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The internet is slipping out of our reach

injuly.in

71–80 of 135 posts

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#71

> Today, you get paid search results, ads, third-party cookies, trackers, newsletter prompts, notification requests It is worse. You get curated political opinions that you must have, referrals to government agencies, etc.

So it's fine when one party is in control, but then suddenly it's "censored" or "curated"? I would like to get my first page from the "deep state" State Department if I search for "is it safe to travel to Iraq", not from some sketchy travel blog written by a dude who believes in lizard people.

[flagged]

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#72

One thing that makes me kind of happy - I am no longer scared of "AI singularity". Looking at the bullshit LLMs generate, I don't think they will take over world and start to upload our minds to torture chambers or whatever.

It might get worse soon across all sites if governments mandate AI content moderation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39669162

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#73
post #54

Someone once asked a question online about what each person's biggest fear was regarding the future of AI generated content. I thought about it. While the fears of not being able to earn money for creative pursuits are a concern, my biggest concern remains around anonymity. At some point, I fear that participating online with other humans will require "proof of self" and as AI becomes more and more able to generate c…

> I fear that participating online with other humans will require "proof of self" I fear something worse: that it WON'T require proof of self, because the LLMs will be able to tell if you're human... and your age, wants, needs, everything else; that's the nightmare scenario for me: LLMs integrating all the little bits and pieces of yourself you shed online, all the information you leak, from the speed your mouse move…

This is already happening and has almost nothing to do with llm, this is Google and Facebook business model because these are the marketable details.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#74
post #50
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The public internet is too small; we can't all fit in it. what? > It'd be a win if someone figured out how to force OSS to win at the protocol level so interoperability is easier You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable? Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability? Edit: For the size of most of those communities you could host your own Discourse server on a NAS behind Cloudflare's t…

>You know that HTTP, HTML etc. is open and interoperable? W3 at its core is very simple. This simpleness gives large gaps of freedom in what two parties have to do for exchanging data, e.g. 27 years have passed between the birth of W3C and Webauthn. >Or that there's no end of open protocols for interoperability? There is a multitude of reasons why you have marvellous designs on websites but you can't name a mass-mark…

What is the why?

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#75
post #14

This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don't think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search. There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate p…

Despite the new forum feature, Discord is very poorly searchable and requires to be in a specific guild to see what is going on

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's fine when one party is in control, but then suddenly it's "censored" or "curated"? I would like to get my first page from the "deep state" State Department if I search for "is it safe to travel to Iraq", not from some sketchy travel blog written by a dude who believes in lizard people.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#77
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain "ambient authority model of computer software"?

When you run a program under almost any operating system, the operating system assumes you trust it. The code can open any file you've got permission to access, open network ports, etc. The code is you as far the operating system is concerned, and carries with it all of your authority. The assumption that code can just do whatever it wants is baked into everything. There are permission flags on your Smartphone and ot…

This is only really true of Windows and Linux. As you admit, mobile operating systems don't work that way, web browsers (practically an OS) don't work that way, even macOS doesn't work that way (all apps are lightly sandboxed on macOS even if they don't opt in to it).

Sandboxing doesn't change the nature of the web, though. People use hosted services because they don't want to run things themselves, people build hosted services because they want to meet that market demand and also avoid the piracy and support costs that come with allowing self-hosting. You can imagine alternative worlds where that isn't true but people would just have different complaints.

Re: The internet is slipping out of our reach

#80
post #14

This reads to me like a rant. Good material for a blog post but I don't think there is anything particularly profound going on. The internet is not a static place, and parts are always being born and dying. Maybe today is going to be Google search. There was an interesting question early on in the internet of whether content would be aggregated by corporate entities or whether people would self-host and communicate p…

> unless you're the sort of person who doesn't understand why IRC got marginalised Or X Windows. I still hear the occasional diatribe, on how X is "just as good as" Windows or Mac (usually from a person that pretty much exclusively uses CLI). These folks can't understand why desktop Linux hasn't crushed the Microsoft/Apple hegemony. People who hang in like-minded communities can often assume that "everyone" is just l…

The relative market share of X window system, NS Windows, and macOS has nothing at all to do with technical merits of either. MS Windows dominated the corporate world because of MS Office, corporate-level technical support, and efficient salespeople. MacOS became prominent because of the superior hardware produced by Apple.

While indeed uneducated (in specific tech; may otherwise be smart), non-technical, highly varied people who all have too little time constitute the bulk of any audience, big moneyed interests always have and will continue to shape this audience's perception, especially where there is a network effect. It's not just Chrome vs Firefox or X vs Mastodon; the same mechanics stand behind the likes of Coca-Cola.

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