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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

#521

Post by joenot443 »

plasma_beam wrote: post #451
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…

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

I answered something similar above, but I'll paste it here too:

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

#522

Post by hajile »

harshreality wrote: post #346
root-parent wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that will kill AI itself, since much of what it knows is from what learned from StackExchange before this latest one demise. And before the obvious comments on how GenAI is creative , then please do this OpenAI and Anthropic, for your next LLM. Just teach it Python, C and Rust and give it some good books. But dont give it access to Github...lets see what you can do then...

LLM training will eventually transition from real data to synthetic data, same as alphago -> alphazero. AI companies are also working to integrate training with real-world experience through sensors and robotics, to shrink the gap between human experience and hallucinated LLM experience. They all have archives of pre-LLM content. There's also archive.org, google books, and pirate ebook archives. I don't know what the…

Neither AlphaGo nor AlphaZero were transformers. Why would you expect the same results?

Going further, current LLMs have at least an order of magnitude more computing resources, but completely suck at go. Why would this suddenly change unless we dumped the countless games played by alphago for them to train on?

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

#523

Post by layer8 »

HSO wrote: post #354
sph wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same conclusion I reached. I'll keep publishing static websites, so I don't even have to worry about load and CPU usage. I don't care who reads it, the value for me is in writing. I still haven't changed my mind on the "shall I have kids" problem :P

if the value is for oneself, why go through the extra trouble of publishing it though?

Publishing changes the incentive of how you write, because you’ll care differently about the quality and content of the writing, since people might read it. That’s valuable for a writer.

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

#524

Post by pamcake »

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…

All of those are pretty specific to US national culture whereas GP is talking about something more global.

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

#525

Post by loloquwowndueo »

seamlessdev wrote: post #480
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Analyzing? No. It’s just being sycophantic. Try it on code that’s actually correct - it’ll go all “oh you’re absolutely right” and wreck it anyway.

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

#526

Post by inigyou »

Borg3 wrote: post #518
inigyou wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The networking part exists, it's called DN42. But it's hard to set up. I don't see why you'd use this instead of an application layer password.

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

#527

Post by ontouchstart »

tripledry wrote: post #491
goekjclo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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,…

Ideas are seeds. Seeds can be cheap or expensive, but perhaps what we want to talk about is not the _cost_ of ideas but the _value_ of ideas.

The correlation between cost and value can be very complicated, especially in the chaotic world (or chaotic situation).

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

#528

Post by loloquwowndueo »

sneak wrote: post #449
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I’ve been programming professionally for 31 years. With all those guardrails it writes functional code - but I would still not call it good. But hey to each their own.

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

#529

Post by loloquwowndueo »

carlosjobim wrote: post #474
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AI is like eating cardboard.

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

#530

Post by daishi55 »

wesleywt wrote: post #450
prolly97 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don’t seem to have read the comment you are replying to.
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