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IMO it's more vital than ever to fund projects like the Internet Archive. They're the only ones incentivized to maintain a snapshot of un-LLM-clouded training d
by btown 4y ago
IMO it's more vital than ever to fund projects like the Internet Archive. They're the only ones incentivized to maintain a snapshot of un-LLM-clouded training data of human knowledge, unclouded by the hubris of "who cares about the old stuff, we should focus our archiving on the web as it exists today" that inevitably will take hold (or already has) in big tech companies who will have laid off the vast majority of those voicing these concerns. We owe it to future generations to prevent ourselves from falling into the training-cycle trap.
- imhoguy 4y agoThis! As data horder I see even more value in preserving pre-AI content, art, source code. That genuine stuff will be priceless.
- williamcotton 4y agoWe still have curated libraries and the knowledge contained in those books has a much better signal-to-noise ratio than the internet ever will!
- throwanem 4y agoThe Internet Archive is a library.
- williamcotton 4y agoYou're right, and it has a better signal to noise ratio than the internet in general, even when you factor in the Wayback Machine! Here's to curated knowledge!
- throwanem 4y agoThe Wayback Machine is part of the library, too. Specifically, it's the periodicals room.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- toyg 4y agoThe problem with the Internet Archive, which does an amazing job, is that they do an amazing job despite the problem being fundamentally intractable. Web content expands too quickly and too massively. I wonder if the answer is a network of topic-focused archives; like moving from a "Library of Alexandria" model to a modern nationwide system of libraries.
- sho_hn 4y agoThe curator being bandwidth-limited is not necessarily a problem if the problem you are solving is an overwhelmed audience in need of a curator. In other words, the Archive missing things may not really be a problem if the stuff is not missing is on average of value. It raises the issue of governance of the curator, but the IA is already more transparent than Goole & co.
- pixl97 4y agoHow do you measure the future value of something you don't keep?
- cheschire 4y agoOkay so you build a knowledge graph on top of the internet archive. Now you are struggling to prioritize the resources necessary to capture long-tail content that doesn't mesh easily into popular corpuses. I imagine this would lead to the library equivalent of an echo chamber.
- toyg 4y agoI was thinking more of a federated "webring" structure, with some content being present in more than one node, and where maintenance and curation are distributed (and gathered independently) among nodes. The nation of, say, Japan, has limited interest in funding an american noprofit today; but they would likely have a great deal of interest in funding an equivalent focused on Japanese content, for example.
- 4y ago