I feel like this is basically the answer. Things are constantly changing and it’s hard to predict what things have staying power and what is just a blip on the evolutionary railroad.
All this fuzzyness from Anthropic reads more like an incredibly fast growing company working in a brand new space full of uncharted waters. In other words, they are making shit up not because they suck but because that is literally all one can do.
“ I just have no faith in humanity, and do not understand why we think this is a good idea to give a browser this much access to local system resources”
As opposed to dodgy windows-only installable software from
some weird site to flash devices instead? I’ll take my chances with webusb, thanks.
I love that, in order to reprogram my very expensive model locomotive, I not only have to buy a special device (ESU LokProgrammer) but I can also only use said programmer with windows.
Yeah I could have used some other decoder, but they all have limited functionality compared to Lol sound
There's no real reason a future iteration of the LokProgrammer couldn't run a simple webserver, or connect to Web USB.
This also all applies to most PLC programmers. Proprietary crap you have to run on Windows, just to build ladder logic
I wish debates about “ai scraping my site” had more nuance.
There are multiple ways these tools access your site and only one of them is “using it for training”. Others are webfetch from chat sessions, “deep research” agents, etc. And those will have different traffic patterns. They aren’t crawlers, they are clumsy, ham handed AI agents doing their humans bidding.
Both can give a site the hug of death. Both can be badly coded. But there is much different intent behind the two and I feel it is important to acknowledge the difference.
“ If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt”
I mean isn’t that an okay exemption? If the intent is to drive devices to be less disposable and more sustainable… if it incentivizes all mobile phone manufacturers to improve battery longevity, I’d say that’s a win.
I wouldn’t even call it a loophole. The entire purpose of the legislation could be that clause
You can let the LLM create slop for you, sure. But only amateurs are using it for that. You’ll be much happier if you treat it as a tool and use it like any other, a force multiplier to take your ideas and creations and pushes them further along faster.
If you treat it like a black box used to outsource your own thinking, you are holding it wrong.
It could also be that this is an exciting new, fast changing technology that happens to directly overlap and significantly impact the core audience of the site. I don’t think any form of maliciousness or secret astroturfing is required at all.
This stuff has changed a ton of what it means to exist in this whole “tech space”. The entire software development lifecycle got put into a stick blender and is in the process of getting mixed up in new and unusual ways.
It’s super cool. I haven’t been this excited about our industry since way back when the universe was just starting to get onto dialup and I grabbed my very first mp3 or wrote my first shitty program in VB or when AJAX was just entering the universe.
I think a lot of people forgot how fast shit changes in this industry and how learning new things is one of the most important skills to being successful. Everything changes all the time.
This is a tech site called hacker news. Where else would something like this be constantly discussed?
I agree — right now it's "all eyes on AI". They are moving fast, I don't think there's some evil plan behind the scenes. They're trying to build software super-weapons, and they're trying all sorts of different things because they can iterate quickly.
Of course the articles are going to get to the top. It's all anyone is thinking about, and has been for the last few years. I keep wondering if we're going to reach some sort of inflection point where the hype starts to die down, but then another "tool" is released and everyone is convinced that this is the one that will take the jobs. It's a bit tiring, but this is the brave new world.
I think it's probably both in the end. Anthropic has a lot of fans, and combine that with excited employees and investors, they probably don't need to do much explicit astroturfing to reach top of HN.
But they also desperately need users (and the data those users bring) to build their products, and the people who do have the power to manipulate this site are on their team. And it does get tiring to see a new Claude feature with like 1 comment and 25 points right at the top, multiple times in the last two week. Keeping their needs in mind, it has begun to look like manipulation, even if the above effect could explain it.
I'm glad the technology foments it excitement for you. The idea that we can share intellectual processes broadly and implement them without the previously requisite skills will obviously change the world. That it could change the world for the better, excites me too.
But many of us have our excitement tampered by the messaging, the questionable ethics behind how it has been done, and the fact that a real % of the space is basically driven by eschatological thinking. And it especially annoys me that Anthropic is the company whose messaging simultaneously encourages that eschatological thinking, and preys upon the emotional reactions it creates.
I think it is increasingly clear--if you look at recent public sentiment and feel what is in the air--that they are a villain in this aspect. I don't think we want the people who believe they are building the future to be doing so both out of fear--of China--and gaining power through others' fear of what they are doing.
But villains can ultimately do good in the world, despite their villainy. Let's hope that is how it plays out.
I mean you aren’t wrong. It’s just I don’t think it requires any kind of vote manipulation to see why ai company releases hit the front page. Back in browser war days it was the same thing.
Oh my god have Anthropic products been absolutely saying everything is load bearing for the last week or so. Literally ever other paragraph has “such and such is load-bearing”.
> You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.
See also Covid-19. Same shit only waaaaaaay more batshit insane and waaaaaaaay more crazy 24-7 fear mongering.
All this fuzzyness from Anthropic reads more like an incredibly fast growing company working in a brand new space full of uncharted waters. In other words, they are making shit up not because they suck but because that is literally all one can do.
reply