YHK - yet another hacker news clone

If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

81 points signa11 1 hour ago 18 comments

popularonion 1 hour ago | parent

> I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to "do it myself".

> You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.

This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor?

Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.

inerte 1 hour ago | parent

Plus Stack Overflow was gamified. "Nothing to gain" except 12 different artifacts showing how awesome you are.

beej71 52 minutes ago | parent

I dunno man. In it's heyday, SO was pretty fucking awesome. IMHO. Just a massive amount of good information concentrated. And some bad, but a damn sight better than random Google searches even back then.

Forgeties79 33 minutes ago | parent

ChatGPT also isn’t going to tell you when your idea is a bad one and will happily assist you in your (unknowing) efforts to brick your computer. So there’s that.

Cider9986 1 hour ago | parent

On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone.

AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.

zorpner 58 minutes ago | parent

Humans are social animals. It's true that not all of these interactions re positive, but so much of what drives us is not even related to acclaim or flattery, but merely interaction in a general sense. In a sense this is one of the true perils of LLM-style interaction (going back to Eliza, I guess) -- that we can not only potentially satisfy that drive mechanically, but do so in a way that's structurally produced by a commercial entity. Do you think that the models talking to you have your best interests at heart? They don't have any interest in you at all.

iamnothere 46 minutes ago | parent

In this sense, running (and heavily tuning) a local LLM could be seen as a form of self-authorship.

Not that I find them all that useful, still.

altcognito 41 minutes ago | parent

We had better have even more time to help each other as a result of LLMs, or what are we even doing here?

I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.

vasco 28 minutes ago | parent

No increases in productivity ever led to less working hours, only organized action. We work more hours than miedeval serfs.

isolay 20 minutes ago | parent

Fewer working hours.

dofm 11 minutes ago | parent

My personal rule as a recovering grammar school victim: don’t correct nits if you’re not going to add some cool trivia or at least provide some way to navigate the same confusion next time.

Less/fewer is probably a lost cause, and a little bit of why is this kind of useless correction. If those who correct can’t or won’t explain why one is correct over the other, then it isn’t.

Retric 13 minutes ago | parent

Serfs had few incentives to work more hours.

Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.

You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive.

Arainach 18 minutes ago | parent

The people who control the LLMs would rather be 0.1% richer than have any/every other person on the planet feel better in any way.

NL807 12 minutes ago | parent

The flaw with this argument is the assumption people who control the LLMs is the sole problem. Plenty of people use LLMs for personal gain at the cost of others.

sciencesama 40 minutes ago | parent

Every scope of help commoditised. Help for late night drop. Uber ! Need for friendly food door dash !

runarberg 33 minutes ago | parent

At some point LLM users and proponents have to come to terms with the fact that this has all been a massive theft of labor, including donated labor and mutual aid in forums such as Stack Overflow.

Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.

Cider9986 14 minutes ago | parent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622042

You can't steal something that's infinitely duplicatable. Also, AI training is fair use, not that I believe it should have to be.

runarberg 2 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]