Ask HN: Any online tech spaces you hang around that don't involve AI?

Posted by jc_811 3 days ago

I understand why Ai is dominating online discourse right now. The tech is novel, it’s pushing boundaries, the business side has trillions of dollars involved, and it’s made its way to the mainstream of every day people.

But, I just truly don’t find it interesting. For all those that do - great! But for myself, for whatever reason it just does not scratch that part of my brain. I’d rather spend days writing and debugging code (to create a 5 minute automation ;) ) than having Ai spit something out in 10 seconds.

I just use Ai like a supercharged stack overflow. Ask it something if I have a syntax error or whatever, and then move on by continuing to use my own brain to think through the logic and patterns of my project.

All that to say - I miss what HN was before Ai and LLMs started dominating everything!

Anyone have other spaces, blogs, communities, or whatever where you go to learn and/or discuss interesting things that don’t have anything to do with Ai?

Comments

Comment by rokoss21 3 days ago

Lobsters is the natural choice - thoughtful tech discussion with strong moderation against hype. Also worth checking: comp.lang.* Usenet groups (surprisingly active), Reddit's niche programming subreddits (r/rust, r/golang), and specialty forums like electro-tech-online.com for hardware folks.

The key difference: smaller communities attract people who are there for the craft, not engagement metrics.

Comment by firefax 1 day ago

> Also worth checking: comp.lang.* Usenet groups (surprisingly active)

Do you know of a newbie friendly FAQ on how to access usenet in the modern era?

>Reddit's niche programming subreddits (r/rust, r/golang)

Even less niche places like /r/python seem pretty open to writing code by hand. (Though I like how python has libraries for many things)

Comment by gtirloni 2 days ago

you can't join lobste.rs without begging though.

Comment by leephillips 3 days ago

“I miss what HN was before Ai and LLMs started dominating everything!”

This might be your solution:

https://hn-ai.org/

Comment by tim333 3 days ago

I was thinking couldn't you just filter the AI stuff out. It normally seems to be less than 20% of items.

Comment by leephillips 2 days ago

https://hn-ai.org/ features a quality index showing how much had to be filtered out.

Comment by tomfox2 2 days ago

I also think just GPTs is not a good way for everyone.Now it's like google or something like google.But I relly need great agent in my life，like a real man，not AI.

Comment by krapp 3 days ago

So far I've been able to keep it out of my various fediverse feeds and accounts.

Comment by skydhash 3 days ago

Mailing lists for some of the stuff I use (Emacs, openbsd,...)