8 ms·

We should start donating more heavily to archive.org - the way back machine may soon be the only way to find useful data on the internet, by cutting out anythin

We should start donating more heavily to archive.org - the way back machine may soon be the only way to find useful data on the internet, by cutting out anything published after ~2020 or so.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago
[dead]
cauliflower99 3y ago
Interesting idea. Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Or maybe it would be a combination of pre-AI content plus some extra barriers to entry for newer content that would increase the likelihood the content was generated by real people?
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Yes, but largely it'll be people who don't want to train their AIs on garbage produced by other AIs
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Like the market for pre-1940s iron resting at the bottom of seas and oceans, unsullied by atmospheric nuclear bomb testing.
  - tempest_ 3y ago
    That was the first thing that came to mind for me as well
  - volkk 3y ago
    the problem is that data tends to become less useful/relevant over time as opposed to iron that is still iron and fulfills the same purpose
    - Moru 3y ago
      Well, the AI generated data is only as usefull as the data it's based upon så no real difference there.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  I'm in the camp where I want AI and automation to free people from drudgery in the hope that it will encourage the biggest HUMAN artwork renaissance ever in history. I don't want AI to be at the forefront of all new media and artwork. That's a terrible outcome to me. And honestly there's already too much "content" in the world and being produced every day, and it seems like every time we step further up the "content is easier to produce and deliver" ladder, it actually gets way more difficult to find much of value, and also more difficult for smaller artists to find an audience. We see this on Steam where there are thousands of new game releases every week. You only ever hear of one or two. And it's almost never surprising which ones you hear about. Rarely you get an indie sensation out of nowhere, but that only usually happens when a big streamer showcases it. Speaking of streamers, it's hard to find quality small streamers too. Twitch and YouTube are saturated with streams to watch but everyone gravitates to the biggest ones because there's just too much to see. Everything is drowning in a sea of (mostly mediocre, honestly) content already, AI is going to make this problem much worse. At least with human generated media, it's a person pursuing their dreams. Those thousands of games per week might not get noticed, but the person who made one of them might launch a career off their indie steam releases and eventually lead a team that makes the next Baldur's Gate 3 (substitute with whatever popular game you like) I can't imagine the same with AI. Or actually, I can imagine much worse. The AI that generates 1000 games eventually gets bought by a company to replace half their staff and now a bunch of people are out of work and have a much harder uphill battle to pursue their dreams (assuming that working on games at that company was their dream) I don't know. I am having a hard time seeing a better society growing out of the current AI boom.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - chongli 3y ago
    The AI that generates 1000 games eventually gets bought by a company That seems like only a temporary phenomenon. If we've got AI that can generate any games that people actually want to play then we don't need game companies at all. In the long run I don't see any company being able to build a moat around AI. It's a cat-and-mouse game at best!
- boznz 3y ago
  Extra barriers! LOL. Everything I have every submitted written by me (a human) to HN, reddit and others in the past 12 months gets rejected as self-promotion or some other BS even though it is totally original technical content. I am totally over the hurdles to get anything I do noticed, and as I don't have social media it seems the future is to publish it anywhere and rely on others or AI to scrape it into a publishable story somewhere else at a future date. I feel for the moderator's dilemma, but I am also over the stupid hoop's humans have to jump.
  - sanroot99 3y ago
    So true, barrier to entry is already too High.
- koliber 3y ago
  Silly prediction: the only way to get guaranteed non-ai generated content will be to go to live performances of expert speakers. Kind of like going to the theater vs. TV and cinema or attending a live concert vs. listening to Spotify.
  - megiddo 3y ago
    You could hash the hoard and stick the signature on a blockchain. If only it was 2018, we could do this as a startup and make a mint.
    - __loam 3y ago
      We'll fight one buzzword with another!
    - koliber 3y ago
      There are companies that do this! It’s for proving that something existed at a particular moment back in time.
  - andrewla 3y ago
    Until the experts are replaced by "experts" with teleprompter/earpieces.
- zhenyakovalyov 3y ago
  and a market for books published before 2022 (minus self-publishing on Amazon) :-)
letitbeirie 3y ago
It will be like salvaging pre-1945 shipwrecks for their non-irradiated metal.
- laserlight 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- macksd 3y ago
  Let's hope that, like irresponsible nuclear weapons tests, we also experience a societal change that eventually returns things back to a better way.
- datagram 3y ago
  It's funny, I made the same analogy the other day: https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1736838023940112523 https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1736838023940112523 I think something interesting to note is that once we stopped atmospheric nuclear testing steel radiation levels went back down and are almost at normal background levels. So maybe the same thing will happen if we stop using GenAI.
  - krick 3y ago
    It was quite limited set of entities that did atmospheric nuclear testing. Same cannot be said about LMMs. Mine post-apocalyptic scenario I half-jokingly predicted some 5-10 years ago was that all general-purpose computing hardware, which is common and relatively cheap now will be abandoned and possibly outlawed in the end. People will use non-rootable thin clients to access Amazon, which will have general-purpose hardware, but it will be heavily audited by government entities.
hyperthesis 3y ago
~2020, the end of history
- broscillator 3y ago
  so the mayans were off by merely a decade
  - grungydan 3y ago
    They probably just forgot some mundane detail.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  I’m afraid that already happened after World War I, according to the final sentence of 1066 and All That <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That>: > America was thus clearly Top Nation, and History came to a . (For any confused Americans, remember . is a full stop, not a period.)
- araes 3y ago
  Well, it was 2020. You kind of expect "ah, now we see where humanity's behavior went wrong." Hindsight and all.
sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
Love that sentiment! The Internet Archive is in many ways one of the best things online right now IMO. One of the few organisations that I donate regularly to without any second thoughts. Protect the archive at all costs!
emsign 3y ago
I won't even bet on archive.org to survive. I will soon upgrade my home NAS to ~100TB and fill it up with all kinds of information and media /r/datahoarder style. Gonna archive the usual suspects like Wikipedia and also download some YouTube channels. I think now is the last chance to still get information that hasn't been tainted by LLM crap. The window of opportunity is closing fast.
- TimurSadekov 3y ago
  The last chance to get reliable information that hasn't been tainted by the bullshit of LLM hallucinations is CyberPravda (dot) com project. The window of opportunity is closing fast.
- krick 3y ago
  > ~100TB That's a lot, compared to mine. How do you organize replication and do you make backups on any external services? I kinda do want to hoard more, but I find it complicated to deal with at large scale. It gets expensive to back-up everything, and HDDs aren't really a solid media long-term. Now, I can kinda use my judgment of what is important and what is essentially trash I store just in case, but losing 100TB of trash would be pretty devastating too, TBH.
EasyMark 3y ago
I update my wikipedia copy every few months, but I can't really afford to back up internet archive. I do send them and around $10 every christmas as part of my $100 bucks to my favorite sites like archive, wikipedia, etc

We should start donating more heavily to archive.org - the way back machine may soon be the only way to find useful data on the internet, by cutting out anything published after ~2020 or so.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago

[dead]

cauliflower99 3y ago

Interesting idea. Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Or maybe it would be a combination of pre-AI content plus some extra barriers to entry for newer content that would increase the likelihood the content was generated by real people?

autoexec 3y ago
> Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Yes, but largely it'll be people who don't want to train their AIs on garbage produced by other AIs
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> Could there be a market for pre-AI era content? Like the market for pre-1940s iron resting at the bottom of seas and oceans, unsullied by atmospheric nuclear bomb testing.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  That was the first thing that came to mind for me as well
- volkk 3y ago
  the problem is that data tends to become less useful/relevant over time as opposed to iron that is still iron and fulfills the same purpose
  - Moru 3y ago
    Well, the AI generated data is only as usefull as the data it's based upon så no real difference there.
bluefirebrand 3y ago
I'm in the camp where I want AI and automation to free people from drudgery in the hope that it will encourage the biggest HUMAN artwork renaissance ever in history. I don't want AI to be at the forefront of all new media and artwork. That's a terrible outcome to me. And honestly there's already too much "content" in the world and being produced every day, and it seems like every time we step further up the "content is easier to produce and deliver" ladder, it actually gets way more difficult to find much of value, and also more difficult for smaller artists to find an audience. We see this on Steam where there are thousands of new game releases every week. You only ever hear of one or two. And it's almost never surprising which ones you hear about. Rarely you get an indie sensation out of nowhere, but that only usually happens when a big streamer showcases it. Speaking of streamers, it's hard to find quality small streamers too. Twitch and YouTube are saturated with streams to watch but everyone gravitates to the biggest ones because there's just too much to see. Everything is drowning in a sea of (mostly mediocre, honestly) content already, AI is going to make this problem much worse. At least with human generated media, it's a person pursuing their dreams. Those thousands of games per week might not get noticed, but the person who made one of them might launch a career off their indie steam releases and eventually lead a team that makes the next Baldur's Gate 3 (substitute with whatever popular game you like) I can't imagine the same with AI. Or actually, I can imagine much worse. The AI that generates 1000 games eventually gets bought by a company to replace half their staff and now a bunch of people are out of work and have a much harder uphill battle to pursue their dreams (assuming that working on games at that company was their dream) I don't know. I am having a hard time seeing a better society growing out of the current AI boom.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chongli 3y ago
  The AI that generates 1000 games eventually gets bought by a company That seems like only a temporary phenomenon. If we've got AI that can generate any games that people actually want to play then we don't need game companies at all. In the long run I don't see any company being able to build a moat around AI. It's a cat-and-mouse game at best!
boznz 3y ago
Extra barriers! LOL. Everything I have every submitted written by me (a human) to HN, reddit and others in the past 12 months gets rejected as self-promotion or some other BS even though it is totally original technical content. I am totally over the hurdles to get anything I do noticed, and as I don't have social media it seems the future is to publish it anywhere and rely on others or AI to scrape it into a publishable story somewhere else at a future date. I feel for the moderator's dilemma, but I am also over the stupid hoop's humans have to jump.
- sanroot99 3y ago
  So true, barrier to entry is already too High.
koliber 3y ago
Silly prediction: the only way to get guaranteed non-ai generated content will be to go to live performances of expert speakers. Kind of like going to the theater vs. TV and cinema or attending a live concert vs. listening to Spotify.
- megiddo 3y ago
  You could hash the hoard and stick the signature on a blockchain. If only it was 2018, we could do this as a startup and make a mint.
  - __loam 3y ago
    We'll fight one buzzword with another!
  - koliber 3y ago
    There are companies that do this! It’s for proving that something existed at a particular moment back in time.
- andrewla 3y ago
  Until the experts are replaced by "experts" with teleprompter/earpieces.
zhenyakovalyov 3y ago
and a market for books published before 2022 (minus self-publishing on Amazon) :-)

letitbeirie 3y ago

It will be like salvaging pre-1945 shipwrecks for their non-irradiated metal.

laserlight 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
macksd 3y ago
Let's hope that, like irresponsible nuclear weapons tests, we also experience a societal change that eventually returns things back to a better way.
datagram 3y ago
It's funny, I made the same analogy the other day: https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1736838023940112523 https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1736838023940112523 I think something interesting to note is that once we stopped atmospheric nuclear testing steel radiation levels went back down and are almost at normal background levels. So maybe the same thing will happen if we stop using GenAI.
- krick 3y ago
  It was quite limited set of entities that did atmospheric nuclear testing. Same cannot be said about LMMs. Mine post-apocalyptic scenario I half-jokingly predicted some 5-10 years ago was that all general-purpose computing hardware, which is common and relatively cheap now will be abandoned and possibly outlawed in the end. People will use non-rootable thin clients to access Amazon, which will have general-purpose hardware, but it will be heavily audited by government entities.

hyperthesis 3y ago

~2020, the end of history

broscillator 3y ago
so the mayans were off by merely a decade
- grungydan 3y ago
  They probably just forgot some mundane detail.
chrismorgan 3y ago
I’m afraid that already happened after World War I, according to the final sentence of 1066 and All That <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That>: > America was thus clearly Top Nation, and History came to a . (For any confused Americans, remember . is a full stop, not a period.)
araes 3y ago
Well, it was 2020. You kind of expect "ah, now we see where humanity's behavior went wrong." Hindsight and all.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago

Love that sentiment! The Internet Archive is in many ways one of the best things online right now IMO. One of the few organisations that I donate regularly to without any second thoughts. Protect the archive at all costs!

emsign 3y ago

I won't even bet on archive.org to survive. I will soon upgrade my home NAS to ~100TB and fill it up with all kinds of information and media /r/datahoarder style. Gonna archive the usual suspects like Wikipedia and also download some YouTube channels. I think now is the last chance to still get information that hasn't been tainted by LLM crap. The window of opportunity is closing fast.

TimurSadekov 3y ago
The last chance to get reliable information that hasn't been tainted by the bullshit of LLM hallucinations is CyberPravda (dot) com project. The window of opportunity is closing fast.
krick 3y ago
> ~100TB That's a lot, compared to mine. How do you organize replication and do you make backups on any external services? I kinda do want to hoard more, but I find it complicated to deal with at large scale. It gets expensive to back-up everything, and HDDs aren't really a solid media long-term. Now, I can kinda use my judgment of what is important and what is essentially trash I store just in case, but losing 100TB of trash would be pretty devastating too, TBH.

EasyMark 3y ago

I update my wikipedia copy every few months, but I can't really afford to back up internet archive. I do send them and around $10 every christmas as part of my $100 bucks to my favorite sites like archive, wikipedia, etc