> And this is the gate that lets me sleep: a story only auto-publishes if the editor says PASS, the risk score is comfortably low, a hero image exists, and it has at least one source
I've read more than a handful of AI-generated articles on HN recently. The last one even had a fake author with a fake face. despite the site insisting it had human editors and reviews. The web property was created by a marketing/AI agency from (AFAIK) a European country with zero employees credentialed to edit hard science news articles, also zero employees with English names and faces like the supposed author.
> the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer
Let's be fair, it's possible to reach the footer! You keep pressing the end key for like a minute or two and 665 requests (with embedded base64 encoded images and all) later, you have your footer.
So saying it's possible to reach the footer would be technically correct - the best kind of correct!
I "love" infinite scroll on websites where important links like finding a way to contact customer support for help is only in the footer that you can never reach.
But the hero image is an AI homage to cute paper-craft, to remind us that people cannot or will not put in that level of effort any more, so it's okay!
Because I didn't read that thread? Last week I was at a conference, so I spent relatively little time on HN.
That said, I likely wouldn't have read that thread even today. I prefer engaging more deeply with fewer stories.
Another new AI benchmark result is of little interest to me, in contrast to a story about Microsoft stalling or even partially reversing the GitHub Azure migration.
There are so many bad and false assumptions baked into your short comment, it's hard to begin. For instance: in what world does someone have provide justification for their critique of an AI-written website, because they didn't happen to respond to some previous post?
I helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner.
One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.
If there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand.
This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.
SpaceX had been doing their thing for a while before Blue Origin got started. It seems to me that Bezos never wanted to try to catch up with Musk. His approach is not "move fast and break things", but instead more old-school (try to get things done right as best you can, and only test when necessary). Despite the gap, Bezos is slowly gaining ground. He's flying passengers and he's winning government contracts. The USG likes to have a second source for everything, and they're fed up with Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed, ULA (who have all absorbed some of the other space and launch startups). So Bezos is capitalizing on the US government's desire to have real competition, and a second source for launch (besides ULA).
It’s filling in a lot of the holes, but it’s putting a very convincing paper cover over the ones it misses. So it’s very hard to find the ones it didn’t fill, better hope your most valuable customers don’t walk over the paper ones!
I am surprised it is that low. The Bun Zig-to-Rust AI port was 6755 commits in like two weeks. If you make 10 commits per working day, that is 2500/year.
While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.
I suspect there is a cacophony of work that happens when a commit hits the server. That request needs to get replicated, git repositories need to be repacked, pull requests need to calculate diffs, CI jobs need to execute, on and on.
That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.
That commit count alone should not become any problem for infrastructure, even for Azure. They probably developed some ungodly mess with actions that did not/could not translate very well on Azure infrastructure.
Seems very reasonable, from my use. I commit much more often, as checkpoints, with branch rules that prevent force pushes/deletions, so the agents can't delete anything. And, suspect MS is only counting commits, and not the eventual squashes to one commit.
We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state.
We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons.
We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.
Nope. You can configure CI to not run for every commit of every branch (seems insane to have full CI for every commit, unless you don't allow your devs to push until done with something, which also seems insane).
They were originally on their own datacenters + huge amounts of burst and ancillary stuff in AWS, the internal push to move away from "the competitor's cloud" after the acquisition was huge and entirely stupid. I'm ex-GitHub and was one of the annoying people constantly saying GitHub should only move where it was provably the best option for GitHub - the third best major cloud provider is likely never it on merits alone.
If this story is true, it's good that they finally realised that GitHub's performance and availability mattered more than using Microsoft's products. It would mean someone finally came to their senses rather than forcing a wholesale push to Azure - but I bet they still want to have it both ways even if they concede some AWS now.
In the early 2000's they did the same dumb thing to WebTV: forced a move from Solaris to Windows, that completely wrecked the engineering team's velocity and motivation.
AWS gets a lot of money from both the unclassified government work they do plus the more secretive work. If they were required to disclose as part of that, they would disclose - why put all those contracts at risk?
I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.
I'm not sure if it was entirely true, but there are stories that after Microsoft bought Hotmail in the mid-90's, they quickly attempted to move them from FreeBSD (?) to Windows NT. But it failed miserably, and they went back to the original stack for another ~decade.
the FreeBSD migration didn’t take that long - iirc this was the frontend migration to an IIS ISAPI.
the Solaris bits (storage and routing tables) took far longer - and again iirc the frontend had been rewritten in C# before all the Sun hardware had been decommissioned.
- the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer
- the title tag doesn't seem to work properly (just shows the URL in the tab title, on Chrome and Firefox)
- 2007-style keyword stuffing in meta keywords
- the entire page is client-side react with a completely empty body?
The agency that built it even proudly states on their website that they vibecode everything: https://gradientnoise.com/
EDIT: Turns out, the articles are mostly AI-generated as well? https://blog.ryanmerket.com/how-i-built-runtimewire-a-one-pe...
> And this is the gate that lets me sleep: a story only auto-publishes if the editor says PASS, the risk score is comfortably low, a hero image exists, and it has at least one source
The interslop is real. Simulacra and simulation.
Let's be fair, it's possible to reach the footer! You keep pressing the end key for like a minute or two and 665 requests (with embedded base64 encoded images and all) later, you have your footer.
So saying it's possible to reach the footer would be technically correct - the best kind of correct!
Mobile Chrome can't show a tab title either https://i.k8r.eu/3vVCTQ.png
And the infinite scroll causes the page to constantly jump back up, again preventing me from accessing the footer
And of course with JS disabled you get nothing at all (which affects RSS readers, kindle devices, etc)
That said, I likely wouldn't have read that thread even today. I prefer engaging more deeply with fewer stories.
Another new AI benchmark result is of little interest to me, in contrast to a story about Microsoft stalling or even partially reversing the GitHub Azure migration.
There are so many bad and false assumptions baked into your short comment, it's hard to begin. For instance: in what world does someone have provide justification for their critique of an AI-written website, because they didn't happen to respond to some previous post?
One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.
every fucking time
Heathen lies!
Oh, wait… we have to use it? Oh, that’s terrible…
This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.
So AI means 14x the checkins? That's not 14x features completed, but still... wow.
While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.
Spread over a year, roughly estimating a generous 4 kbytes of data per commit, comes out to a throughput of a little under 2 MB/s.
Of course, it isn’t spread out uniformly and there is also a lot of hashing and other things going on.
Maybe pulls and clones drive more I/O ?
That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.
We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state. We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons. We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.
My belief is it is likely 1% or more. And likely coming in as an avalanche.
If this story is true, it's good that they finally realised that GitHub's performance and availability mattered more than using Microsoft's products. It would mean someone finally came to their senses rather than forcing a wholesale push to Azure - but I bet they still want to have it both ways even if they concede some AWS now.
(Probably just tea leaves. If you wanted to be extra spicy, you’d note that Jassy just threw Fable under the bus.)
https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc
It was fun and I found the code nice and helpful.
I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.
Agents are starting to use it while they think.
the Solaris bits (storage and routing tables) took far longer - and again iirc the frontend had been rewritten in C# before all the Sun hardware had been decommissioned.