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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

#551

Post by m0llusk »

nuclearnicer wrote: post #535
jgtrosh wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another good one. My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater. But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.

My family used it to capture programming we couldn't normally be around for, especially late night BBC content on PBS. Pretty much all we used it for was DVR style recording.

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

#553

Post by pferde »

esposm03 wrote: post #159
pferde wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.

> Your thinking Should be "You're thinking".

Maybe I'm just making silly misspellings like this on purpose, to prevent someone from fingerprinting me based on my writing style. :-)

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

#554

Post by pessimizer »

KPGv2 wrote: post #505
netcan wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infrast…

If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad. Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usene…

If you judge the internet and the world by "no new anime content today" things have actually improved. But some would think that's not a healthy way to see things.

> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting.

Judged on an anime freshness scale, probably not.

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

#555

Post by rayiner »

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…

That was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those technologies worked. It enabled a small group of people in charge of the radio/TV stations to have a monopoly on communications and media. The technology both before (printing presses with myriad newspapers) and after (the Internet) were by their nature decentralized.

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

#556

Post by inknight »

bluebarbet wrote: post #543
erfgh wrote: post #341

AI has killed reading-anything-written-after-AI for me. Due to this effect it is probably the worst invention in human history or pre-history.

Am I really the only one who doesn't care whether or not prose was written by AI? Assuming that a text is signed off on by a person, then surely what counts is its substance, not who or what actually strung the words together. I'm constantly surprised by this obsessive need to falsify what is unfalsifiable. And among nerds of all people. It feels religious, like a modern form of heresy-purging.

people who generate entire blogposts with claude probably do not care about substance, tho. before llms, people would have to put effort into what they write and be mindful about the things that they are saying. now it just generates the whole thing, the people who "signs it" barely reviews it fully most of the time, IF they review it at all, proceed to say "eh, good enough" and publishes it.

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

#557

Post by pythux »

inigyou wrote: post #384
slig wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try brave search.

Both DDG and Brave Search are front-ends for Bing.

Brave Search operates a fully independent index (i.e. we have zero reliance on Bing or any other third-party index).

Disclaimer: I work at Brave

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

#558

Post by seamlessdev »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #525
seamlessdev wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was talking about style and architecture. In all these cases the code is working as intended either way. There is no such thing as "correct" style and architecture. There are only tradeoffs. You should know that if you have 31 years of experience.

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

#559

Post by carlosjobim »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #529
carlosjobim wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI can make fully functioning computing solutions. That's just a fact and denying it is like denying that a bicycle can roll and only four wheeled vehicles can.

Or saying that a car is a better vehicle than a bicycle. That is probably true, but many times for many people a bicycle is all they can get.

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

#560

Post by pferde »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #191
pferde wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.

> it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator In that case the creator should welcome AIs with open arms; a human reader will forget eventually, but the AI will preserve the knowledge forever.

AI will mutate the knowledge and eventually produce some mangled version of it, mixed in with ramblings from a random reddit post and half a paragraph from a copyrighted book that its fascist creators stole.
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