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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

#271

Post by suslik »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #247
suslik wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. I run a homelab tailscale/k3s setup with gitops, dozens of services, VMs, backups, etc, all vibed by claude, and works just fine. Didn't write a single line of code for this. I don't know kubernetes and never will.

> I don't know kubernetes and never will. He said, proud of his own ignorance.

Proud? No, but I am not ashamed of it also.

I would be the first to admit my ignorance on the absolute majority of topics. There is a limited number of things I can learn in life, and kubernetes won't be one of them - I'm just not interested in it (and all the other infra stuff, to be honest), as long as it works.

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

#272

Post by sph »

shoobiedoo wrote: post #189
sph wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with oth…

On a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filt…

May I suggest you to look into mesh networks? I am a huge fan of Reticulum. Using it feels like being a pioneer, the scene is very welcoming.

The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow further.

https://reticulum.network/

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

#273

Post by dd8601fn »

agentcoops wrote: post #241
dd8601fn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That movie is ridiculous and still great. At least as a nostalgia pump. And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.

If I recall correctly, the film actually had Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 and Kevin Mitnick as consultants, so despite the hollywood treatment you have moments of accuracy like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE . Probably the only time Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools made it to the big screen. At the yearly 2600 conference, they used to always do a big group rollerblade through NYC.

Cereal Killers name was Emmanuel Goldstein, too.

That movie still gives me wardialing and 2600 meetups and “voice bridging from a Dennys payphone bank at silly hours” memories.

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

#274

Post by cryptoz »

esposm03 wrote: post #159
pferde wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> Should be "You're thinking".

This should be "This should be 'You're thinking'." don't you think? Why bother correcting someone's grammar with a sentence fragment? You're just trading one mistake for another. I'm hoping someone finds a grammar error in my post, because continuing this would be hilarious.

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

#275

Post by account42 »

tome wrote: post #220
hliyan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated…

Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

Is there some downside to the slave who is housed and fed for free? Are there any upside he would have were he not property of another man?

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

#276

Post by tempfile »

lopis wrote: post #230

My personal anecdote is that I used to search for "xyz nutrition" quite often on Google. It used to provide a data table with lots of information. Sure, nutritional information is hard to get right, but at least that data was consistent. Now Google just gives you an AI answer with random values pulled from blogs and Reddit. It's almost always blatantly incorrect. I genuinely can't understand why Google would destroy…

[dead]

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

#277

Post by sph »

ChiMan wrote: post #196

AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.

More than a facilitator of theft, LLMs are the tragedy of the commons at industrial scale.

The public internet is dead, the future is private invite-only walled gardens.

Corporations love a walled garden, what we need is open-source frameworks to create these islands, rather than defaulting to horrible systems like Discord and Twitter-clones.

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

#278

Post by Gigachad »

mittensc wrote: post #235
tome wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

he's missing out on any attention that his shared thoughts would bring? and all benefits that might bring if he's good at what he does. he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.

It feels like volunteering at an Amazon warehouse when you previously volunteered at a charity store. Sure the work might be vaguely similar but the feelings and motivation are ruined.

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

#279

Post by account42 »

pjc50 wrote: post #245
ChiMan wrote: post #196

AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.

Eh, part of what made early-internet so good was exactly that it did allow copying by users ; the DRM era was later. But it's a very good example of why not to allow for profit copying, because that absolutely will crowd out the original. Piracy has to exist at the margin. The zero piracy world would also eat its memories because none would leak into archives. Remember Qubi? It wasn't even popular enough for people t…

I think the lack of credit is even more egregious and a bigger problem than the commercial copying.

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

#280

Post by DrScientist »

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…

Yep - it's awesome, the problem is that Google isn't sharing the revenue with the context creators anymore - over time, unless fixed, this will decimate the knowledge base it feeds on.

> Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me

Are you sure about that? Even if you didn't see ads ( remember people pay even if you don't click - just like a billboard ) - they are still profiling you to better sell you ads in the future, and using your interaction as free training data.

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