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Dead Internet Theory

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Re: Dead Internet Theory

#551

Post by groundzeros2015 »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #380
quantummagic wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not the right thing to take away from this. This isn't about one group of people wanting to be angry. It's about creating engagement (for corporations) and creating division in general (for entities intent on harming liberal societies). In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack…

> outraged at people who think racism is a problem.

This is one level of abstraction more than I deal with on a normal day.

The fake video which plays into people’s indignation for racism, is actually about baiting people who are critical about being baited by racism?

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#552

Post by iso1631 »

lrvick wrote: post #465
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…

If there are ad incentives, assume all content is fake by default. On the actual open decentralized internet, which still exists, mastodon, IRC, matrix... bots are rare.

Usenet died partly due to the ads, and the inability for adblocking software at the time to keep up.

People left and never came back.

But those bots were certainly around in the 90s

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#553

Post by embedding-shape »

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…

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, aren't the LLMs actually trained to look like human language? So whatever particular "quirk" you have as a writer, there is probably an LLM emulating that either wholesale, or like 50% of the times.

LLMs use em-dash because people (in their training data) used em-dash. They use "You're absolutely right" because that's a common human phrase. It's not "You write like an LLM", it's "The LLMs write kind of like you", and for good reasons, that's exactly what people been training them to do.

And yes, "pun" intended for extra effect, that also comes from humans doing it.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#554

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

adzm wrote: post #532
Okawari wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again. Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members onl…

You're describing Discord today

Bots are a major problem on Discord. I frequently receive messages to buy MMO gold.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#555

Post by groundzeros2015 »

DrScientist wrote: post #472
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the right thing to take away from this. This isn't about one group of people wanting to be angry. It's about creating engagement (for corporations) and creating division in general (for entities intent on harming liberal societies). In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack…

> Until you realize that this is the root of the problem, that the whole system is built to make people angry at each other, you are only contributing to the anger and division. It's not built to make people angry per se - it's built to optimise for revenue generation - which so happens to be content that makes people angry. People have discovered that creating and posting such content makes them money, and the reven…

> it's built to optimise for revenue generation

I think blaming it all on money ignores that this also serve political goals.

Groups spend money to manipulate public opinion. It’s a goal in and of itself that has value rather than a money making scheme.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#556

Post by vlachen »

fullstop wrote: post #523
gwd wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a generational thing? All my groups of this type are on WhatsApp (unfortunately).

Yes. Whatsapp requires a phone number and Discord does not. The tweens who do not have a phone yet can join Discord with their siblings / friends. The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...

Having been out of university since before Discord was much of a thing, that's news to me. It also is eerily reminiscent of Facebook's beginning sign up requirements.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#557

Post by fedeb95 »

kenty wrote: post #329
fedeb95 wrote: post #327

"you are absolutely right" mught come from non native english speaker. For instance, in Italian you say something like that quite often. It's not common in english, but it's common for people to be bad at a second language.

> it's common for people to be bad at a second language Non-native speaker here: huh, is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow? I.e., are you a bad english speaker for using it? Fully agree (I guess "fully agree" is the common one?) with this criticism of the article, to me that colloquialism does not sound fishy at all. There might also be two effects at play: 1. Speech "bubbles" where your preferred language is…

I'm also a non native speaker. The point is, you tend to make grammatically correct phrases (mostly), but in a way that's not very common between native speakers. You're right that there are many factors at play. I think dismissing something as AI generated just because it uses common AI-generated strings is not correct. I'm speaking in general and not about the specific case.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#558

Post by topaz0 »

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…

I'm in your camp, that both of these are appropriate for some situations. In particular I like starting with a variation on "you're absolutely right" when it appears my interlocutor has identified the wrong disagreement, before realigning the conversation to a more useful direction (though of course there are many phrases that accomplish that).

It's still frequently identifiable in (current-generation) LLM text by the glossy superficiality that comes along with these usages. For example, in "It's not just X, it's Y", when a human does this it will be because Y materially adds something that's not captured by X, but in LLM output X and Y tend to be very close in meaning, maybe different in intensity, such that saying them both really adds nothing. Or when I use "You're absolutely right" I'll clarify what they are right about, whereas for the LLM it's just an empty affirmation.

Re: Dead Internet Theory

#559

Post by culebron21 »

cannonpalms wrote: post #507

I believe this was the original thread. Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661308

I took a look at the source code -- well, what if it's a working thing -- and of course, 2 files in, there are instructions that panic (i.e. crash the host process), all over the code, just everywhere, in every API method. That's nowhere near "production ready" as the author's LLM says.

I've seen, 17 year ago, a schoolboy make "his own OS", which was simply Ubuntu with replaced logos. He got on TV with it, IIRC he was promoting it on the internets (forums back then), and kept insisting that this was his own work. He was bullied in response and in a few weeks disappeared from the nets.

What has it to do with me personally, if I'm not the author, nor a bully? Today I learned that I can't trust the new libraries posted in official repos. They can be just wrapper code slop. In 2012, Jack Diedrich in his speech "Stop Writing Classes" said that he'd read every library source code to find if there was anything stinky. I used to think it's a luxury of time and his qualification to read into what you use. Now it became a necessity, at least for new projects.

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