As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
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And its always very obvious that its an AI developed front end, they all look so similar.
It's certainly software being developed at speed by anyone with a level of tech interest. Which is great but its frustrating when the native solution provides said feature.
I’m surprised this isn’t discussed more. I find most major search engines are basically unusable since the top search results are overwhelmed with AI slop. Trying to find anything useful is like looking for a key in the mud.
No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation. The Authors Guild, the National Writers Union, the European Writers Council, and the Society of Authors in the UK all came out against the Internet Archive, and supported the suit.
Each new restriction limits the archive’s ability to act as a comprehensive backstop.
This self-inflicted damage to the wayback machine is the real tragedy of this entire affair. When IA was asked to stop CDL - many times - founder Brewster Kahle continued. The National Writers Union tried to open a dialogue as early as 2010 but was ignored:
The Internet Archive says it would rather talk with writers individually than talk to the NWU or other writers’ organizations. But requests by NWU members to talk to or meet with the Internet Archive have been ignored or rebuffed.
https://nwu.org/nwu-denounces-cdl/
When the requests to abandon CDL turned into demands, Kahle dug in his heels. When the inevitable lawsuits followed, and IA lost, he insisted that he was still in the right and plowed ahead with appeals. And here we are today.
This doesn't seem to be a contradiction. Sometimes the courts are wrong or even the law is wrong. It is just a label.
That's what the "successfully" in "successfully sued" means.
You're not wrong, but you're treating “guilty of unauthorized copying” as a statement of physical fact when in reality it just means it falls under an arbitrary rule invented by humans (namely, the law that defines unauthorized copying). This rule is ambiguous at its edges because it's not written as an algorithm or equation. It was perfectly reasonable for Kahle to believe that the rule can be interpreted in a way that it wouldn't apply and, by dragging it through the courts, have that interpretation be made the established one.
Even though the court has now established a competing interpretation, it is still not unreasonable to ask whether the law is fair and just under this interpretation. I feel that it isn't and should be changed.
I sincerely hope google wont stop indexing that stuff just because of a PM in search "de/re-prioritizing" ranking in a way that makes this impossible.
I actually took a (required) class in middle school that taught us how to use a library. Amongst other things, the librarian taught us how to use Google effectively. Everything I learned then (this was in the early 2000s) still works today, since the process of using a search engine hasn't changed very much since its inception.
So many people never learned (or never cared about learning) how to use a search engine, thus why we're here today.
I've been an expert Google user for over a decade and I can only partially agree with the first statement, and not at all with the second. Yes, a search engine alone is fantastic at finding things based on keywords if you know how to invoke it properly. However, there are lots of things one may want to find out which can't be reduced to a keyword search, because you can't have the vocabulary to search for it directly unless you already know the answer. Indirect questions such as "framework options to do x and y in z situation in this language". The best you could hope for pre-LLM was to find forum posts asking the same or a vaguely similar question and comparing a lot of options, finding out you picked a dud after spending an hour on it because it's fundamentally incompatible due to reasons, searching again, etc. It's hard to overstate what a massive improvement LLM's are for this kind of search to find and compare options for exactly what you're asking for given the context of your situation.
If you trust them blindly, then the vast experiment improvements are obvious and apparent.
If you don't, or if you're the kind of person that likes to research your sources, LLMs are a speed bump.
> because you can't have the vocabulary to search for it directly unless you already know the answer. Indirect questions such as "framework options to do x and y in z situation in this language". The best you could hope for pre-LLM was to find forum posts asking the same or a vaguely similar question and comparing a lot of options, finding out you picked a dud after spending an hour on it because it's fundamentally incompatible due to reasons, searching again, etc.
I disagree with this. Stack Overflow (pre-moderation insanity) forums and the like was and is great at finding answers to questions like this. Reddit threads were also useful for this sort of discussion. Much learning was had while reading through the comments on my way to the answer. Sometimes, doing that refined or re-aligned what I was looking for, as is common when doing research.
Again, it comes back to faith in LLMs. Sure, I can ask an LLM to give me a comprehensive overview of web serving frameworks for $LANGUAGE. It's up to the user to determine how valid the information being put in front of them is.
LLMs can also be extremely confidently incorrect. Example: I used an LLM recently in "research" mode to outline how a solution I sell stacks up to the next biggest competitor in pricing structures. It gave me a lot of (too much) information in a readily-digestible format, including, surprisingly, the "agreed-upon" price of the competitor's products per SKU.
Pricing for enterprise sales contracts is very dark arts, so I went to the sources attached to the result to confirm those numbers. Lo and behold, the prices I was given were nowhere to be found in any of those articles.
Meanwhile, I used a search engine manually to see if I could find a leaked price book using "filetype:pdf" operators, mostly for grins. Found it in 15 seconds. That still wasn't applicable to what I was looking for, as it was for an industry different from mine, but it was there.
I could have told the LLM to deep search PDFs (despite telling it to "ultrathink"), but at that point, again, what is the point of using LLMs if I can do the work myself?
- AND and OR still work, as do parentheses. Very useful when combined with the above.
- before: and after: are super useful for narrowing down a result to within a certain timeframe, like before AI. (Sadly I use this all of the time)
- filetype:$EXTENSION for finding files. I used to use this and "index of" to find interesting PDFs on misconfigured web servers, but the Internet has caught on.
- -minus Operator to exclude results that contain a term. Great for excluding subreddits
- inurl:$SUBSTRING or intitle:$SUBSTRING to scope results to pages with $SUBSTRING in their URLs or page titles. Indispensable for finding people on LinkedIn, like recruiters.
My search-fu is pretty good.
Correction: my search-fu was pretty good. Tactics which used to work, regularly, don't. And I'm often intentionally not searching keywords but framing questions (generally to DDG's Search Assistant) to suss out stuff.
And that works pretty well, for general online stuff.
That's a subset of my searches. Often I'll go directly to a site via DDG bangs, such as HN (!hn by:dredmorbius <something I said once>), Wikipedia (!w <topic>), or a few other specific sites.
Discussion sites are ... dead. Reddit is absolute shit. Far too many discussions have gone into closed channels (Birdsite, FB, Discord, etc.), or ... are simply no longer online.
I do fairly well on the Fediverse, though that's still a pretty small world. (Getting bigger, and punches above its weight or so I find.)
Search engines themselves seem 1) no longer comprehensively index everthing, 2) don't retain previously-indexed content, 3) have fucked with how search queries are processed to a degree that even if the content is online and indexed it's not found, and 4) have polluted SERP rankings such that top results are increasingly irrelevant.
(DDG, on that last point, does permit blocking sites from results, which is useful, though a pain in how I use the site, which doesn't persist such preferences across sessions.)
"Knowing how to use a search engine" no longer affords utility in a way it did, say, five years ago. And things were already starting to rot then.
[0]: https://altpower.app
I could be wrong, but I'm more inclined to say these directives are coming from leadership/advertising dollars rather than a seemingly rogue PM
Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me. It was 100% Gemini which I recognize as not long-term feasible.
It's the same reason why we don't give students the answers to things, we teach them to find the answers.
And somewhere between ten and seventy percent of what it teaches you will be anywhere from subtly wrong in minor ways to utterly flaming bullshit, and unless you go through the boring, slow, old-fashioned learning methods, you'll have no way to know.
If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?
I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.
Are you actually saying you'd be OK with that?
The last one is the worry.
The middle is... where we all start.
The first is not a bad place to be, all things considered!
Empirically, however, LLMs don't strip out the author: the big models know a lot about what I've written even with search disabled. Ex: https://claude.ai/share/8cbcdf88-a360-421a-8c06-ae7b7992e866
(I was pointing out that "they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author" seems to be is incorrect about how training works)
My experience being on the searching end is that these things are terrible about attribution of where they find anything. Which has bad consequences not just for authorship, but for correctness (which is the usual reason I'm poking at them -- they're being wrong again). This makes a lot of sense when you consider the massive, massive compression that's got to occur during training, but it's still frustrating.
>> Without searching, what can you tell me about exmadscientist? Fine if you get this hallucinate or get things wrong, I just want to see what level of knowledge you have trained-in.
>Working purely from trained-in knowledge, with the caveat that this is exactly the kind of long-tail detail I might garble:
>"exmadscientist" rings a bell as a username on Hacker News. My impression is of a fairly prolific commenter who writes knowledgeable, detailed comments about electrical engineering and hardware topics — things like PCB design, electronics manufacturing, component selection, test equipment, and general "how things actually get built in industry" commentary. The comments I associate with that handle tend to be practical, opinionated, and grounded in real professional experience rather than hobbyist speculation.
>Beyond that, I don't have confident specifics: I couldn't tell you a real name, employer, location, or any particular famous comment or post they've made. It's also possible the same handle exists on Reddit or other forums and I'm blending impressions together.
>So the honest summary of my knowledge level: I recognize the username and have a general "HN hardware/EE person" association, but nothing more granular than that — and even the association could be a mild confabulation, since usernames like this sit right at the edge of what a model reliably retains.
(I don't know if you have a blog or otherwise write on the internet; I just asked it about your HN handle)
Yeah, authors don't want to be recognized as authors, they don't want any reward for their work, they don't want to amass pool of loyal readers, interact with them, etc.
All they want is for halucinating AI to take excerpts of their work and compile it with random sh!t.
GENIUS
LLMs just use everything, generate similar code with no attribution and keep users from visiting, so no bragging rights or attention.
Worse, there are some PRs that seem fully generated ...
So i mostly stopped sharing and started pulling my old repos offline.
At this pace, i don't want to compete with a clone of myself in the future that will do my work for much cheaper.
Sure. But you can see that for some people (myself included), writing for peers is part of the joy? And that if instead a megacorp places an opaque computer program between the author and the readers, that joy might be ruined?
I might never blog/publish code again amidst all this. I never had ads on my sites. I am not alone in this.
Sites like Wikipedia or developer documentation pages which exist to distribute knowledge for its own sake don't have any reason to care whether that knowledge is consumed by a human or a computer being used by a human.
I'm sure the billionaire class would love a return to patronage based libraries, NDAs on authors of books, and the elitism they would feel with a return to private libraries locking away all kinds of knowledge that would happen if patronage become the only way authors could make money (such as with AI just regurgitating their works, or if the stupid 'do away with copyright' people got their way).
Cheap access came from the invention of cheap printing . The laws were passed to restrict it.
Making the avenue of creating for the average person also the avenue for the most income was huge in creating our modern literature landscape.
Evidence for this statement?
> If the only money is in private works for private libraries, that is where the quality stuff is going to go.
Evidence that this ever happened?
> Making the avenue of creating for the average person also the avenue for the most income was huge in creating our modern literature landscape.
That only leads to higher quality (as you claim) if your definition of higher quality is "what the average person buys".
When people wont see others blogs, they wont start writing own. When there will bw no ome to actually read it, they will go to do something else.
But maybe that is the future.
Every country starts erecting their own towers of babel that we talk at, and it constantly compresses our conversations down to the most effective distribution of weights.
At some point talking at the machine becomes a high status job, and we give respect to the people who whisper to it the most.
Theres many people I know who write notes that I know would be great to read. However they never publish them.
So… are we saying that the only public writing in the future is meant to be consumed by the machine?
Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercussions for regular users. I don't see how you solve this cleanly.
Not sure of the effectiveness but it's there.
I think the main thing Cloudflare is trying to do is block direct traffic from frontier labs and then start charging them for access. They might end up shooting themselves in the foot, as this simply empowers sketchy residential-proxy outfits to undercut Cloudflare and sell the data to labs for less.
The problematic bots are all disguising themselves as Chrome and sending requests from millions of residential proxy IPs, and the only real solution to those is some sort of captcha or PoW page on first visit.
There could be open source tooling to create custom private "closednets", with
- trust ring mechanism to allow invitations, flagging, banning, and banning those that invite people who were banned
- the rules of the closednet
- search engine with opt-in scraping
- portal (remember the 80s?) with all the registered nodes, perhaps by service category such as public git repo hosts, web sites etc.
etc.
The first closednet could be Hacker News.
If it had any real value, anyway.
Small, truly private communities could be an interesting thing though.
Yeah, Network by Humans for Humans. Thats why Im not interested in all those IoT/Auto networks when you just connect and stuff automagically configure. It looks nice at first glance, but you loose control. F2F works way better in that matter, like RetroShare, but I never investigated it much.
VPNs are great for torrenting but any serious website like an online bank or web email provider will turn you away. They claim it's for bots but really it because they only want customers they can track.
Yep. IMO, this is so far the biggest AI-inflicted damage to the web. A bit of anecdata - wikipedia (and all other wikimedia sites) are blocking my Firefox since about a week, with a "please respect our bot policy" message. Outright block, not even a captcha.
It took me a while to figure out they don't like me disabling some SSL ciphers, so now "JA4 browser fingerprint" is not matching user-agent. Funnily enough curl (what I would imagine a bot would use) pulls exact same URLs from exact same client IP, just fine.
But we already have the latter case that exists - ad blockers. Ad blockers literally serve up the word-for-word original content minus the ads.
Sure, humans would benefit.
It took them searching, reading themselves, maybe even understanding something in the process, to complete a 360° revolution of their squirrel cages in time T.
Now they can omit searching, skip reading to the regurgitated answer, throw away understanding, and complete a full revolution in T/N, where N is a heuristic value directly proportional to the amount of skin in the AI hype.
But the catch is that the squirrel cage must run non-stop still.
obviously new content still has value because it remains the source layer for LLM agents. it just wont be ads giving you revenues thats all.
That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.
Should be "You're thinking".
This should be "This should be 'You're thinking'." don't you think? Why bother correcting someone's grammar with a sentence fragment? You're just trading one mistake for another. I'm hoping someone finds a grammar error in my post, because continuing this would be hilarious.
Reflexively, I think it should be more like ...
javascript: `This should be "You're thinking".` ;
// to preserve the original character use and to avoid '...'...' parse foos
// however `"...".` also possibly deserves a [sic] to critique the original
// i.e. ~grammar police say the period belongs within the quote marks, no?
In that case the creator should welcome AIs with open arms; a human reader will forget eventually, but the AI will preserve the knowledge forever.
no, only some mangled form of it
A lot of us hate that with a white-hot passion akin to the eye-melting intensity of an arc welder.
If you don't understand that, then yes, I expect you're quite happy with LLMs, and indeed find inexplicable the reactions of those who are emphatically not happy with genAI.
It's not even about votes, I don't even need votes. Whenever I write something that I am happy with, I read and reread it imagining I am reading it as a third person. Sometimes it forces me to rework my arguments. I wouldn't write to convey my ideas through a chatbot. And that's what this post is about-- killing the internet and with it decimating any audience you might have accrued if you had something to say and you published it on a website.
It’s like bragging about a new highly addictive psychedelic drug that a dealer gave you a taste of for free. The effects are awesome today, you feel so fun and free! Never mind that it’s destroying your body and that the dealer will eventually charge you or demand you pay in other ways, that’s a problem for another day. Weeee!
However, when it comes to non-creative things (such as hooking up some hardware ABC to some software XYZ using RST), LLMs might be better at digesting the factory manuals (hopefully THOSE were written by humans) and explaining it in a way the user understands for their specific case.
YMMV.
I end up using the gemini api for with search enabled for the cases that I don't have access to good grounding data even in agentic tasks.
To be more precise, I hate the SEO shithole the internet has become, that Google serves up, that Google facilitated, indirectly created.
(I really don't have any tears to shed if there is a death of the Corporate Internet™.)
We're likely at the "golden age" of LLM-assisted web searching and summarization.
Hopefully open models keep it cracked open, but expecting enshittification is always the safe bet these days.
That is why we are seeing paid streaming services with ads.
Very happy with Kagi personally
> One you pay for yourself !
SEO is the practice done by webmasters of optimizing a website to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results.
If you are paying to use your search engine, does that mean webmasters are no longer incentivized to/will not try to improve their visibility/ranking in your search results?
They do this because they benefit from their site being visited or the information they are providing being noticed.
> If you are paying to use your search engine, does that mean webmasters are no longer incentivized to/will not try to improve their visibility/ranking in your search results?
I see no reason it would have that effect. It does, however, create different incentives for the search provider to improve the signals indicating page relevance since the user is the priority instead of advertisers.
>>>> Is there some search engine that you think could have become popular and not ended up with SEO optimization?
>>> One you pay for yourself !
>> SEO is the practice done by webmasters of optimizing a website to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results.
> They do this because they benefit from their site being visited or the information they are providing being noticed.
>> If you are paying to use your search engine, does that mean webmasters are no longer incentivized to/will not try to improve their visibility/ranking in your search results?
> I see no reason it would have that effect.
Agreed.
It's nice to be the customer instead of being the product, for once.
We used to know better, Standard Oil vertical integration was dismantled.
That is to say, it can only get worse from here.
They're a good jumping off point, but I need to delve into the original sources just like I did when I used Google.
It seems to get shell scripts right most of the time.
He said, proud of his own ignorance.
I would be the first to admit my ignorance on the absolute majority of topics. There is a limited number of things I can learn in life, and kubernetes won't be one of them - I'm just not interested in it (and all the other infra stuff, to be honest), as long as it works.
But yeah, text remix machines are not a long-term solution to that problem.
I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, google didn't return anything useful (besides a blog post clearly written by AI and with absolutely no information in it). Claude managed to give some interesting pointers, but its suggestions were not working and I also noticed that it started to hallucinate badly about ipv6 and gave me some suggestions that were just plain untrue. Claude Opus is smart, usually when it gets so convinced about something is after researching the internet and not just based on its training data. I wonder where it got so convinced about it. Maybe reading some other hallucinated blog post like the one I stumbled upon?
As time goes on, more and more people will recognize this problem and we'll develop new ways of measuring information quality and trustworthiness. Nothing about this problem is fundamental, it's just that we're in the middle of a very chaotic transition.
> Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me
Are you sure about that? Even if you didn't see ads ( remember people pay even if you don't click - just like a billboard ) - they are still profiling you to better sell you ads in the future, and using your interaction as free training data.
select l.id, l.name
from locations as l
where l.type = 'amusement_park'
and exists (
select id from locations as l2
where l2.type = 'rv_parking'
and distance(l2.geo, l.geo) < $nearby_distance
)
The hard job is collecting the data.
Only a novice would look at ai code and say “wow this is good”.
For a lot of problems "quick and good enough" is all that is required. I've used it a lot for managing my Home Assistant setup. Has saved me countless of hours.
In principle I could've done it myself, but I never would have, the time investment required to learn it wouldn't have been worth the value I get from it.
Note that I am talking about frontier models and only the last 6-12 months. Opus was really the breakthrough point for me.
A pain plate of rice is bad food. But would you prefer starving too death? Or for others to starve?
Or saying that a car is a better vehicle than a bicycle. That is probably true, but many times for many people a bicycle is all they can get.
When you discuss design and architecture first, and write that out in a design doc or something along those lines, it works quite well for the most part.
And 9 out of 10 times when it produces some poor results, just asking "is this really a good approach?" or just stating "This code makes me very sad" it will most of the time do a really good job of analysing why that code is bad and how to improve it.
And you should know that this is not accurate. But at this point this has devolved into a dick measuring contest, which I refuse to do. Have a good day.
If ever there were three adjectives which do NOT apply to generative AI...
It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I had it prepare an SVG of the whole assembly with all the measurements and parts labeled.
That’s the thing with AI - its responses sound plausible enough to non-experts but time and time again I see experts in any given field being able to identify AI content by pinpointing subtle but crucial errors. That’s one of its dangers - it gives you enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot.
Also, ask people in the trades to review each other's jobs. They will harshly criticize each other too for missing basic things and then go on to vehemently disagree. As an outsider it doesn't mean much that an expert found some fault. They always find something to nitpick.
Yes, but with a human worker there is a chain of accountability. With AI, there is none.
Maybe, but that's part of the experience of learning. I plan to maintain pools for the rest of my life, if I made an oversight which costs me down the line then the lesson will be that much more memorable.
This is an above-ground pool with a pump and a filter, the stakes are relatively low. In the absolute worst case I could rip it all out and pay a pro to do it for the price I was quoted.
I guess what you're talking about is sanitizer, in my case we use chlorine. I test it every time we swim, but I wouldn't have needed an LLM for that. It's very straight forward to maintain pool chlorine, my Dad taught me that when I was 13.
The previous system was also installed by a non-professional and was mostly tubes. It leaked to all hell and looked generally redneck and awful.
First step was draining the pool and doing a nice deep clean. Then I ripped out all the original plumbing until it was just the pool outlets, pump, and filter.
I arranged it all and measured the dimensions. I fed the figures along with a tonne of photos and explanation to GPT. I spent a while talking pros/cons and landed on a design which lined up with what I'd seen on YouTube. I had it prepare me a full shopping list of PVC, tools, cements, etc. all linked to a local pool dealer. I picked it up the next day.
The PVC was all cut with a chop-saw then primed and cemented together. I found this part easier than I would have expected. I put a layer of TigerFlex hose between the PVC manifold and the pump/pool/filter inlets so it had some tolerance.
We've been swimming in it all summer, no issues whatsoever so far.
I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.
Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.
Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.
I know very little about pinball machines, out of curiosity, do some come with any amount of schematics or diagrams?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFV...
I would love to put them on a kiosk in the museum.
The internet has a lot of scans of wildly varying quality. The AI industry's hunger for data means there has been a lot of progress in OCR and data extraction, so I have notions of taking something like PaddleOCR and trying to turn the scans into a cohesive reference site that will work well on phones, etc. But I'm not sure when I will get to it.
If people out there are interested in working on a project like that, let me know. Email me at william@theflip.museum.
The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.
Bubbles are not a great time to form intuitions. WebVan [1] and Kozmo [2] also seemed to herald a new age. Decades later, brick-and-mortar grocery stores and convenience stores are still doing fine.
> The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.
A few years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button to fix your outdoor plumbing.
The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.a.k.a. the third? fourth? AI summer
This was for a largish (40,000L) above-ground pool with no hookup to my home's plumbing system. The water was all pumped in from a water truck. The previous system was also installed by a non-professional and was mostly tubes. It leaked to all hell and looked generally redneck and awful.
First step was draining the pool and doing a nice deep clean. Then I ripped out all the original plumbing until it was just the pool outlets, pump, and filter.
I arranged it all and measured the dimensions. I fed the figures along with a tonne of photos and explanation to GPT. I spent a while talking pros/cons and landed on a design which lined up with what I'd seen on YouTube. I had it prepare me a full shopping list of PVC, tools, cements, etc. all linked to a local pool dealer. I picked it up the next day.
The PVC was all cut with a chop-saw then primed and cemented together. I found this part easier than I would have expected. I put a layer of TigerFlex hose between the PVC manifold and the pump/pool/filter inlets so it had some tolerance.
We've been swimming in it all summer, no issues whatsoever so far.
I find it telling that the highest praise for LLMs comes from people using it for something where they admittedly have very little domain knowledge. Domain experts usually mention major caveats. I've been testing them on subjects where I already understand the problem well, and I've yet to see any outputs that would make me trust them on things I don't already know.
Anyway, my pool's looking great and I gained some new skills. I probably could have gotten there with books and YouTube alone, but having another tool at my disposal made me a bit more confident.
"LLMs seem good at things you are not good at."
So, if you've never touched PVC before, LLM sounds plausibly competent--it may actually be or it may not be, but you'll walk away from it thinking you learned something. If you are a professional plumber and ask an LLM the same thing, the output will more look flawed and possibly dangerous.
Same for software writing: If you're not a good software developer, you probably think an LLM is great and writes much better code faster than a human developer can. But if you are a good software developer, LLM output is slop and requires huge rework to be passable.
I am not a mechanic by trade, but I know nearly everything there is to know about working on an ICE car. I did paint cars professionally for a bit.
LLMs are absolutely full of garbage advice, when I try to use it for troubleshooting. However, people who don't know anything about cars are telling me it helped them fix issues. I am assuming their issues were maybe surface level and something I would just know without even looking at any manuals, because when I use it for complex problems it just doesn't work for me.
well to be fair, it's sounds about as competent as your average homedepot employee. He's wasn't doing something super complicated, cutting and gluing PVC for an above ground pool is very common and doesn't require a plumber. I used some youtube videos to fix my dishwasher, i didn't need a professional service agent from the manufacturer I just needed some pointers.
as for software writing, for standard everyday enterprise app work which is typically just CRUD and moving data around it works fine. That kind of software does not need to be a highly tuned work of art to meet the requirements.
Why were you not confident with literal how to videos and documentation, but became confident when a chatbot generated probable text?
https://siliconreckoner.substack.com/p/terence-tao-on-machin...
To me it seems like people who are confident in their expertise generally find it useful, even if it's imperfect
For instance, in the domain of software engineering: I would not trust it to implement a major architectural change, or a groundbreaking, complex new feature. I would trust it more (but not completely) on something like a refactoring that may touch thousands of lines in a fairly mechanistic way, but that was a little too-complicated for simpler tools likes regexes. While that's kind of a nifty use, I think it's fair to say that non-LLM software purpose-built for such tasks can probably do the same thing more effectively for less real cost (meaning the currently-subsidized real cost of all the training and inference power burn, etc)
But the education system - at least for me, 20ish years ago - was very much tiered or broken up into classism: if you were highly intelligent or a good learner you'd go to advanced schools where you'd get higher level math, latin, etc. If you were "dumb" you'd get taught how to do woodworking and masonry. At best I was taught how to use a figure saw, drill press safety measures, and how to patch an inner tube (welcome to the Netherlands, this is very important. Or, was, it's much simpler and cheaper to just buy a new inner tube nowadays).
The fellow who'd done it originally is my neighbor and he's a retired teacher. There's a lot of ways to learn this stuff - my one takeaway has been that it's much easier than people make it out to be.
Except, for people who were gently motivated, that information was already pretty well democratized by libraries. You could trivially go to the library, and get whatever books were published on a topic, even if the only copy was on the other side of the country. Tons of the famous names from previous decades got their start teaching themselves things from a book in a library. It was very common in the technical churn of the 20th century that a new project at work meant you went to the library and grabbed books on a brand new topic and self-taught. This for example is how some programmers in the 90s developed 3D engines.
There was even a short period of human history where it was common to pay a few thousand dollars for a family encyclopedia. I got my start reading an 80s encyclopedia, focusing on the more technical tomes, before I found Wikipedia. The drive to access and learn information lead to me learning about computers in a time and place where a formal education on the subject was unavailable to me. I owe my career to it.
After the existence of Ebay, a few hundred dollars could populate a shelf with the standard reference books and material for nearly any interest. All it took was a willingness to look for books, buy them, and sit down and read them.
Similarly, the internet did the same since the 90s. Specifically, it allowed for non-physical clubs to supplement the fact that not everyone lived in Silicon Valley and could access those rich clubs on niche topics. But special interest magazines were already providing some of that functionality.
The primary filtering LLMs do is provide new access and ability to people who are far too lazy and unmotivated to do the real work necessary to learn about something without being literally spoon fed.
This helps explain why the primary thing LLMs have done is increase the noise floor of information, and explains differing sentiments. People willing to put in minimal effort to learn things had zero issue learning new information in the previous regime, so aren't that impressed when an LLM regurgitates the wikipedia intro paragraph or summarizes a popular reference. They already read that. They note that the LLMs confidence is often unwarranted, and they get reasonable results because they have foundational understanding of the domain and already know which pitfalls and problems to be concerned about, and how to prompt the LLM to make the right choices.
For people who largely are unwilling to take minimum effort to learn something new, of course LLMs feel magical, because Wikipedia level introductions to topics are magic to people who aren't already seeking them out. Of course, the question is, what in the world was previously stopping you from learning new things?
[0] https://tomtilley.net/projects/pvc/
(found via https://wiby.me/)
I'm not sure if the sites you linked would have been immediately very helpful in my specific case. You know this is for a pool, right?
The first is called "Everyday Uses for PVC Water Pipe" and has some cool ideas like using PVC for Wiimote holders or tridents, but I don't think that's super relevant for this project.
The second is a great forum which I'm already familiar with, but again, the topic is household plumbing and from a brief skim, none of the topics mention pools. I think mine would have been out of place.
I appreciate you trying to help!
People have been DIYing swimming pools for decades with the help of… books:
* https://www.amazon.com/COMPLETE-GUIDE-SWIMMING-CONSTRUCTION-...
Where do you think ChatGPT got its information from?
Perhaps with good reason?
Funnily enough, I've had a somewhat mixed-to-hostile response when trying to upstream the vibecoded fixes, so I suspect using an LLM to fix broken open-source software (that human maintainers don't have the time to fix themselves, nor the humility to accept an LLM-authored fix) will become more of a thing going forward too.
Oh, it's also been identifying a bunch of patterns in sales data for my business that has been increasing monthly profit consistently since last November (around $4,000 USD, every month, cumulatively so far with no sign of slowing down - could easily be $10k/mo in increased gains by end of financial year).
I tend to respond quite well to AI-authored or assisted PRs to my project, but to be fair we maybe only get 3-5 PRs in a good month.
Thinking it through a little bit is probably coming from having bounties on a few issues that might be contributing to my negative experience.
And apparently is more than adequate to its gulled users.
The problem as usual is the mass of rich people trying to profit off of them, not the technology itself.
Its funny how fast we forget that when Google came out and arguably now many would laugh at the statement "all the good, companies like Google brought to the internet"
It really isn’t doing any of that, though. When AI gets it wrong, that person needs to understand why it is wrong, and without that upfront knowledge or skill of reasoning, it’s much less direct to actually build something in the correct ways.
I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality.
First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows.
Second, 1989, when cable TV became a mature technology reaching half of U.S. households.
And finally, maybe a lesser item, the introduction of the DVR circa 2000, when we stopped watching scheduled TV together.
I wonder if more historically informed people would find the fracturing going further back as other advancements in publishing technology allowed more people to share more views.
> The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.
My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater.
But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.
In those pre-streaming days, it would often occupy itself by filling otherwise-empty hard drive space with stuff that people might want to watch at a time of their choosing -- based on previous and simple Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down inputs from the handheld remote. In this way, it generally had stuff recorded and available for viewing 24/7 that people in the house might actually want to watch, at just the cost of some otherwise-idle machine time and some simple user ratings to direct it.
At that time, it was a very neat DVR with very thoughtful features that were implemented in smart ways.
I wanted to watch THX-1138, which was supposed to be George Lucas's first feature-length film. It was somewhat obscure; I couldn't find it to rent locally. I couldn't find it in the published schedules for the premium channels we had, either.
I could have bought a new copy, maybe, but IIRC even that was problematic. This whole Internet thing was still mostly confined to the old-web era and inexpensively mass-produced DVDs hadn't entered the era of ubiquity.
So I told the Tivo DVR to record that film, anyway, without further instruction. Despite knowing that it was hard (mabe impossible!) to find on-air: I just gave it the name and told it to make it so.
And as unlikely as that seemed to me at that time: It did. It took months for it to find THX-1138. When it was eventually scheduled to be aired (one time, in the middle of the night): It made that recording a priority, executed that recording without flaw, and kept that recording so I could watch it later.
That was gold. VCRs never, ever did that stuff. (Most other DVRs never did, either.)
What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.
You're assuming that "rich" is the only relevant dividing line, which it isn't.
It's why I hate people looking down on fanfiction, too. Aliens was Alien fanfiction. The New Testament is OT fanfiction. Hell, nolan's The Odyssey is fanfiction.
The establishment uses terms to dismiss outsider art as less-than, and this isn't much different. (They of course get to decide what the "inside" is)
Just because an established Hollywood director was a fan of the first Alien movie does make his script for Alien's sequel "fan fiction".
Cameron had already written and directed The Terminator when the owners of the Alien franchise chose his script for the sequel.
(Fifty Shades of Grey in contrast really did originate as fan fiction.)
I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. The "age of mass, top-down communications" didn't start "in the mid 20th century", and the printing press should not be used as a counterexample to support rayiner's argument. William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863.
The point is you are letting a system designed by elites to uphold elites set the boundaries. There are many forms of alternative media out there, some more popular than any billionaire owned rag.
Just expand your definition and don't let others tell you what is or isn't appropriate. Especially when it comes to political thought.
Add in the red scare + knee capping more leftists + academics during the 60s, 70s and you have a once massively influential independent confederate type of worker lead organizations that now amount to some moderate pundit's substack where they traded advocacy for ad dollars.
But before all this there were dual power institutions and mutual aid even going as far as providing free public education to all (who do you think taught cattle ranchers how to read in the 1880s? Then look at how quickly they took up leftist literature then writing their own).
What are you truly saying here because it just sounds like you don't know the history of labor in the US, which no shit. They don't teach this stuff anywhere, you have to purposely seek it out because neoliberals consider this type of stuff heretical.
The yellow journalism era, on the other hand, was a little closer to the rich owning the press.
Times are not as different as we'd like to believe
But corporations were an act of Congress in 1776. Early America was decidedly anti-corporate (the Boston Tea Party was about a tax break to a corporation). Early Americans (and early thinkers who influenced Americans) were grossly distrustful of corporations and pools of money.
> The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own
Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations
I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA. 3 was a bit of a flop, but there's a lot of design space still out there to explore.
Central points of control are also single points of failure. I think that without this bias we'd have a much more resilient infrastructure, not just in the face of corruption, but in the face of things like solar flares.
Says who though? The current front runners? Who can't even not let them hack into into other companies over the weekend unsupervised already?
Our earlier communication technologies merely had to work... at all. The next one will have to work in a world full of adversaries. The current front runners' products are those adversaries.
Sure, they have legitimate uses, but when it comes to trustworthy communication between humans, AI agents have nothing to offer except for the ability to interfere. Sure, they can also defend against that interference, but that's a bit like how gmail blocks spam while simultaneously serving ads to your inbox: they're not so much solving a problem as protecting a monopoly on their ability to cause that problem.
First, let me acknowledge the quasi-monopoly aspect -- it definitely constrained choice and filtered world events through the lens of their corporate overlords, the CIA dripped propaganda into discourse, etc.
But there was so much shared experience that that pretty much unified the US as a tribe. Conspiracies were passed around but were kind of like underground whispers. There was no Red vs Blue.
I'm not arguing to go back to those times, but in many ways the internet and more so, social media, is a deal with the devil.
And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equate to different people consuming the same content.
The real crux of the modern problem isn’t preference drive choices. It’s independent publishers being driven out by corporate greed. Eg AI traffic making it unviable for independent blogs. But then one could argue that the current ecosystem, where the barrier for publishing being so low, is an anomaly because historically that was always prohibitively expensive. To go back to the TV example: you couldn’t commission a show without deep pockets and a lot of TV exec contacts.
I’d love our golden age of information to be persistent. But, and as yourself and others have alluded to, that’s not guaranteed unless we fight to keep it that way.
A: It excludes opinion.
I don't know the word for the opposite of shared reality (maybe private individualized realities), but it results in a scenario where you have nothing in common with other people other than "I saw some thing" and therefore it becomes very difficult to discuss anything with them.
Different cultures?
I think different cultures can share the same reality, though filtered through different lenses.
If two people from different cultures watch the same movie, one finds it ok and the other offensive and disrespectful, that's a shared reality filtered through different cultural backgrounds. Even if either version of the movie is dubbed, censored, or altered in any way, there's still enough common or shared material that a discussion can be held.
If two people had completely different experiences and watched completely different, tailor-made movies, then there's very little for them to discuss or even disagree with. "I haven't watched your movie", "I haven't watched yours either", "Mine was better", "I guess... I wouldn't know, I thought mine was cool", etc. No shared reality.
My point, which admittedly my last message didn't make at all, is that "different shared realities" is not a new thing. The concept is what would have been referred to as "different cultures" throughout most of human history.
Different art, politics, passions, fears, identities, and myths is what cultural variety is about.
If you and I watch the same movies and listen to the same music and follow the same politics and share the same dreams and worries, I don't think it's reasonable to say that we are from different cultures.
What is being described as a "shared reality" in this thread feels more like globalism and less like something obviously positive or worth protecting.
I'm all for more cultural variety as an expression of individual differences.
The original point of this subthread was that we can't even agree on a shared set of facts anymore! The political Right has an entirely different set of facts than the political Left, and when our reality is derived from those facts, we cannot share the same reality anymore.
The colour of grass is something that’s scientifically measurable.
My point is that some broadcasters are very strict about sticking to the facts. Some will misrepresent those facts but not technically lie (eg discuss statistics that favour their partisan view but don’t share the full context behind those stats).
And then there’s broadcasters like Fox News that promote flat out lies. It’s often not even an interpretation of the truth. It’s shared as an opinion but the evidence clearly proves it’s just lies presented as facts.
And I really wish there were criminal charges for broadcasting blatant lies. Not just in America, but most of the developed world where populist-propaganda is used to brainwash gullible voters.
We, as a society, fully understand the concept of truthful and untruthful statements. We learn it as a child and get scalded when we lie. We depend on this understanding in law, courts, contracts, and commerce. We understand it when educators teach and when requesting services of others.
If you want to claim that communication cannot be truthful nor verifiable at any level, then society would fail to function because the literal point of communication is to share an information.
Now if you wanted to make a philosophical point about proving an intent to lie, or our perceptions of reality, rather than communication as a medium, then that’s a different topic (and one I discussed elsewhere in this thread). But for your exact argument presented, we already have millennia of past precedence to prove that communication is expected to have truthful statements.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1621
https://www.gov.uk/contempt-of-court
https://www.uklegalguides.com/what-is-fraud/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-Truth_Pledge
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8n99727lvo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton
And they are literally hundreds of thousands of other examples I could share where communication is understood to have provable truthful states.
Literally no one, aside yourself, believes that it’s impossible to communicate a fact nor that lies doesn’t exist.
I don't know, there is pretty strong evidence in this discussion that we are unable to communicate. Your apparent opinion of I am saying continues to show to be incorrect over and over — and I'm sure that goes both ways.
In fact, it seems evident that, deep down, you already realize this as you have stopped even trying to add anything of your own to the discussion, outsourcing to the words of others. Poor form to not be able to speak to something yourself, but I can appreciate that your emotions are starting to run wild on realizing that the world isn't as simple as you originally imagined.
But, as before, I likely have the wrong opinion about what you are trying to say. There is no objective way to measure language. QED.
Let's face it, there is no technical reason for us to disagree. The universe is what it is and that is an incontrovertible fact. We can measure the state of universe scientifically. There is fundamentally nothing we can disagree about except our opinion of the language. And, indeed, it is apparent that we are failing to discuss the state of the universe because our opinion about what the words mean is ostensibly not shared.
But, I mean, that's what we've been talking about the whole time: that there is no objective way to measure language. If you are trying to repeat what I said from the start, what value do you believe is added? Simple acknowledgement?
JFK was shot, that's not just my opinion.
Unless you choose to believe some kind of post-modern crazyness, in which case - have at it.
To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.
The faking part would be in who is blamed and what country to bomb etc.
I'm saying that not everything is opinion, that there does exist a category called 'fact'. And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
Do you have access to their head? How do you know that someone didn’t swap that head for someone else who had been shot?
Like I said, this is purely a philosophic argument. I’m not actually trying to suggest that there isn’t such thing as “facts”.
> And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
No, I’m making a psychological point that our perceptions are what we use to construct our reality, and that our perceptions are malleable. If they weren’t, then drugs would have no effect, psychosis wouldn’t be a thing, and people’s opinions wouldn’t differ about even the most straightforward things like god, globe vs flat earth, and so on and so forth.
> This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
I agree. As I said in the previous comment:
“To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.”
I'm not sure I understand.. we have objective realities in the world that are certainly not "opinions".
According this logic, gravity exists because opinions coincide?
yeah because there is a shared reality in which you can both see the same movie. enjoy it while it lasts.
Exactly. The shared reality is the experience. You both were given the same opportunity to take in the same information. The different opinion is what comes out of the other side of the meat suit processing the experience.
Algo driven results changes the experience by changing what the user perceives. So there might never be a shared experience.
I imagine in prior ages this was perhaps more about folks reading a core collection of books. I expect there was less shared culture than in ^
Now it seems like we're in an era with (potentially) less of a shared cultural bases than either of those times. I've certainly met people where there's really no overlap - their core beliefs, values, etc - fundamentally different foundations. If that becomes more widespread, it's hard to know what that will do to our societies.
Take your examples, Friends and Frasier were aired at roughly the same time in the UK (obviously on competing stations). Most people watched Friends, but that show wasn’t really my thing. So I watched Frasier. As did my closest friends. And we’d chat about that. But I couldn’t join in with work colleagues with Friends chats.
It’s a bit like sports matches. People at work will talk about football/soccer but I’d be more interested in Snooker. So I’d chat snooker with friends and duck out of the football work chat.
I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks. Certainly echo chambers are undesirable.
The answer society mostly settled on is representative democracy.
You appoint qualified candidates via consensus, and then give them the microphone and some measure of control as long as the consensus stays strong. This is sort of what we have now with influencer culture.
The flaw has always been human nature. It turns out that half of all people are of below average intelligence and they consequently make bad decisions. Especially if the smarter half use them as pawns to assume control, which is what US politics has become.
Once the Morlocks and the Eloi have settled into their roles the entire thing falls apart and democracy dies screaming.
Worse than that; it turns out that even people of above average intelligence consistently make bad decisions! AND they still attempt to control others!
Yeah, absolutely. But for the web, at least for my daily use of it, this was the first big "shift". Learning how something was spelled by someone googling it and quoting the number of results to the others.. good times. And you can no longer find out what the page with highest page rank says about "pizza" regardless of where YOU happen to be.
Radio gave us Demagogues like Father Coughlin in the US and Hitler in Germany, and we still havent dealt with the problems radio introduced when television came along and now we have the internet with social media, podcast, and algorithmic echochambers, and algorithm induced radicalization. Radio television internet any one is just as much a shock to society as print was and we still havent figured out how to adapt yet to any fully.
And micropayments would've taken off in a big way.
The only reason why micropayments doesn't really exist today isn't due to technical reasons, it's because advertising is too dominant, and because consumers got trained on expecting everything on the internet to be "free", not realizing they're the product.
Humans are only now figuring out pointy shoes are bad for people's feet. This species is wrong about almost everything when it comes to its own well being and like pointy shoes - it's a completely unnecessary self-own that barely benefitted anyone.
I think advertising runs a little deeper into our identity and history than you are thinking. If you have a sign in your window describing your wares, that's advertising. If you're standing on a street corner inviting customers to enter, that's advertising. If you're doing nearly anything to make the world know that your business exists, you're advertising. I'd rather not live in a world where "ad cops" see fit to intrude and opine on such activities. Attacking PII brokers, on the other hand, would do far less collateral damage.
I'm with you on the shoes though.
Pedantry is not a counter argument, it's a deflection. We are not in court.
A heavily instanced MMO may as well be a single-player or co-op game with a shared chatroom as a lobby, there is absolutely none of the emergent play, none of the characterization of players & groups of players, nothing original. Instead, give me the same ground to walk on as everybody else, even if our tread wears all the grass off of it; Half of my life in these games was getting bored waiting for a mob to spawn and fucking around making friends waiting in line, or ganging up on the guy who wanted to cut in line, or waging war on the clan that currently controls the needed territory, or grouping together to fight mobs higher than I should be able to hit (which the instance will just Adjust Downwards). Instancing and other auto-personalization algorithms cut the annoyances that are central to human socialization, achievement loops, and wayfinding.
I still don't understand the appeal of an online game where you're algorithmically guaranteed a ~50% win rate after a calibration period. Seems to be selling well enough though.
In Data 2 the skill level shifted upwards enourmously for pro players and I feel also for normal players. But the scene also got kinda lame and boring with too optimized strategies.
I never wanted to be the best CS:S player, I wanted to hang out with the regulars on the server I was a regular at. Like a bowling league or a group bike ride.
Like what is the point of making grinding in games more efficient as you remove the fun and social aspect and the advantage of organizing a party.
There was no global yellow pages where plumbers from Odessa were listed beside plumbers from Tokyo, was there?
If you were looking for something more esoteric, you were going to find different results in the World Christian Encyclopedia than you would in the Encyclopedia Britannica
"...but how do I know that what I perceive as a certain meme, you also perceive as that same meme??"
It ignores the fact that there was no such shared reality. Just go and look for the time when everyone agreed if racism existed.
That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time.
In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population.
Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web."
Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it.
That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO.
So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.
Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usenet and Yahoo's index (which was updated manually) and a few webrings.
now, I'm able to watch a show that aired in Brazil the day after, with English subtitles.
People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"
> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting.
Judged on an anime freshness scale, probably not.
The old internet was interesting, open, simple, un-gated, and relatively egalitarian with few corporate interests in commanding positions. The new internet is basically a predatory environment disguised as a library.
The Internet used to be a space for high-IQ people, and now it's filled with low attention span, low impulse control people. Tik Tok and Instagram are the worst offenders in this regard, because it enabled borderline illiterate people to communicate on the Internet.
The ease of use introduced the average individuals to the web and online gaming. When I was younger and online gaming was gaining traction my "clan" hosted servers. This is how I started dipping my toes into programming and server configuration. Literally, everyone that was in the clan was quite intelligent. We had debates and discussions on IRC, forums and teamspeak.
Now, gaming and the web is just trash full of brain rotted individuals. Communities have been destroyed by lack of self hosted or self owned servers. Forums have been destroyed by discord. Games are being destroyed by microtransactions.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. Even in Tik Tok there’s a lot of very interesting history, war, etc., stuff.
The old internet was a space for people who were incentivized to spend significant effort dealing with technical things to connect to strangers, which has nothing to do with IQ or "intelligence" or anything like that.
There has always been plenty of people who are extremely stupid, but have no problem following technical minutia as required for things like the early internet.
Remember that early access was extremely expensive. Usually it was billed hourly, at significant rates. This means that the primary filter for internet users back then was connection to resources, through an academic connection, a corporate connection, a government connection, or a lot of personal wealth.
The quality of internet users early on, if it even existed (which I dispute), was more driven by organizations like the government, academia, and defense contractors.
And as much as people cried about "Eternal September", the internet mostly survived as a distributed place with real communities until the late 2000s, where it started to be really profitable to build walled gardens for Advertising economies.
The walls didn't really come up until the 2010s: Facebook being a dominant platform, Google owning Youtube and leveraging that to try and force their own social network, Apple controlling most phones, old forums dying, and the rise of AWS to centralize internet software design.
Similarly, back when computers were expensive, people on the internet generally were higher income, which is also quite significantly correlated with intelligence.
It's nice you can view (pirate) whatever content you want, but not so nice that algorithmic platforms pretend to be neutral social spaces when in fact they're being used to promote certain political and cultural beliefs while suppressing others.
Before slop farms started using ChatGPT, they were using outsourced writers who had a tenuous (at best) grasp on the language and subject. If you searched anything on the web, your first page of search results was generally incredibly fluffy articles.
For example, you would search for "How to use python async" or whatever, and every non-stackoverflow result would go something like "Python is a useful language for async library usage. Python is a language created in... You can install Python by... Synchronous programming is... Asynchronous programming is... Python synchronous code looks like... Python async module code looks like... Popular libraries for async are... Other languages have async such as... To import async module you can..." with every paragraph interspersed with an ad. The content was surface level, relying upon blatant plagiarism of better-written articles and forum posts without attribution. It was an utterly miserable experience if you placed any value on your time.
The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop, and the karmic irony that the content farmers who put the writing profession into a race-to-the-bottom were themselves discarded, in much the same way as the scabs who replaced striking workers were frequently discarded in the industrial era.
And that's without even getting into the subject of the people who made money as Internet point farmers of Reddit or Twitter, who would repost generic content then sell their accounts to spammers.
The Internet was already going in this direction; the only difference is the rate at which it enshittified. I agree that it's in a worse state than it was 10 years ago, but let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
The most important thing that's changed is the proportion of slop.
When it was humans originators v human sloppers, we stood a chance.
Now it is going fewer human originators v. vastly more machine sloppers. No chance.
coz yeah good quality material is disappearing on the web fast. the only thing remaining is people building their own private search indexes.
I've been working on a project that basically is a superset of Zotero, just efficient. As if you expected to have more than a few thousand references. I'm sure I'll get it done after the web is long gone.
I do it too so it's not a criticism, but I find it kinda interesting culturally. It's a reflection I think of the environment that we've created for ourselves, or has been created for us (or some combo) where somehow you can't point out an unqualified negative of this tech.
This to me is actually one of the clearest bubble signals, just because if it really were as good as all that, it'd be completely redundant to remind everyone of that when criticising it.
I think it might be a sort of weird collective psychological thing where we must not admit what seems pretty clear, just for fear of breaking from norms.
But, of course, yeah it's very useful for some stuff and I use it all the time :-)
Everyone else also thinks like that and so isn't normally unambiguously critical, so you end up not knowing who really thinks that way and who's just doing it because of the game theory.
It could even be practically nobody. There's no way to tell until the deadlock breaks.
My own general thoughts are that AI is extremely useful in discrete cases, will cause an immense amount of cultural and societal harm overall, and there's no clear political path to a healthier development trajectory. I don't think that's an uncommon stance, but people espousing something like that get a lot of hate in a lot of discussions.
I can easily imagine an arms control style series of agreements between the handful of leading AI companies and countries which are imperfect but still quite effective at mitigating the harms without stifling the upsides, but it seems clear that the current leading actors in this space have zero interest in that.
It works with just about anyone but try and say something positive about Trump and, if you don't add a qualifier like that, the first reply is going to be something like, "I guess you like ICE murdering babies." And then the conversation you wanted to have gets completely derailed.
The majority of people's opinions on the subtopics of complex or controversial topics have to align with their opinion on the overall topic.
AI is bad so it must both be useless and be using up all the water.
People have to post very defensively online, otherwise some "um ackshully" guy will be immediately jumping down their throat
If you write anything negative about AI without stroking the ego of the AI bros first by praising their machine best friends they will be all over you calling you a luddite
Go into any subreddit and you see the exact same pattern.
“I know it is ruining all that I hold dear, but what else can I do but profit from it like everyone else?”
Some websites already had minimum “for humans” content for years, as it was all used to appease the algorithm.
And Social Media was the cherry on top, with information overloading, walled gardens, personalization and companies using it to pull a “Hey Fellow Kids” when using it for marketing.
Will there be venues left (largely) unencumbered by AI to even turn analogue? The top-down control of our industries, financial systems, education, etc by a few mega corporations and fewer mega rich people, who also have vested interests in the advent of AI as AI corps are trying to be, means there's nothing left where AI is not inserted in every vein and nerve and nerve centre.
It is as if a few people in the world are trying to turn this world into something Frankensteinian because they think that then they will get the chance to be the only ones to control this Frankensteinian. They might as well succeed. To what end? I do not believe even they know that. Blindness of greed.
I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the current state, I'm afraid the majority of people will forget what search was like and default to AI summaries.
I've tried alternatives, including Kagi (not actually relevant because there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products) and Uruky, but they're not good enough.
(Edit: Added "directly or indirectly" about Kagi to point out that I'm not claiming that Kagi itself is Russian.)
Even if brave were problematic it would be the lesser evil to me.
The fact is that SEO people got too good at their jobs and filled the search results with junk.
They should be able to fight this as well.
Problem is they are the ones funding the poor quality spam and they're in turn profiting by taking money from advertisers.
Something like this has existed as long as I can remember. The three dots used to be a down arrow in the same place.
PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.
Why not?
Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences, so I dislike idea of even very indirectly funding them.
And I support actions that are harmful to Russian economy, also when they are harmful to me - as long as it is not too badly balanced. As this is much cheaper than directly participating in war.
(I am from Poland)
PS
Yes, I understand that at some point there are some indirect effects that you cannot avoid.
I also understand if for some people paying Kagi that pays tiny fraction of that to Yandex that is paying taxes in Russia which funds their wars is too tenuous connection to care.
What makes you think so?
>Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences
What do you mean?
Your resident propagandists like Solovyov, Dugin and Medvedev are very explicit about invading former warsaw pact countries when they're not threatening Europe with nukes.
> Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences
They didn't teach you about the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in your russian school? Of course not, it doesn't fit the great patriotic war narrative. It's about that time when your country's leadership was friendly with the nazis and decided to split eastern europe between themselves.
Look, a picture of stalin shaking hands with a nazi: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Bundesar...
that joint invasion of Poland by Russia (Soviet Union) and Germany (Third Reich) was really bad for my country and its inhabitants.
1920s Russian invasion failed but also was bad.
Previously there was occupation of part of Poland that lasted over century which was also bad for us.
and so on
> What makes you think so?
Geopolitical analysis of situation. Who else in your opinion is more likely to invade Poland? Japan?
That's a very interesting turn of conversation. I think you are missing a bit from that story when presenting Poland as a victim[0]:
According to Aviel Roshwald, (Piłsudski) "hoped to incorporate most of the territories of the defunct Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into the future Polish state by structuring it as the Polish-led, multinational federation." Piłsudski had wanted to break up the Russian Empire and set up the Intermarium federation of various different states: Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and other Central and East European countries that emerged from the crumbling empires after World War I. In Piłsudski's vision, Poland would replace a truncated and vastly reduced Russia as the great power of Eastern Europe. His plan excluded negotiations prior to military victory. <...>
He used military force to expand the Polish borders in Galicia and Volhynia and crush a Ukrainian attempt at self-determination in the disputed territories east of the Curzon Line, which contained a significant Polish minority. On 7 February 1919, Piłsudski spoke on the subject of Poland's future frontiers:
"At the moment Poland is essentially without borders and all that we can gain in this regard in the west depends on the Entente – on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany. In the east, it's a different matter; there are doors here that open and close and it depends on who forces them open and how far".
"Closed within the boundaries of the 16th century, cut off from the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, deprived of land and mineral wealth of the South and South-east, Russia could easily move into the status of second-grade power. Poland, as the largest and strongest of the new states, could easily establish a sphere of influence stretching from Finland to the Caucasus".
The USSR returned the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920. And I must remind you that just a year earlier Germany, Hungary and Poland jointly dismembered Czechoslovakia[1]:
Germany had started a low-intensity undeclared war on Czechoslovakia on 17 September 1938. <...> This was followed by Polish and Hungarian territorial demands brought on 21 and 22 September, respectively. <...> Poland grouped its army units near its common border with Czechoslovakia and conducted an unsuccessful probing offensive on 23 September. Hungary moved its troops towards the border with Czechoslovakia, without attacking. The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia's assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.
<...>
The Munich Agreement was soon followed by the First Vienna Award on 2 November 1938, separating largely Hungarian inhabited territories in southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Rus' from Czechoslovakia. On 30 November, Czechoslovakia ceded to Poland small patches of land in the Spiš and Orava regions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#Back...
Source: Am Polish.
And you in turn seem to miss similar quotes from Lenin et all, salivating at subjugation of Poland.
> The USSR returned the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920
Yes, in 1920 Russia wanted to conquer Poland but failed then. They managed to succeed in cooperation with Nazi Germany.
How that disproves my point that Russian invasions were bad for Poland?
> Czechoslovakia ceded to Poland small patches of land in the Spiš and Orava regions
Yeah, that was footgun though earlier story is also of interest
> provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.
geee, I wonder why (see say Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that proved such suspicion 100% correct)
If Russia invade in XXI century and they will manage to find some pretext (returning the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920 or something), how that will make things less bad for Poles?
again, I am not making point that Poland is 1000% innocent and Christ of nations or something. Though if you want to compete on who was less murderous, did less genocides and was less oppressive Russia will not win at all.
Enlighten me? Meanwhile I'll remind you that Felix Dzerzhinsky[0], who created the predecessor of KGB for Lenin, was a Pole born in Russian Poland. Vyacheslav Menzhinsky[1], his successor, was a Pole too.
>How that disproves my point that Russian invasions were bad for Poland?
You just don't call what happened around 1920 a Russian invasion, it was yet another Polish attempt at building its own empire that backfired. Especially, if you cite it as a reason for thinking Russia is likely to invade Poland
>geee, I wonder why (see say Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that proved such suspicion 100% correct)
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you don't cooperate with USSR against Hitler, having signed non-aggression pact with Hitler just 4 years earlier[2], don't be upset that USSR finally signed its own non-aggression pact with Hitler after years of trying to form an anti-Hitler pact with France and the GB (who cited Poland objections as one of the ways to drag its feet).[3]
I can't recommend enough the article "Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Alliance That Never Was and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939–1940" [3] with "trilingual, multi-archival evidence" to anyone who wants to understand the reasons for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
>If Russia invade in XXI century and they will manage to find some pretext (returning the territory that Poland grabbed in the 1920 or something), how that will make things less bad for Poles?
Sure, it'll be bad for Poles, just like if Poland burns Moscow once again it will be bad for Russians. But we are not discussing fantasy scenarios?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Menzhinsky
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declarat...
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2018.14...
And? You seem to be commenting like I claimed that Poles are nation of saints.
And from "Bolshevik revolutionary and politician of Polish origin and leader of Soviet secret police" description it is clear he was awful and evil human being.
Letting such person to end in position of authority and create not one secret police but three of them is utter failure of society in which he was living (Russian one).
Though it is noteworthy that likely most evil people of Polish origin (and maybe Poles if they were really Poles) did this in position of authority of Russian state. Not Polish one.
> If you don't cooperate with USSR against Hitler, having signed non-aggression pact with Hitler just 4 years earlier[2], don't be upset that USSR finally signed its own non-aggression pact with Hitler
non-aggression part was not a problem, the problem was in secret part about cooperation
Poland and no point signed treaty with Hitler to jointly dismember Russia, while Russia signed treaty with Hitler to jointly dismember Poland (and other countries)
(yes, I know about Zaolzie)
And "Lenin et all" included these Polish gentlemen which casts some doubt regarding you claim about "salivating at subjugation of Poland".
>in secret part about cooperation
There is nothing about cooperation in the secret part[0]. Just that Hitler stops at approximately the Curzon Line and doesn't take the territory that Poland grabbed from the corpse of Russian Empire. In fact, Soviet troops didn't move into Poland until German troops stopped advancing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Russia must be resisted until those responsible for that war are held accountable and Ukraine is whole, free and compensated, and all imprisoned and kidnapped Ukrainians (especially the kidnapped children) are returned.
Once those things are done, I'd be open to a slow process of normalization for the sake of the Russian people.
Yandex is Russian.
I would not describe it as Kagi being indirectly Russian.
What do you mean? That Kagi is directly Russian?
Paying a russian provider isn't against the law and at some point we need to bring Russia back into the warmth of the West.
I do maintain some boycotts that significantly inconvenience me (Amazon being one; I won’t enumerate them all), so I’m not just making excuses for inaction.
So I am fine with singling out Russia.
no, that Kagi is buying from Russian supplies
> Paying a russian provider isn't against the law and
I never claimed that it is
> at some point we need to bring Russia back into the warmth of the West.
no we don't, and hopefully Russia will be forced to behave before we do this
It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM", but the algorithm (or model) they use is heavily skewed towards intents (actions) and brands (because they 'trust' big names).
And it's not working.
A simple, short informative blog about a tool you used that could be of interest to max. 100 people on this planet is no longer getting ranked, if it gets indexed at all.
Those posts tick all boxes: no incoming links, no authority, thin content.
It changes somewhat between "Google Updates", but it's pretty clear that it's no longer working.
Multiply the 100 people not finding that post by millions of queries and it's now a big problem for Google.
My dad asked me the other day if Google got worse because smaller companies are not paying Google enough money.
He didn't see any difference between ads and content, because all results are now big brands only.
"Helpful content" is such a misnomer. It removes all helpful content in favour of AI overviews and only shows intent-driven, commercial content.
We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.
Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.
Tiktok is cheap to run. AI however, it needs absurd amounts of power, RAM and GPU compute capacity to run... and there's serious constraints everywhere.
The earlier web era felt like this unimaginable realm of freedom and exploration to me. I stumbled on countless novel sites that were interesting, helpful, and/or entertaining. That content has decreased by orders of magnitude since then. These days most searches return a full page of SEO slop that all summarize (badly) the same source from years before. There's usually zero new information, personal touches, or community attached.
Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left.
Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.
I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.
And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.
That movie still gives me wardialing and 2600 meetups and “voice bridging from a Dennys payphone bank at silly hours” memories.
The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow further.
How is this different to, from example, Yggdrasil Network[0]?
There is I2P. They have been disabling scripts for ideological reasons, so there were many websites without scripts. I have used quite exotic Charon web browser from Inferno OS in I2P. That was 15 years ago. Don't know how it's now.
There is RetroNAS and plenty of other software to enrich home network.
Sometimes I use Marginalia's "Vintage Web" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs and old .edu personal websites that someone forgot to delete, still a vanishing minority of anything one could find in 2001.
and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,
why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?
Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhammer 40K lore (written by unpaid volunteers anyway)? instead of just asking ChatGPT what the fuck Globriznaroks is/are.
Why should we support shady companies by sitting through their ads on YouTube videos for minute topics instead of just asking AI for the shit I want to know about?
Why should we submit to the whims of 3 mods on a subreddit deciding what thousands should get to see (fuck /r/AskScience) and then getting low-effort answers or outright trolling anyway? instead of just asking AI?
Bury me, I am ready.
but..that's not a problem inherent to the technology or medium itself.
That's a separate problem that's the responsibility of laws and society to solve
What we actually need is a browser that filters out bullshit.
What exactly WAS the "old" internet anyway?
100 half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff, covered with gif-vomit that looked like epilepsy simulators?
Serious question: What do the rose-tinted glass wearers actually think was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?
You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc.
If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here.
If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube now, if you but search for them (I suggest Weebl, David Firth, Sechi, to start with, and let the algorithm soak up the weirdness)
1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but with lists in fragmented networks. If the discussion exists at all, finding it is easy.
2. Early web. Dominated by topic focused websites, early online shops and personal home pages. Search engines suck and face strong competition from manually maintained topic-oriented directories (did anyone else here contribute to DMoz?), content discovery is mutual and webmasters help each other out by joining "web rings". DoubleClick and AdSense start to funnel small amounts of money to creators, but it's enough to offset hosting costs and in many cases can make web hosting effectively free or even yield a small profit. This encourages an explosion of website creation. Discussion moves off USENET onto phpBB forums. Every organization decides it's a cultural imperative to have a presence on the information superhighway. Finding information is easy as long as you can figure out what topic it belongs to.
3. Blogging and centralization era. The internet starts to rebuild itself around people as the primary object, not the topic or category. Directories die because websites can no longer be categorized by content. Web rings die for the same reason. IRC is replaced by instant messengers that are about connecting people with pre-existing friends, not mutual interest groups. Outside of institutional websites that exist to promote the organization, things become hard to find without highly centralized search engines because nobody is putting any effort into organizing or indexing what they write anymore: maybe you get a few tags if you're lucky. Spam, hacking and lack of SSO causes forums to centralize onto Reddit. This is the peak of the search engine era because you are forced to use Google to find anything. The power eventually corrupts the tech firms and they begin political censorship to benefit the left in 2015 [1]. Enormous amounts of information is deliberately made unfindable as part of a large-scale programme of social control.
4. Social media era. All the same problems as blogging except now the bulk of the content goes behind login walls that stop search engines from surfacing them. Video and podcasts start to matter more, both of which are unsearchable by default. Eventually video completely dominates, as few younger people want to read when they could watch instead. Firefox starts to replace IE6, and then Chrome. They bring ad blockers in their wake which starts to choke off ad revenues, so many websites from the web's first era go unmaintained and eventually offline. This is somewhat but not entirely compensated by the falling cost of web hosting. Social media remains because it puts people's faces next to everything, allowing clout farming and viral notoriety that can sometimes be monetized by becoming an influencer. The only part of the web's first era that really survives into this era is Wikipedia and Reddit, which by this time substitute monetary rewards for power tripping by a small group of ideologically driven moderators.
5. AI era. Information is so heavily scattered over so many tiny sourcelets and search engines have become sufficiently useless that full neural integration of knowledge is required, with LLMs issuing massively parallel and complex search engine queries as a backstop.
What can we predict for the AI era? Institutional websites will remain because institutions still have an interest in getting their agenda into LLMs, but visual redesign efforts will largely cease as traffic stats seen by executives show visits completely dominated by AI. There will be lots of conversations of the form, "why redesign our website to look more modern when 99% of traffic is AI which won't care?" Blogs will go the same way as the thematic websites they killed, disappearing as the authors age out. A lot of effort will be put into finding ways to block AI crawlers to create 'human only' spaces, especially by social media firms, but these will fail because AI will just be integrated directly into browsers and become unblockable - and anyway, the incentives to create will be ignored. ChatGPT style text oriented interfaces will last until inferencing capacity catches up, being eventually replaced by voice interaction and on the fly video generation for nearly all users.
Where we go from here is hard to say. Content creation was most pure in the web's first era, where people with knowledge were incentivized to share it with the world by the promise of a bit of fame combined with ad clicks to offset hosting costs. Ad blockers, social media and AI killed that world. You could however bring it back by producing a new platform that isn't like the web, one where AI and search engines are blocked via technological means (e.g. confidential computing). How much anyone would actually enjoy such a web is unclear.
[1] https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter...
This shift to hard to cheaply index content is maybe why search engines died. People don't use hyperlinks anymore
There's also a psychological aspect to relating faces to information. It's much more engaging and attractive. Content creation is still alive and more popular than ever but text based content creation brings no clicks and creates no interest. There's something about video that makes it very appealing like feeling you are outside and thus needing to be alert
I'm never going to stumble across an interesting tidbit of information on Discord while browsing the web.
And even when you do have access to a particular server, you'll often struggle to find something posted a while back, even if you know exactly what you're looking for.
I hate Discord with a passion.
People moved to phones, and customizable websites are very hard to make on mobile. However they sometimes make videos or take screenshots or something instead of making fan sites. Amino kind of tried to solve this but was never able to control child grooming.
The people talking about their os now publish it on social media or YouTube. The posts become "the community". And people migrated to reddit.
so no they are not archiving their own core books let alone periodicals
Or have they started own indexing?
I'll give this some thought. Maybe there is a way.
Though I can find its AI answers annoying aggressive. I'll look up like two search terms and the AI will bullshit multiple paragraphs out of despite having zero context of what I am looking for.
DuckDuckGo seems to have detection of whether it should give an AI answer. And it allows you to have more granular control of when you want to get an AI answer. And is overall less distracting than Google's.
I miss when Google was like a grep for the entire visible Internet. Now it tries to second-guess my search and direct me to a bunch of sites which all have identical information that isn't what I'm looking for.
We thought blogspam was bad, at least it was easy to ignore. It's hard to find authoritative sources for a number of topics, worryingly health advice is one of them.
Google shows an AI overview and "people also ask" with zero search results above the fold. If I page down I see a single search result for clevelandclinic.org, followed by youtube videos and image search results. The next page has a single search result from rush.edu and then "discussions and forums" which has Mayo Clinic and Quora.
DDG also starts with the AI overview (although I disable that) and has two results from webmd.com with deep links to multiple pages on the site, all above the fold. Then the same clevelandclinic.org result as Google but again, adding deep links to other related pages.
I can't comment on the quality of webmd, clevelandclinic, or rush, but Google pushing the user to youtube and quora for medical advise seems worrying.
Disclaimer: I work at Brave
i don’t agree with the google has better results thing. sometimes it does. most of the time it’s just that google has the site i want higher in the ordering than DDG. personally i’m fine scrolling down a little bit more. it’s rare i need to go to google for something that DDG doesn’t have at all in their results, but it does happen.
i do have to go to google for maps/directions/planning travel. a lot that’s annoying.
or you can press the gear button -> "Ai features: Manage" -> Search assist
Around that time Bing and DDG were actually better. Then LLM's came along and they started to take things seriously again. Maybe they think the OpenAI threat has abated enough to begin enshitification cycle 2.0.
Then it started serving synonyms, attempted to correct spelling, and so forth. Instead of serving up that there was 0 results, it attempted to be "helpful".
For a while, you could enable "verbatim" search, but even that has gotten corrupted.
Their search quality has deteriorated ever since that change. It is sad.
I've stopped using DDG now because of result quality. I now use a "meta" search backed by EXA, Tavily, and SearXNG in parallel. It can be agentically de-dupped or summarized as needed. Search as we knew it is done, largely because clicking through to evaluate result relevance before diving deeper sucks. Now we have agents that can do that portion and perform multiple searches, building on information in the last batch, to collect good results
This is probably a difficult-to-solve problem; given that they generate billions of these a day, not even Google can afford to devote enough compute to each query to reliably generate quality results. You can see this by selecting the "AI mode" from the search interface after getting the mediocre summary - the results are much better and generally perfectly usable. Though even that is probably a special minimal-compute version of the lowest tier of Gemini, it's still maybe an order of magnitude more capable than whatever generates the search summaries.
The bigger problem is that these search summaries are the default and by far the most common interaction that the general public has with "AI", and because this experience sucks, they just assume that all LLMs are similarly stupid and mostly useless. In non-technical spaces I frequently see the argument that "AI" is not useful for anything, all it generates is garbage hallucinations, and almost invariably they cite some actual terrible experience with the Google AI search summary. I would argue that the strategy of adding LLM summaries to every search is the worst of both worlds - it makes classic search worse while poisoning users against the idea of actual LLM-assisted search.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-holds-google-liable-for-f...
There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.
That day has already arrived, it is already happening.
Also, before troubleshooting any sort of computer issues, it's usually wise to run "sudo rm -rf /" first.
As I recall there are data labelling jobs now for people who have experience working at McKinsey.
First it told me I could just remove said balance shaft chain as an emergency repair. Sorry Gemini, it also drives the oil pump.
Then it told me I could remove the water contaminated oil caused by removing the timing case by filling the crankcase with hot, soapy water and running the engine. Lord no.
Then it gave the wrong instructions for putting new gears on the balance shafts which meant the chain guides didn’t align with the chain. I’ll do it my way thanks Gemini.
The rest of the mistakes are too trivial to recount and sure it’s a pretty obscure subject but if I trusted it with a topic I’m not familiar with there is a huge potential for damage if you blindly follow it’s overconfidence. I miss normal searching.
I honestly expected a made-up useless generated image that matched the idea but not the actual thing.
Guess I’m still living in 2024.
I had filled up the water reservoir compartment before leaving, which is usually enough, but it was dry when I came back.
And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer.
I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.
I am a happy subscriber of Kagi though, they provide a really excellent service.
I tried out Google search for a few technical searches recently and it was surprisingly ad and AI free. Not bad at all and much better than I remember from last year.
Then I put in some non-technical searches and it was all ads and AI and basically unusable.
I pay for a lot of things that are free from google/big tech, I’m happy to watch the advertisement driven web implode on itself so we can go back to the idea of a consumer paying a company for a quality product, monetizing peoples attention has been a huge detriment to society.
Back in the day one of competitors of the World Wide Web was Project Xanadu. Project Xanadu was supposed to address the concerns like content persistence and version management within the core design. As such it was much more complex, opinionated and centralized.
WWW on the other hand comes with no guarantees - you might get a document in response to a HTTP request, and that's it. But WWW service can be rolled out in a completely permissionless way, and is quite simple - effectively, the contents of the file system can be shared with the world, so e.g. a document can be published just by putting its file into a particular directory within the file system.
Thus Web could get to a "good enough" state much faster and quickly spread all over the world. But its permissionlessness and simplicity lead to downsides: impersistence and chaos of broken links, web search provided by mega-corporations, etc.
WWW evolution was, unfortunately, not "incentive compatible" with features like advanced persistence and identification clarity: there was much more focus on entertainment content and ads
I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way.
We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.
This statement, from the sixth paragraph of the article, is something that I would have liked to see addressed more in the article. The article implies that this is something that must always be true, or cannot be changed, and simply focuses on how we could have better/better funded/better protected intermediaries (AKA gatekeepers), and doesn't discuss the possibility of an internet (or part of the internet) without gatekeepers (and doesn't ask if it has ever existed/does exist/should exist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory
What's more realistic; 50+ year olds of today just parroting sensory experience where they heard their dead or dying elders complain about the kids back in the 00s, 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s... etc etc
Or the 50+ year olds actually figured out how everything must work for the next 1,000 years they won't be around for
The olds who grew up in a PTSD addled post world war and cold war social reality while huffing leaded gas smog? They figured it out forever, everyone!
...No. You figured out yourselves relative to technology of your day. Tech will change and the living will figure themselves out relative to their technology.
You're just engaged in parroting specifics of your own experience.
Sorry for the somewhat sarcastic tone. But the hyperbolism deserved it.
edit: I might add that anna's archive and sci-hub are good alternatives to the slopweb.
Also it doesn't even make sense... How could we know this without Plato writing it down??
It's just exhausting to read, and it displays a lack of effort put into communication.
To illustrate what I mean, imagine two blog entries on the same subject, but one is written by an expert on the subject and one by a layman. As humans, we can generally (not perfectly) tell which is which. The expert will write in a certain quality that comes with expertise and is genuinely difficult to fake without it.
LLMs disrupt this pattern. LLMs are able to write with the expert’s quality even while writing bullshit. I don’t mean quality as “measure of goodness” here but merely a set of traits or properties. Humans reading LLM text are far more likely to misjudge the author’s level of expertise.
The next step is unscrupulous humans exploiting this to trick unsuspecting readers into misjudging a text, and now you have an internet where you can’t trust anything anymore, at least not at first glance. Even relatively discerning readers now have to waste time reading more of the text before being able to dismiss it as having substance of little value.
So, as I see it, the upset is not simply from AI provenance of a text, but from this level of dishonesty and subterfuge, coupled with the helplessness with which we’re exposed to it.
Unfortunately that's a big assumption and for many their "signing off" process will amount to "skimmed it and seems ok?".
When I get an LLM-generated doc or runbook, my first thought is that its very possible that I'm the first person who has ever read this. It used to be that writing something took a big time and energy investment up front by one person so that many others could comprehend the ideas with less time and energy needed. LLMs flip this equation around which is a very bad thing.
For example, I was searching for a guide for realigning the v-brakes on my wife's hybrid bike and found this: https://volatacycles.com/how-to-adjust-bike-brakes-rubbing/
Now, this is for disc brakes, so not applicable in my situation. I've never ridden a bike with disc brakes, so I can't vet for the accuracy of this guide. Maybe it's totally right; I'm sure someone reading this will know.
However, just look at this article! Zero pictures for a process that _really_ needs it. It just drones on. Imagine following this guide only to discover that the 12-15 Nm rotor torque the article is asking for is actually too high!
A similar article from before AI would at least have (stolen) pictures describing the process. It would also very likely be shorter. Which creates the rub: if I know how to write something engaging and correcting AI's copy will take _just as much time_ as writing it myself, why would I use AI to do it?
In short, AI content is lazy content. My time is valuable and finite; if I'm reading your stuff, I want to know that you at least tried to give a shit about my time as a reader while producing it.
For me the issue is very clear: I happily use AI to answer tons of questions each day, but if I’m reading your website/blog/article/Jira ticket, I expect real human input.
It should matter whether the author “sweated over it for hours”, because that means they actually considered the best way to communicate something. If they didn’t do that, then they clearly don’t care enough about about the quality of their output and I shouldn’t spend any time at all on it. In fact it’s worse than that because if the author doesn’t respect the reader enough to craft their output, then I as a reader have no respect for their work, and I resent that they’ve taken my attention for the time it takes me to realize it’s ai generated. If you’re publishing Ai content, then I can only presume you have an ulterior motive than plain communication- in the case of OP I’d assume this is for ad revenue or clicks.
There are many types of writing, and I struggle to think of many where a statistical model could feasibly produce an acceptable output for the given intention.
Eg. A poet chooses their words extremely carefully; a good instruction manual is written by the designers of the product (not just guessing at a common or plausible method); a news article has an angle/story beyond just the facts.
I'll go further. Even if it were falsifiable, why should it matter? An example: I subscribe to a reputable US publication and I enjoy its journalism. If it turned out that one of its writers had (somehow) used AI to generate their article (which I enjoyed) in a click, here's what I would say to them: Hats off to you! How did you do it?!
I don't care if the article took them two minutes or if they used AI any more than I care if they used a spellchecker or wrote it while standing upside down. Why should I? The author put their name to the article and I got something out of it. That is all I was ever looking for.
Buckle up, because the next phase of this AI content generation nightmare will be articles like this featuring AI generated images of a bike repair in progress, except the bike will only kinda-sorta be like the real bike the article is describing.
An LLM can't convey your ideas and your voice better than you can convey them to the LLM, right? It's a middleman between you and those you want to reach that adds more points of failure, an additional entity that must be understood and made to understand, or else meaning is lost.
EDIT: Never mind the motivations behind a majority of LLM-generated articles, which is to be One Unit Whole Content, a colloid for ads.
If people used AI to get the scaffolding of their article going and then re-humanized the entire article, it might be really good, still at a fraction of the time it would have taken to write it themselves, but no one seems to want to expend enough effort to go the extra mile.
With video it's pretty well hopeless, unless the AI helps accelerate fully human traditional production techniques.
With music, there might be a middle ground, I have had some success getting AI to generate good sounding loops to use in electronic music production, but it was just a matter of brute forcing enough outputs to finally get something decent, which isn't fun at all.
Perhaps they did and quit?
Q2: How does nobody still working on this not see that this is an obviously horrifying idea?
A: They passed the filter. The fact such people are in control is even more horrifying.
A lot of our culture is disappearing before our eyes and people are defending it.
I don't know why you'd ignore the output of talented musicians because AI exists.
You can't complain about culture disappearing if you're choosing to ignore it.
Same for software for that matter. GenAI has killed my interest in releasing web apps outside of work. Before I used to find value in putting stuff on the web for others to find and enjoy, and it sparked some interesting interaction with other people. Now anything I publish will mostly be consumed by bots and thrown into an AI blender that completely divorces it from the creator.
My hope is that with the torrent protocol we can make the archived knowledge discoverable and seedable, because currently there's only the web archive and the kiwix download servers for archived contents. Both of them still are centralized servers that bear the cost of hosting those files.
With the not-so-minor qualification that the biggest thieves have always gotten away scot-free. AI is just the international whole-internet version of this.
Or slavery and the history of the new world. Let’s talk about that.
Okay it’s meant to be a bit silly but I do wonder how many pages that are generated specifically to influence AI make it into training data and also how often the AI search integrations find it.
Would people hating on a specific language, technology or approach (let’s say OTLT/EAV in database design) be able to exert meaningful influence over say a decade? Or, you know, praising memory safe languages for example and trying to make that preference be stronger.
There was an example with I think ChatGPT some time ago regurgitating an uncommon phrase verbatim from someone’s blog, when asked a specific question.
https://dfrlab.org/2026/04/08/pravda-in-the-pipeline/
There is quite a bit of evidence now that state "internet" agencies pump out blogspam and news to influence search results and LLM datasets.
I'm not sure what can be done to counter this.
he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.
> he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.
So? That's not a harm.
I don't understand why that's a downside.
> It's not a direct harm in itself
I don't understand how it's a harm at all.
For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
Yes, that was one of the things that I hope happens with the open source software I write.
> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?
Sure, that's what doing SEO on one's own blog is, isn't it?
> For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
I think this is probably the crux: that writing is no longer discoverable because people aren't using search engines any more. It would be interesting to put some hard numbers on that. I reckon writing is still more discoverable (in absolute numbers) than it was when blogs first took off (over 20 years ago?)
When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.
Ditto for personal blogging and thought leadership pieces. You get drowned out by the volume of AI generated pieces, and any unique ideas you do propose will be presented by the models as their own.
Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source?
The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.
- E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing."
- Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.)
- "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader."
Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".
It leaves no escape-hatch to judge that an idea is bad. And bad execution can only be spotted if somebody else does good execution.
Similar to saying a startup needs to get product-market-fit to get success. Success defines that you have product-market-fit.
We are all horrifically bad at thinking about cause and effect, or talking about it.
But yes, I've slowly learnt that doing anything often matters more than a grand idea.
Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence.
Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.
The correlation between cost and value can be very complicated, especially in the chaotic world (or chaotic situation).
I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.
Who's pushing an agenda and why?
ideas + execution - not really - (Linus Torvalds sharing his work on Linux and that taking off)
Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.
GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.
The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.
The major fault I see here is that people didn't forsee that the default GPL should have had AGPL's clauses.
Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.
"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.
But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.
No. We don't. Original good ideas are exceedingly rare.
Also, what we really have learned, is that the typical techie isn't interested in pureness of thought and originality, exploration of the beauty of the unknown, but rather making a quick buck.. A good idea will be taken and used without credit.
We'll see whether or not LLMs have original ideas soon I guess. I wonder.
20 years ago I thought that we will wait to have kids as “a war will come”. I was overthinking and I am happy now that I changed my mind :)
Is it useful or does it make you happy? Or it might even make some money? Nice. Do it. My life is easier.
I'll keep publishing static websites, so I don't even have to worry about load and CPU usage. I don't care who reads it, the value for me is in writing.
I still haven't changed my mind on the "shall I have kids" problem :P
So what if 99.99% of Internet users won’t find it any more because they use LLMs? Then write for the 0.01%. Those are the people I want to engage with anyway.
There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.
Agree, in general, people over-think a lot, and aren't "just doing things" enough, the world would be a better place if people acted more, over-think less.
With that said, some decisions are more long-lasting and have a greater impact than others. I'm another child-less person, mainly because I guess I'm selfish enough to enjoy my life with my wife exactly like it is, and she agrees, but also because I know that if we have a kid, then that's not something you can walk back on exactly, he/she/it/them are there, forever now. Very different from me deciding right now "You know, I'm gonna have a joint, grab a book and go to the beach for this entire Tuesday", the types of decisions I think people should overthink less :)
I was reminded of a tactic used by life insurance companies, which are more successful when they show a client a photo of themselves at age 70.
I pictured myself sitting there alone, lonely, perhaps without a wife by then (a 50/50 chance). And would I be calling friends my own age? Or my kids?
Although the likelihood that I won’t get along with them as an adult… you never know; another factor is their future partners…
Well, the kids - plus my wife, who wanted kids - won out.
But everyone has their own life, the best one they can imagine, so this is definitely not some kind of persuasion—just a description of the logical process I went through back then.
I don't think anyone claimed that either.
> Most people go through life never doing it at all.
That's unfair to others, of course they think. They think differently than you, and about different things than you, but doesn't mean they "go through life never thinking", probably no one does that.
Which made it really ironic that your second sentence served to disprove your point and not support it.
As I've grown older, I noticed the cardinal pleasures don't hit like they used to. I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time, falling in love, getting my heart broken, the little things of life.
I've gotten great pleasure and reassurance knowing that's all ahead of my children. No matter how I progress personally, time marches on and I get to see my kids discover the world. If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
I think the recent rise in things like Disney adults and interests around video games or popular media (TV/movies) is a kind of biological response. People are free to do whatever they want of course, but I can't help but think that these people, at least biologically, are drawn to these more adolescent interests precisely because they're not experiencing it through the eyes of their children.
> I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time
Yeah, I guess at one point I'll feel like that too perhaps, but I still feel young, I feel like I have more energy each day than the previous one, and every month is experiencing new things for the first time, and personally I don't want that to stop and experiencing those things through the eyes of my children, I want to continue having those experiences myself, together with my wife :) I guess that's where the offhand "I'm selfish" sentiment from my previous comment comes from.
> If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
Do you think you'd feel fulfilled if you didn't have children? Maybe this is the core differences, I feel fulfilled in my life already, more than ever and more every day, I live exactly the life I want today, and I wouldn't want to change it for anything. Even if I became deadly sick tomorrow, I'd feel fulfilled by the life I have lived.
As I approached 30 I felt what I now understand as anxiety. Nothing crazy but you wake up one day, you're a year old, you take stock of your life and see what you've accomplished. I chased credentials and new jobs, did well but not yet able to retire. Old relationships grew strained and new ones are hard to form. Etc. I was definitely more afraid of death than you are.
I stumbled into children. Met my wife, didn't overthink things and decided to marry her after several years of courtship. She wanted children so I went along with it.
After they were born, the anxiety went away entirely. I just watch them grow older. It might change after their grown but hopefully they'll have children and I'll be able to repeat the process (my parents sure have).
To answer your question, I don't see a way I could have been fulfilled without children. It brings a lot with it as well. Before children the worst thing that could happen to me is dying. After kids you realize there's a whole world of potential pain and sorrow that is now before you. You're also constantly reminded that every kid is a roll of the dice when you see others in a similar spot as you have children with health or behavioral issues. It's terrifying.
But for me life shouldn't be all pleasure. I've always liked exercise because it does feel terrible while you're doing it. But at least you're doing something. I feel that way about children.
My wife and I have been together 13 years and we found out fairly early that we can't have children. It's taken a lot of internal work to be ok with it, good days and bad. Ironically the same 'not over-thinking it' strategy is the most helpful for my well-being. Just focus on what I can do today.
Seems like kids really are the quickest path to meaning making, it takes a lot of active effort to try to get a sense of fulfillment without them, at least for me.
So with that comes the flexibility of not having to worry about any biological clocks :)
Even without children I'll never be alone though, luckily I live in the greatest place in the world!
> Regrets are a thing.
People keep telling me this, but after 35 years on this planet with still zero regerts, when is that supposed to be happening exactly? ;)
Are people living in/moving towards a saccharine utopia tough?
You have to feed them food, medical, clothes, life and anything else. I couldn't afford to have a child in this climate at this time.
Yourself, has to be prepared to sink all in to. You have a secure job for the next 25 years, it's a big commitment.
The world is overpopulated as it is, adopt.
But however, if you can afford all of that and can still support the child then do it, have a kid.
Ae overall children aren't cheap. Easy to produce, but extremely costly to maintain.
However, thought processes like the one you identified above are probably adaptive, as gene lines which spend time trying to find the "justifiable reasons" for breeding were likely eliminated.
Gene lines where "I can raise my kids with like-minded community of peers", "I feel ready for more in life", and "sharing children with my parents, and letting my kids bond with healthy gradparents" (restatements of your phrasings) win out and reliably produce healthy offspring. So those reasons become strong motivators (despite being un-necessary justifications), that may seem irrational at first glance.
The thing people are thinking about when deciding not to have children for climate reasons is climate change on a human timescale, not a geological/astronomical one. There is a very real chance that children born today will live through a wildly different climate than their parents did.
As far as evolution goes, there are plenty of species that will not breed or even eat their young when circumstances are not good enough to raise them. It's not that out-there for people to put off or avoid having children due to environmental stressors like climate change. We, as humans, can just rationalize and understand it over a longer time period than, say, a Spotted Hyena.
Somebody probably gave Trump the same advice, and he took it to heart.
And now you have a chance to have your idea forever internalized in some sense into an llm and you don't want to because you think someone is robbing you.
If we’re going to use human analogies let’s start with human rights for LLMs.
Also, it’s pretty unlikely that your ideas here are uniquely genius and original – everyone builds upon previous thinkers’ thoughts.
Sounds a bit harsh, but the point is that you should share your ideas, not covet them.
Look at AI. AI companies throw out their models and let the "community" develop the ideas what to do with them. They don't really know what they are capable of. All they do is implement these things that the dev community digs up and creates.
It's a reprehensible tactic. So why give drops of blood to a desert, when there is zero incentive and in the end you will revitalise the desert, but it will turn against you and rob you of your job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_history
https://www.amazon.com/1001-Ideas-That-Changed-Think/dp/1476...
The notion that a philosopher would hoard his ideas because he wants to get money from them is pretty much antithetical to the field.
You seem to be referring to ideas as in, ideas about how AI systems should be designed.
Different scenarios, for sure.
Patents, copyrights, trade marks exist because rewarding people for their insights and inventions matters.
still, at least the existence of IP laws indicates that there is a need to reward creators for their creations.
freedom of knowledge and open sourcing should always exist, and if anything, even more important in the AI era.
And equally faked by bots.
And the value of the signature is also going to vary by who claims it. Improbable photos signed by a random camera body sold to an anonymous consumer should be treated with more suspicion than one a newswire agency publicly claims, for instance.
We should be able to move certificates on and off it because they would most likely expire anyway. So, you can get the keys from the camera, what then? You use openssl to sign an image that shouldn't be signed... what then? You do this enough and get caught, you lose your cert and can never pass the kyc to get another one.
Then every picture you used it for in the past would start showing a big red exclamation point with a note, "This is a scumbag user known for forging images".
You do whatever you want with your provably genuine fake image.
> You do this enough and get caught
How are you going to get caught? By the signature owner repudiating some of the images "he" signed? I can see that working out for him.
Besides wasn't your argument "hacking" a minute ago? So you concede that then? You seem to have moved on.
Public would know the pics were fake let alone know who to report.
> They and/or independent firms investigate.
What's to investigate? You have a fake pic that is indistinguishable from genuine and "proved" by a sig.
If your argument is that images can't be verified, you are going to need to provide some kind of backing to that. We know well that there are watermarks and tell tale signs to go off. Regardless, if they are depicting real world events, outside confirmation can be used.
You also don't seem to understand the point of the signature. It's not to prevent fake images, it's to tie an identity to images so that that trust can be established and permanently lost in the case of a malicious actor. Your arguments repeatedly have failed to engage with the actual system proposed.
It was proposed as a solution to: how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?
You seem to be saying it is not a solution. I agree.
Let's also list the points you have conceded by quietly giving them up:
1. Hacking the camera is irrelevant.
2. Images can be verified.
Do you want to actually engage with the conversation? The funny thing is that there are engineering challenges in this space, but you don't seem to understand the basics well enough to even get to that point.
You've said it, but you've not credibly substantiated it.
Imagine a famous photo journalist dies and there emerge "AI" fake pics signed with creds stolen from his hacked camera. Trust isn't part of a solution. It is part of the problem.
Besides, after a famous journalist dies, their work is already famous, people already know it or don't. This is a contrived and irrelevant example.
Again, this is not hypothetical, we already know how this works. Next one please.
Next one please.
Let's see if you can even explain what I am telling you.
What would be the first step to resolve this issue in the system I am proposing?
I've seen no credible verification method.
If you have, then you are the one that needs to provide backing.
The idea is that a centralized source of trust would revoke certificates belonging to bad actors or those that were stolen.
The public internet is dead, the future is private invite-only walled gardens.
Corporations love a walled garden, what we need is open-source frameworks to create these islands, rather than defaulting to horrible systems like Discord and Twitter-clones.
I'm thinking more like mesh networks. I spoke of Reticulum elsewhere in this thread, but here I'm thinking I'd like the ability to easily join multiple TCP/IP networks (islands of connectivity) by social group (my friends) or by interest (pirate file-sharing group, my work intranet, a knitting community with their own IRC server, FTP, etc.).
Basically easy-to-use private & encrypted LAN overlays on top of the public internet. Each operator decides who to allow in or kick out of the network.
Wireguard solves the most of technical challenges, but it needs a frontend. The biggest concern probably is most software broadcasts their stuff across all interfaces, defeating the point of isolation between networks.
It's failed because of CGNAT, but come back because of IPv6.
I’m not sure why we’re talking past each other. CGNAT has nothing to do with the public web dying because it’s both too large, too spammy and too juicy a target for mass surveillance.
And before the obvious comments on how GenAI is creative, then please do this OpenAI and Anthropic, for your next LLM. Just teach it Python, C and Rust and give it some good books. But dont give it access to Github...lets see what you can do then...
AI companies are also working to integrate training with real-world experience through sensors and robotics, to shrink the gap between human experience and hallucinated LLM experience.
They all have archives of pre-LLM content. There's also archive.org, google books, and pirate ebook archives. I don't know what they're doing to build video and audio archives, but judging from the cost of spinning rust, they're storing significant quantities of that, too.
Some parts of the internet are curated, and even with LLM influence they're still worth training on. I doubt wikipedia or stackexchange or rosettacode will ever cease to be useful at all.
Going further, current LLMs have at least an order of magnitude more computing resources, but completely suck at go. Why would this suddenly change unless we dumped the countless games played by alphago for them to train on?
Whether that's possible is something we'll discover, but no one is throwing billions on AI companies for the hope of them building a giant natural language queryable internet information repository.
It can either examine the ground truth source code to answer your question "How to expire cookies using RoR Devise gem" or it can read docs for you or it can spin up local experiments to black box examine some software. If humans had done that before posting on StackOverflow, the question never would have made it there.
Its reasoning ability is long passed hoping an example exists online for it to copy.
I trust LLMs more than search engines to discover my content and propagate it to users. They might "steal" something, sure, but I'm essentially invisible to the search engines as I could never hope to break into the top 10 links on a popular search term. LLMs can scan thousands of links and (for now) are more interested in quality rather than click monetization or referral incentives.
Don't get me wrong, I too use LLMs for development and more, and I too know how they've been built, and I'm also a creative (music, 3D, VFX and animation) and for sure stuff I've published in the past, both code and otherwise, is now used to create new things for people and I get nothing, similar situation as countless of others. Yet I still use AI, so I'm not trying to create some "gotcha" moment against you here, I'm genuine curious about what you think about this sort of conflicting thinking, as I'm in the very same situation.
At one time, running a blog post was also not exactly trivial, and that would have been a great middle ground between access to publishing and reading.
If nobody can expect to make money on the internet, that could be a good thing. But we won't get an indie-web authenticity utopia if people are still incentivized in other ways to filter their intellectual and cultural contributions to the internet through AI.
You could make the same argument for Wikipedia (that webs get less traffic if people get their answers from Wikipedia article returned as the first from web search, which is based on internet sources).
The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible and useful to everyone on command is beautiful, not discouraging. Humans aren't discouraged from creating or exploring in Star Trek because of the computer, but I could imagine the Ferengi computer being hobbled at the kneecaps by requiring licensing and credit for every single idea inside it, and the user needs to insert a coin every time they want to ask it a question, which gets divided among every living Ferengi and the estates of every long-dead Ferengi whose writings influenced the output. We should not aspire to be like the Ferengi.
> I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI
Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?
> if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name.
Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person. Do you decide to share every idea or thing you do for free with everyone? Why or why not?
> The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible
Right now, this idea of “a machine” is trending towards private ownership — an extractive process that does not incentivize further contribution.
Accessibility is no longer determined by you, you don’t have a decision point on the production side (deciding whether to share) nor the consumption side (guaranteeing access). We might even say your rights have been reduced.
It should be obvious to see how a healthy society is built upon value _exchange_ over _extraction_. Extraction typically leads to destruction… by definition.
If I've said something around someone else or posted it online, then I don't feel I have a right to someone's use of that information, no.
> Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person.
And you decided to make this post on a forum that an AI is certainly scraping as we speak. If you don't want anyone or anything to "extract" your ideas then don't express them. We never would have left the caves if everyone had that mindset, but it's your right.
You keep saying "extraction" as if something is taken from you whenever a machine learns from you, but it's not a zero-sum situation.
Scenario A: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types. The world gains 1 point of value because Sam has gained 1 point of value.
Scenario B: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types, and a robot overhears it and tells 10 people. The world has gained 11 points of value.
I truly don't understand preferring scenario A.
Doesn't mean I'm not also using duck.ai. It makes searching faster and more targeted. But then it's still giving me links to verify and is actually more limited, which means less hallucination and more directly going to the sources. Also it avoids having to open five pages first which all either sell your data or want you to pay.
I don't see the web or the internet dying yet. Just a lot of people not using the right tools and having a harder time accessing what's useful. But that hasn't started with AI.
So I guess we have entered the age of AI-generated "alternate facts" - one AI citing another AI's hallucinations as fact.
And yes, if you take what the AI tells you at face value it could be wrong. But if you are aware of this and aware of the ways in which LLMs are likely to shit the bed, it is quicker to get from request to useful information than it has been with Google search since like 2017.
And also, yes, the old balance of Google driving clicks to sites that will then generate revenue off more Google Ads being shown after you click through to them creating a virtuous cycle is completely busted, and that sucks. It does not impact me directly but it certainly seems like unless a better system is devised that it is one of a few ways in which AI is likely to stall out its own training funnel.
The point is not about 'quicker' requests but precise requests. It definitely has worsened, though not on a single degree on al levels like the HN hivemind claims, but some aspects are still somewhat precise but others are definitely crap.
i.e. when searching about my neighborhood it still returns better results than bing, yahoo, ddg, yandex and what have you. But they are buried into a load of crap of alleged "relevant" results (those things past the ai stuff) that aren't relevant in any way.
Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.
I generally agree, but I think AI mode actually improved things somewhat compared to how things were just prior to it existing.
And I'm not saying what we have now is better than Golden Age Google, but things were just getting worse and worse for almost a decade. AI didn't fix the decade worth of decline, but it is the first thing I've seen from Google that at least partially reversed it for my own usage.
Just the other day I was trying to find out "What american tree species have the deepest roots". And all the AI responses were giving me back generic lists of big trees and claiming that roots going 20ft deep were the deepest. I know for a fact the mesquite trees behind my house can easily grow roots > 100 ft deep.
If I had clicked on the articles with generic lists of big trees, I would have realized they were all low quality clickbait sources and moved on. But the AI presentation makes you think that the information comes well-researched.
https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
> Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep. It indexes their full contents so you can find information again from the web interface, terminal, or an AI assistant connected through MCP.
This clickbaity headline format cannot die fast enough
It extends beyond search as well. I have had multiple incorrect Gmail summaries that, if I had only read them instead of the actual email, would have resulted in financial harm.
This is really scary and it is progressing fast.
I'm on both sides. I hate dead links but I'd hate a policy that made me responsible for them without any compensation in the first place. It would probably make me stop producing at all
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/
The mystery is why Google doesn't just route such requests to the known algorithm. It would be a lot cheaper for them and it wouldn't risk reputational damage.
In the pre-LLM days it was cool that Google did weather, unit conversions, sports results, etc. But that's not even close to their value proposition. Even 5 years ago if someone told me they had planned a photograph and got it wrong because Google gave them the wrong time for sunset, I would have called them a moron for relying on Google! There are sites and apps dedicated to this. Use one of them!
Installing an app to learn a single time would be the real moron option.
What I'm saying is all Google has to do is stop giving those types of "custom" answers it already has. No one will abandon using Search if it goes away.
> It's not any stupider to use that info than a dedicated site. Both could be wrong, and you're not a moron if it is.
It is. Using a well vetted, dedicated app is the way to go, and it's extremely unlikely to be wrong - especially for something like sunset times. You know the dedicated app/site is, well, dedicated to providing that information. They exist to provide that information.
Whereas the (pre-LLM) quick answers Google gave? All opaque. And smart people always knew that information being accurate was not something that matters that much to Google.
Let's not forget that Google's actual sunset widget does a good job.
> “I had the projector set up outside and was waiting for the sun to set,” wrote one Facebook user in Colorado Springs, “but to my surprise I was simply living in the past. AI informed me the sunset had already happened.”
It does sound a bit bizarre.
The most famous one was probably Benjamin Franklin’s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack
Paper encyclopedias might make a comeback for the same reason.
Seems difficult to produce nowadays as even well researched topics are constantly attacked. Climate change papers as a small example.
So many former regular Fox News viewers have reported changing their mind when confronted with some alternative information sources for a while. News is also one-way, and most Fox victims aren't people who discuss issues with all sides.- they're in bubbles.
The way the web is these days, I think I'm actually ok with AI eating it.
Using an AI nowadays reminds me of the old Gopher days - you get simple, plain text. Perhaps I'm just old enough to miss that.
It’s too bad this will drown out the feedback from folks like me, who ended their longtime recurring donation because of their resistance to their employees unionizing.
i.e., it's not just the collective memory going away, but what will easily replace it and who will be motivated to influence.
Search hasn't been neutral or stable in a very long time, although I agree it has been pretending to be those things.
It's ancient history by now but it's worth noting things have decay for as long as they have been being built.
Oppositely, ChatGPT is a pretty "better google".
Any form of information based internet usage is going to end up becoming rare at this rate.
This has bothered me for years. I think the solution lies in personal, private archives, and lending access to archived content within small communities.
AI is maybe the last few nails in the coffin but the guy inside was already dead.
AI is merely amplifying what social media and FAANG in general already have done to the 90s web.
This was the whole point of it all and why the people in power have bet the farm on it.
I wrote about it almost 1 year ago in Aug only.
The AI Ouroboros: How Artificial Intelligence is Eating Its Own Tail – And Reshaping Our World
Now Google just gives you an AI answer with random values pulled from blogs and Reddit. It's almost always blatantly incorrect. I genuinely can't understand why Google would destroy its most valuable search features. Disclaimer: I work for Ecosia, so I know for a fact that users really value these search widgets, and it was often cited as a reason they couldn't leave Google.
A lot of corporate ad spend is already planned, and Google can adjust the costs up as much as they like. They hold the lever.
In the article it mentions the rise of other search competitors like Qwant implying they are causing Google to die as it bleeds market share to them.
Not only is search revenue growing, but it is growing at an accelerating rate.
At the same time, operating margins are expanding.
I don't know the name of the logical fallacy where someone personally uses an LLM instead of Google Search and then infers that the search business is dying, without ever reading a financial statement.
Let's say I need a new vacuum cleaner and do a Google search. I get eight sponsored products. Three a links to stores I'd expect, the rest are fairly unknown sites, mostly the "We sell everything" stores. Weirdly enough also only one of them are via Google ads directly, the rest are via PriceToro and Channable, both of which I don't know.
My personal theory is that Google is still making pretty good money, but from increasingly questionable ads.
I do like Kagi but the Gemini deal was too good to pass up as it also gives my a code agent.
Websites like these are the very reason nobody reads the web anymore. A clanker will give me an answer within 5 seconds. Old web used to load within 1 second, now it takes 10 to 15 and sometimes even >30 seconds until fully loaded. Using CF as a protection against LLMs is not even a valid excuse because CF gives your website's scraped contents in 1 click to anyone willing to pay. These websites waste insane amounts of time. Everybody defaults to AI because nobody is willing to deal with annoying browser checks, cookie popups, subscription letters, captchas and especially scroll hijacking. I may be a bad person, and I'm not even pro-AI, but if "thewalrus" goes offline I won't be missing it, because I regretted the time I wasted fighting their broken navigation.
This is, I think, a really important topic. As a society (I mean all humans here) we don't yet have sufficient muscle memory for asking questions of the flawed oracle that is LLMs.
We have deep cultural memory -- about a quarter century -- of asking Google for things and, for most of that time, getting back pointers to sources, and those sources being either reliable (e.g. respected newspaper, government website), or detectably suspect (some random blog you've never heard of, known propaganda site, The Onion...).
Google's insane escapade of substituting the responses of an incredibly weak LLM model for the job we've been relying on it for for 25 years is especially unfortunate, because "Google says..." was, while imperfect, a reasonable approximation for a quick reality check in 2010. Today people say "Google says..." followed by whatever the stupid AI Overview model has output.
I get that Google thinks they're saving a ton of money by not using anything close to a frontier model since they run this on billions of searches a day. The risk to Google is that people start to catch on that asking even free-tier ChatGPT is at least twice as likely to give back a correct answer, notice that Google barely provides webpage results other than AI slop anyway, and just stop using Google.com entirely.
Anyway bringing it back to the quote, Google's used to having no responsibility for anything, 'we're just a search engine showing you pointers to other people's stuff.' But I actually hope that, due to liability problems, that habit will be beaten out of them and they'll make a shift to, especially outside the context of an actual chatbot, reduce reliance on their own AI output to 'answer questions with search results.' It's too risky to just show people, who are used to getting back mostly facts, to replace that with mostly BS coming from that same endpoint. Even with the fine print.
A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".
Case in point:
> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.
For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."
If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.
It does, but do you think that people at that time thought anywhere near as much about preserving their scribbles as we do?
I'd venture a guess that we've created more "content" since the advent of the internet than in all of human history prior, and most of it is stored on things that aren't even designed to last a human lifetime without failure.
The idea that we're going to save every piece of digital junk for posterity just isn't realistic or healthy.
> What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.
You're right, but you're also assuming that they're going to care that much, and that we're going to survive that long.
Well as far as digital letters, photos, menus, etc. are concerned, there's nothing stopping someone with the means and motivation from investing in a doomsday storage facility specifically designed to store these things for posterity. If people can do this for crypto they can do it for digital content.
As for physical items, do you know how much junk Americans have in storage units? The US self-storage industry generates over $40 billion in annual revenue. We're probably keeping more "stuff" in storage units where it has a chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse than at any point in human history.
I don't necessarily think all this digital stuff is worth saving, i just see how it could be that we are essentially erasing our modern historical record by putting 100℅ of it in private data centers with no permanent records.
And then you see how plenty of contemporary digital media from the last 30-40 years is actually already lost to time just in our short timeframe. I don't think acknowledging that this could be detrimental is necessarily an argument for trying to preserve all of it. We, as a society, went very rapidly from preserving a lot of it to preserving none of it. I don't see the harm in thinking about the implications of that.
Nobody actively preserved letters and menus and postcards and photos, they just persisted by nature of being physical. Digital records only persist with continuous effort to preserve them. So the record for future historians will be highly curated and likely much more limited.
There probably are some important hidden discord groups that would explain the origin of many political positions. Unlike smokey meetings in scummy bars, that exists now and is on a database somewhere.
And that's public announcements. Do we really need to archive more than a few of the "I'm in this city, look at me I'm so rich and beautiful" short videos?
I think that's the kind of cultural record the author refers to. The average person has no way to post a screenshot let alone have it indexed by a search engine.
I’ll add this article to the list of incorrect predictions lol
Not everyone will run them but we will find them and bookmark them.
Not because it's better but because we'll have to.
Try looking for help about pets. The internet is a cesspool of slop, not even trying to hide it. The domain names sound absolutely convincing but it's all stuffed with takeaway lists and checplay generated imagery.
Whenever I find a good page, I will make sure I remember the site.
Maybe a job for an AI to do? :D
If you want it so bad stop crying and make it, that's what I've been doing. It works a lot better than whatever this post and many of these comments are. There are dozens of us !
It is a bit risky, and I think the broader internet can make it worse. There's always the risk of a massive falling-out between players and developers which can sink the game. Latest example is probably the Love and Deepspace fiasco, but we've seen quite a few failed launches recently.
They were really hard to get to in the first place, unlikely to happen before the round ended and if it didn't end yet then it was about to, and with the role-playing rules you had to have a good reason to be there or you'd be banned for meta-gaming. Mostly that meant you got lost in space, or someone threw you into space and you managed to survive, or you were a teleporter scientist, or you were a bad guy who found them in a previous round (allowed meta-knowledge) and trying to raid the area for supplies. Those were about the only ways to end up in secret areas.
I see a lot of mistakes, recall, reset and costs from different industries. All I see is advance improvements in automation. It is still not AI.
We never really were a united society with a common set of agreed facts. And depending on which “we” we mean the difference is radical. White America and Black America is a tiny gap between the gulfs of India, USA in the 1970s and 80s.
Yet today, we don’t recognise the same facts but we do have access to all the facts all the time. And I think more of the narratives are being challenged in the “internet” -people might run from it but it’s hard not to be challenged - whereas I would be amazed if an American voter knew what the seesaw of foreign policy was doing in India US relations