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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

#441

Post by customguy »

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…

I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and therefore the ability to reason and act in public, and with others. I bet some still consider it hyperbole. It's just taking in trends and seeing where the glacier moves to, how the cookie will crumble so to speak.

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

#442

Post by bko »

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…

Curious how old you are.

As I've grown older, I noticed the cardinal pleasures don't hit like they used to. I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time, falling in love, getting my heart broken, the little things of life.

I've gotten great pleasure and reassurance knowing that's all ahead of my children. No matter how I progress personally, time marches on and I get to see my kids discover the world. If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.

I think the recent rise in things like Disney adults and interests around video games or popular media (TV/movies) is a kind of biological response. People are free to do whatever they want of course, but I can't help but think that these people, at least biologically, are drawn to these more adolescent interests precisely because they're not experiencing it through the eyes of their children.

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

#443

Post by FloatArtifact »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #422
inigyou wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It can be very exhausting to receive a lot of PRs. especially when they're LLMs. We have to read what people don't often even read themselves. They're often very wordy. Then it hurts all the more when it's wrong.

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

#444

Post by bonoboTP »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #423
joenot443 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Human workers also wreck these jobs horribly that come to bite your ass in the end. I think an intelligent person equipped with AI and common sense and real stake in the thing being well done (because it's their own, so they care) is better than whatever is possible to pay for or book in a realistic timeline from another human.

Also, ask people in the trades to review each other's jobs. They will harshly criticize each other too for missing basic things and then go on to vehemently disagree. As an outsider it doesn't mean much that an expert found some fault. They always find something to nitpick.

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

#445

Post by AdamN »

andrepd wrote: post #392
gsinclair wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answers to a lot of questions, with breadth, depth and nuance. And assistance in carrying out work on a lot of fields, not just programming.

breadth, depth and nuance If ever there were three adjectives which do NOT apply to generative AI...

Oh the text definitely has breadth, depth, and nuance ... just not sure how correct it is.

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

#446

Post by dgroshev »

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?

Here are a couple examples: https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build

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

#447

Post by sgt »

mike_hearn wrote: post #313
TFNA wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, too, look back fondly on the early web. Lately, though, I have been thinking that one reason for its decline wasn't just corporate interests like we often talk about here. A significant number of early bloggers were middle-aged and elderly people. After decades, they simply aged out. The younger generation that replaced them (albeit not so much among OS nerds like yourself) was less likely to use a real computer a…

While we're here exchanging old man stories, I remember the web before blogs existed! I guess we can organize the internet into these eras, each of which was in some sense harder and more expensive to find available info than in the previous: 1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but…

BBS's should definitely get a mention in the pre-web step

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

#448

Post by rnd33 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #426
post-it wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

For well-scoped tasks I wouldn't say the code is bad, not brilliant for sure, but definitively good enough.

For a lot of problems "quick and good enough" is all that is required. I've used it a lot for managing my Home Assistant setup. Has saved me countless of hours.

In principle I could've done it myself, but I never would have, the time investment required to learn it wouldn't have been worth the value I get from it.

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

#449

Post by sneak »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #426
post-it wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

I’ve been programming professionally for 29 years and with the right constraints (strongly typed language, strict linting, adversarial review styleguide, test coverage, clearly defined spec or requirements) it does indeed regularly write good code. All of the other stuff required is either set-once-and-forget or is also AI, and it does require supervision, but it writes good code the vast majority of the time.

Note that I am talking about frontier models and only the last 6-12 months. Opus was really the breakthrough point for me.

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

#450

Post by wesleywt »

prolly97 wrote: post #367
erfgh wrote: post #341

AI has killed reading-anything-written-after-AI for me. Due to this effect it is probably the worst invention in human history or pre-history.

You're comparing almost three millennia of text, to a couple of years worth of text. Let's see this play out. Plato also threw shade on writing. Which is an invention that turned out alright for humanity, imho. Maybe it'll turn out that we can push through to a yet-unknown-but-better state, as we've so far done, rather than relying on just going back to a previous state that we were content with. Sorry for the somewh…

Nah, AI writing is overwhelming real writing but contributes nothing new.
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