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

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 1001 posts

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#111

Post by smackeyacky »

Gemini has been a hilarious companion to my while I fixed the balance shaft chain guides in my old Mitsubishi triton (mighty max for US readers).

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.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#112

Post by ElFitz »

smackeyacky wrote: post #111

Gemini has been a hilarious companion to my while I fixed the balance shaft chain guides in my old Mitsubishi triton (mighty max for US readers). 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 r…

Meanwhile, ChatGPT correctly diagnosed what was wrong with my plant from a single photo, identified which leaves I should cut, and annotated the picture showing where to cut and what not to touch.

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.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#113

Post by queenkjuul »

satvikpendem wrote: post #81
queenkjuul wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come now, copilot is worse in every way

Copilot can use any model like Sol or Opus and is just a harness so not sure why people say this.

Personally it's because i used it when it was brand new and work paid for it and i had no idea what model it was using, my boss just turned it on for automatic PR summaries and code reviews and it was universally dogshit, and the auto complete in my IDE was awful as well.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#114

Post by shuwix »

jefftk wrote: post #67
paxys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. 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 re…

> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.

Your level of thinking is defined by ICD-10.

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

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#115

Post by Melatonic »

no-name-here wrote: post #103
JKCalhoun wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. When my kids wonder why I don't hate AI the way they do I tell them it's because I hate Google even more. 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™.)

Is there some search engine that you think could have become popular and not ended up with SEO optimization?

One you pay for yourself !

Very happy with Kagi personally

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#116

Post by 0x262d »

badestrand wrote: post #106
dualvariable wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably going to figure out how to aggressively monetize and enshittify LLMs at some point. 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.

For the free to use LLMs, for sure. But if I pay $20 monthly, why should they enshittify it?

look at every paid streaming service...

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#117

Post by no-name-here »

Melatonic wrote: post #115
no-name-here wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some search engine that you think could have become popular and not ended up with SEO optimization?

One you pay for yourself ! Very happy with Kagi personally

>> 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.

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?

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#118

Post by queenkjuul »

ElProlactin wrote: post #84
queenkjuul wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it isn't that we should save all of it, it's that we are not saving any of it. Random letters, notebooks, calendars, family photos, restaurant menus, etc have all proven useful to various historians, of which there will essentially be none from our era.

> I think it isn't that we should save all of it, it's that we are not saving any of it. Random letters, notebooks, calendars, family photos, restaurant menus, etc have all proven useful to various historians, of which there will essentially be none from our era. 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 doomsd…

I mean, none of that stuff in storage units is human communication, though. Nobody prints emails or text convos or insta photos. Nobody is mailing each other letters. So none of that stuff is in storage units, though plenty of it from previous generations might be.

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.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#119

Post by Randor »

laughing_man wrote: post #96
comrade1234 wrote: post #7

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I s…

I've run into major problems with LLMs as I maintain my home Linux systems. If I just copied commands they list, I would have a near 100% failure rate, as most of the information they have has been gleaned from forum posts that are years out of date. They're a good jumping off point, but I need to delve into the original sources just like I did when I used Google.

Have a look at https://github.com/ThorOdinson246/whatisit-nl2sh

It seems to get shell scripts right most of the time.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#120

Post by watwut »

satvikpendem wrote: post #80
paxys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. 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 re…

People write and create regardless of profit motive, it has been that way for thousands of years.

People are way less likely to write if there is no one to read it. And blog were also monkey see monley do - people seen other peoples blogs and got inspired.

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.

Post reply on HN