271–280 of 542 posts
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It did feel emotive but this wasn't the main point. Data is harder to get (or more expansive) and more polluted.
Is 2023 going to be for data what the trinity test was for iron? Eg post 2023 all data now contains trace amounts of ai?
On the one hand, I completely agree with Robyn Speer. The open web is dead, and the web is in a really sad state. The other day I decided to publish my personal blog on gopher. Just cause, there's a lot less crap on gopher (and no, gopher is not the answer).
But...
A couple of weeks ago, I had to send a video file to my wife's grandfather, who is 97, lives in another country, and doesn't use computers or mobile phones. Eventually we determined that he has a DVD player, so I turned to x264 to convert this modern 4K HDR video into a form that can be played by any ancient DVD player, while preserving as much visual fidelity as possible.
The thing about x264 is, it doesn't have any docs. Unlike x265 which had a corporate sponsor who could spend money on writing proper docs, x264 was basically developed through trial and error by members of the doom9 forum. There are hundreds of obscure flags, some of which now operate differently to what they did 20 years ago. I could spend hours going through dozens of 20 year old threads on doom9 to figure out what each flag did, or I could do what I did and ask a LLM (in this case Claude).
Claude wasn't perfect. It mixed up a few ffmpeg flags with x264 ones (easy mistake), but combined with some old fashioned searching and some trial and error, I could get the job done in about half an hour. I was quite happy with the quality of the end product, and the video did play on that very old DVD player.
Back in pre-LLM days, it's not like I would have hired a x264 expert to do this job for me. I would have either had to spend hours more on this task, or more likely, this 97 year old man would never have seen his great granddaughter's dance, which apparently brought a massive smile to his face.
Like everything before them, LLMs are just tools. Neither inherently good nor bad. It's what we do with them and how we use them that matters.
I regret the situation led to the OP feel discourage about the NLP community, wo which I belong, and I just want to say "we're not all like that", even though it is a trend and we're close to peak hype (slightly past even?). The complaint about pollution of the Web with artificial content is timely, and it's not even the first time due to spam farms intended to game PageRank, among other nonsense. This may just mean…
Sci-fi author:
I created the Torment Nexus to serve as a cautionary tale...
Tech Company:
Alas, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic Sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus"
1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch25.htm
I regret the situation led to the OP feel discourage about the NLP community, wo which I belong, and I just want to say "we're not all like that", even though it is a trend and we're close to peak hype (slightly past even?). The complaint about pollution of the Web with artificial content is timely, and it's not even the first time due to spam farms intended to game PageRank, among other nonsense. This may just mean…
Even if, this is a dangerous thought that discourages decisive action that is likely to be necessary for this to happen.
Many of my searches nowadays include suffixes like "site:reddit.com" (or similar havens of, hopefully, still mostly human-generated content) to produce reasonably useful results. There's so much spam pollution by sites like Medium.com that it's disheartening. It feels as if the Internet humanity is already on the retreat into their last comely homes, which are more closed than open to the outside.
On the positive side:
1. Self-managed blogs (like: not on Substack or Medium) by individuals have become a strong indicator for interesting content. If the blog runs on Hugo, Zola, Astro, you-name-it, there's hope.
2. As a result of (1), I have started to use an RSS reader again. Who would have thought!
I am still torn about what to make of Discord. On the one hand, the closed-by-design nature of the thousands of Discord servers, where content is locked in forever without a chance of being indexed by a search engine, has many downsides in my opinion. On the other hand, the servers I do frequent are populated by humans, not content-generating bots camouflaged as users.
"I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans." We've been past the tipping point when it comes to text for some time, but for video I feel we are living through the watershed moment right now. Especially smaller children don't have a good intuition on what is real and what is not. When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer but…
There are a series of challenges like: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/09/technology/ai... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/19/technology/ar... These are a little bit unfair, in that we're comparing handpicked examples, but I don't think many experts will pass a test like this. Technology only moves forward (and seemingly, at an accelerating pace). What's a little shocking to me is the speed of…
The Technological Singularity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Did we (the humans) somehow managed to pollute the internet so much with AI that's it's now barely usable ? In my opinion the internet can be considered as the equivalent of a natural environment like the earth. it's a space where people share, meet, talk, etc. I find it astonishing that after polluting our natural environment we know polluted the internet.
Corporations did that, not humans.
"few people recognize that we already share our world with artificial creatures that participate as intelligent agents in our society: corporations" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4116
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a tech site, where >50% of us are programmers who have achieved greater productivity thanks to LLM advances. And yet we're filled to the gills with Luddite sentiments and AI content fearmongering. Imagine the hysteria and the skull-vibrating noise of the non-HN rabble when they come to understand where all of this is going. They're going to do their darndest to stop us from achieving post-economy.
I fail to see the difference. Actually, programming was one of the first field where LLMs shown proficiency. The helper nature of LLMs is true in all the fields so far, in the future this may change. I believe that for instance in the case or journalism the issue was already there: three euros per post written without clue by humans. Anyway in the long run AI will kill tons of jobs. Regardless of blog posts like that…
And also agreed: many trumpet the merits of "unassisted" human output. However, they're suffering from ancestor veneration: human writing has always been a vast mine of worthless rock (slop) with a few gems of high-IQ analysis hidden here and there.
For instance, upon the invention of the printing press, it was immediately and predominantly used for promulgating religious tracts.
And even when you got to Newton, who created for us some valuable gems, much of his output was nevertheless deranged and worthless. [1]
It follows that, whether we're a human or an LLM, if we achieve factual grounding and the capacity to reason, we achieve it despite the bulk of the information we ingest. Filtering out sludge is part of the required skillset for intellectual growth, and LLM slop qualitatively changes nothing.
[1] https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THE...
As a random example: just trying to find a particular popular set of wireless earbuds takes me at least 10 minutes, when I already know the company, the company's website, other vendors that sell the company's goods, etc. It's just buried under tons of dreck. And my laptop is "old" (an 8-core i7 processor with 16GB of RAM) so it struggles to push through graphics-intense "modern" websites like the vendor's. Their old website was plain and worked great, letting me quickly search through their products and quickly purchase them. Last night I literally struggled to add things to cart and check out; it was actually harrowing.
Fuck the web, fuck web browsers, web design, SEO, searching, advertising, and all the schlock that comes with it. I'm done. If I can in any way purchase something without the web, I'mma do that. I don't hate technology (entirely...) but the web is just a rotten egg now.