Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 1001 posts

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

#471

Post by rnd33 »

lnrd wrote: post #239
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…

That works now because there are human made sources that the AI can find and summarize for you. But now there are no incentives at all for humans to write anything on the internet and if they do the content will be buried by hallucinated content someone else posted at a larger scale. I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, g…

Isn't this only a transitionary problem though? Right now, during the transition there is no incentive for humans to write anything, it will get drowned in AI slop.

As time goes on, more and more people will recognize this problem and we'll develop new ways of measuring information quality and trustworthiness. Nothing about this problem is fundamental, it's just that we're in the middle of a very chaotic transition.

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

#473

Post by MSFT_Edging »

sertraline wrote: post #407

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. Websit…

All of these speedbumps are due to the massive amount of botting and scraping that AI has enabled.

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

#474

Post by carlosjobim »

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”.

Something is better than nothing.

A pain plate of rice is bad food. But would you prefer starving too death? Or for others to starve?

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

#475

Post by Maken »

joenot443 wrote: post #462
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It’s likely it missed some crucial subtlety that will come to bite you in the ass down the line. Maybe, but that's part of the experience of learning. I plan to maintain pools for the rest of my life, if I made an oversight which costs me down the line then the lesson will be that much more memorable. This is an above-ground pool with a pump and a filter, the stakes are relatively low. In the absolute worst case I…

If that's a pool for human use, the worst case is a bacterial/fungal infection due to incorrect filtering.

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

#476

Post by morkalork »

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 feel like if you had wanted to you could have done it before. When I got a pool in 2020,there were still old school phpBB forums out there dedicated to DIY and maintenance. That same summer, my neighbour who in no way is techie or handy redid his plumbing too.

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

#477

Post by gosub100 »

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…

In the 90s and prior you could have done the same thing using the public library.

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

#478

Post by bashwizard »

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”.

Skill issue. No pun intended.

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

#479

Post by joenot443 »

mlrtime wrote: post #424
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'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.

This was for a largish (40,000L) above-ground pool with no hookup to my home's plumbing system. The water was all pumped in from a water truck.

The previous system was also installed by a non-professional and was mostly tubes. It leaked to all hell and looked generally redneck and awful.

First step was draining the pool and doing a nice deep clean. Then I ripped out all the original plumbing until it was just the pool outlets, pump, and filter.

I arranged it all and measured the dimensions. I fed the figures along with a tonne of photos and explanation to GPT. I spent a while talking pros/cons and landed on a design which lined up with what I'd seen on YouTube. I had it prepare me a full shopping list of PVC, tools, cements, etc. all linked to a local pool dealer. I picked it up the next day.

The PVC was all cut with a chop-saw then primed and cemented together. I found this part easier than I would have expected. I put a layer of TigerFlex hose between the PVC manifold and the pump/pool/filter inlets so it had some tolerance.

We've been swimming in it all summer, no issues whatsoever so far.

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

#480

Post by seamlessdev »

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”.

Yeah if you just let it run wild, it will produce subpar results. But that is not much different from humans tbh.

When you discuss design and architecture first, and write that out in a design doc or something along those lines, it works quite well for the most part.

And 9 out of 10 times when it produces some poor results, just asking "is this really a good approach?" or just stating "This code makes me very sad" it will most of the time do a really good job of analysing why that code is bad and how to improve it.

Post reply on HN