11–20 of 72 posts
I think that AGI is inevitable, but I don't think it will arrive before 2050.
If you make a small list of such sites, forums, podcasts, you'll have save and maintain the last few corners that exist.
If the world is about to become a loud miasma of AI nonsense, I’ll just build thicker walls around the human-built and human-curated parts. It’s just damn unfortunate for those outside those walls. There will be very few public spaces left if they are prey to automated grift, but we can still make the private ones nice and pleasant.
You have to realize you are part of the problem. The old traditional forums didn't die because of AI but because you stopped contributing to them. There is a reason HN is still alive. If you want to maintain the "old" web, you have to keep browsing and interacting with the old web. I keep an old fashioned website ( https://omarabid.com ) and there are barely any viewers. Google completely de-ranked the site for no re…
Dang’s salary?
HN is the only forum I can think of where not only are the economic incentives between users and owners mostly aligned but there’s a paid moderator who is part of the community (as opposed to the faceless moderation teams of Twitter/Facebook/etc).
All the forums I loved died mostly because of owners shutting them down or giving up on moderation but YMMV
> being bombarded with tons of AI-written books, pornography, music, video, audio, images
I don't come across any of these unless I am very actively looking for them.
> try googling any historical figure and you'll find some bullshit AI generated image of them likely before the actual one.
I just tried, and there wasn't a single AI generated result in the top 5 pages.
I don't go on Twitter/X. I only subscribe to Reddit communities that I am genuinely interested in and which stay spam free. I frequent other sites like HN that have a very high ratio of signal to noise. I don't waste time on garbage SEO-bait blogs.
I'm not even putting in that much effort to have a sane online experience. If I can do it, so can you.
If the internet you knew and loved is gone, mourn it, move on, find a new thing to love. Or create it.
I spent a lot of today messing around connecting Anthropic's MCP system to Emacs and while the LLM's tendency to overwrite my code with its own was annoying, it was fascinating to play with it.
I spent a lot of the early days of the Internet arguing with people who thought it was ruining everything, with terrible art, and disgusting spam, and pervasive anonymity. Maybe they were right: but I realised that for me the better conversations, and better progress, were to be had with those who explored those boundaries to understand them better rather than those who reeled away from them. After some anguishing, I feel the same now. The fear is as much a habit as it is a fixed response.
Maybe that's just how I cope, but then again -- that is what you asked.
Twitter is a shitshow but that is biologically generated nonsense! And the hot take engagement is spreading to linkedin leading to borification of these platforms and my minimal use of them.
You have to realize you are part of the problem. The old traditional forums didn't die because of AI but because you stopped contributing to them. There is a reason HN is still alive. If you want to maintain the "old" web, you have to keep browsing and interacting with the old web. I keep an old fashioned website ( https://omarabid.com ) and there are barely any viewers. Google completely de-ranked the site for no re…
The reason was that they decided to remove web search from Google search.
Google is still useful for searching Google sites however.
Personally I'm kind of OK letting some other search engines bloom along with some human curation.
Where do you hide? Sure, you can and should create Dunbar-sized networks where everyone knows your name, but IIRC, Amazon sells AI clones of real books, "Scientific" papers are completely or partly AI. You can't buy an iPhone without AI (hoping my iPhone SE can't support it), your computer will have it, want it or not. And every damn business and agency you deal with will, if for no other reason, it eliminates jobs,…
As you note, the dream of replacing expensive and unruly humans with unpaid, compliant robots is extremely attractive to most large businesses.