HN user
Costs will continue to come down. That's how technology works. They will continue to come down further and further until they cross the threshold and become negative, and when that happens, instead of it costing you money to use GPT 5.5, you'll actually receive money! LLMs will become magic money generating machines, and I personally can't wait.
Why are the leading models capable of regurgitating full copyrighted works such as "Harry Potter" and "On the Road"? Did they hire someone to type those out for them?
I wanted to know my real score so I intentionally picked the answer most likely to be wrong in those instances.
Not always. I once got accused of cheating at University because my take-home assignment was so much better than my in class work. At home there was no pressure to perform. I could practice and try things.
It was a "Keurig", and I had to put a pod in it and wait a few seconds. Is that not espresso?
I make espresso at home by grinding/tamping it myself so I admittedly don't know much about the pod version or whether that still counts as espresso.
I did go to an American coffee house while I was there. It was called something like "Phil's" and there were no lattes to be had.
Really? The Last time I was in an American office, there didn't seem to be any milk around. They had an unrefrigerated bottle of "creamer" next to the coffee machine, but I was too scared to try it. I'm still not sure what it is, or how I'm supposed to use it.
I’ve been trying to ask people a different question: sure, we’re more productive now but to me, the AI era is only serving to plunge us deeper than ever into producing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. And for what? What’s it all for?
Many devs here have stated that the fun part for them is seeing the end product, not the act of creating it. Using AI is an act of need satisfaction.
Unfortunately, cloning a GitHub repository or downloading a Squarespace template doesn't hit the spot, because you can see exactly where the code came from, so your brain knows you were not the one responsible. AI's greatest feature is that it obfuscates provenance. You can now happily clone that repository or download that template without the feeling that you're cloning someone else's repository or downloading someone else's template.
On the other hand, one of my recent launch posts received comments such as "this is the sort of thing that is now possible with AI!", when I didn't use any AI at all.
This still means that 40% of consumers aren't turned off at all. That seems promising for AI bulls.
The fact that anything I post online will now get slurped up by a machine and regurgitated for people who have no idea it was my work that made their prompt come to life.
I get where you're coming from, and I agree to some extent, but I do think our tendency to weight criticism more favorably than praise (as if praise is "chaff" and criticism is automatically valuable) can be dangerous. This negativity bias unfortunately led me to adopt less-than-optimal ways of working in my younger years, because I assumed the people offering me criticism knew what they were talking about, when this wasn't always the case.
So while criticism can be valuable, I think it's worth reflecting an equally critical eye back at the person who is offering it, as upon closer inspection they may not be worth listening to at all.
I'm sorry to hear that. If it's any consolation, people often say I act like an alien pretending to be a human. Maybe it's just the price I pay for being an inquisitive person.
One time a project I made appeared at the very top of the front page. It attracted many negative comments. Some saying it was barely usable. Others saying I'd built it wrong, and offering half-baked advice on how I should have done it instead. That project later went on to get me lots of work and recognition, and even won me a few industry awards.
HN posters tend to be overly critical, often tripping over themselves to demonstrate how they're smarter than the creator of whatever it is they're commenting on. In my experience, they rarely are.
I might be the only person at my job that doesn't use it, but it feels like I'll be found out by upper management sooner or later. Maybe I'll need to use a library I'm unfamiliar with, I'll take longer than expected to grasp it, and then people will start asking questions. Every time a manager puts a random call in my calendar, I'm worried it's going to be about this.
This is good PR for them. They get to tweet about how scary and powerful their models are in the lead up to their IPO.
People talking about "flow" and using AI as a "tutor" are missing the point entirely. The beauty of AI is that you don't need a tutor anymore, and you don't need flow. It's like asking how best to use a combustion engine to improve your horse riding ability.
You're conflating engagement farming and rage-baiting. Engagement can be both positive and negative. I can't find any online sources that agree with your definition.
Here's one that I think sums it up pretty well:
"Engagement farming refers to a range of deceptive practices on social media designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and followers."
"Engagement farming employs various tactics to exploit social media algorithms, with the intent to appear more popular than actual user interest would warrant. Examples include posting controversial content to provoke emotional responses, repurposing successful posts without originality, and using automated systems for mass liking or following." [1]
If you don't think this is happening on HN (especially to mass downvote posts) you're naive.
[1] https://www.isme.in/engagement-farming-prof-sriram-prabhakar...
HN rewards engagement in the form of upvotes. If you make a post or comment with the intention of getting upvotes, you're engagement farming. I hate to break it to you, but there are many people doing that on this website.
Why do you think all engagement farming would result in downvotes? You think HN posters are so keen at sniffing out bad actors that they would never reward them by accident?
It feels like you're being willfully dense about this. I can see why the other person accused you of being AI.
Why would anyone "engagement farm" on HN? That's crazy.
All sorts of reasons! One is that when you reach 1000 karma, you gain the ability to downvote comments.
You seem like a smart person. I'm sure you can think of some reasons why that might be useful.
Have you tried Claude Opus 4.7
I mean, I'm just reporting my experience. You're saying you think it's been generally negative over the years? Like, up until now?
HN has been very pro-AI over the last several years. It's only swung back slightly the other way recently. I suspect this is due to tensions in the gulf causing some institutions to reallocate their investments, which results in reduced bot activity.
It would be free labour! Truly crowd-funded development.
I'm picturing something like folding@home, but where people donate their spare tokens to a service, and those tokens get distributed amongst all open source projects on GitHub. You don't think that would be cool? Like, someone might initialise a repo with only a readme and a to do list before they go to sleep, and then wake up to a complete software ecosystem that looks as if it's been in development since before they were born. Like, so much code that no one person could possibly understand it, and it all happened overnight while they were sleeping!
Their loss.
Think about it. Anthropic just reported that their codebase is now improving itself. We're moments away from every open source repo being able to do the same. Think of it like torrenting — you'll be able to open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days.
Ladybird doesn't know it yet, but they just left themselves in the dust.
It's pretty crazy that a company like Anthropic no longer needs to hire Software Engineers, because their software engineers itself. If that's not a break through I don't know what is!
edit: it looks like I was wrong and they're still hiring many software engineers. Not completely sure why that is just yet.
This story is part of Science’s AI in Science Reporting Initiative, which is supported by Ray Rothrock & family.
This excessively pro-AI article brought to you by private equity.
So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???)
I mean, Github Copilot's pricing just went up considerably, so I guess they were right?
"Inference is cheap" is a common refrain on here. I was hoping one of the people who regularly spouts this phrase would pipe up and tell me why it's suddenly so expensive.
Also, to answer your question, I think a good baseline for "cheap" is probably whether you can charge the end user enough to make a profit and not have them complain about the price of your service, as they're currently doing. If you can't do that, you're probably not even in the ballpark of "cheap", so it's not worth getting any more specific.
Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?
NFTs? My company had nothing to do with blockchain but I ended up working on NFT integration regardless.