak evidence for it being ChatGPT.
Suppose ChatGPT uses a semicolon more often than an individual person. On a pageful of comments from many random people, someone using a semicolon doesn't mean they're a bot even if 100% of their comments on that page includes one.
> It behooves you to not write like that if you don’t want people dehumanizing you.
I have to strongly disagree with you on this. It behooves us (as a species) not to degrade our own manner of speaking and writing simply because of a (possibly temporary) technical anomaly.
In my view, it would be really, really sad to lose expressive punctuation or ways of constructing sentences simply because they're overused by AI.
I, for one, won't be a part of that, and I hope you won't, either.
I think a human would have split the "it's not this, it's that" type of sentence into two separate sentences that could be more descriptive. This is a blog post, not a tweet, so there's no length constraint.
If they wanted to keep it to a single sentence, they could have used a a word like "rather" to act as a separator between moat and wall.
I noticed how much basic stuff is getting upvoted that confirms people's priors. I guess HN has always been this way, but it doesn't speak well of a community that views itself as thoughtful.
It's frustrating watching this topic turn into culture war.
You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers.
I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.
The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype.
MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train.
Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything.
I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.
Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.
Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?
I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.
It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"
Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.
But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.
All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.
That's the most recent time. But I've bounced around all the LLMs - they're all superficially amazing. But if you understand their output they often wrong in both subtle and catastrophic ways.
As I said, maybe I'm wrong. I hope you have fun using them.
Yes. And, again, they look amazing and make you feel like you're 10x.
But then I look at the code quality, hideous mistakes, blatant footguns, and misunderstood requirements and realise it is all a sham.
I know, I know. I'm holding it wrong. I need to use another model. I have to write a different Soul.md. I need to have true faith. Just one more pull on the slot machine, that'll fix it.
The web? GLP-1s? 5G? The newton was mega-hyped, failed but Apple came back with the iPhone. All the dot com failures that eventually became viable businesses (so viable in-fact that sfgate has to reach back 26 years to write their stinkpiece [1])
Hype is often early, in 10-20 years we'll start seeing the value as the rest of the world catches up
Why do you think that solar+battery technology or MRNA vaccines haven't been written about in excited, hype-filled ways? If a technology is successful, then looking at past accounts of that technology and why it will change the world don't come across to you reading it now as hype, they come across as a description of something normal about the world.
You're attributing a whole lot of agency to things that might have different factors.
I can't downvote becuase though I've read HN since 2007ish, this is a new account. I would, however, probably downvote threads like this becuase out of all 600 comments, I don't think very many people have learned anything and a lot of blatantly false and sometimes racist stuff has been shared by people of every persuasion. I don't think these discussions are productive at all, but it makes people feel good because they're "fighting" for a cause, but they're still just a rate in a cage.
Is the cause of Gaza or Israel bettered by this comment section?
These discussions are absolutely necessary because it’s the best we have to stay informed. If accuracy and credibility were more important we would have foreign journalists there on the ground providing factual information.
> Is the cause of Gaza or Israel bettered by this comment section?
Absolutely the cause of Gaza has been bettered by the thousands of comment sections. Again, the US wouldn't have bought TikTok if it didn't.
r/thedonald boosted the cause of Trumpism, posters on X have boosted the cause of extreme right wing nationalism in Europe. Discourse matters, that's why so many try to influence it. Reputation with the masses matters, that's why countries like KSA spend hundreds of billions on trying to shore it up.
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