HN sans AI/LLM

https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai

The fediverse still has a sense of community to me, and there are alt-webs like geminispace. All of it is anti-capitalist and anti-AI which should at least delay their eventual consumption by the rot, although holding it back entirely is impossible.

As tired as I am seeing the constant stream of LLM stories (and even worse, vibe-coded projects) on HN i'm getting just as tired of the regular posts complaining about how much the internet sucks as well. HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") but lately it seems like nothing left but vitriol and bitterness. I feel like I need to limit my exposure to this place the way I do other social media platforms because it's just too toxic.

Ah well. It was fun while it lasted.

I have RSS feeds I use to pull out my long-reads to consider knowledge, when I'm not doing wiki walks, that helps give me the 'novel world expanding hit' from the web.

I've started to go to tiny forums like forums.bladerunner.net and hobby-specific forums like rpgpub and vogons to hang out at the water cooler around others.

Awhile back, I dropped into Libera.chat's lobste.rs room and asked about this topic, which got no traction, but we ended up chatting for a bit, I was given the classic noob treatment. One user complained I was a bot at first, then asked me absurdist non-sequitors to haze the newbie, another user complained that they should close membership off from randos like me (and another user argued with him that they need new members eventually), and a third user told me not to post more than a few sentences without using a pastebin because their terminal IRC client looks ugly.

So I had a very nostalgic web 1.0 world: 1)the angry troll trying to kick me out 2) the tired mod trying not to tap the sign 3)the grumpy greybeard who never left emacs and 4) nobody really addressed the topic I was hoping to talk about.

If that's not congealed 199x internet exchanges, I don't know what is! It was very nostaglic and comforting in a way, the only thing it was missing was some erectile dysfunction pop-up windows and a gaudy internet radio widget.

The web as we know it is out there, I saw it on the lobste.rs libera chat just a few weeks ago! So maybe you have to go as far as islands like fediverse and simplex which are so isolated, most of the users there only want to talk about the tech itself, but , fellow web rando, have some hope, because I didn't go out there and I found some true internet recently, it can happen to you too!

Ask your search engine or LLM to help you find small-medium sized forums ased on hobbies you like, and start lurking, just like we used to 20(!?) years ago.

I don't think it's necessarily just the algorithmic feeds that are addictive. Even in a social media that was completely straight forward 'friend to friend' networking, you'd still have FOMO, the curiousity about what that latest ding/notification says, and much more. And I think these things are inherently addictive.

BBS' are probably a good example of this for those who around during that era. They were basic dial-up services with some basic social features, and they were extremely addictive even though it was limited to nothing but a handful of people in your geographic region, and long before 'the algorithm' was even a thought.

While there are still the small sites, they really are lost in the noise. The bigger players would probably prefer it that way, it prevent competition from getting a foot hold.

It is like trying to take on Coke/Pepsi with a new cola drink, good luck! They will do anything that can get away with so long as it keeps them on top.

> So it's difficult to find these smaller forums and get involved with them.

Because the effort put in searching is so high that I am tired before involment.

As you say, amount of noise is too large.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm a new contributor, long time reader on hn. I also have an old reddit account. I have always thought hn as higher quality than reddit, but lately I'm becoming a victim of my own irritation. I can't help but click and read comments that grate me and I'm finding more an more here.

I don't want to make this into the very thing I'm trying to avoid, so my direct question is, if my interest is in building quality software with AI (in the current form, that is LLMs), where should I go to interact with like minded, friendly people? I've literally avoided reddit like the plague for the last couple of years, but perhaps I should return to certain subs there?

I'd just like to avoid a certain style of comment, remove the noise so to speak, and just trade helpful advice and opinions from people with similar goals. I can't do that here on hn, because it isn't that sort of forum. 99.9% of ask hn posts are going to get no traction.

> is not the addictive algorithmic feeds.

The Internet has been addictive since forever. Algorithmic feeds take the blame recently because simple explanation makes brain feel good, but they are at most a catalyst. We used to hog the phone lines until someone yelled that they needed to talk to someone "IRL", we installed additional phone lines, we endured 64k (32 was before my time) just so we could get one more hit of "you got mail" or post on that forum, or moderate that community, or chat with that person. It's world-wide, "free" and instantaneous communication with anyone and from anywhere. Of course it's addictive!

Addiction is really boring and makes you really boring. That’s part of why it’s so terrible.

When William Burroughs was on heroin he would spend 6 hours or so a day just staring at his shoe.

Exactly the example I was going to use. People do not get addicted to things because those things are too enjoyable. Watching people who are addicted to slots is just depressing, they just sit there gloomily depositing every single penny they have - until they have nothing. They just have a compulsion to engage with the slots. Engage, engagement, the exact thing big tech has been trying to optimize for since day 1. It's always just been a euphemism for addiction, and they succeeded.

People report spending obscene amounts of time on social media while also saying that social media makes them feel worse. So captain obvious says why not just quit? Well that's because they're addicted to it. This is probably also why you see overwhelming support for age restrictions of social media, even amongst demographics that would otherwise be quite reluctant to give the government yet more power - people don't want their children to end up being another one of these stats.

If you’re not a math major I can translate:

“if A is a subset of X and p is in X, that does not imply that p is in A”

This is too simplistic. There are simply many many issues and topics that can't be adequately explained in a few minutes. E.g. complicated weather interactions like El nino / la nina, or economic concepts like externalities.

And furthermore, even if you can compress your information into a short period, the audience might not beable to successfully absorb the information at that rate.

There have been studies done on this finding short form content to be less effective for education.

While to some degree you are right, I disagree with your assertion that "Just because something is short doesn't mean it is bad so long as it is sculpted just right." When we are talking about distributing information, I agree more with the author that short hand content breeds tribalism and makes people lazy.

you are correct, there is a difference between a hot take and a laconic statement.

the issue is with attention-seeking. Platforms willingly turn their forums to competition for likes, instead of encouraging compromise, which is what drives interesting discussions.

Absorb and consume only some of the things.

Although now that I think of it, stopping absorbing everything, or, _absorbing nothing_, might be a good mindfulness practice.

That's indeed true, I share your concern, and I think most will call 2 hr/day rookie numbers. But there is also youth out there that do things differently. And (most) laws and understanding of the situation are changing for the better.

Based on that stat, if the average life time is 80 years, Tik tok burns up 4,800 lifetimes a day. (380,000 years) Ouch!

Every generation has its own vilified time waster. Can I truthfully say that time spent on TikTok is worse than the 4+ hours a day I spent playing Skyrim in 2011?

It does have that feeling still but one does get the sense that they are on the path toward aggressive monetization.

Funnily enough this is what both Medium and Substack were trying to do but both have ended up being sucked into the system.

Seems to be a universal thing, in a society that values capital as one of the highest achievements, it will co-opt anything that ends up trying to work against it and sell it back to you.

Well, at the base layer I think we need a CRDT of some kind. For my prototype I'm using a GSet of tuples, union for merge.

Overtop that, an API which ensures that applications conform to the CALM theorem. This is a major restriction, but it buys us a lot. CALM violations are nucleation sites for enshittification. They're the points where platform owners exert their influence.

Going without them means going without DNS, for instance, because which bits which name resolves to is the kind of coordination problem that, in our previous attempts, we allowed centralized control to solve for us. And centralized control means presenting a target to corrupting forces.

So I figure we go content addressed. And we gossip tuples of hashes around which we will use to decide which content is which, which is trustworthy, which is malicious, etc. We'll get these from humans that we've met in real life, shook hands with, etc.

We won't have to use a globally unique human friendly name to communicate about content because we won't be blindly trusting content on the basis of it having come from a server with a trustworthy name in the first place. Instead, the act of sharing will be part of the protocol: an attestation about a hash. Instead of "go to Netflix and search for foo" we'll say "here, I've recommended a movie to you" and then you can find it under the list of movies I've recommended to you. It'll have a name for humans, but its the hash that the protocol will operate on.

The lack of a need for a name resolver means we can be partition tolerant. Apps will get smaller if they're just on a LAN with two peers and no internet, but they won't break.

We can gossip this peer to peer over Bluetooth or WiFi, or we can treat Twitter or whatever as our transport protocol: just a dumb wire full of ads nobody sees.

It might never support video calls, because you're gossiping messages opportunistically and there are no service providers involved: nobody to demand that their hardware stays online and conforms to some SLA.

Latency to the other side of the planet might measure in weeks, might require the right person who happens to be taking the right flight to have gossipped the right tuple.

But these are constraints I can live with. Mostly I want to know about local goings on anyway. If it takes my peers a few days to get distant news to me, so be it.

I paid for a yearly AppBlock subscription. I tried locking up my phone (literally, in a drawer with a lock), uninstalling almost everything, and just plain old willpower, but I'm the type that needs to see money go out in order to motivate myself sometimes. It's been a few months and working well for me. In fact I only pick up my phone to see if I have any whatsapp/line notifications.

Other than that it's just an occasional google maps usage. I never browse anymore. My home PC has reddit/youtube DNS'd to 127.0.0.1. This isn't impermeable but it creates small gaps of boredom where I'm more likely to go for a walk or pick up a kettlebell. Adding up small wins is where the ship starts to turn around

I really liked my Windows Phone, mostly because it didnt have apps on it.

Although it did have facebook, it was facebook delivered by Microsoft engineers and was missing a lot of features.

That is a fair take. Personally, I use my android basically an iPod. Only offline files via VLC.

Never hopped on the streaming bandwagon for anything but the most throw away stuff. Yes, I kept all my DVD's from decades back.

The irony, or perhaps cognitive dissonance, inherent in this position is staggering to me.