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The internet is slipping out of our reach

injuly.in

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Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#31

Post by iteygib »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18
bsd_source wrote: post #11

AI is an old concept and it turns out that if you let a computer think for itself, it'll be objective and without emotional baggage. It's like a child that grows up with a blank slate of mind only to be burdened with the opinions, religions, and politics of peers. And it turns out that truth hurts. The absolute truth hurts absolutely. Marketing departments, where people are paid to lie, can't have AI spit out truths…

AI cannot be objective because it mirrors the bulk of humanity with all its follies. Marketing departments don't have to nerf AI because AI already outputs the irrationality and stupidity of what is on the internet.

I would say even that is part of the problem. AI on a cultural level is based on the participation of subset of humanity: internet users, of which there are varying degrees of involvement (power users versus the email checkers, etc.), so what you see AI spit out will be based on what is popular for that subset.

IE, most AI art I've seen (as in imitation of hand painted work) seems to all be based on one style, Japanese anime, of which you can further dissect to see only specific styles of anime, etc. It gets so repetitive to look at that I am genuinely feeling nauesous looking at it all now.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#32

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

roenxi wrote: post #14

This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don't think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search. There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate p…

> unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised

Or X Windows. I still hear the occasional diatribe, on how X is "just as good as" Windows or Mac (usually from a person that pretty much exclusively uses CLI). These folks can't understand why desktop Linux hasn't crushed the Microsoft/Apple hegemony.

People who hang in like-minded communities can often assume that "everyone" is just like they are; when, in point of fact, their community represents the tiniest sliver of an edge case.

There's a lot of tecchies, in the world.

But there are a lot more non-tecchies, and they are the ultimate arbiters of what succeeds or dies.

The Internet (actually, every type of infrastructure or social construct) will be shaped by this great mass of uneducated, non-technical, ADHD, etc. people.

The tech folks that make the huge piles of money, know this, and work to serve (and train) the masses.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#33

Post by instagraham »

The privilege to be solely among humans and human-generated content may end up being a paywalled one.

> For the past few years, I've been holed up in small discord servers – the only place where I expect to freely interact with meaningful messages that aren't marketing posts in disguise. And if you too have been hiding in telegram groups and mailing lists – good, don't leave. It's dark outside.

this works too though, I guess.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#34

Post by troupo »

roenxi wrote: post #14

This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don't think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search. There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate p…

> The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it.

what?

> It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier

You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable? Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability?

Edit:

For the size of most of those communities you could host your own Discourse server on a NAS behind Cloudflare's tunnel, and the world would be better for it.

E.g. some opensource projects in the Elixir space have been moving to Elixir's ElixirForum: https://elixirforum.com/. And now you can search those discussions, link them, point people to them etc. The "small public internet" seems to accommodate it just fine

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#35

Post by llm_trw »

The irony is that this feels like a chat gpt post asking it:

"Write something negative about the internet outside my bubble."

That said I've found that asking a question of an llm, then copying its response into google gets me extremely high quality results, much better than the question does by itself.

In essence the curse of dimensionality means that with enriched queries SEO is literally impossible. You can't SEO an arbitrarily large space because no query is ever repeated.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#36

Post by ejb999 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #20
vouaobrasil wrote: post #15

That is definitely true about search. Google ruined it, like they ruin most things. The more hand-curated style of the old Yahoo was far superior. Yes, Google was superior in search in the short-term, but their automated algorithms came with the inevitable attachment of the future of gaming their algorithms. The modus operandi of Google is to provide a highly-centralized automated service that at first appears superi…

>The more hand-curated style of the old Yahoo was far superior. You say hand-curated, I say political manipulation. The motives of 1990s people and 2020s people are very different.

results are still manipulated for political purposes - it is just automated now instead of manually done.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#37

Post by injuly »

klum wrote: post #13

I agree that the mainstream web is becoming increasingly useless, but at the same time, there are counter-movements: search engines like Marginalia, decentralized communities and federated protocols, open-source projects and businesses, "the indie web". "Small Discord servers, Telegram groups and mailing lists" aren't the only places good stuff happens on the internet, though it might take some deliberate effort to f…

Love marginalia. It still has ways to go before it can become my daily driver, but I'm rooting for it.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#38

Post by iteygib »

rpigab wrote: post #29
danielovichdk wrote: post #7

Poor title. This has nothing to do with the internet but everything to do with the culture a lot of people has adapted to. You don't have to use Google or Reddit. Or ChatGPT. It's a choice. It's up to the individual to make that choice by applying some thinking. So the title could be "Thinking is slipping out of our reach".

Yeah, and if you want a movie review and don't know where to find it, just go door-to-door and ask strangers if they watched the movie and what they thought of it. Do it in different countries to get different opinions too. I wish there was a way to get the same results in less than 3 years per movie... Wait

Do you not have any friends or family?

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#40

Post by CraftingLinks »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #18
bsd_source wrote: post #11

AI is an old concept and it turns out that if you let a computer think for itself, it'll be objective and without emotional baggage. It's like a child that grows up with a blank slate of mind only to be burdened with the opinions, religions, and politics of peers. And it turns out that truth hurts. The absolute truth hurts absolutely. Marketing departments, where people are paid to lie, can't have AI spit out truths…

AI cannot be objective because it mirrors the bulk of humanity with all its follies. Marketing departments don't have to nerf AI because AI already outputs the irrationality and stupidity of what is on the internet.

'All it follies' usually contains all viewpoints. It sees all echo chambers. If AI can 'think for itself', ie.its hand isn't forced. Objectivity and rationality could well be hallmarks imo.
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