Could you clarify that last paragraph for me? I’m not sure what ”contentious climate” is here. AI antihype? I don’t understand the connection to not being harassed for something, isn’t that a good thing rather than something that would make you uncertain if you want to share prompts in the future?
"AI tech bro creates slop X because they don't understand how X actually works" is a common trope among the anti-AI crowd even on Hacker News that has only been increasing in recent months, and sharing prompts/pipelines provides strong evidence that can be pointed at for dunks. Sharing AI workflows is more likely to illicit this snark if the project breaks out of the AI bubble, though in the case of the AI boosters on X described as in the HN submission that's a feature due to how monetization works that platform. It's not something I want to encourage for my own projects, though.
There's also the lessons on the recent shitstorms in the gaming industry, with Sandfall about Expedition 33's use of GenAI and Larian's comments on GenAI with concept art, where both received massive backlash because they were transparent in interviews about how GenAI was (inconsequentially) used. The most likely consequence of those incidents is that game developers are less likely on their development pipelines.
You'd think so, but with the recent extreme polarization of GenAI the common argument among the anti-AI crowd is the absolute "if AI touched it, it's slop". For example in the Expedition 33 case (which won Game of the Year), even though the GenAI asset was clearly a placeholder and replaced 2 days after launch, a surprisingly large number of players said sincerely "I enjoyed my time with E33 but after finding out they used GenAI I no longer enjoy it."
In a lesser example, a week ago a Rust developer on Bluesky tried to set up a "Tainted Slopware" list of OSS which used AI, but the criteria for inclusion was as simple as "they accepted an AI-generated PR" and "the software can set up a MCP server." It received some traction but eventually imploded, partially due to the fact that the Linux kernel would be considered slopware due to that criteria.
Sure, but I'm gonna push back and go "so what"? That sort of thing is what haters do, especially in the notoriously toxic world of gaming.
"Some people expressed disappointment about a thing I think is silly" is literally the center square on the gamer outrage bingo card lol. Same with "someone made a list that I think is kind of stupid".
And again, so what? Why should you care? Again, if you feel that insecure about it, it's you and your work that's the problem, not the haters who are always going to exist. Have the courage of your own convictions or maybe admit that it isn't that strong of a conviction lol.
My dude, that's not "victim blaming" lol. Nobody's forcing you, personally, to do anything. I don't care if you, personally, publish your work or not.
What I'm saying is that _feeling_ of insecurity doesn't come from haters, because haters gonna hate, it's a sign that _your_ work might not be as good as you think it is, and you don't feel that you can stand behind it.
Also, managing public expectations and messaging is a thing professionals in many industries do all the time. It's not even particularly difficult, you just hear about it when it's bungled.
EDIT: To clarify, as a SWE, my work is available to anyone at the company. Any engineer I work can see what I've done, and the public sees it too, they just don't know about it, because if I screw up, the company will take the blame for it. You get very very very very used to critique in this role and taking responsibility for what you make and making the case for your technical solution.
you can use however you like, no one cares. really, no one.
but, people in general are NOT inclined to pay for AI slop. that is the controversy.
why would I waste my time reading garbage words generated by an LLM? If people wanted this, they would go to the llm themselves.
the whole point of artistic expression is to present oneself, to share a perspective. llms do not have a singular point of view, they do not have a perspective, they do not have an cohesive aggregate of experiences. they just regurgitate the average form.
no one is interested in this. even when distributed for free, is disrespectful to others that put their time until they realized is just hot garbage yet again.
people are getting tired of low effort `content`, yet again another unity or unreal engine resking, asset flipping `game`...
you get the idea, lots of people will feel offended and disrespected when presented with no effort. got it? it is not exclusively about intellectual property theft also, i don't care about it, i just hate slop.
now whether you like it or not, the new meta is to not look professional. the more personal, the better.
AI is cool for a lot of things, searching, learning, natural language apropos, profiling, surveilling, compressing information...it is fantastic technology!
not a replacement for art, never will be.
Ok, so they have to. Or else what? Back of the envelope, it would take somewhere between 200k and 1 million years of 24/7 work to pay it back at that rate.
I have to say, I don’t understand what ”for you” means in ”best/worst possible life for you”. At first I read it roughly as ”given the fundamental unchanging circumstances of your life, such as where and when you were born, who your parents are, and your basic health” but maybe they mean something like ”in your subjective perspective on what is good/bad”?
My thought as well, but the question is: does it matter for what the survey is trying to achieve?
Some people will interpret it one way, some a subtly different way, but is there a reason that people's interpretation changes over time in a way that is more rapid and more significant than the underlying question of how good their life is broadly? Probably not.
There may be cultural differences that make it tricky to do comparisons between cultures / countries, but it should give something useful when looking at the same culture / country over time.
Fitting HN, that seems to follow the Silicon Valley mindset perfectly - we’ll ignore laws and trample on people’s rights in the name of reducing some absolutely trivial ”pain”.
I doubt any laws are being broken. When you contribute something to the public record on a website that is unquestionably public, even the GDPR has carveouts and exceptions for public interest, freedom of expression, and data necessary for continuation of the original purpose.
There is a growing misconception that the GDPR and similar laws give complete control over any user-contributed inputs to a website, but that’s not true.
European digital law explicitly allows for a "right to be forgotten". Something which HN vehemently opposes because it breaks the flow of threads or some other BS reason.
As I explained above, the GDPR law has a lot of exceptions and carveouts.
It has been widely misinterpreted as a tool to force website operators to remove anything you've contributed to the website or any information about you, but that is neither consistent with the language of the law nor consistent with what the courts have found.
You are free to remove your own e-mail address from an account (visit your account page) or to never provide any identifying information at all to the website. I've also seen the moderators change account names away from identifying information for those who request it.
However, there is no GDPR requirement that websites must universally delete any and all contributions you provide to a public website if you retroactively decide you don't want you public posts to be public.
Like I said, I doubt casual HN commenters have a better grasp on the law than Y Combinator's legal team.
If HN removed their record of the email address associated with a username, might that satisfy GDPR? The personally identifying data has been "forgotten". From that point on, the comments could have been entered by "anyone".
Why would it? A comment in itself might contain information about anything and anyone, and always contains some personal information about its author, such as the time they published it and the handle they were logged in as. That doesn’t go away because the email associated with it is removed.
Surely it does, if there's no way to point back to the specific user. The best one could say is "someone using this username posted this message at this time, but we can't tell who that was".
I accept that if someone data-mined every comment by said user, they might be able to build a picture of said user clear enough to identify them (e.g. posting times might indicate likey country of origin). Possibly, depending on the content they posted.
(I'm just thinking around the problem. I'm not a security/privacy researcher designing systems I'd like others to use, just an interested user curious where the lines in the law lie, and also what the threat models might be to me as a user.)
I like this idea, actually. A good chunk of HN is throwaways and accounts otherwise disconnected from any sort of person-hood these days, the messages from "forgotten" accounts wouldn't even particularly stick out.
Unfortunately, it’s also intended to be not just accessible, but ”principles-driven”. Can’t have that. (More seriously, it’s probably more appropriate for screens than print)
For what it’s worth, the very page we’re on here still uses tables and spacer gifs, in 2025. (EDIT: I don’t mean to imply that this is good, just an inescapable observation in this context)
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