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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
I'm not just talking about within the context of Cambridge Analytica / USA specific things.
For a more immediate example, look at Russian weaponization of social media in Mali for a pro-russia, anti-everyone-else narrative. Often deployed against a population that has a much greater level of credulity of anything they see on social media, and lack of inoculation against it by multiple years of seeing artificially generates nonsense.
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I bet you even Windows built-in Pinball game hurt somebody and had social implications.
I reserve my opinions on microsoft fuckery for more practical and immediate concerns like the recent LG monitors and device drivers auto-installing adware.
The point is inclusion criteria are too broad
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.
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.
There are less things to talk about on HN today than ever before!
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.