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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

#491

Post by tripledry »

goekjclo wrote: post #263
robocat wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them. Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source? The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

I still think it's correct. Execution is the part that matters.

Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence.

Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.

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

#492

Post by gosub100 »

intended wrote: post #342
keiferski wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say I agree. The most influential ideas in history were not conceived of by people looking for money and recognition. Nor were they “radically original.”

The entire edifice of intellectual property would like to interject and say hi. Patents, copyrights, trade marks exist because rewarding people for their insights and inventions matters.

I was with you until 'people'. I think you meant billion dollar corporations.

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

#493

Post by Cthulhu_ »

gosub100 wrote: post #477
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…

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

Still can (libraries still exist plus the internet) but finding the online resources gets more and more difficult; the fact the author mentioned youtube videos instead of someone's old-internet style "all about pvc pipes" website [0] or comic sans plumber sites [1] is already telling.

[0] https://tomtilley.net/projects/pvc/

[1] https://www.plbg.com/

(found via https://wiby.me/)

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

#494

Post by joenot443 »

Maken wrote: post #475
joenot443 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A pool filter is for removing physical debris, it's not really for preventing bacterial or fungal infections.

I guess what you're talking about is sanitizer, in my case we use chlorine. I test it every time we swim, but I wouldn't have needed an LLM for that. It's very straight forward to maintain pool chlorine, my Dad taught me that when I was 13.

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

#495

Post by mike_hearn »

tome wrote: post #486
mike_hearn wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of blogging especially in the tech space is driven by recruiting (startup blogs), or establishing a reputation as a thought leader (personal blogging, LinkedIn). So there were upsides that are now gone.

Why are they gone?

Publish some interesting info on a startup eng blog and nobody will see your pitch to apply for jobs, they'll just delegate the task that needs the info to an agent and it'll remember the answer from its training.

Ditto for personal blogging and thought leadership pieces. You get drowned out by the volume of AI generated pieces, and any unique ideas you do propose will be presented by the models as their own.

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

#496

Post by joenot443 »

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…

> I run a not-for-profit pinball museum

Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.

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

#497

Post by dzonga »

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…

how I handle this - if I find an interesting web page - I save to pdf & save to my external sdd. ideally I should get one of the 8tb HDD to save material I see on the web.

coz yeah good quality material is disappearing on the web fast. the only thing remaining is people building their own private search indexes.

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

#498

Post by beeforpork »

And the same holds for documentation about anything. Documentation is gone. Dead. Reference documentation, output from Doxygen or similar, and many other things that could be searched for hints on how to implement or generally do stuff. It's gone. When writing a simple Python script today and wondering about how an API for some library works, I ask AI, because there is no (findable) documentation anymore. (And yes, I usually still like to write it myself, but it's basically no difference: the AI writing that Python script would be the same point: docs are dead and gone.)

This is really scary and it is progressing fast.

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

#500

Post by intended »

gosub100 wrote: post #492
intended wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire edifice of intellectual property would like to interject and say hi. Patents, copyrights, trade marks exist because rewarding people for their insights and inventions matters.

I was with you until 'people'. I think you meant billion dollar corporations.

Hah, too True. Unfortunately larger firms have the ability to leverage the systems better than individuals at this point.

still, at least the existence of IP laws indicates that there is a need to reward creators for their creations.

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