And why not? We humans do things like this all the time. We act with powerful false beliefs. Misunderstand a situation or simply just the meaning of a word, and then build our world-view and lives around those false beliefs. Train your model on this, and replicate in those false beliefs.
You can't trust the internet anymore
161–170 of 191 posts
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great question; it's something I still need to explore, but it would involve some sort of distributed public key database and IP address directory, then a routing table on top of that as people add more resources to the mesh. Wireguard is particularly good at transparent roaming, so it's trivial to use on portable devices or if you need to migrate your server from one provider to another.
Isn't this just Tailscale? Or Netmaker maybe if you want your own control plane?
You're not wrong; mainly this is an exercise in coming up with a solution that can evolve with the needs of a modestly-sized community with decentralisation. (Oh fuck I hope I didn't just accidentally propose a blockchain, I'm gonna kms) I'm not particularly married to one particular solution or another, or even to the idea of a control plane, or its scope or locality.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#163Tangentially related, I have a hunch, but cannot prove, that prediction markets are the driving force behind a lot of the bad information online, since they essentially monetarily incentivize making people misjudge the state of the world. There's been a huge uptick in this sort of brigade like behavior around current events. First noted it around LK99, that failed room temperature semiconductor in 2023, but it just k…
The volumes on the majority of markets are very small
Are you downplaying the incentive for bad actors to generate false or misleading information online in order to create a margin for monetary gain?
This, in the same country that has allocated some of the greatest minds of our generation towards tasks like High Frequency Trading under the guise of “price discovery”?
Forgive me if I’m a little less credulous than you.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting theory. I'm inclined to disagree, however. Prediction markets essentially allows people to trade information for money, even the types historically more difficult to trade. There aren't enough people betting on things for deliberate misinformation to become worthwhile, IMO, and most people would stop betting after being in the wrong too often, unlike casinos which always let you win sometimes. I believe t…
It's the same as with crypto rug pulls, nobody is going to fall for that several times. Was still money to make in that before everyone and their grandma wisened up.
> It's the same as with crypto rug pulls, nobody is going to fall for that several times.
Same grift, different mask. NFTs, shitcoins, blockchain startups, AI startups. We continually see that even if it’s not the same mark, there are plenty of fools easily separated from their wallets.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#165The future of the internet is going to be invite-only enclaves. I sometimes wonder is anyone working on the next generation of discussion forums, or if it'll be a return to PHPBB.
They'll instantly become infiltrated with bots and include people based on arbitrary politics. Either the content is such that it makes zero sense to game or spam or it is lost already.
But if approval of a new user in the enclave requires vouching by an existing member, then they will be anyone who joins lest they are banned themselves right?
I'm talking about like 100-200 members max social clubs, not subthing like subreddits with tens of thousands of users.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you misjudge the world based on web articles? If you don't have proper foundations where to source your information from you are already doomed.
It's generally not articles that are used, but discussion boards and social media. If it seems like everyone agrees on something, it's very easy to get dragged into thinking the idea has merit
Now both of those are almost 100% bs.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago. For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet tha…
Right. The change has come from how willing the internet's gatekeepers (primarily, Google) have been willing play ball with SEO. Enshittification is just them becoming more amenable to it over time.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The specific strategy is not about using LLMs or polluting the internet. Enshittification is ... ah screw it, let's turn to wikipedia: > Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve busin…
Feels like there is a case to be made here that the decline of The Internet rather precisely fits those definitions, with the exception that it is a collective of those products and services undergoing enshittification, since high-quality internet-based products/services no longer exist in quantity. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Impact which talks of the broadening of the usage of that term.
There still are some high-quality internet-based products/services, but the most important of them are not exactly commercial, or they are even illegal, e.g. various digital libraries with old publications, archive.org, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, etc.
Also there are many online shops that are the best option for purchasing various things.
The greatest decline is in the search engines, which not only are overwhelmed by sites with fake content, but they generate fake content themselves, in the form of stupid answers that are offered instead of the real search results, whether you want them or not.
If you know precisely the Web sites that you want to use, it is still OK, but when you search something unknown, it has become horrible.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. Everyone serving a website is being ddos by AI agents right now. A local mesh network is one way to make sure that no one with a terabit network can index you.
Make it private invite only behind Cloudflare
Oh yes, just let Cloudflare solve all of our problems. Fuck this. We shouldn't have to rely on yet another huge company to fix this for us.
Re: You can't trust the internet anymore
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like there is a case to be made here that the decline of The Internet rather precisely fits those definitions, with the exception that it is a collective of those products and services undergoing enshittification, since high-quality internet-based products/services no longer exist in quantity. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Impact which talks of the broadening of the usage of that term.
There still are some high-quality internet-based products/services, but the most important of them are not exactly commercial, or they are even illegal, e.g. various digital libraries with old publications, archive.org, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, etc. Also there are many online shops that are the best option for purchasing various things. The greatest decline is in the search engines, which not only are overwhelmed b…
> but they generate fake content themselves, in the form of stupid answers that are offered instead of the real search results, whether you want them or not.
&udm=14 my friend, &udm=14