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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

#401

Post by intended »

satvikpendem wrote: post #80
paxys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to re…

People write and create regardless of profit motive, it has been that way for thousands of years.

I had a flippant answer which was “who ever wanted to write for a machine in the past thousands of years”

But maybe that is the future.

Every country starts erecting their own towers of babel that we talk at, and it constantly compresses our conversations down to the most effective distribution of weights.

At some point talking at the machine becomes a high status job, and we give respect to the people who whisper to it the most.

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

#402

Post by pythonRon »

In the first year of Google search, it was possible to find exactly what you were looking for. The engine paid attention to inclusions, exclusions, the whole nine yards. It was a thing of beauty and it was why Google took over from all the other search engines that used to haunt the Internet of the late 1990's and early 2000's. And if what you were looking for didn't exist? You got 0 hits. (Sigh)

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

#403

Post by doublerabbit »

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.

Those I know don't because of money. Everyone seems to forget that children cost money.

You have to feed them food, medical, clothes, life and anything else. I couldn't afford to have a child in this climate at this time.

Yourself, has to be prepared to sink all in to. You have a secure job for the next 25 years, it's a big commitment.

The world is overpopulated as it is, adopt.

But however, if you can afford all of that and can still support the child then do it, have a kid.

Ae overall children aren't cheap. Easy to produce, but extremely costly to maintain.

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

#404

Post by inigyou »

pjc50 wrote: post #297
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.

Someone showed me something about Old-School Runescape recently and it struck me how quickly the game evolved. I played it in high school for two years at most. If you rewind or fast-forward in two year increments at a time, a lot about the game is barely recognizable each time. I think if you rewound two years from my play time, there was unlimited free trade, no grand exchange, and two or three fewer skills, and if you fast-forwarded two years, you got unlimited free trade again and the Evolution of Combat. It really puts in perspective how the people who make games are not planning the perfect game and then spending 10 years building it (except for Jon Blow) - they're flying by the seat of their pants. Apparently in 2001, the game's creators expected that nobody would ever reach the maximum level in any skill.

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

#405

Post by sixtyj »

embedding-shape wrote: post #332
bko wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enoug…

Yeah, having kids is tough call.

I was reminded of a tactic used by life insurance companies, which are more successful when they show a client a photo of themselves at age 70.

I pictured myself sitting there alone, lonely, perhaps without a wife by then (a 50/50 chance). And would I be calling friends my own age? Or my kids?

Although the likelihood that I won’t get along with them as an adult… you never know; another factor is their future partners…

Well, the kids - plus my wife, who wanted kids - won out.

But everyone has their own life, the best one they can imagine, so this is definitely not some kind of persuasion—just a description of the logical process I went through back then.

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

#406

Post by KellyCriterion »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #34
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…

its pretty good with logs too. i mostly paste a few pages i suspect hace a problem in them and let it go to town. its almost always correct and is way faster than me

also great for Windows-Log Exceptions to decipher the mostly cryptic error messages :-)

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

#407

Post by sertraline »

I find it ironic how people talk with a high hand about "Google dying", "Internet dying" and "AI eating everything" and then I open their website and it forces me to waste 10 seconds as cloudflare "checks" my browser, then reloads, checks it again, finally lets me through and then I end up on a useless page because the scroll is broken - thanks javascript. Then I need to hit F5 and finally I can read in peace.

Websites like these are the very reason nobody reads the web anymore. A clanker will give me an answer within 5 seconds. Old web used to load within 1 second, now it takes 10 to 15 and sometimes even >30 seconds until fully loaded. Using CF as a protection against LLMs is not even a valid excuse because CF gives your website's scraped contents in 1 click to anyone willing to pay. These websites waste insane amounts of time. Everybody defaults to AI because nobody is willing to deal with annoying browser checks, cookie popups, subscription letters, captchas and especially scroll hijacking. I may be a bad person, and I'm not even pro-AI, but if "thewalrus" goes offline I won't be missing it, because I regretted the time I wasted fighting their broken navigation.

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

#408

Post by KellyCriterion »

pythonRon wrote: post #402

In the first year of Google search, it was possible to find exactly what you were looking for. The engine paid attention to inclusions, exclusions, the whole nine yards. It was a thing of beauty and it was why Google took over from all the other search engines that used to haunt the Internet of the late 1990's and early 2000's. And if what you were looking for didn't exist? You got 0 hits. (Sigh)

...and you could call a friend and say: "insert X into google, click the second result on page 2" - both of you had the same output back then

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

#409

Post by inigyou »

champagnepapi wrote: post #375
post-it wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If typing is the bottleneck you're working in too low-level of a language. Use more abstraction.

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

#410

Post by richie_adler »

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.

As opposed to have kids because "is the thing to do", "it's time", or "I have to give grandkids to my parents"? Those are much worse reasons to breed.
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