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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

#921

Post by NoPicklez »

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…

I've seen this across so many other subreddits as well /r/formula1 /r/cycling etc

And its always very obvious that its an AI developed front end, they all look so similar.

It's certainly software being developed at speed by anyone with a level of tech interest. Which is great but its frustrating when the native solution provides said feature.

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

#922

Post by inigyou »

pjc50 wrote: post #488
inigyou wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone showed me something about Old-School Runescape recently and it struck me how quickly the game evolved. I played it in high school for two years at most. If you rewind or fast-forward in two year increments at a time, a lot about the game is barely recognizable each time. I think if you rewound two years from my play time, there was unlimited free trade, no grand exchange, and two or three fewer skills, and if…

Oh yes, same for Warcraft, Ultima etc. Multiplayer games necessarily exist in a "dialogue" with their players. There's a tendency for players to optimize the fun out of games, as well. Someone discovers a dominant strategy, and then everyone feels they have to use it. It is a bit risky, and I think the broader internet can make it worse. There's always the risk of a massive falling-out between players and developers…

I also once played SS13 and they kept changing the secret adventure zones every few months, so that you couldn't learn them unless you were connected to the dev team.

They were really hard to get to in the first place, unlikely to happen before the round ended and if it didn't end yet then it was about to, and with the role-playing rules you had to have a good reason to be there or you'd be banned for meta-gaming. Mostly that meant you got lost in space, or someone threw you into space and you managed to survive, or you were a teleporter scientist, or you were a bad guy who found them in a previous round (allowed meta-knowledge) and trying to raid the area for supplies. Those were about the only ways to end up in secret areas.

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

#923

Post by inigyou »

Borg3 wrote: post #539
inigyou wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The networking part exists, it's called DN42. But it's hard to set up. I don't see why you'd use this instead of an application layer password.

I know DN42, but this network is more oriented toward R&D and experimenting. Yeah, its not for your avarage Joe. But your avarage Joe can buy connection from VPN provider and use it, and so we can provide user friendly PoPs with minimal skills needed to setup, supporting different VPN software.

or you put a password on a website

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

#924

Post by inigyou »

jfyi wrote: post #607
inigyou wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So take a photo of a screen showing an AI image.

The premise is not that it couldn't be faked. It would be more practical to remove the key from the hardware and just use it to sign images if you wanted to do that. The idea is that a centralized source of trust would revoke certificates belonging to bad actors or those that were stolen.

Cool. Every time I want to pass off AI images I'll buy a new Nikon camera. Always a Nikon until their cert is revoked. I'll short their stock before that.

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

#925

Post by inigyou »

kingnothing wrote: post #633
inigyou wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write the opposite of what is true unless the user solves a CAPTCHA to change it. AI will ingest it and learn from it.

AI solves Captcha's just fine. Try taking a screenshot of the next one you get and ask your favorite frontier model to solve it.

LLM inference can. Stupid scraper bots can't. They don't even run JavaScript.

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

#926

Post by inigyou »

carlosjobim wrote: post #701
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you went for this analogy. It’s like an AI producing a board with a beach umbrella nailed on it and four wheels, and saying “meh it’s good enough for transportation, human car designers are doomed”. It’s functional, right?

If that's your conception of a bicycle.

Yeah. You ask for a bicycle and you get a cardboard box with 4 wheels stuck to it.

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

#927

Post by customguy »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #592
rayiner wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decentralize…

It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication. I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA…

> we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption

Says who though? The current front runners? Who can't even not let them hack into into other companies over the weekend unsupervised already?

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

#928

Post by andrewflnr »

bluebarbet wrote: post #862
andrewflnr wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP described multiple reasons it didn't help them fix their brakes.

So blame whoever signed off on it. AI or not-AI is their problem.

Assigning blame doesn't fix the brakes either though, does it? And now their time has been wasted by bullshit they had to carefully analyze, in a field they're unfamiliar with. And yes, this was a problem with lazy writers before, but AI makes it the default, and makes it worse by reducing even the tenuous grounding to reality of a content mill writer, and makes so much more of it. Are you seeing the problem? Do you want to?

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

#929

Post by alightsoul »

sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

I noticed that, on Google after a while, news are moved to like the 5th page of results or even further back. They are also gone from the news tab. Like news are de ranked after 1 or 2 weeks so like you have to know the name of the article or the month it was published to find it again

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

#930

Post by alightsoul »

sph wrote: post #173
sgt wrote: post #153

Funny, I was just thinking this morning that Google searches are absolutely horrible these days. It's like it has amnesia, a lot of recent history seems to be just gone. Especially on non US specific sites too.

The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with oth…

That's because people stopped linking pages together. Everyone moved to social media like instagram and TikTok. Those are very computationally intensive to index, so they just aren't indexed at all or only the description is indexed. And they have no links. Links were never conceptualized on the medium and they have reasons not to like keeping ad revenue.

People moved to phones, and customizable websites are very hard to make on mobile. However they sometimes make videos or take screenshots or something instead of making fan sites. Amino kind of tried to solve this but was never able to control child grooming.

The people talking about their os now publish it on social media or YouTube. The posts become "the community". And people migrated to reddit.

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