401–410 of 781 posts
The importance of good search engines and good discovery engines will grow even more.
Search engines got SEO'd to death decades ago
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That sounds pretty great. If we could just flip 1 switch to accomplish things in absolutes, then that'd be awesome. I'd like to flip the switches that absolutely end poverty globally, absolutely eliminate guns from the US, and absolutely remove bots from Reddit, If you can show me where these switches are located, I'll cheerfully go flip them and accept full responsibility for the results. (Over here where things don…
No I'm saying it's better that they at least killed the "good" bots, even if this didn't result in killing all the bots.
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The fact that reddit enabled hiding your posts is crazy to me. In a time where knowing who's engaging in a community is more important than ever (am I talking to a bot or a troll?) reddit removes even more options to validate.
I interpreted that as an attempt to mask the number of bots on the site so as to not scare paying advertisers into thinking their ads won't be seen by real humans.
HN is in peril and I don’t think it is a bad thing. Or rather, I’d like to bring back the old chestnut: it’s a good thing. While the site has moved to using /showlim, the AI garbage just bypasses that and goes straight to the home page. Almost every project that’s being shown is vibe coded and looks exactly the same - generated by Claude or the like. This is an excellent test for the site: will it be able to adapt or…
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LLMs are not good at writing. If they were we would have entire libraries of new, amazing literature.
Exactly, they aren't good at creating new material. But many discussions in comment section are simply regurgitations of existing material, which they are good at rearranging. New novel discussions in places like this are actually a very rare thing, as many comment sections are simply people who already know informing those who don't. I'm doing that right now, funnily enough.
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> But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person. They can, but ideally they wouldn't be able to make infinite accounts with that authenticated status. So it would still reduce the number of bot posters on the web
There is actually a different problem with this: Suppose there is a major vulnerability in some popular device. 50 million people get compromised; the attacker can now impersonate any of them at will. They go around and create 50 million accounts on various services, or take over the user's existing account on that service. What are you going to do with their identities at that point? These are real people. If you ba…
I guess you could have an eyeball scanner at your computer that only sends out a binary "yes this person is human" to the system every time the log in. That sounds expensive and hackable and just janky though.
I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…
Imagine an online community where you can only join on the recommendation of two other members, who you must have actually met in person, to participate. Meanwhile, you leave at least some of the activity publicly available to the general public so that interested parties can meet up IRL and join.
This could probably be implemented easily on top of existing online platforms like Discord, Reddit, etc. since it's really just a community building rule, not a community itself.
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I don't think the main challenge is building this system, the main challenge is getting enough people using it to make it worthwhile. Personally I think it should be a government provided service, not something with a sign up fee. There's actually no point at all in building this if people have to pay to use it, because they won't
Which government? Will they interoperate with foreign governments? My point was to create something outside a specific government, with very limited information... that would require a fee or some kind of funding. I don't think I'd trust the US/China or other bodies to trust each other for such a use case.
Ideally, yes
But you're right, this isn't likely to happen in real life and I'm just being wishful. Instead we're going to get the much shittier capitalist version of this where every company and government spies on us and we have no expectation of privacy online at all