Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

881–890 of 943 posts

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

#881

Post by hnlmorg »

ryandrake wrote: post #813
hnlmorg wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the facts can differ then they’re not facts. What you’re then dealing with is propaganda.

Then, we're just back to OP's conundrum: "Everything is opinion." I'll say grass is green and you'll say grass is red, and there can be no fact because they differ.

Not really no. Some things can be proven while some cannot.

The colour of grass is something that’s scientifically measurable.

My point is that some broadcasters are very strict about sticking to the facts. Some will misrepresent those facts but not technically lie (eg discuss statistics that favour their partisan view but don’t share the full context behind those stats).

And then there’s broadcasters like Fox News that promote flat out lies. It’s often not even an interpretation of the truth. It’s shared as an opinion but the evidence clearly proves it’s just lies presented as facts.

And I really wish there were criminal charges for broadcasting blatant lies. Not just in America, but most of the developed world where populist-propaganda is used to brainwash gullible voters.

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

#882

Post by brandon272 »

schaefer wrote: post #11

Kagi search today is better than Google search ever was. And it’s clear that Google’s Ad model ultimately created a priority inversion. The advertisers became the customer. I am so glad Kagi came along with a business model that is actually working.

I had tried Kagi a few years ago but it didn't stick. Tried it again now and it feels like a breath of fresh air, which is probably less of a statement about Kagi's advancements and more a statement of what Google has become.

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

#883

Post by robocat »

goekjclo wrote: post #263
robocat wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them. Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source? The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

> psyop

Who's pushing an agenda and why?

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

#884

Post by ziiinq »

hamdingers wrote: post #714
mapt wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personalization came along in MMOs around the same time, and it was hard to communicate the difference to people between a persistent MMO zone as a "place" where people and things exist, even if those things are inappropriate for your character or hostile to the point that you can't survive there or too crowded for the intended flow... versus an instanced MMO zone, a little pocket universe for you specifically that h…

Similar impact to non-massive multiplayer online games. Skill based matchmaking destroyed the third place that once existed on public game servers. I still don't understand the appeal of an online game where you're algorithmically guaranteed a ~50% win rate after a calibration period. Seems to be selling well enough though.

[dead]

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

#885

Post by rabid_0wl »

laughing_man wrote: post #110
arcfour wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth LLM are you using and do you tell it which distro/version of Linux they are supposed to be working with + give them access to web search or man pages? I haven't had this issue in like a year and a half.

By default I use Leo, and I do specify the distro. I tried to qualify by version, but when I do that I lose out on a lot of correct information for things that haven't changed in awhile.

Leo is not even the LLM, its just a browser extension typically running a very weak/cheap model. Why not use claude code so it knows your system without relying on you to give it accurate info? I guarantee your results will be night and day

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

#886

Post by win311fwg »

hnlmorg wrote: post #881
ryandrake wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, we're just back to OP's conundrum: "Everything is opinion." I'll say grass is green and you'll say grass is red, and there can be no fact because they differ.

Not really no. Some things can be proven while some cannot. The colour of grass is something that’s scientifically measurable. My point is that some broadcasters are very strict about sticking to the facts. Some will misrepresent those facts but not technically lie (eg discuss statistics that favour their partisan view but don’t share the full context behind those stats). And then there’s broadcasters like Fox News t…

Communication cannot be scientifically measured. Someone's expression being a "blatant lie" can only ever be an opinion, fundamentally.

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

#887

Post by jdauriemma »

nixonpjoshua wrote: post #880
jdauriemma wrote: post #674

I see symptoms of this all the time. For example, it's a weekly annoyance for folks to pop into /r/strava to showcase their vibe-coded app that uses the Strava API to do $THING. Then someone invariably points out that an existing app (or even Strava itself) already does $THING, and often it's free. I don't mean to be negative, I think it's great that people are building useful niche software and I don't blame them fo…

Hopefully now that AI provides quick answers, web search can go back to providing and respecting boolean and more advanced techniques. If web search is no longer the go to tool for most users, then search can do better what it can do uniquely?

One can hope!

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

#888

Post by shimman »

netcan wrote: post #457
figassis wrote: post #336

I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The am…

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…

I always hated the term "democratization" because last I checked there was never any consensus on what should be done, always MBA pricks shoving whatever they wanted down our throats.

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

#889

Post by JKCalhoun »

no-name-here wrote: post #103
JKCalhoun wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. When my kids wonder why I don't hate AI the way they do I tell them it's because I hate Google even more. To be more precise, I hate the SEO shithole the internet has become, that Google serves up, that Google facilitated, indirectly created. (I really don't have any tears to shed if there is a death of the Corporate Internet™.)

Is there some search engine that you think could have become popular and not ended up with SEO optimization?

Only if ads were not a thing.

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

#890

Post by chrisjj »

jfyi wrote: post #834
chrisjj wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but this doesn't require a general capability. The suggestion is a camera could apply the signature. Cameras could be hacked.

A camera should not need to be hacked. What do you expect to accomplish by hacking the camera? We should be able to move certificates on and off it because they would most likely expire anyway. So, you can get the keys from the camera, what then? You use openssl to sign an image that shouldn't be signed... what then? You do this enough and get caught, you lose your cert and can never pass the kyc to get another one.…

> You use openssl to sign an image that shouldn't be signed... what then?

You do whatever you want with your provably genuine fake image.

> You do this enough and get caught

How are you going to get caught? By the signature owner repudiating some of the images "he" signed? I can see that working out for him.

Post reply on HN