This series is seriously the best thing I have read about AI. Thank you thank you thank you for doing so much hard thinking and taking the time to write it all up. It's a monumental work and extremely valuable.

The next time someone asks me where I think AI is going, I'll just point them at this series.

I have read every post in the series and really appreciated it.

I've had a tremendous amount of respect for you since I first encountered the Jepsen analyses, but your breakdown of the likely impacts of LLMs and ML may impress me more.

You've articulated very well several concerns of mine that I haven't seen anyone else mention, and highlighted other issues I had not previously recognized.

Thank you for publishing this now, when it could still have some influence, rather than polishing and researching and refining until it was thoroughly rigorous and too late to be relevant.

The overall topic is the same, even in the hypothetical sequence you mention. Keep in mind that even if an article series is strictly partitioned into distinct parts, the discussion threads mostly won't be - all the different aspects will blend together, which means the threads will be more like "the same soup over and over" than "one about metallurgy, one about design, etc."

(Edit: I just noticed that strbean already made this point in the sibling comment!)

Also: usually the splitting into a series is somewhat artificial. In the worst cases, people try to make the segments be like TV episodes with cliffhangers, to push you to the next bit. That's a poor fit for HN. But even when they don't, to get the full "meal" you still have to go through all the parts. Few people do that, and the threads as a whole never do. This makes it less interesting and satisfying.

But there can be exceptions, and (ironically?) featuring an occasional exception mixes things up and so reduces repetitiveness! The trouble is that once people see one exception, they immediately expect/want others, pushing things back into a repetitive sequence and making the site less interesting again. It's a bit like telling the same joke twice in a row—the interest is all in the first telling.

Guess: there is likely some repetition in articles in a series, but there is a ton in the discussion here, and that is what HN wants to avoid. Discussion on a link that bundles together the parts of a series helps avoid excessive rehashing in the comment sections.