28 ms·
I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was full of organic dog shit.
by erellsworth 3y ago
I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was full of organic dog shit.
- cranberryturkey 3y agotime to abandon google and go back to web rings.
- 7thaccount 3y agoI don't know how the old web worked, but something decentralized makes sense to me.
- bee_rider 3y agoIt was a bit annoying, you just kind of wandered around aimlessly until you stumbled upon something interesting. Google was a breath of fresh air.
- bombcar 3y agoGoogle was powerful because it found those "something interesting" - you'd be searching for details on how to configurate and obligator and the answer would be on an entire forum dedicated to obligators that you didn't even know about - and then you'd spend time there learning and reading. You'd use Google to find interesting places and then you'd colonize them. Now Google is used for strategic shots - you are interested in one piece of information, you find it, and you quickly retreat to your safe havens.
- firecall 3y agoPeople used to email each links to cool websites! And there were services like Hotline! And bookmarks. You bookmarked everything!
- 7thaccount 3y agoOh I remember the Internet in the mid to late 90s. I just don't remember how anything worked technologically in the 80s.
- WJW 3y agoThe web was invented in 1989, so mostly it didn't. Before that there were BBSes that you could dial into. From there, you could chat with other users who happened to be logged onto the same server or download text documents and whatnot that others had uploaded.
- 7thaccount 3y agoAh. Yeah it's those BBS's I've heard of that sound kind of cool. I'm sure they mostly sucked, but the idea sounds cool.
- elteto 3y agoWell, you were siloed to whatever _local_ BBSs existed and you could dial without paying a fortune for long distance calls. If you lived anywhere outside select urban centers then you were out of luck. So yeah... let's count our blessings.
- cwbriscoe 3y agoThere were free BBS's, AOL and Compuserve where you would dial in with your modem. I kind of miss those days to be honest.
- firecall 3y agoGotcha! Well…. Before modems, we used to drive to peoples houses and literally swap floppy disks of software and files! There would be meetups. I was just a kid, but my Dad used to network with other computer owning parents and friends! So Sneaker Net essentially. We’d go to computer shows too!
- Eisenstein 3y agoPeople had a 'links' page on their page with links to pages they liked, and if you liked the page you visited you clicked on the links and bookmarked relevant ones, and then sent them to your friends and put them in your links page.
- scotty79 3y agoI think the solution is the ultimate decentralization. Putting the tools in each and every browser. Ad blockers are one such tool. AI powered answer extraction tools are the next one. That can filter out all the product placement noise for you while you are browsing. Algorithm feed aggregators that can consume algorithm feeds and filter them to get rid of garbage and things that trigger you in negative ways to invoke engagement.
- _heimdall 3y agoIndexing tools will always be more convenient than the alternative of having to discover links yourself. People pick convenience above almost everything else unfortunately, a few may prefer the old world but a vast majority of people will use Google and whatever its successor is.
- bovermyer 3y agoAnd/or human-curated web directories.
- nicbou 3y agoAnd trusted brands. People buy brands because they don't want to figure out what's good or bad. Brands tend to gain a reputation by being good. The same is true for websites. People will trust specific websites when they seek information, and those websites will get passed around.
- oceanplexian 3y agoHumans are the original bullshit generator. AI is only doing what humans have been doing since forever.
- gorjusborg 3y agoHumans care about reputation. Humans get tired.
- Arubis 3y agoPreviously, these were marketing points _in favor of_ automation.
- _heimdall 3y agoMy bull would beg to differ. He and his bovine forefathers have been generating bullshit for much, much longer than humans have.
- agentultra 3y agoSo instead of putting out the fires, in the interest of improving the situation, we'll make the fires bigger? A good deal of humans care about the truth. Some of them actively seek to deceive and avoid the truth -- liars, we tend to dislike them. But the ones both sides dislike are the ones who disregard the truth... ie: bullshitters -- the, "that's just your opinion, man," the, "what even is the truth anyway?" people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kevindamm 3y agoSometimes the truth is more complicated than your binary characterization. Most of the time, probably.
- agentultra 3y agoComplicated is fine, but knowable. You can accept the truth or deceive others but regardless of your intentions you can recognize the truth exists. While I'm aware of the criticisms of Frankfurt's definition of bullshit [0], I think a useful part of it is the idea that there are folks who don't even care what the truth is. This seems to be the intended purpose of generative AI; ie: hallucinations exist by design and cannot be removed without recognizing that the approach needs to change. I think that's what gets people like the author to write criticisms like this. We detest bullshit in a number of critical areas such as information retrieval and search. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
- gremlinsinc 3y agoyou mean like stack overflow scraped answer spam? wasn't that like last year? I hardly ever Google anymore I just ask Bing chat.
- jebarker 3y agoThere are purveyors of artisanal organic bullshit now, but it's pricey.
- jprete 3y agoHuman shitposting is at least entertaining.
- wharvle 3y agoI think there's actually some deep insight here into why we tend not to like too much AI in our art. Consider: TimeCube. Created by a human? It's nonsense, but... it's fascinating. Engaging. Memorable. Thought-provoking (in a meta kind of way, at any rate). I dare say, worthy of preservation. If TimeCube didn't exist, and an AI generated the exact same site today? Boring. Not worth more than a glance. Disposable. But why? It's the same! ------ Right or wrong, we value communication more when there's a human connection on the other side—when there's a mind on the other side to pick at, between the lines of what's explicitly communicated, and continuity for ongoing or repeated communication that could reveal more of what's behind the veil. There's another level of understanding we feel like we can achieve, when a human communicates, and expectation, an anticipation of more, of enticing mystery, of a mind that may reflect back on our own in ways that we find enlightening, revealing, or simply to grant positive familiar-feeling and a sense of belonging. What's remarkable is this remains true even when the content of the communication is rather shit. Like TimeCube. All of that is lost when an LLM generates text. I think that's also why we feel deceived by LLM use when it masquerades as human, even if what's communicated is identical: it's because we go looking for that other level of communication, and if that's not there, giving the impression it might be really is misleading. This may change, I suppose, if "AI" develops rather a lot farther than it is now and we begin to feel like we're getting a window into a true other when it generates output, but right now, it's plainly far away from that.