Comment by dang
11 days ago
Unfortunately your comment is doing the same thing, just at a different level—something like this:
- I am a thoughtful technologist, building real things for real people, concerned about others and the social impact of my work;
- they are greedy and ignorant, destroying society for short-term personal gain, no matter what the consequences.
It's human nature to put badness on an abstract them, but we don't get anywhere that way. It's good for getting agreement (e.g. upvotes), because we all put ourselves in that sweet I bucket and participate in the down-with-them feeling. But it only leads to more of what everyone decries.
First off, no, it did absolutely not do the same thing. It was a polemic question, sure, but it was a specific criticism of a technology and its proponents.
I did not make any claims about myself at all, until I was separately accused of being something or other by someone projecting onto me whatever it was they needed to feel better about themselves.
Second, you have rate-limited me with the "posting too fast" thing so I couldn't reply to your comment or other ad hominem, even though I was posting at a rate no faster than the discussions about OpenSCAD and FreeCAD I had been involved with earlier (considerably less, I would say).
It's IMO really classless to use your administrative privileges to silence people after you accuse them of something but before they can respond, but I am not surprised to see that.
I will repeat again: I think it is really clear to me, and really to everyone I have me outside this bubble, that there is no fine distinction to be drawn between content generating AI projects that are "good" and those that are contributing to "slop". It's all slop-generation; e.g. NotebookLM is no better or cleverer than Midjourney.
Every tool HNers are excited about is going to be used to make the world's culture, and the web, worse.
I'd encourage you and those reading to consider this.
Sure, you can't make much of a change by yourself. But you don't have to be part of what amounts to inflicting automated cultural vandalism on an unprecedented scale.
Goodbye.