News at Y Combinator used to be my preferred reading diversion: reading interesting technical stories, debates on political topics, learning things, my comfort food of the same topics repeating the same arguments over the span of a decade. Now it’s that but also 65% AI doomscrolling.
Same with me. I found a new hobby: reading pre-LLM HN. It turns out I missed so many interesting projects and discussions. Some are a bit funny in hindsight, some are inspiring.
At the same time, the current version of HN is still usable, you just need to mentally filter LLM-related stuff. It was similar with cryptocurrencies TBH.
I just press the "Hide" button under most stories related to AI; it removes the temptation for me to jump into the thread, and surfaces more interesting (i.e. not AI bullshit) submissions.
You could probably automate it with a browser extension and a regex that looks for words like "AI", "LLM", and the names of any popular companies or projects.