If you think Lemmy hates AI, don't look at mbin or Piefed.

But by all means check out HackerNews. Stay there if you like.

Their view is understandable if majorly flawed.

They were people who rolled the dice on their interests early on, picked the winning combo of CS + Finance, and then just raced ahead in the career ladder over their peers as software work consumed the world.

Now it's ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of them are seeing the writing on the wall, and are wondering whether they were anything special at all.

The answer of course is no, but it's a tough pill to swallow. So cling on desperately to the idea that they can "bootstrap" themselves back into success

In a roundabout way, I guess what I'm saying is that for the last few decades they have never needed to have any shred of sympathy for others, and believed that their success was derived purely from their own efforts and not from opportunities that existed at the beginning of their careers

It was inevitable in that respect that the VC's interests would start to reflect on how the forum was managed due to the financial incentive, but I just assumed that they were smart enough to not boil the frog like every other for-profit media site because they would lose the tech crowd who are the first to notice when they're being boiled.

I do wonder who their audience is now. I can't see them going the way of reddit and enticing in the non-tech crowd, because then... what would HN's identity even be?

I can't exactly put a finger on the redditisms, but do know what you mean about a topic snowballing into something else other than the original post. I don't mind it so much when I can peer behind the veil of a FAANG company and get an employee perspective.

I have been seeing some Maker/circuitry posts making it to the frontpage there, and there you do get some great tech discussions. But the software discussions have just fallen off the map.

It's a shame. I don't really know where to go now for tech discussion. Lemmy scratches that itch partially, but it's rare. My IRL friends don't fully understand my hobbies. I do miss social media for connecting me with people who shared my enthusiasm over certain topics

Every time i see a non-technical political discussion there (for example immigration related) i just get majorly racist and bigoted vibes from the comments.

I've found it intolerable for a long time, with its mixture of techbro conformism, fad-chasing and self-hype, but it's even worse these days. AI boosters are so obnoxious that they're actually doing valuable work putting people off AI.

Didn't try Hacker News until after I had already tried Lemmy, but it seemed to contrast here quite a bit in terms of being filled with pro-AI libertarians.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s heavily botted, as it’s a relatively influential place and an obvious one to shill your startup/grift or whatever.

That being said, I still see a lot of push back against true Tech Bros in the comments.

I've always found HN to be tech bro centric but I do end up clicking through to there sometimes from the lemmy repost bots. I was always surprised at the anti ai sentiment. Maybe try to find one of the repost bots and just click through for the open source and hn makes (or whatever they are called when people show their projects) threads? Not surprising that the major posts are all taken over though. I feel like a forum run by a VC firm is the ideal place to test ai engagement and comment bots.

Yes. I still have the muscle memory of typing 'H' then enter on my phone browser whenever I'm bored, but lately I've been catching myself before hitting enter. I need to find another site that starts with H to take priority in my autocomplete.

I also stopped using this site long ago, and only rarely check back in, although that's due to all the obnoxious Redditisms rather than AI. There ain't no "expert tech discussions" happening here.

At this point I feel like a hermit, since there's no social media I regularly use. It's honestly pretty great, and I feel like I'm better at focusing on my work and enjoying real life in general.

Yeah... I mean it's not a monolith in that respect, you do get the hippie crowd speaking up every now and then and sometimes shouting the techbro's down, but it's far and few between these days.

God I remember when I first got into programming and ran into the different communities and just assumed that all programmers were left-wing liberal artists expressing their individuality and building a shared common future that all would benefit from.

And then I had the culture shock of meeting programmers who.... had different ideas about the purpose of what they were creating, and somehow it never crossed my mind that some people just... really love money. Not need it -- they have their investments, they're comfortable, they wouldn't need to work a day in their life at their present rate -- but it's not enough, and they want more, and programming is a means to achieve that and are happy to sponge off the collective efforts of others to further that goal.

And that was the day I learned exactly what the purpose of the MIT license was for

I stopped visiting when I came across some bigoted discussions there. They really live up to the 'STEM techbro' stereotype.

Hacker News

HackerNews

probably Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/news

What is HN?

Oh a systemd-logger, I dont have access to the logs, only the admin does. Plus I can't reattach to the process that way

I won't happen. If you prefer KDE you should pick another distro. One that doesn't have an official DE (Debian, etc) or one gives KDE a primary role (OpenSUSE, etc).

No. There are two major DEs and it's them. I see neither is going anywhere and more often than not, both are offered to choose from. I think GNOME is often picked as the default because it's all about simplicity and that makes sense for business-oriented distros like Ubuntu and Fedora

Eh, Ubuntu (definition: can't configure Debian for us oldies) is just a waystation to better Linux places. It's saving grace was compatibility to weird and wonderful hardware, 'just works'. That's long since been rolled into the kernel, any distro will work with most things.

I gave my kid a bazzite installer when their old motherboard died and they didn't want to buy M$ again, literally zero issues. Was expecting some, but no, everything they use was fine, or at least they worked it out without my input, proud parent moment. I occasionally give them hints as to how powerful it is, but they don't care, and that's great.

Reducing the attack surface with Gentoo .. (I see myself out)

Actually, I use Debian stable on servers by default, only when clients request Ubuntu, I help them admin it. I would never pick Ubuntu for the desktop. Debian and Fedora do a better job being closer to upstream. And: there are snaps which I want to avoid on the desktop.

Usually it is about the attack surface where more (unnecessary) stuff is running/enabled, the bigger the surface is. Ideally you want as small as possible surface, Alpine is perhaps better in that.

They're both good in their own ways. What's better is the choice we have.

Well, they try things time to time. They had their own init system, own display server. They eventually went with more mainstream variants, almost every time.