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

thewalrus.ca

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

#151

Post by arjie »

ilamont wrote: post #82

After publishers successfully sued the Internet Archive over its digital lending program, calling it unauthorized copying No. The court specifically determined that the Internet Archive was guilty of unauthorized copying. It was not simply an unfounded or unproven allegation. The Authors Guild, the National Writers Union, the European Writers Council, and the Society of Authors in the UK all came out against the Inte…

Seems inevitable, doesn’t it? Expecting otherwise would have been hoping that notorious atheist Richard Dawkins somehow spared one specific god. Making websites accessible with history ignoring copyright is sort of what it does. That he would do it with books seems entirely in keeping with the philosophy.

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

#152

Post by AussieWog93 »

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have a near 100% failure rate, as most of the information they have has been gleaned from forum posts that are years out of date.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.

I've had the opposite experience giving claude code SSH/ADB access to my devices. Not sure if it's the model itself or the harness, but I haven't had to manually do a sysadmin task in months.

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

#154

Post by Borg3 »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #145
neuralkoi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen websites put up some draconian measures to try and get a grip on the scraping. So much for the sub-second loading experience when you have Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. It's made the web browsing experience so much worse. Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercu…

Sure - it sucks, unfortunately the alternative is the sites going away entirely. When the load from scraper bots is constantly knocking the site offline the choices are literally to allow it to remain inaccessible for much of the time, put up a layer of defenses with all the user-annoyance compromises that entails, or just give up and unpublish the site.

The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the battle. Just wake F*ing up...

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

#155

Post by renegat0x0 »

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 hate to break it to you, but we are at the start of enshittification circle. Once Gemini has monopoly you will reminisce with joy google search results.

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

#156

Post by Dylan16807 »

BeetleB wrote: post #26
tayo42 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were planning their day for a specific time to be somewhere. If you're looking at the sun it's to late...

That's fine, but arguing that Google should give accurate times based on where you are is ... crazy? In the pre-LLM days it was cool that Google did weather, unit conversions, sports results, etc. But that's not even close to their value proposition. Even 5 years ago if someone told me they had planned a photograph and got it wrong because Google gave them the wrong time for sunset, I would have called them a moron f…

I don't understand your argument. It's not their core value proposition so it's crazy? That's quite a leap. But giving a good answer is just as core as their search results. The answer is what you're there for and they get to show ads. It's not any stupider to use that info than a dedicated site. Both could be wrong, and you're not a moron if it is.

Installing an app to learn a single time would be the real moron option.

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

#157

Post by mr_mitm »

tayo42 wrote: post #6
danpalmer wrote: post #2

It's hard to get past the beginning of this article and take it at all seriously. The quote someone who missed a sunset because they asked google and supposedly got the wrong time... but they didn't think to look at the sun or lack thereof to check? Also when I put "when does the sun set today" I get a single exact figure at the top of my results, not from AI, which is honestly the best kind of result – an exact corr…

They were planning their day for a specific time to be somewhere. If you're looking at the sun it's to late...

From the article:

> “I had the projector set up outside and was waiting for the sun to set,” wrote one Facebook user in Colorado Springs, “but to my surprise I was simply living in the past. AI informed me the sunset had already happened.”

It does sound a bit bizarre.

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

#158

Post by wartywhoa23 »

karmakaze wrote: post #104
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…

Funny, I published information in the hopes that humans would benefit from it. If it happens to be through collective intelligence of LLMs I'm ok with that--even more so if through open models.

> Funny, I published information in the hopes that humans would benefit from it.

Sure, humans would benefit.

It took them searching, reading themselves, maybe even understanding something in the process, to complete a 360° revolution of their squirrel cages in time T.

Now they can omit searching, skip reading to the regurgitated answer, throw away understanding, and complete a full revolution in T/N, where N is a heuristic value directly proportional to the amount of skin in the AI hype.

But the catch is that the squirrel cage must run non-stop still.

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

#159

Post by esposm03 »

pferde wrote: post #147
littlecranky67 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward" That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.

Your thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.

> Your thinking

Should be "You're thinking".

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