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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

#291

Post by sph »

Melatonic wrote: post #203
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…

Checkout Kagi SmallWeb !

I love Kagi, I am a paid user since day 1, but SmallWeb is a collection of English-speaking tech blogs, it cannot even begin to compete in diversity with the GeoCities era of the web. (to be fair: I've had Kagi employees telling me their dataset is growing larger and more diverse every day, so worth keeping an eye on it)

Sometimes I use Marginalia's "Vintage Web" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs and old .edu personal websites that someone forgot to delete, still a vanishing minority of anything one could find in 2001.

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

#292

Post by keiferski »

hliyan wrote: post #213
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.

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…

Ideas, once they go into the world, aren’t really yours anymore.

Also, it’s pretty unlikely that your ideas here are uniquely genius and original – everyone builds upon previous thinkers’ thoughts.

Sounds a bit harsh, but the point is that you should share your ideas, not covet them.

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

#293

Post by account42 »

sgt wrote: post #229
wickedsight wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 15 years ago, I won a phone in a contest. Last week I tried to find information about it, but I couldn't. No AI, nor Google could find anything the contest I won it in. When people say "the internet is forever" that can certainly be true, but it isn't for everything.

That reminds me - my wife had a friend who was killed by a shark (no joke). There were newspaper articles, but Google has completely forgotten about this and the newspapers are often behind a paywall, changed their URL's or simply the article vanished from those sites as well, which certainly doesn't help.

I wonder how libraries, who have traditionally been the ones to archive the news, have kept up with everything moving online and now being subscription-holed. Hopefully it's not just the Internet Archive doing this, which has its own problems.

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

#294

Post by pjc50 »

goekjclo wrote: post #263
robocat wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them. Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source? The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

Possibly "bad ideas are cheap". A lot of people got tired of "ideas guys" who never build anything themselves. The best case of a raw idea is an uncut diamond, it will inevitably require work.

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

#295

Post by tommek4077 »

monster_truck wrote: post #284

I just don't care man. Did these people just log on yesterday or something? The MUDs and MMOs I grew up with disappeared. The IRC networks, and especially forums I learned so much from are gone (these were largely killed for something even worse than AI: commercial blogs!). Effectively every social network I've ever cared about has been ruined, failed, or sold. Even games have become bottom line chasing, live service…

The old net is still there to a degree, but we live in pre-Alta Vista times again. It is hard to find. (I know as I run an old-school Forum and RPG-Game for more than 20 years now.)

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

#296

Post by spacechild1 »

Gigachad wrote: post #278
mittensc wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a very striking - and depressing - comparison.

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

#297

Post by pjc50 »

monster_truck wrote: post #284

I just don't care man. Did these people just log on yesterday or something? The MUDs and MMOs I grew up with disappeared. The IRC networks, and especially forums I learned so much from are gone (these were largely killed for something even worse than AI: commercial blogs!). Effectively every social network I've ever cared about has been ruined, failed, or sold. Even games have become bottom line chasing, live service…

I remember from the MUD era there was a paper (possibly by Richard Bartle) on the "MUD lifecycle", and how they tended to last on average two years before the operators got bored / burned out / the community left / there was an Incident.

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

#298

Post by danhite »

cryptoz wrote: post #274
esposm03 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> This should be "This should be 'You're thinking'." don't you think?

Reflexively, I think it should be more like ...

  javascript: `This should be "You're thinking".` ; 
  // to preserve the original character use and to avoid '...'...' parse foos
  // however `"...".` also possibly deserves a [sic] to critique the original 
  // i.e. ~grammar police say the period belongs within the quote marks, no?
... but then that's just me, in [my] quirks mode.

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

#299

Post by [deleted] »

lnrd wrote: post #239
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…

That works now because there are human made sources that the AI can find and summarize for you. But now there are no incentives at all for humans to write anything on the internet and if they do the content will be buried by hallucinated content someone else posted at a larger scale. I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, g…

[deleted]

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

#300

Post by mvanbaak »

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…

While I understand that you feel good as you got the device configured, you would have been better off without gemini. The 'old' way as you call it would have resulted in you knowing the backgrounds and the inner workings of your router, making maintaining it a breeze and helps you actually understand your setup. Besides that, it would probably trigger you to rethink some of the things you now blindly have implemented because gemini did not show alternatives nor reasoning behind it. (something that most definitely would have been documented on the source pages)
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