Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dead Internet Theory

kudmitry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 735 posts

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#271

Post by evanelias »

optimalquiet wrote: post #232
kimixa wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In British English you'd be wrong for using an em-dash in those places, with most grammar recommendations being for an en-dash, often with spaces. It's be just as wrong as using an apostrophe instead of a comma. Grammar is often wooly in a widely used language with no single centralised authority. Many of the "Hard Rules" some people thing are fundamental truths are often more local style guides, and often a lot more…

Interesting, I’m an American English speaker but that’s how it feels natural to me to use dashes. Em-dashes with no spaces feels wrong for reasons I can’t articulate. This first usage—in this meandering sentence—feels bossy, like I can’t have a moment to read each word individually. But this second one — which feels more natural — lets the words and the punctuation breathe. I don’t actually know where I picked up thi…

It can also depend on the medium. Typically, newspapers (e.g. the AP style guide) use spaces around em-dashes, but books / Chicago style guide does not.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#272

Post by quantummagic »

alex1138 wrote: post #183
clearleaf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that p…

I really want to see people who ruin functional services made into pariahs I don't care how aggressive this sounds; name and shame. Huffman should never be allowed to work in the industry again after what he and others did to Reddit (as you say, last bastion of the internet) Zuckerberg should never be allowed after trapping people in his service and then selectively hiding posts (just for starters. He's never been a…

> But we have to remove + from searches

Wasn't that functionality just replaced? Parts of a query that are in quotation marks, are required to appear in any returned result.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#273

Post by _zagj »

nitwit005 wrote: post #252
_zagj wrote: post #59

Reddit has a small number of what I hesitatingly might call "practical" subreddits, where people can go to get tech support, medical advice, or similar fare. To what extent are the questions and requests being posted to these subreddits also the product of bot activity? For example, there are a number of medical subreddits, where verified (supposedly) professionals effectively volunteer a bit of their free time to an…

I'm not aware of anyone bothering to create bots that can pass the checking particular subreddits do. It'd be fairly involved to do so. For licensed professions, they have registries where you can look people up and confirm their status. The bot might need to carry out a somewhat involved fraud if they're checking.

I wasn't suggesting the people answering are bots, only that the verification is done by the mods and is somewhat opaque. My concern was just that these well-meaning people might be wasting their time answering botspew. And then inevitably, when they come to realize, or even just strongly suspect, that they're interacting with bots, they'll desist altogether (if the volume of botspew doesn't burn them out first), which means the actual humans seeking assistance now have to go somewhere else.

Also on subreddits functioning as support groups for certain diseases, you'll see posts that just don't quite add up, at least if you know somewhat about the disease (because you or a loved one have it). Maybe they're "zebras" with a highly atypical presentation (e.g., very early age of onset), or maybe they're "Munchies." Or maybe LLMs are posting their spurious accounts of their cancer or neurdegenerative disease diagnosis, to which well-meaning humans actually afflicted with the condition respond (probably along side bots) with their sympathy and suggestions.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#274

Post by HaZeust »

hayleox wrote: post #219
makingstuffs wrote: post #120

Think the notion that ‘no one’ uses em dashes is a bit misguided. I’ve personally used them in text for as long as I can remember. Also on the phrase “you’re absolute right”, it’s definitely a phrase my friends and I use a lot, albeit in a sorta of sarcastic manner when one of us says something which is obvious but, nonetheless, we use it. We also tend to use “Well, you’re not wrong” again in a sarcastic manner for s…

It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change? If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). T…

Hot take, but a character that demands zero-space between the letters at the end and the beginning of 2 words - that ISN'T a hyphenated compound - is NOT nice typography. I don't care how prevalent it is, or once was.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#275

Post by alex1138 »

quantummagic wrote: post #272
alex1138 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to see people who ruin functional services made into pariahs I don't care how aggressive this sounds; name and shame. Huffman should never be allowed to work in the industry again after what he and others did to Reddit (as you say, last bastion of the internet) Zuckerberg should never be allowed after trapping people in his service and then selectively hiding posts (just for starters. He's never been a…

> But we have to remove + from searches Wasn't that functionality just replaced? Parts of a query that are in quotation marks, are required to appear in any returned result.

Yeah, but quotes aren't as convenient and I think I've heard they're less accurate than + used to be

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#276

Post by jmyeet »

Given the climate, I've been thinking about this issue a lot. I'd say that broadly there are two groups of inauthentic actors online:

1. People who live in poorer countries who simply know how to rage bait and are trying to earn an income. In many such countries $200 in ad revenue from Twitter, for example, is significant; and

2. Organized bot farms who are pushing a given message or scam. These too tend to be operated out of poorer countries because it's cheaper.

Last month, Twitter kind of exposed this accidentally with an interesting feature where it showed account location with no warning whatsoever. Interestingly, showing the country in the profile got disabled from government accounts after it raised some serious questions [1].

So I started thinking about the technical feasibility of showing location (country or state for large countries) on all public social media ccounts. The obvious defense is to use a VPN in the country you want to appear to be from but I think that's a solvable problem.

Another thing I read was about NVidia's efforts to combat "smuggling" of GPUs to China with location verification [2]. The idea is fairly simple. You send a challenge and measure the latency. VPNs can't hide latency.

So every now and again the Twitter or IG or Tiktok server would answer an API request with a challenge, which couldn't be antiticpated and would also be secure, being part of the HTTPS traffic. The client would respond to the challenge and if the latency was 100-150ms consistently despite showing a location of Virginia then you can deem them inauthentic and basically just downrank all their content.

There's more to it of course. A lot is in the details. Like you'd have to handle verified accounts and people traveling and high-latency networks (eg Starlink).

You might say "well the phone farms will move to the US". That might be true but it makes it more expensive and easier to police.

It feels like a solvable problem.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/x-new-location-transpar...

[2]: https://aihola.com/article/nvidia-gpu-location-verification-...

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#277

Post by Terr_ »

lucumo wrote: post #269
fallinditch wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A giveaway for detecting AI-generated text is the use of em-dashes, as noted in op - you are caught bang to rights!

Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI. Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.

nice try but u used caps and punctuation lol bot /s

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#278

Post by wjholden »

kelvie wrote: post #261
fsckboy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the i…

Of note is theother terrible heuristic I've seen thrown around, where "emojis = AI", and now the "if you use not X, but Y = AI".

Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#279

Post by bee_rider »

XorNot wrote: post #251
Duanemclemore wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash. I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...

Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this. The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash). The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.

Is this—not an em-dash? On iOS I generated it by double tapping dash. I think there are more iOS users than AIs, although I could be wrong about that…

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#280

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

quantummagic wrote: post #201
seiferteric wrote: post #116

My parents were tricked the other day by a fake youtube video of "racist cop" doing something bad and getting outraged by it. I watch part of the video and even though it felt off I couldn't immediately tell for sure if it was fake or not. Nevertheless I googled the names and details and found nothing but repostings of the video. Then I looked at the youtube channel info and there it said it uses AI for "some" of the…

As they say, the demand for racism far outstrips the supply. It's hard to spend all day outraged if you rely on reality to supply enough fodder.

I like that saying. You can see it all the time on Reddit where, not even counting AI generated content, you see rage bait that is (re)posted literally years after the fact. It's like "yeah, OK this guy sucks, but why are you reposting this 5 years after it went viral?"
Post reply on HN