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

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

#331

Post by jasode »

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

The other half of the one-liner is "Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything."

- E.g. an idea is "Everybody should have cheap housing! Or an even better idea, everybody should have free housing."

- Ok, how exactly in concrete terms do we actually do that? (The very expensive Execution of the idea.)

- "Uh, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader."

Ideas are easy and execution is hard. That's what jaded people mean when they say "ideas are a dime a dozen".

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

#332

Post by embedding-shape »

bko wrote: post #314
sixtyj wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do it for yourself. I stopped worrying about who’s gonna use it. 20 years ago I thought that we will wait to have kids as “a war will come”. I was overthinking and I am happy now that I changed my mind :) Is it useful or does it make you happy? Or it might even make some money? Nice. Do it. My life is easier.

Really happy for you. It's disheartening how many people put off or choose not to have kids because they think some combination of climate disaster, famine, overpopulation, war or skynet will ensure a life of misery for their children. There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.

> There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.

Agree, in general, people over-think a lot, and aren't "just doing things" enough, the world would be a better place if people acted more, over-think less.

With that said, some decisions are more long-lasting and have a greater impact than others. I'm another child-less person, mainly because I guess I'm selfish enough to enjoy my life with my wife exactly like it is, and she agrees, but also because I know that if we have a kid, then that's not something you can walk back on exactly, he/she/it/them are there, forever now. Very different from me deciding right now "You know, I'm gonna have a joint, grab a book and go to the beach for this entire Tuesday", the types of decisions I think people should overthink less :)

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

#333

Post by pshirshov »

bko wrote: post #314
sixtyj wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do it for yourself. I stopped worrying about who’s gonna use it. 20 years ago I thought that we will wait to have kids as “a war will come”. I was overthinking and I am happy now that I changed my mind :) Is it useful or does it make you happy? Or it might even make some money? Nice. Do it. My life is easier.

Really happy for you. It's disheartening how many people put off or choose not to have kids because they think some combination of climate disaster, famine, overpopulation, war or skynet will ensure a life of misery for their children. There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.

> some combination of climate disaster, famine, overpopulation, war or skynet will ensure a life of misery

Are people living in/moving towards a saccharine utopia tough?

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

#334

Post by mike_hearn »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #162
luciana1u wrote: post #133

we're building the world's largest library and then locking the doors, letting the bots photocopy everything before the lights go out.

In a world, where everything can be stolen it will be hard to produce anything. I still have hope though. Maybe the Internet will be better. Currently everything has to be monietized. Everything is ad heavy. At the beginning it was not so. People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme. I have seen neocities, personal blogs created and maintained in this year. I know I run my own "In…

This is a common misremembering of the early internet.

The internet was never ad free. The first ad was posted online in the 1970s (for DEC)! It pissed people off but not everyone: supposedly it generated $18M in sales. There was very little advertising back then only because the internet was restricted to a handful of large companies and universities.

The web itself was launched in 1991 and the early web was inaccessible to basically everyone as it required an extremely expensive NeXTStep machine. Windows didn't even ship a TCP stack in this era, iirc. So took a few years for the web to reach the point where it was usable at home. By 1995 the web was starting to become barely usable thanks to Win95 and Netscape, and DoubleClick launched immediately in the same year.

My memory of the early web is that basically every website had DoubleClick ads on them, it was notorious for that. "Punch the Monkey" was an early campaign. Almost every topic oriented website carried ads, partly because bandwidth and servers were very expensive so that helped defray the costs. GeoCities took off because it handled the complexities of running ads for you, so you could publish for free.

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

#335

Post by mikae1 »

chrisjj wrote: post #240
t0bia_s wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on filed. As documentary photographer it motivates me even more to capture authentic images of life around me. I don't care about remixing, because that is not what makes documentary photography valuable.

And how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?

Because the photographer builds trust, over years, by not manipulating their images using AI. All trust is erased if anyone spots the manipulation.

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

#336

Post by figassis »

I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The amount of harm (direct and indirect) this will cause, and the cost to return to baseline will be so immense, and yet we will not be able to point to the root cause. They won't be there to take responsibility.

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

#337

Post by jasode »

sph wrote: post #320
exo762 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to. Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.

Allow me to disagree. GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT/BSD which have been the greatest catalyst towards the establishment of tech corpo giants and the software ecosystem we have today. GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this h…

>GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT

The less restrictive ~1984 MIT early version of the software license was several years before ~1989 GPL v1.

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

#338

Post by shoobiedoo »

sph wrote: post #272
shoobiedoo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you! I'll definitely look into this.

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

#339

Post by account42 »

Gigachad wrote: post #216
mittensc wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps this would not be a problem if google did not directly monetize AI Slop... for that matter why even include AI crap in search.

The Google conspiracy has been getting shared for long before AI slop came in to the picture. The fact is that SEO people got too good at their jobs and filled the search results with junk.

Google used to penalize websites for SEO hacks. Then they started attending SEO conferences themselves. SEO specialists didn't outsmart Google, Google stopped trying. As the sibling implies this is most likely because they noticed that the easiest way for SEO spam to monetize is ... Google ads.

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

#340

Post by bko »

rcxdude wrote: post #325
bko wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you care about is financial, expected value of someone reading your blog and asking to collaborate is MUCH lower than odds of being part of some settlement in the future with these AI companies ingesting your data for training purposes.

From their phrasing I don't think the reward they're looking for is financial: more the emotional reward of knowing that someone else appreciated their ideas. I dunno how much less likely this is in the age of LLMs, though.

In that case, more LLMs scraping the net will read your blog than people, that's almost a guarantee. And they'll immortalize your ideas at least in some sense, well after your hosting platform ends up gating your content, or GitHub pages is down indefinitely, or you forget to renew your domain.
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