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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

#451

Post by plasma_beam »

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…

Fellow pool owner who has always drawn the line at “only pros do the pvc cutting”. I’d love to hear more.

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

#452

Post by olmo23 »

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”.

You don't have to let it design the architecture. Personally, when I'm using AI: I design the software, and the AI implements it. The classes and functions are typed the way I want them to be typed. AI does a great job.

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

#453

Post by sgt »

account42 wrote: post #293
sgt wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me - my wife had a friend who was killed by a shark (no joke). There were newspaper articles, but Google has completely forgotten about this and the newspapers are often behind a paywall, changed their URL's or simply the article vanished from those sites as well, which certainly doesn't help.

I wonder how libraries, who have traditionally been the ones to archive the news, have kept up with everything moving online and now being subscription-holed. Hopefully it's not just the Internet Archive doing this, which has its own problems.

I bet the intelligence agencies are keeping track, though. The likes of CIA and Mossad, at the very least.

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

#454

Post by SadErn »

wpietri wrote: post #425
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…

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 us…

[dead]

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

#455

Post by t0bia_s »

chrisjj wrote: post #240
t0bia_s wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on filed. As documentary photographer it motivates me even more to capture authentic images of life around me. I don't care about remixing, because that is not what makes documentary photography valuable.

And how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?

By trust. If you pay attention enough, you'll discover authenticity and "handwriting" well.

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

#456

Post by OCTAGRAM »

shoobiedoo wrote: post #189
sph wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with oth…

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…

There are retrocommunity sites. DOS, OS/2 (eComStation, ArcaOS), Amiga (Apollo Vampire), Mavericks Forever. Amiga is quite alive community. If I am to write game, I consider this platform. Steam game will be lost in 100.000 games, and Amiga game will be noticed.

There is I2P. They have been disabling scripts for ideological reasons, so there were many websites without scripts. I have used quite exotic Charon web browser from Inferno OS in I2P. That was 15 years ago. Don't know how it's now.

There is RetroNAS and plenty of other software to enrich home network.

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

#457

Post by netcan »

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 think a lot of this is "accelerating trends."

That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time.

In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population.

Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web."

Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it.

That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO.

So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.

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

#458

Post by AussieWog93 »

FloatArtifact wrote: post #443
AussieWog93 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had negative responses to small, isolated submissions that I've heavily QA'd and semi-positive responses to longer ones. I think it has less to do with the "realpolitik" of the code itself and more to do with the maintainer's viewpoints about whether AI as a whole is a positive or negative thing.

I tend to respond quite well to AI-authored or assisted PRs to my project, but to be fair we maybe only get 3-5 PRs in a good month.

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

#459

Post by bonoboTP »

ChiMan wrote: post #196

AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it. It is an industrial-strength example of why we don’t allow stealing.

Copyright violation is not stealing. Training is not copyright violation. And not stealing.

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

#460

Post by embedding-shape »

bko wrote: post #442
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…

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 ge…

About 35 years old, more or less.

> I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time

Yeah, I guess at one point I'll feel like that too perhaps, but I still feel young, I feel like I have more energy each day than the previous one, and every month is experiencing new things for the first time, and personally I don't want that to stop and experiencing those things through the eyes of my children, I want to continue having those experiences myself, together with my wife :) I guess that's where the offhand "I'm selfish" sentiment from my previous comment comes from.

> If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.

Do you think you'd feel fulfilled if you didn't have children? Maybe this is the core differences, I feel fulfilled in my life already, more than ever and more every day, I live exactly the life I want today, and I wouldn't want to change it for anything. Even if I became deadly sick tomorrow, I'd feel fulfilled by the life I have lived.

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