bear's ai obsession
Oh no! Someone crossposted yet another "AI-uncritical" Bear Blog post to Hacker News: Andrej the Giant's 2025 LLM Year in Review. While the Hacker News submission earned hundreds of upvotes, the post in question earned thousands. That was enough for it to top the Trending page of Bear Blog's Discovery feed for days! Whatever shall the Bear Blog "community" do?!
Suliman's How does Bear Blog view AI? shows the outsized attention the topic receives from inside the platform, "seeing as blog posts about it are as rare as sand on a beach." Its local omnipresence shows how unwelcome visitors and especially residents find it:
- Posting about AI? Check.
- Embedding or linking to AI-related content? Check.
- Upvoting AI posts to the Trending page? Check.
- Publishing AI disclosure pages? Check.
- Joining the No AI Webring? Check.
- Not By AI badges or statements? Check.
Do people seriously think that Karpathy debates how fringe his ideas are on his blogging platform of choice, let alone optimizing posts for external sites? Like Suliman's other target, Phong and his I love X, and I love Grok post, Karpathy busies himself with valuing his people, wants, and interests. They both experience self-reflection in "promoting and using AI infused software" compared to the simulation of their critics.
Bear Blog is another social media site where you can do all of the above. It even supports multiple communities. Herman's copy for Bear Blog's Hidden Blogs feature on the Discovery feed says as much:
Not everyone likes everything. Some people like programming posts, others like slices of life.
Portraying Karpathy, Phong, and others as "the digital equivalent of terrorists" isn't the own the "community" thinks it is. Calls to reject "these types" of people instead incentivize learning from and befriending them to enliven our mutual spaces and enrich our senses of self. How can you interface whom and what you cherish toward the same constructive ends?