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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

#371

Post by kaoD »

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…

I always find these mesh networks landing pages a bit lacking in information, and I wish they weren't.

How is this different to, from example, Yggdrasil Network[0]?

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

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

#372

Post by inigyou »

Borg3 wrote: post #154
robinsonb5 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - it sucks, unfortunately the alternative is the sites going away entirely. When the load from scraper bots is constantly knocking the site offline the choices are literally to allow it to remain inaccessible for much of the time, put up a layer of defenses with all the user-annoyance compromises that entails, or just give up and unpublish the site.

The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the…

It doesn't have to be an IP-layer network. A website that you need to log in to view works just as well.

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

#373

Post by eloisius »

harshreality wrote: post #346
root-parent wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that will kill AI itself, since much of what it knows is from what learned from StackExchange before this latest one demise. And before the obvious comments on how GenAI is creative , then please do this OpenAI and Anthropic, for your next LLM. Just teach it Python, C and Rust and give it some good books. But dont give it access to Github...lets see what you can do then...

LLM training will eventually transition from real data to synthetic data, same as alphago -> alphazero. AI companies are also working to integrate training with real-world experience through sensors and robotics, to shrink the gap between human experience and hallucinated LLM experience. They all have archives of pre-LLM content. There's also archive.org, google books, and pirate ebook archives. I don't know what the…

That (theoretically) solves training, but it doesn’t change the fact that even smart models can’t extract useful information from a dead internet, so you’ll always be stuck with a stale training cutoff. This is already a problem I run into a lot. I search something first. Top results are slop sites, so I switch to a chatbot. Its answers look suspiciously similar to the slop sites I just noped out of. Check the sources. It’s them.

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

#374

Post by inigyou »

matherial wrote: post #135
Grimburger wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare specifically has a block for LLM and AI training bots now. Not sure of the effectiveness but it's there.

Minimal. I'm behind Cloudflare and 90% of the traffic is still scrapers. I don't think they're serious about the long tail. I think the main thing Cloudflare is trying to do is block direct traffic from frontier labs and then start charging them for access. They might end up shooting themselves in the foot, as this simply empowers sketchy residential-proxy outfits to undercut Cloudflare and sell the data to labs for…

I think the other thing they're trying to do is get most of the internet to send them all of their cleartext traffic. Expect in 2040 the PRISM2 docs will get leaked by some Eduardo Rainedon and we'll find out Cloudflare was the NSA all along.

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

#375

Post by champagnepapi »

post-it wrote: post #347
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what value do we get from AI?

It's really good at writing code.

Ehhhhh it’s faster at typing code. Writing in a full agentic mode, we’ve only experienced slop.

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

#376

Post by inigyou »

exmadscientist wrote: post #88
jefftk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.

The danger that's concerning people (rightly or wrongly) isn't that LLMs are going to be an intermediary to your website. It's that they'll be the only thing reading it. No one will ever read your post or know what you wrote. The only consumers will be LLMs, they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author (probably more due to expedience than any sort of malice; it's not like you're famous , are you?), a…

So I'll write a lot of falsehoods to poison the AI. Like the urban legend where the sky is blue. I'll say the sky is blue, AI will think it's true, and regurgitate it to unsuspecting users who will see that AI is completely unreliable.

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

#378

Post by wegwerf17377382 »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #359
post-it wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really good at writing code.

It’s good at all kinds of stuff that is search adjacent, “find amesent parks with water feature within 100 miles of me that have rv parking nearby”, etc

This will of course never be underminded by aggressive marketing

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

#379

Post by inigyou »

0x262d wrote: post #116
badestrand wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the free to use LLMs, for sure. But if I pay $20 monthly, why should they enshittify it?

look at every paid streaming service...

To be fair those enshittified because of copyright owners, not because of paid streaming services.

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

#380

Post by inigyou »

no-name-here wrote: post #117
Melatonic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One you pay for yourself ! Very happy with Kagi personally

>> Is there some search engine that you think could have become popular and not ended up with SEO optimization? > One you pay for yourself ! SEO is the practice done by webmasters of optimizing a website to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results. If you are paying to use your search engine, does that mean webmasters are no longer incentivized to/will not try to improve their visibility/ranking in…

It means your search engine is incentivized to fix it.

It's nice to be the customer instead of being the product, for once.

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