81–90 of 165 posts
The ShackNews forum: https://www.shacknews.com/chatty was similar - go back in time on on it and you can find posts about 9/11 unfolding.
Ars Technica started with comms forums + this new idea to report tech news. The forums are still there but not nearly the camaraderie of the early days.
Is there anywhere on the internet that still has camaraderie?
Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…
> If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans. I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. This reminds me of the time around ChatGPT 3's release where Hacker News's comments was filled with users saying "Here's what ChatGPT has to say about this"
Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…
Exactly. Why in the hell would I want someone to use ChatGPT for me? If I wanted that, I could go use that instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't sign your posts!
Are you saying nothing should be key-signed because you want some kind of deniability later? Or do you mean people should avoid using an pseudonym in favor of posts that are anonymous, so that there's never any created identity to exploit/defend?
Sorry, it was a bad joke, there's a phrase "don't sign your posts" used when someone ends one with an insult. I support signing your posts with digital signatures if you want.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
iHUEARYKAB0WIQQC37hdRRO1LtrTQY8AXxvbqjG5KgUCZ5QRXwAKCRAAXxvbqjG5 Kth4AQCccNygglcSyEiMAqQyw6cXH54fnqBT9rJO9TSIqH14rgEAyUwxiQlV05XV Du2ftMk3DwiUZLKDxVI+ODCn4osf2wM= =XZhX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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Rephrasing can be beneficial. It can make things clearer to understand and learn from. Like in math something like khan academy or the 3blue 1 brown YouTube channel isn't presenting anything new, just rephrasing math in a different way that makes it easier for some to understand. If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new info…
>If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new information You can literally just google that or use the appendix that's probably at the back of the manual. It's also probably stamped on the engine oil cap. It also probably doesn't matter and you can just use 10w40.
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The problem with "provide LLM output as a service," which is more or less the best case scenario for the ChatGPT listicles that clutter my feed, is that if I wanted an LLM result...I could have just asked the LLM. There's maybe a tiny proposition if I didn't have access to a good model, but a static page that takes ten paragraphs to badly answer one question isn't really the form factor anyone prefers; the actual cha…
Rephrasing can be beneficial. It can make things clearer to understand and learn from. Like in math something like khan academy or the 3blue 1 brown YouTube channel isn't presenting anything new, just rephrasing math in a different way that makes it easier for some to understand. If llms could take the giant overwhelming manual in my car and get out the answer to what oil to use, that woukd be useful and not new info…
Talk about burying the lede! Near the bottom of the story the site owner confirms that it was him that added the backdated AI comments (perhaps it should have been obvious...)
Dead internet theory is one of those ideas that keeps resurfacing or being revied with articles like this, even though the evidence is only limited to confirmation bias. It ignores that there are huge parts of the internet that are not dead. I think it's more like the quality of discourse has fallen for reasons that are not clear.
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Ars Technica started with comms forums + this new idea to report tech news. The forums are still there but not nearly the camaraderie of the early days.
Same with siliconinvestor.com It was an early stock discussion forum. It grew rapidly when search engines started indexing everything and this forum had a URL for each message that was easily indexable. It's still around, but nothing like the old days.
https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=36035
Suppose the average post is about 1 paragraph long. One paragraph is about 150 words. So 192211 * 150 = about 29 million words. For comparison, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is only around half a million words.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are more words about Qualcomm in that thread than the total amount of internal and external documentation and financial guidance that Qualcomm itself has ever produced.
Surely users aren't expected to read the entire thread before adding a post? But I think I remember seeing old forums where that basically is the expectation. And honestly... that's pretty cool. It seems better than the new social media, where we keep having low-effort recurring debates. I like the idea of adding to an enormous pile of scholarship in cyberspace. A Ship of Theseus discussion which may outlive any individual participant, but has a semblance of continuity all the same, like an undergraduate college society with a 100+ year history.
Time for a cyberpunk revival. Retro-cyberpunk, we could call it.
Something I'm increasingly noticing about LLM-generated content is that...nobody wants it. (I mean "nobody" in the sense of "nobody likes Nickelback". ie, not literally nobody.) If I want to talk to an AI, I can talk to an AI. If I'm reading a blog or a discussion forum, it's because I want to see writing by humans . I don't want to read a wall of copy+pasted LLM slop posted under a human's name. I now spend dismayin…