HN rewards engagement in the form of upvotes. If you make a post or comment with the intention of getting upvotes, you're engagement farming. I hate to break it to you, but there are many people doing that on this website.
Why do you think all engagement farming would result in downvotes? You think HN posters are so keen at sniffing out bad actors that they would never reward them by accident?
It feels like you're being willfully dense about this. I can see why the other person accused you of being AI.
>It feels like you're being willfully dense about this. I can see why the other person accused you of being AI.
No, you fucking idiot. Not everybody who disagrees with you is AI.
"Engagement farming" is a term of art with a specific meaning, basically just the adult way of saying "ragebait". People engagement farming on IG or TikTok are typically doing so by posting deliberately controversial content designed to troll upset viewers into writing upset comments. It is inherent to the technique that it only works on platforms without downvotes.
You don't see anyone "engagement farming" on Reddit either, it's always specifically "karma farming" because farming karma requires positive engagement. Engagement farmers do not care if the engagement is positive or not, the required approaches are completely different.
You're conflating engagement farming and rage-baiting. Engagement can be both positive and negative. I can't find any online sources that agree with your definition.
Here's one that I think sums it up pretty well:
"Engagement farming refers to a range of deceptive practices on social media designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and followers."
"Engagement farming employs various tactics to exploit social media algorithms, with the intent to appear more popular than actual user interest would warrant. Examples include posting controversial content to provoke emotional responses, repurposing successful posts without originality, and using automated systems for mass liking or following." [1]
If you don't think this is happening on HN (especially to mass downvote posts) you're naive.
Maybe look at how people actually use it? Not sure why the Indian blogspam is worth looking at.
"Engagement" has a specific meaning. It's different from "like farming" or "karma farming". Some platforms specifically reward engagement, making it a reasonable thing to farm on those platforms.
> using automated systems for mass liking or following
Clearly the author was clueless, this has nothing whatsoever to do with engagement farming.
HN has been very pro-AI over the last several years. It's only swung back slightly the other way recently. I suspect this is due to tensions in the gulf causing some institutions to reallocate their investments, which results in reduced bot activity.
It's the opposite. There's documented evidence of China recently funding anti-AI bots in the west in an attempt to weaken the US's AI lead, I imagine that such bots also inhabit HN.
Think about it. Anthropic just reported that their codebase is now improving itself. We're moments away from every open source repo being able to do the same. Think of it like torrenting — you'll be able to open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days.
Ladybird doesn't know it yet, but they just left themselves in the dust.
> More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days
I wonder if any of you AI boosters have any actual knowledge of how software is written, why bugs exist
and how to mitigate tech debt. I wonder if you guys even know what tech debt is.
Somehow it’s always very young accounts which made me wonder if I’m talking to exuberant teenagers or people that have done a one week Python code camp 10 years ago and now think they’re John Carmack with their Claude subscription.
Is your point that Anthropic is now accepting code submissions to Opus 5.0 from “millions of contributors”? No?
Ladybird uses AI to code. This is not them banning AI. This is them not wanting to take responsibility for the code WE write with AI. They think outside code contributions are raising their risk and slowing them down.
I dislike this change but it does not track to what you are saying at all.
Like always with Open Source, if you really believe what you are saying, fork the project. Outrun them if you can.
> open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days.
It would be free labour! Truly crowd-funded development.
I'm picturing something like folding@home, but where people donate their spare tokens to a service, and those tokens get distributed amongst all open source projects on GitHub. You don't think that would be cool? Like, someone might initialise a repo with only a readme and a to do list before they go to sleep, and then wake up to a complete software ecosystem that looks as if it's been in development since before they were born. Like, so much code that no one person could possibly understand it, and it all happened overnight while they were sleeping!
Just donate your tokens to the project. The actual team that’s actually leading the project can direct the prompts better and evaluate the LLM-generated code better for their project than random drive-by contributors can. That’s the whole point of their announcement.
It's pretty crazy that a company like Anthropic no longer needs to hire Software Engineers, because their software engineers itself. If that's not a break through I don't know what is!
edit: it looks like I was wrong and they're still hiring many software engineers. Not completely sure why that is just yet.
> So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???)
I mean, Github Copilot's pricing just went up considerably, so I guess they were right?
"Inference is cheap" is a common refrain on here. I was hoping one of the people who regularly spouts this phrase would pipe up and tell me why it's suddenly so expensive.
Also, to answer your question, I think a good baseline for "cheap" is probably whether you can charge the end user enough to make a profit and not have them complain about the price of your service, as they're currently doing. If you can't do that, you're probably not even in the ballpark of "cheap", so it's not worth getting any more specific.
Scorcese understands that Hollywood's ultimate limiting factor is the number of available actors. A finite pool of actors means a finite pool of movies. Removing this limitation means that, just like an AI image generator can generate any image imaginable, a future movie generator will be able to generate every movie imaginable, at the click of a button.
Why would anyone want that? I don't want infinite movies, I don't have infinite time. I'd rather have intent over quantity. There is already an abundance of content, a century of cinema. Who actually wants this and why?
But what if you could have the movie you want exactly with the story and characters as you envision them. You may not want that still, but I guarantee you there are people that will.
I read books and watch movies to engage and be moved by stories I didn't know I wanted, that surprise me and/or leave me thinking for a while.
I loved Annihilation and it's sequels, not knowing what I was getting into. I would never have come up with those stories. And a one to one translation of the text to screen would have left us without an interesting movie on its own right.
When there is a large portion of society that realises this is a way to say, "what if I had every social interaction in the setting I want, with the characters I want, with the response I want, where I say exactly the right thing" and choose to spend all of their leisure hours generating imaginary worlds to make them feel better there will still be people saying, "and so what if they do? If people will pay for it, ultimately the market decides"
We could invade other countries and take their actors. We could reinstate the actor's draft or do mandatory 1-2 years actor's service like some other countries do
I HIGHLY doubt that's his POV. Almost all directors, and he has said this himself many times, think of actors as collaborators and their performances as an essential part of the movie.
There's a shortage of actors that you can star in movies to sell enough tickets to justify making $200m movies that have traditionally been the backbone of studio profits.
The studios probably killed themselves going all-in balls-to-the wall on making the exact same blockbuster movie 12 times a year, every year, for 25 years straight.
It is a refreshing breath of relief to see all the Indie stuff absolutely killing it as of late, and the Action Hero movies consistently underperforming studio expectations by a mile.
So much so people do anything to try to become an actor, the ones that make i are an incredibly small fraction of the actual pool. Worse, most of those you see on the screen are also not rich or making bank, sometimes they're just paying the bills.
It's an old running joke that most waiters/baristas/etc in LA are aspiring actors. It's part of the reason that service workers in LA are so uncommonly hot on average.
What does this random sentiment have to do with the article, which is about him using a particular tool for storyboarding, which is a process of communicating a vision to a range of human contributors?
All sorts of reasons! One is that when you reach 1000 karma, you gain the ability to downvote comments.
You seem like a smart person. I'm sure you can think of some reasons why that might be useful.
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