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We need tech news sources which exclude AI 105 points by botfriendsarent4 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 55 comments Its now clear that we need to preserve tech press for non AI related things. Techmeme for example is now completely overrun with AI stories. HN is getting closer to that every day. If AI kickback deals, phony new model ratings, high RAM prices and your surprise at how you think you coded something with AI and it was AMAZING! even though it doesnt work is all there is count me out. We need a filter on existing tech news sites or an alternative press. marcus_holmes3 hours ago | next[–] I've been coding professionally for over 30 years. LLMs have changed the profession more in the last 12 months than anything else has in all that 30 years. I would totally understand your position if it was, say, crypto that you wanted to exclude. The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam built on some interesting but not very useful maths, and there's nothing to redeem it. There are no interesting tech discussions to be had there. And sure, there are plenty of AI scam artists out there (most seem to have switched from Crypto experts to AI experts in the last couple of years). But the underlying tech that is being used in AI is not only interesting, but also useful. I'm seeing people who have never coded before produce some cool apps. OK, they're not production-grade, but that's still new people doing new and interesting stuff with this tech. My own workflow is profoundly different from what it was a year ago. I've seen old problems that were really incredibly difficult to fix collapse completely using this tech. It's a useful tool if you're developing software. I suspect there are other areas of human endeavour where it will be useful too. I very much doubt it will replace all human work, or become sentient. I think we need to separate out the AI business, which is its usual mess of scam, exaggeration, and buffoonery, and the actual AI tech, which is producing some really useful tools. reply kazinator1 hour ago | parent | next[–] OP does not want to censor AI topics from every news source. They want news sources which provide access to topics that exclude AI. (Without necessarily those same sources excluding AI entirely.) This is legitimate. There are many topics in computing and tech. Not wanting to read about AI in every category is much the same like not wanting to see a C++ forum filled with threads about Angular. reply botfriendsarent1 hour ago | parent | prev | next[–] You speak it gracefully. People who have never coded.... Are you volunteering to fix their bugs? I was fired from my first software job the day I showed up. It was 1982. The Apple II was quite mature the PC was on scene. I showed up 30 mins late. The software chief fired me. I said "why Im only 30 mins late?", he replied "because I can write a complete accounts receivable system in 30 mins." I was 14. And he wasnt lying. He could. Using tools available to him in 1982. You in 2026, cannot using an LLM, maybe the sass is there. But YOU cant make it. Copy and paste and prebuilt apps will always and forever beat intellectual property theft obfuscation. Dont get any ideas this didnt happen here. This was in Alabama. Im still coding professionally. reply marcus_holmes1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] An Apple II in 1982 has 256 Kb of RAM. My first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 12Kb of RAM with the expansion pack, and packed two programming languages into 1Kb of RAM. I used to write Assembler on it, and there were 3 registers and no paging at all. I wrote an timesheet tracking system for my A-level in 1986 on my BBC micro (the Atom's big brother). It took me more than half an hour, but it worked and did useful things. I'm sure it had bugs in it. So I remember this period you're describing. Your software chief was a dick, though turning up 30 mins late on your first day would be a firing offence in any job back then. We learned how to code when coding was very simple. There were no GUIs, no mice, all professional software was menu-driven. Screens had one resolution. None of these systems were networked, you only ever had to deal with one user. Security was never an issue, there was no external interface at all. Performance was usually not an issue, because everything was so simple. The OS was tiny and did almost nothing [0]. You could write software quickly because everything was much, much, simpler back then. I'm seeing people who have never coded before write useful apps in 2026, against our modern massively more complex and intricate tech stack, using LLMs. No it's not perfect, but it's improving. There is absolutely zero chance that they could write an app themselves, or learn how to do that in less than a year, like we did back in 80's, because everything is so much more complex now. [0] yes there were systems that did do all these things, but they weren't on the machines we're talking about here. reply botfriendsarent59 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] More useful than a working accounting system? Because of the disaster of screen resolutions, mobile form factors and all the previous dishonesty inherent in the past 30 years of software development? That must be really useful. The machines are not the problem. UI layout was solved 40 years ago on all windowed and non windowed platforms. Mobile breakpoints are not special. How about the browser as a "failed platform"? Seems to fit! Hardware is irrelevant. reply retired2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code. reply marcus_holmes2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life. Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did. reply aspenmartin2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models. reply zzzeek2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices. reply aspenmartin1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad? Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where? reply zzzeek12 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it. reply ares6232 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that? reply aspenmartin2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Good thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai (like the first box) Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant: 3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50 So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch. One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption. reply joeyguerra1 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I already get hired to replace/fix code built by humans. reply api2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode. reply jerf2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time. By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore. reply marcus_holmes2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time) The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it. And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services). And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been. reply bigstrat20031 hour ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] The difference between compilers and LLMs is that compilers actually work. LLMs do not produce a usable result, no matter how much AI bros try to convince everyone else otherwise. reply wild_egg24 minutes ago | root | parent | next[–] > LLMs do not produce a usable result At this point, this is categorically false. Your mental model is very out of date. The results may not be ideal but I can't say I've had a single output so far this year that wasn't usable. reply zzzeek2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work reply AussieWog932 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] I'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts. reply esafak2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Not only that but it impinges on your life; it would be irresponsible to ignore it. There goes your job while you weren't paying attention... This is the mother of all tech revolutions. There will never ever be anything as big as AI, especially after embodiment. reply OutOfHere2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] > The whole of crypto finance is an edifice of scam That is straight-up false. It's best to not speak of things you don't properly understand. If it were true, they wouldn't hold the financial value that they do or anywhere close to it. You don't know the first thing about its utility and place in the financial sector. People will try to scam others in basically every sector, even in academia. It doesn't in any way invalidate the respective sector. reply marcus_holmes2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I don't want to get into the argument here, so won't respond. reply OutOfHere1 hour ago | root | parent | next[–] You started the dumb argument, and you don't actually have any case to make. If this site didn't have policies protecting even its most asinine users, you would really hear it from me. Also, if you think that AI will never become sentient, then you're no technologist at all, but an offense to it. The buffoonery you speak of is present most of all in your comments. reply browningstreet1 hour ago | prev | next[–] Honestly. I want the AI news. I wish HN would add filtering features. I know they want us to all see the same homepage, but it’s time to let us have our tables. Pro-AI-era should be able to have a cohort thread, and anti-AI should be able to avoid it, or have a ring fence for their anti-AI discussions. We end up with some good threads on HN in both directions, but there’s a weight to early voices that can bend a posts’ comments pro or anti AI which isn’t necessarily reflective of the quality of said post. reply postalcoder6 minutes ago | parent | next[–] If you want HN with ONLY ai stories, you can invert the filter on hcker.news. https://hcker.news/?ai=include reply Curiositry4 hours ago | prev | next[–] There’s Elijah Potter’s HN sans AI: https://elijahpotter.dev/hnsansai reply thesmtsolver22 hours ago | parent | next[–] How is the filtering done? Manually or with AI? reply linzhangrun2 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] It would be interesting if this page was also created with vibe coding. reply kgwxd4 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] I fully expected that to be a blank page :) Not too far off. reply jedberg2 hours ago | prev | next[–] Look at /r/programming on reddit. They have explicit no AI policies. reply newsomix9xl2 hours ago | parent | next[–] Reddit is a training ground for AI. They are part of the "AI problem " no? And AI needs to avoid feeding itself synthetic data. Maybe this whole Anti AI frenzy is just an attempt to feed AI human content. reply jedberg2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Any public website will be a training ground for AI. reply newsomix9xl2 hours ago | prev | next[–] I disagree. The problem, if I concede there is a problem , is not new or unique to AI but problematic to the internet -fake news, fake reviews, AstroTurfing, etc. This is not an AI problem. The internet is a bad place with lots of bad actors and no one says anything about malicious state actors who pollute the internet (they might be called xenophobic !) AI merely is another tool for bad actors to be better bad actors, but that doesn't mean AI is the problem. reply botfriendsarent1 hour ago | parent | next[–] You are right about being cynical about media. But you didnt grow up reading BYTE magazine. reply postalcoder3 hours ago | prev | next[–] https://hcker.news/?ai=exclude You can also exclude github repos posted here that contain ai attribution. Filters are updated daily to catch exceptions. reply justShane3 hours ago | parent | next[–] Now that's what's up. reply breznev39 minutes ago | prev | next[–] it's called lobsters and it sucks reply 2866609204 hours ago | prev | next[–] This topic is just naturally controversial — AI and the internet are so intertwined with it that there’s really no way to avoid the conversation. reply mproud3 hours ago | parent | next[–] And here’s a conversation. reply Madmallard3 hours ago | prev | next[–] I agree. The worst part about it is like 80% of the conversation is motivated speech. That's worse than the technology itself. reply AndrewKemendo3 hours ago | parent | next[–] What do you mean by “motivated speech?” Do you mean it’s puffery or scammy? reply throwaway815233 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I haven't heard that exact expression before, but basically agenda-driven speech, for commercial or ideological persuasion or whatever. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning reply AndrewKemendo2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I’ll wait for OP to respond in affirmative but I’m not necessarily agreeing that that’s what they meant. By that standard then literally everything that is opinion based (ideological) is motivated reasoning reply ShinyLeftPad2 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] With cryptocurrencies/NFTs/etc. everybody talked them up because they are invested in Bitcoin or whatnot. With LLMs, everybody talks them up because they are invested in Nvidia or have other exposure (which is almost everybody considering with all the datacenter building if this industry tanks US economy is also), or because they are invested in having jobs. reply AndrewKemendo2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] So then what of people who’ve been working in AI for decades? specifically those who like me are very excited about the future and have been excited about every step of the way since they got started? In my case this is all going fantastically as planned and almost perfectly on the Kurzweil timeline. so as a 40+ person who has been wanting an Oracle in my pocket forever, we are closer to that then we have ever been. why the fuck wouldn’t I be excited about that? there was nothing like this in the 1980s and that’s a fact. The concept of the Dick Tracy watch was science fiction when I was a kid and my kids all have Dick Tracy watches casually. That’s unbelievable! The technology is amazing. Our society is the problem. People are attributing to AI what are ultimately society problems, much like the nuclear debate a century ago. reply tophnposts2 hours ago | prev | next[–] You’ve hit the nail on the head of what is the smoking gun of today’s tech sites — no doubt about it. reply ares6232 hours ago | parent | next[–] A key insight. This closes the gap. reply marcus_holmes2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Here's the thing - it's not AI that's the problem, it's that it was trained on LinkedIn. reply Curiositry2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] You’re absolutely right! reply ares6233 hours ago | prev | next[–] we need entirely new communities where "contributors" all share a common understanding that they will not publish AI for other contributors to consume. They can all individually create and consume AI outside of this community of course. reply newsomix9xl2 hours ago | parent | next[–] The model of crowd sourcing semi anonymous sources makes this, I think, nearly impossible. reply ares6232 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] That's why I say "contributors" rather than "members". It would be like an open-source project with contributor guidelines. But instead of source code people are sharing text and media. reply coffeecoders3 hours ago | prev | next[–] I think the problem is concentration. AI now absorbs almost all of the oxygen from every category. A story about new chips becomes an AI story. Cloud pricing becomes an AI story. Even personal projects get pulled into the same orbit. reply Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact