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I am a blogger, and I'll stay a blogger even with GPT stuff. I agree. As bloggers continue to link only to good stuff between them, those blogs will become inf

I am a blogger, and I'll stay a blogger even with GPT stuff. I agree. As bloggers continue to link only to good stuff between them, those blogs will become infinitely more valuable than the flood of trash that people will post from GPT. It seems hopeless that people will find that good stuff, but word of mouth will do it, I think.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
The internet seems ripe for the return of a service like StumbleUpon. I used to find all kinds of great niche content through that service. A much better way to kill time than endlessly refreshing a feed or shitposting -- it feels more like exploring the internet.
- naravara 4y ago
  I know of a couple: - https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ - https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/
LinuxBender 4y ago
I am waiting for the day that GPT can show it's work so to speak. i.e. "Debug last results" and get a list of all the trained input data including any URL's, books, text input and who performed the input, where the data came from. I am told this will never happen but I think courts will disagree once enough big mistakes and/or potential malfeasance or fraud occurs and people try to blame GPT. Or when GPT repeats the unsavory behavior we have all witnessed with social media algorithms leading to highly divisive outcomes.
- softfalcon 4y ago
  I think this is a good idea. When we disagree about things in conversation, we as humans ask "where did you hear that?" and from there, we dig into the source of the thought process. Unfortunately, a lot of what folks are saying to you is true. It's very hard for GPT to cite its results because the way it is trained it is by design made to garble the inputs down into a simplified concept of guessing the next words given some input. It essentially just has a procedural generator for words that is seeded by your prompt. If you give "alfalfa" it will head off in a direction towards "farm", "hay", and "grazing" along with other connective words to form sentences. Because its concept of data is all around just word spaces, it can't really go "oh, I read about alfalfa on a Wikipedia article with x sources". It just knows "alfalfa is like the word grazing". I am simplifying to make a point, but this is in essence how these algorithms work, directions of traversal, guided by probability, towards word clouds floating in a grouped space. This is sort of changing though. Bing and Google (as well as many other researchers) are using specialized databases to provide further context that is fed into your prompts that come from real search results. Theoretically, they could get this tuned enough that GPT and other LLM can have the right data to provide a connection to cited facts alongside the hallucinated glue language. I feel like what you're asking for is valuable, but might take a bit before we really get it relatively accurate.
kerkeslager 4y ago
This is one of the main reasons I think advertising is harmful and all ads should be blocked. We don't have a problem with shortage of content, we have a problem with filtering out all the bullshit where they've put all the effort into search engine optimization and ad monetization, and no effort into creating content. Ad apologists will claim "but how will we fund content creation!" and the answer is, if the content is actually good, people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by donations right now. "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. They're the ones creating the filtering problem. Paid, quality content creation inherently doesn't scale because it's inherently serial: a person/team creates one piece of content at a time. You can scale distribution, but you can't scale quality creation. And the fact is, people will create because they want to create, even if they aren't paid to do so. Maybe they are paid, but that's secondary to the human need to create. As Quincy Jones said, "When you chase music for money, God walks out of the room."
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. The problem is, payment is hard. For authors: - Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive - Users want it to be as simple and hassle-free as possible, which means you're stuck with Stripe, Ko-Fi, Patreon or PayPal as that is what people have, and they don't want to trust Joe Random Blogger with their credit card information or their real name - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime) - Accounting is annoying because each micro-donator needs a formal invoice, you have to deal with dozens to hundreds of micro invoices at tax time - You're virtually stuck with credit cards and their limitations (again, see above, most of PayPal's ridiculous policies comes from the big CC networks) if your audience is international, but guess what, less than half of Germans have one [1], and outside of Europe the situation is even worse. For users: - Fuck no I don't want to fill out a form with CC number, CVC code, my real name and my address just to give a dollar for Joe Random Blogger's coffee cash - Fuck no where did I just put my phone for 2FA - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters? - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$ The centralized entities (Paypal, Stripe, ko-fi, Patreon, whatever) take care of a ton of the associated bullshit, but they are expensive and, as I wrote, prone to randomly ban you without recourse - and not just ban your commercial entity but also your personal account - for life. In contrast, ads are easy: you embed some piece of code on your website (or set some identifiers in your WordPress theme/plugin) and get a check or bank transfer every month. That's it. [1] https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/ https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nwoli 4y ago
Basically what people who went against the “we won’t be able to tell what’s real and not” deepfake narrative even 5 years ago predicted. Ie a web of trust will still keep up paths of believable high quality content etc
kiachnish 4y ago
Blog post curation services like Thinking About Things are great for finding the best of the internet without the hassle of wading through the cruft. Anyone know of any others?

vanilla_nut 4y ago

The internet seems ripe for the return of a service like StumbleUpon. I used to find all kinds of great niche content through that service. A much better way to kill time than endlessly refreshing a feed or shitposting -- it feels more like exploring the internet.

naravara 4y ago
I know of a couple: - https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ - https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/

LinuxBender 4y ago

I am waiting for the day that GPT can show it's work so to speak. i.e. "Debug last results" and get a list of all the trained input data including any URL's, books, text input and who performed the input, where the data came from. I am told this will never happen but I think courts will disagree once enough big mistakes and/or potential malfeasance or fraud occurs and people try to blame GPT. Or when GPT repeats the unsavory behavior we have all witnessed with social media algorithms leading to highly divisive outcomes.

softfalcon 4y ago
I think this is a good idea. When we disagree about things in conversation, we as humans ask "where did you hear that?" and from there, we dig into the source of the thought process. Unfortunately, a lot of what folks are saying to you is true. It's very hard for GPT to cite its results because the way it is trained it is by design made to garble the inputs down into a simplified concept of guessing the next words given some input. It essentially just has a procedural generator for words that is seeded by your prompt. If you give "alfalfa" it will head off in a direction towards "farm", "hay", and "grazing" along with other connective words to form sentences. Because its concept of data is all around just word spaces, it can't really go "oh, I read about alfalfa on a Wikipedia article with x sources". It just knows "alfalfa is like the word grazing". I am simplifying to make a point, but this is in essence how these algorithms work, directions of traversal, guided by probability, towards word clouds floating in a grouped space. This is sort of changing though. Bing and Google (as well as many other researchers) are using specialized databases to provide further context that is fed into your prompts that come from real search results. Theoretically, they could get this tuned enough that GPT and other LLM can have the right data to provide a connection to cited facts alongside the hallucinated glue language. I feel like what you're asking for is valuable, but might take a bit before we really get it relatively accurate.

kerkeslager 4y ago

This is one of the main reasons I think advertising is harmful and all ads should be blocked. We don't have a problem with shortage of content, we have a problem with filtering out all the bullshit where they've put all the effort into search engine optimization and ad monetization, and no effort into creating content. Ad apologists will claim "but how will we fund content creation!" and the answer is, if the content is actually good, people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by donations right now. "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. They're the ones creating the filtering problem. Paid, quality content creation inherently doesn't scale because it's inherently serial: a person/team creates one piece of content at a time. You can scale distribution, but you can't scale quality creation. And the fact is, people will create because they want to create, even if they aren't paid to do so. Maybe they are paid, but that's secondary to the human need to create. As Quincy Jones said, "When you chase music for money, God walks out of the room."

mschuster91 4y ago
> "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. The problem is, payment is hard. For authors: - Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive - Users want it to be as simple and hassle-free as possible, which means you're stuck with Stripe, Ko-Fi, Patreon or PayPal as that is what people have, and they don't want to trust Joe Random Blogger with their credit card information or their real name - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime) - Accounting is annoying because each micro-donator needs a formal invoice, you have to deal with dozens to hundreds of micro invoices at tax time - You're virtually stuck with credit cards and their limitations (again, see above, most of PayPal's ridiculous policies comes from the big CC networks) if your audience is international, but guess what, less than half of Germans have one [1], and outside of Europe the situation is even worse. For users: - Fuck no I don't want to fill out a form with CC number, CVC code, my real name and my address just to give a dollar for Joe Random Blogger's coffee cash - Fuck no where did I just put my phone for 2FA - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters? - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$ The centralized entities (Paypal, Stripe, ko-fi, Patreon, whatever) take care of a ton of the associated bullshit, but they are expensive and, as I wrote, prone to randomly ban you without recourse - and not just ban your commercial entity but also your personal account - for life. In contrast, ads are easy: you embed some piece of code on your website (or set some identifiers in your WordPress theme/plugin) and get a check or bank transfer every month. That's it. [1] https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/ https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nwoli 4y ago

Basically what people who went against the “we won’t be able to tell what’s real and not” deepfake narrative even 5 years ago predicted. Ie a web of trust will still keep up paths of believable high quality content etc

kiachnish 4y ago

Blog post curation services like Thinking About Things are great for finding the best of the internet without the hassle of wading through the cruft. Anyone know of any others?