How would that look like in practice? I've just heard about the term and I like the description of it, especially the possibilities it gives
That's a great question; it's something I still need to explore, but it would involve some sort of distributed public key database and IP address directory, then a routing table on top of that as people add more resources to the mesh. Wireguard is particularly good at transparent roaming, so it's trivial to use on portable devices or if you need to migrate your server from one provider to another.
Isn't this just Tailscale? Or Netmaker maybe if you want your own control plane?
There's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it. Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo.
The best solution for dealing with AI content slop flooding your eyeballs is to hang out in places small enough to be a community -- like a local area mesh network. AI slop thrives in anonymity. In a community that's developed its own established norms and people who know each other, AI content trying to be passed off as genuine stands out like a sore thumb and is easily eradicated before it gets a chance to take roo…
You can still find the essence of community on the traditional internet in places like invite-only discords, smaller mastodon instances, traditional forums, and spaces similar to Lobsters and Tildes.
...and not on Hacker News. Too many pseudo-anonymous jerks, too many throwaways, too much faith placed in gamified moderation tools.
I thought a lot last night about how we could protect HN, I didn't come up with a good answer except maybe you'll need to have someone with a higher reputation vouch aka invites. My internet community journey has mostly just been irc -> dA -> twitter -> HN. Too frequently these days I feel I might be putting emotional energy into something that isn't human on this site, hard to express how that makes me feel, but it'…
We can't. This forum is run by the company that used to be run by Sam Altman and it's already full of people who work in the industry that's driving AI adoption and who use and aggressively believe in AI to the point of religion. There are already bot accounts posting, and humans posting comments filtered by AI. Most Show HNs are vibe coded. There's nothing anyone can do about it. No matter how many guidelines dang d…
The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades. Enshittification strikes again. And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago. For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world.
"A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year."
It is true that as the cost to construct fake content has gone to zero, we need some kind of scalable trust mechanism to access all this information. I don't yet know what this is but a Web of Trust structure always seems appealing. A lot of people are going to be excluded, but such is life, I suppose. If I were to be honest, going to where the fish aren't is also going to help. Almost certainly there are very few LL…
I think if a Web of Trust becomes common, it will create a culture shift and most people won’t be excluded (compared to invite-only spaces today). If you have a public presence, are patient enough, or a friend or colleague of someone trusted, you can become trusted. With solid provenance, trust doesn’t have to be carefully guarded, because it can be revoked and the offender’s reputation can be damaged such that it’s hard to regain. Also, small sites could form webs of trust with each other, trusting and revoking other sites within the larger network in the same manner that people are vouched or revoked within each site (similar to the town -> state -> government -> world hierarchy); then you only need to gain the trust of an easy group (e.g. physically local or of a niche hobby you’re an expert in) to gain trust in far away groups who trust that entire group.
"You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell lies?" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
A big part of my annoyance is that in the past, something like Phantasy Star Fukkokuban would not really be worth lying about; people need a reason to lie.
Lies are intentional. A liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it.
What we have here is worse; LLMs give you bullshit. A bullshitter does not care if something is true or false, it just uses rhetoric to convince you of something.
I am far from being someone nostalgic about the old internet, or the world in general back then. Things in many ways sucked back then, we just tend to forget how exactly they sucked. But honestly, a LLM-driven internet is mostly pointless. If what I am to read online is AI generated crap, why bother reading it on websites and not just reading it straight from a chatbot already?
This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.
>The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. Everyone serving a website is being ddos by AI agents right now. A local mesh network is one way to make sure that no one with a terabit network can index you.
Then firewall traffic that doesn't come from your local ISP blocks or authenticated users.
It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed. Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while. Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine. The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero. We have burned the web.
Hence dead internet theory has turned into dead internet reality.