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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

#421

Post by embedding-shape »

richie_adler wrote: post #413
embedding-shape wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thinking is NOT overrated. Most people go through life never doing it at all.

> Thinking is NOT overrated

I don't think anyone claimed that either.

> Most people go through life never doing it at all.

That's unfair to others, of course they think. They think differently than you, and about different things than you, but doesn't mean they "go through life never thinking", probably no one does that.

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

#422

Post by AussieWog93 »

inigyou wrote: post #343
figassis wrote: post #336

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 am…

what value do we get from AI?

I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop that I let Claude Code sysadmin. It makes it really easy to self-host open source stuff, and if there are issues it can fix them too.

Funnily enough, I've had a somewhat mixed-to-hostile response when trying to upstream the vibecoded fixes, so I suspect using an LLM to fix broken open-source software (that human maintainers don't have the time to fix themselves, nor the humility to accept an LLM-authored fix) will become more of a thing going forward too.

Oh, it's also been identifying a bunch of patterns in sales data for my business that has been increasing monthly profit consistently since last November (around $4,000 USD, every month, cumulatively so far with no sign of slowing down - could easily be $10k/mo in increased gains by end of financial year).

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

#423

Post by loloquwowndueo »

joenot443 wrote: post #394
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what value do we get from AI?

Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I…

It’s likely it missed some crucial subtlety that will come to bite you in the ass down the line.

That’s the thing with AI - its responses sound plausible enough to non-experts but time and time again I see experts in any given field being able to identify AI content by pinpointing subtle but crucial errors. That’s one of its dangers - it gives you enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot.

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

#424

Post by mlrtime »

joenot443 wrote: post #394
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what value do we get from AI?

Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I…

I've love to know more about how you did this. Was it the underground plumbing or your pump system above ground. This is one of the few areas of the home I have little understanding of.

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

#425

Post by wpietri »

joenot443 wrote: post #394
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what value do we get from AI?

Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I…

I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..."

I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.

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

#426

Post by loloquwowndueo »

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.

It’s really good at writing bad code - something that superficially works but is badly architected, abstracted, or wrong in a subtle way.

Only a novice would look at ai code and say “wow this is good”.

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

#427

Post by Rperry2174 »

figassis wrote: post #336

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 am…

Whatever AI is doing to how we find / share information aside, I do think that one under appreciated effect is on how software (and other things) get built. Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing , but we may just not have had enough time to see how that hopefully has positive effects a decade out.

Its funny how fast we forget that when Google came out and arguably now many would laugh at the statement "all the good, companies like Google brought to the internet"

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

#428

Post by dwedge »

richie_adler wrote: post #413
embedding-shape wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thinking is NOT overrated. Most people go through life never doing it at all.

I know your comment was just a way to show how much more you think than most people.

Which made it really ironic that your second sentence served to disprove your point and not support it.

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

#430

Post by ImaCake »

kees99 wrote: post #301
neuralkoi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen websites put up some draconian measures to try and get a grip on the scraping. So much for the sub-second loading experience when you have Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. It's made the web browsing experience so much worse. Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercu…

> Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. Yep. IMO, this is so far the biggest AI-inflicted damage to the web. A bit of anecdata - wikipedia (and all other wikimedia sites) are blocking my Firefox since about a week, with a "please respect our bot policy" message. Outright block, not even a captcha. It took me a while to figure out they don't like me disabling…

Maybe the curl thing is because they are happy to let you do some light scraping. What they want to avoid is bots directly crawling the page interactively. No one seems to be blocking chatGPT when I promot it to use it's web search skill anyway.
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