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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

#511

Post by lgcmo »

dzonga wrote: post #497
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.

Not that this does not work, but there are services for that you could run. If you got (or plan to) a homelab, that is a nice add

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

#512

Post by j45 »

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…

The horoscope reference is resonating for me.

I know very little about pinball machines, out of curiosity, do some come with any amount of schematics or diagrams?

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

#513

Post by iamacyborg »

Intralexical wrote: post #465
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…

> This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. I find it telling that the highest praise for LLMs comes from people using it for something where they admittedly have very little domain knowledge. Domain experts usually mention major caveats. I've been testing them on subjects where I already understand the problem well, and I've yet to see any outputs that would make me tr…

LLMs are infecting us all with Nobelitis.

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

#514

Post by chrisjj »

mikae1 wrote: post #335
chrisjj wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because the photographer builds trust, over years, by not manipulating their images using AI. All trust is erased if anyone spots the manipulation.

Unfortunately that solution fails where "AI" manipulation is not detectable by viewers.

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

#515

Post by Borg3 »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #432
Borg3 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the…

I think you'd struggle to keep LLM bots off the network unfortunately. If it had any real value, anyway. Small, truly private communities could be an interesting thing though.

How I can strugle to keep them off? To peer to network, you need to talk to human. Arrange L2 connection, assign IPs (only static). If its leaf node, we are done. If its another network, we need to form BGP connections to exchange routing.

Yeah, Network by Humans for Humans. Thats why Im not interested in all those IoT/Auto networks when you just connect and stuff automagically configure. It looks nice at first glance, but you loose control. F2F works way better in that matter, like RetroShare, but I never investigated it much.

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

#516

Post by joenot443 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #493
gosub100 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ )

What do you think it's telling of?

I'm not sure if the sites you linked would have been immediately very helpful in my specific case. You know this is for a pool, right?

The first is called "Everyday Uses for PVC Water Pipe" and has some cool ideas like using PVC for Wiimote holders or tridents, but I don't think that's super relevant for this project.

The second is a great forum which I'm already familiar with, but again, the topic is household plumbing and from a brief skim, none of the topics mention pools. I think mine would have been out of place.

I appreciate you trying to help!

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

#517

Post by throw0101d »

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 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.

People have been DIYing swimming pools for decades with the help of… books:

* https://www.amazon.com/COMPLETE-GUIDE-SWIMMING-CONSTRUCTION-...

Where do you think ChatGPT got its information from?

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

#518

Post by Borg3 »

inigyou wrote: post #372
Borg3 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is simple.. Go dark. VPN tech is known from like 30 years. Pretty much everyone can use it (VPN providers). But instead using it to browse net, build VPN overlay networks of interest for people. Gaming networks, R&D networks, Retro Networks. People will peer to PoP and use resources. Bad actor? BAN it from network. You have control. This could be done in Internet, but big corpos and big money won the…

It doesn't have to be an IP-layer network. A website that you need to log in to view works just as well.

Nah, it needs to be IP. IP is well estabilished protocol, everything speak it. Once you set it up, you can use it whatever you like. Web pages, gaming service, IRC, Mail, P2P confereces, everything. Everyone will bring it own slice to the pie. You love networking, became PoP and peer and provide access. You just want content? Connect to closest PoP, get IP + DNSproxy and vioala.

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

#519

Post by jgtrosh »

nuclearnicer wrote: post #502
customguy wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality. First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows. Second, 1989, when cabl…

The VCR became widespread during the 1980s

> The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.

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

#520

Post by joenot443 »

morkalork wrote: post #476
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 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.

Yeah, absolutely. The YouTube guides have all been very helpful, a lot of them are done by actual paid professionals promoting their pool brand.

The fellow who'd done it originally is my neighbor and he's a retired teacher. There's a lot of ways to learn this stuff - my one takeaway has been that it's much easier than people make it out to be.

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