AI has turned me away from HN more and more.

Most of the content is about using some data center based ML provider. My view is how so many ignore the environmental harm these constructs are doing; increasing ambient temperatures, inducing heavy metals into the water table, decreasing the access to water for human consumption in numerous drought areas, hostel ambient noise ... The wealth who are the majority finical backers do not care about these issues.

ML is a tool and hardly focused on it being able to operate as a local based solution. Frameworks are tie to expensive hardware. This creates a hyper pay-to-play scenario. While hand written coding can be done on a computer from 20 years ago. Local based solutions are the only means to decrease the wealth gap. Data center solutions increase the wealth gap.

I don't find value in ML summaries. I want to consume the answer and the ideas around them that lead to the answer. This creates more long-term value.

_Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.

I really wish there was a way to filter out discussions about AI on HN. It feels like lately they take up a good 1/3 of posts on the front page. I don't want to hear about some new AI startup.

> AI has turned me away from HN more and more.

AI has made me aware how opening a tab to HN is a compulsion I no longer truly enjoy. Especially after having made the conscious choice of leaving software engineering as a career, my time here is a mildly negative experience hoping for the random chance of finding a deeply technical post that is not about LLMs, or whose discussion does not devolve into discussion with Joe Rando on how much more productive he is lately.

Sure, it's a moral failing of mine, but by god I wish we had a little more diversity in topics.

I appreciate the way you sum up the ML vs traditional software appeal and I think it's helped me articulate why ML is so unappealing to me. The power of software has very little to do with the power of the machine it's run on (with some obvious exceptions like games and physics sims) which made it very exciting to me when I was learning to code. The same cannot be said about deep learning where more data and more compute means more power.

A lot of those environmental claims are not accurate, or substantially overblown.

Heavy metals in the water table is a new one I haven't heard before, and I'm skeptical.

Most of this is motivated reasoning by people who don't like AI for other reasons and are just looking for justifications to shut it down.

Well your point on it being wrong to interact with a whole industry sounds more like a policy and political party line. This is just nerds discussing bleeding edge things.

> increasing ambient temperatures,

That study was so bad that I can’t believe it’s becoming an actual concern that people use against data centers. They were barely able to register a temperature increase a couple hundred meters directly downwind.

> _Lobsters_ has now becoming my go-to with their posts being focused on ideas and concepts versus advertisements for large corporation ML based solutions.

Lobsters has a funny obsession with being anti-AI, but the most commented posts on the front page are usually AI related.

I might migrate if I could could an invite, but I haven't been able to find anyone on the inside.

Edit: Thank you kind stranger. I'm in.

Do you have lobsters invites?

I don't even care about the environmental aspect- it's just so...un-hackerlike and boring. Where are all the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels?

It is a tragedy that a handful of irresponsible outlier datacenter operators have soured public opinion so thoroughly in the past 2 years. For comparison, Loudon County, VA is among the wealthiest in the country and is home to the largest aggregation of datacenters in the world. Yet these datacenters don't have the externalities that are mentioned here.

Note the intersection between eyewitness accounts of noise, water, and light pollution from datacenters and those datacenter owners' noteworthy political activity. To be specific, the operators of these datacenters are notorious bad actors in many different public spheres.

Edit: the truth is obviously very painful and unpopular in this thread.