So, while it's questionable how much involvement some of the team may have had with this timeline, it's entirely feasible they could have gotten input from the same people that wrote the games from the very beginning.

Original software is still being made, it's just buried under a flood of AI generated slop.

The average person or company's idea for a piece of software is an unoriginal spin on a likely already overdone concept.

Add this to the more technically original projects perhaps not being posted on Hacker News as often (many folks here would say the site's experienced its Eternal September moment, and a fair few of them have almost stopped using it altogether), and well, you're just seeing what moderately technical people are making with the tools of the moment.

If I use an LLM to create something in a programming language I'm not an expert in, I still have a reference point for later use. And that reference should drastically speed up the process of learning how to use said language myself later.

It's just that most marketers seem to be incredibly short sighted, and wrongly assume that doing nothing but marketing their own product/service is somehow the way forward.

Also any forum or subreddit dedicated to self promotion isn't really worth bothering with. Your audience won't be there, just other marketers trying to promote their own stuff.

Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:

- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes - Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman - Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history - Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.

The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.

That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.

Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.

Yes there are more employees than founders, because there are more employees than founders in society. If Hacker News was just founders, it'd be about a hundredth of its current size.

But the negativity is likely because it's just harder to impress people here than on a site like say Twitter or Reddit. If you've been in tech, startups, etc for years, you've seen loads of crazy ideas get proposed, get tested and fail miserably. Loads of startups try these things and fold in about 6 months or so due to a lack of demand.

So, there's probably a bit more scepticism here. You've seen enough massive failures in the tech world that you're probably a little jaded towards another 'world-changing' idea seemingly unfounded in reality.

The vibe-coded product the actual users put out will probably be nowhere near as good as a professionally built one tech wise, but will actually be built to solve relevant pain points.

> Every discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Which in turn lead to more discoveries.

A lot of great ideas just need the right prerequisites to become possible.

Makes me wonder if LLMs lowering the bar for implementing new ideas mean that future ideas that depend on said implementations will finally come into their own. Not sure what those would be, but there have to be ideas that depend on prerequisites that didn't occur because there wasn't a technical guy/team interested in implementing those prerequisites.

> It’s astonishingly simple. If you can’t prove you’re a human, you can’t upload your music. This would get rid of 99% of slop and streaming fraud overnight.

No. No it wouldn't. Most AI artists have human identities tied to them.

Like sure, there are probably some bot networks automating all of this stuff. But a lot of the posters want to be seen as musicians without actually learning to make any of the music. They want their name associated with their AI-generated songs, not hidden away behind a label.

Also not a huge fan of the support for gatekeepers either. Feels like society is better when people don't need to get third party approval to distribute their work to the world, and when artists don't need to abide by predatory contracts from labels.

This advice is good though. All platforms should make this a thing:

> Legacy catalog tracks must be reviewed by humans before being taken down.

> Artists must be granted a mandatory notice and appeal window with human customer support.

> Wrongly removed music must be restored with stream counts and royalties left intact.

We need to make it illegal to have AI moderate content without human involvement, in the same way it shouldn't be allowed to act as a police officer or judge.

1. A lot of AI coded products and services are also open source. In many fields, the number of open source projects has arguably exploded since AI driven development took off.

2. Not everyone builds open source projects because they want to monetise them, restrict how others use them or become popular for their efforts.

So, I think the effects will be... somewhat more limited. Hobbyist fields will be mostly unaffected, but there will likely be a huge drop in the number of commercial ventures making their work open source. If you're trying to sell people on an SaaS, then AI is likely terrifying to you, and making your work open source is just gonna be seen as a way to encourage more competitors. If you're working on a video game mod, then it probably won't change much at all.

> 3.4% named existential risk, and the most common answer was malicious use, at 10.6% (UCL).

The danger isn't about sentient or human level AI, it's about how AI gives everyone capabilities beyond their wildest dreams, often without the knowledge or experience necessary to use those capabilities responsibly.

Forget Terminator, the two risks I can see being the most important here are "major security risk/system failure due to incompetent engineers/maintainers using AI without knowing how things work" and "criminals/terrorists/rogue states use it make their crimes easier and more efficient".

The latter seems especially bad when political stability is down across the board and a lot of people seem frustrated or outright furious with society at the moment.

Still, I feel the risks are still on the manageable side, simply due to both automated systems and malicious actors being constrained by logistics and a human driven society.

> “The reader knows everything I know except this one thing”

Because as the article says, it's hard to know what your audience already knows, and far too easy to take 'shortcuts' when helping them by forgetting how many things you've assigned to muscle memory.

Teaching people is difficult, and it's really easy to leave a lot of crucial information out if you're not careful.

That said, I do have one more antipattern (and one more recommended design pattern) worth considering here too.

For the antipattern, it's when the tutorial doesn't work anymore because of updates to the subject in question. I remember this being a big issue when I was trying to learn Angular a few years back, since the official tutorial was clearly written for a long obsolete version of the framework that functioned very differently from the current one.

The number of times I've had issues like that is far too high online, and it's usually because the person that wrote the tutorial didn't check back in on it whenever the language, framework or relevant dependencies got a major update.

So, if you write about a topic and things change significantly, go back and check your work from before. If you can, update the article, and if you can't, at least put a notice at the top saying the article is now obsolete and should be skipped.

On a different note, a good pattern to keep in mind is that you don't need to be chained to a specific format. Way too many people assume that because they're providing a written tutorial, there's no place for images or video content there.

But the truth is that in many cases, an image is literally worth a thousand words. In other cases, showing people how a step should go in video or GIF format can be more helpful than just providing a list of bullet points.

So, take that into account. Provide all the information in your chosen format for sure, but provide relevant images and videos when the info is clearer in that format, or for when people need a visual cue. That way, you can check them if you're struggling with the written instructions, and figure out whether your setup is wrong (or the tutorial has left out some crucial information) based on how similar the author's screen is to your own at that point.

Just because you're using text doesn't mean you have to treat your guide like it's going on GameFAQs in a .txt file in the mid 90s.

Humans seriously struggle to understand the difference between "more common" and "more documented".

And yes, the media has definitely gotten worse too. Outrage and anger gets attention, so inflammatory content and blatant clickbait run wild online.

The issue is that the design is meant to stir up outrage and encourage addiction. Recommendation algorithms, infinite scroll, provocative posts being rewarded overall, length restrictions that kill nuance, echo chambers created by said recommendation algorithms and the ability for any rando to register as many accounts as they want are what's damaging democracy and people's mental health.

Unfortunately, many of those features are also exactly how they're so good at distributing information for people with an interest in any particular niche or sub field. The same algorithms that trap us in echo chambers are also the same ones surfacing awesome new frameworks and programming techniques, tricks for video game speedruns, artwork of whatever you're interested in seeing more of and crazy mods that put N64 games on the SNES.

The challenge is that we really want to surface the best creative works and finds and information about our interests, while not getting caught in a negativity spiral or trapped in a fake news filled echo chamber.

But for years, those didn't exist, and people got used to that. The former was added to certain browsers in 2022, and the latter was added in 2023-2025. If you've building modals with divs and JavaScript for years, it can take a bit to realise you don't need to do that anymore.

Eventually I suspect we'll be in a place where self-made solutions for common UI issues aren't needed anymore, but that's still sadly a way off, especially given how slow browsers have been to add fully customisable select elements and other form fields.

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Yeah I know I don't exactly have the fanciest career so far, but I'm always willing to learn new languages and frameworks, and am happy to continue my career with a more junior role if need be.