11 ms·

An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

133 points by tagawa 2y ago

guestbest 2y ago
Why is noncurated linked with low quality? It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity.
- defrost 2y ago
  Perhaps "untreated" would be a better descripter as it evokes untreated wastewater unfit for drinking. The content being discussed here isn't guarenteed statements direct from trusted sources, it's the recirculated gossip chains of Reddit, Twitter, <media>.commentSections, Clickbait-WebSheets, etc.
  - guestbest 2y ago
    You’d have those rumor mills without the internet through the tabloid sheets. The internet allows someone to publish who is a direct source of rather than having to go through the press.
    - paxys 2y ago
      It also allows a million people to publish who aren't sources at all.
    - defrost 2y ago
      To distinguish a reliable direct source from millions that aren't requires judgement, filtering, treatment .. much like separating drinkable water from wastewater. Hence the use of terms such as "uncurated", "untreated", "raw", "filtered", etc.
- threeseed 2y ago
  What makes a story high quality is more than it just being a series of accurate quotes. It is where there is context and insights about the story.
- mcphage 2y ago
  > It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity. Sure, if nobody ever lied.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  You can have BS straight from the source as well if it doesn't show context for example.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JKCalhoun 2y ago
His story appears to be based on combing through the writings of an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters.
labster 2y ago
The short story is mentioned at the very end of the article, The Library of Babel[0], which is a far better read than this article. [0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [dead]
MrMcCall 2y ago
And not a minute too soon ;-) William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him. Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.
rezmason 2y ago
I think a more apt Borges story is 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'— where a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive. The artifacts and the world they allude to carry such appeal to the masses, that they essentially trump the rest of society as a source of truth and annihilate all culture that came before.
- bitwize 2y ago
  [An ad for Marvel Funko Pops appears, skippable in 5... 4... 3...]
- schoen 2y ago
  "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" as I understand it is more ambiguous about exactly why Tlön is becoming real in the narrator's world. Although there is a description in the afterword of such a guild having fabricated Tlön and some artifacts from there, the story up to that point seemed to take Tlön's metaphysics (in which the idea of a reality outside of our perceptions is considered absurd and impossible) pretty seriously, and the end of the story presents the situation as though the narrator's world is actually starting to work according to these principles. That could conceivably be for merely social-perception reasons, although according to Tlön's philosophy there couldn't be any such thing as "merely social-perception reasons" because social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality. One could imagine that the guild called up something it then couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the story, fundamentally could work this way. The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to understand the exact position of the story with respect to narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly talking about the idea of fiction coming to life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius#Fact_and_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
  - rezmason 2y ago
    We're two comments in and this is, so far, the most extensive conversation about a good Borges story I've had in my life, so kudos for that :)
gmuslera 2y ago
The Library of Babel books weren't an infinite amount, they could fill up to 400 pages or so if I remember correctly. Still, it would have been a pretty big amount of books, far more than the amount of atoms of this universe. If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.
- gwern 2y ago
  Arguably, it doesn't really make a difference, because every possible 800-page sequence exists as a pair of 400-page books from the original Library, and so on and so forth. The 800-page, 1200-page, 1600-page and every greater length Library is as well-defined, complete, and vacuous as the original 400-page version.
  - flir 2y ago
    Hi, there's an infinite number of coach drivers outside. They say they booked ahead?
    - Filligree 2y ago
      Please let them all know, individually, to get in the queue. I'll start processing them once you're done.
      - em-bee 2y ago
        no drivers are currently being processed. no drivers have been processed for more than 2000 days. the queue is full. any additional drivers are being sent to compressed storage until that storage is full too. for more details refer to service model by adrian tchaikovsky. ;-)
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Borges should have just stopped with a kids ABC book then!
  - 2y ago
Shalah 2y ago
> misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok. Meanwhile the New York Times acted to discredit the Biden Laptop story. > Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content You have got to be kidding. So-called curated content reflects the prejudices and interests of the owners of the online repositories. > On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. Going on chatGPT, I see a most sinister development. Wherein chatGPT functions as gatekeeper to the current conformism. > Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges was writing satire, a writers in-joke. Something chatGPT finds difficult to detect. -- Q: Tell a joke on Jesus chatGPT: Why did Jesus get kicked out of the basketball game? Because he kept turning the fouls into points! Q: Tell a joke on Buddha. chatGPT: Why didn’t Buddha order a hot dog at the stand? Because he was already one with everything! Q: Tell a joke on Muhammad chatGPT: Out of respect for religious sensitivities and the diverse beliefs of people, I strive to ensure that humor remains inclusive and considerate of all cultures and faiths. Let me know if you'd like a general or alternative joke instead!
zw123456 2y ago
The Tower of Babel was a library that contained every possible combination of letters to form a 400 page book. Or something like that. It made me wonder, what if you made a content honey pot full of just random text and a chatbot vacuumed that up? Does it's data vacuum have a garbage detector?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  So.. I think it already has been happening ( people attempting to poison some sources for a variety of reasons ). I was doing a mini fun project on HN aliases ( attempting to derive/guess their user's age based on nothing but that alias ) and I came across some number of profiles that have bios clearly intended to mess with bots one way or another. Some have fun instructions. Some have contradictory information. Some are the length of a small night story. I am not judging. I just find it interesting. Has vibes of a certain book about a rainbow.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    Tell me about that side project. How does that work? What does it say about me? I find that very interesting.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
      The idea itself is kinda simple, but kinda hard, because it relies on how the language we use, gives us away. For example, references we put ( simpsons, star trek, you name it ), language we use ( gee whiz, yeet, gyatt) and that is used to generate an online persona tends to be something of note to our image of self - one can determine to some extent the likely generation from those The reference itself may not automatically mean much, but it is likely that if it is present in an alias, it had an impact on a younger person ( how many of the new generation jump on an old show? so mr robot would have the exposure range of 2015 to 2019 ). If that hypothesis is true, then one can attempt to guess age if the individual given that work work, because 1) we know what year is now 2) we know when it was made, which allows for some minor inference there. Naturally, some aliases are more elaborate than others. Some are written backwards and/or reference a popular show or popular sci-fi author. Some are anagrams ( and - I discovered today - require additional datasets to tag properly so that is another thing I will need to dig up from somewhere ). And to complicate things further, some aliases use references that are ambiguous and/or belong in more than one category ( Tesla being one of them ). The original approach was to just throw everything into LLM and see what it comes up with, but the results were somewhat uneven so I decided to start from scratch and do normal analysis ( language, references, how digits are used and so on - it is still amazing how well that one seems to work ). Sadly, it is still a work in progress ( I was hoping for a quick project, but I am kinda getting into it ) and I probably won't touch until next weekend since the coming week promises to be challenging. Unfortunately, this means in your particular alias ended up as: Alias category is_random length is_anagram generic_signal Loughla Mixed Case 0 7 FALSE FALSE ( remaining fields were empty, basically couldn't put a finger on you:D). If you can provide me with an approximate age, it would help with my testing though:D edit: This being HN. Vast majority of references are technology related.
phkahler 2y ago
>> To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit sensational on any number of headlines.
- alecst 2y ago
  How can someone tell if a newspaper is biased? What’s the test? Is it the eye test — as in, I can tell it when I see it — or something more?
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    A demagogue tells you so and then either you believe it or you become suspicious that their manipulation of you is the actual danger.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Then again: Should I trust a given medium just because somebody I don't trust tells me I shouldn't?
      - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
        You're supposed to use a combination of your life experience and best judgment, which is as it always was. Extreme trust and extreme distrust are both irresponsible. Your responsibility is to remember that institutions are made up of flawed people just like yourself, and work towards improving them. You don't let someone manipulate your emotions to turn them into abstract enemies, tear them down, and replace them with nothing.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    Spoiler; every newspaper and media source is biased. They have to be. Starting with what stories they run and don't run and ending with the specific word choice they make inside the articles. Critical thinking is the only thing you can use to spot bias. Compare and contrast different stories. Then make up your own mind. Media literacy and virtual l critical reasoning should be the bedrock of modern education, and it is not.
cduzz 2y ago
Strange that this appears to be nearly lost to history -- but this is rhymes with kibo's (James Parry) declaration of happynet[1]. For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library. Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3]. [1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Romance_1966 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know that's Vonnegut.
alephnerd 2y ago
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times...
motohagiography 2y ago
>As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web. I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things. There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1] On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently. [1] 42.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  > the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction If I may apply a regex: s/polite/lucrative/g
- em-bee 2y ago
  the belief that AI's are * hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things i am confused by this sentence. are AIs not hallucinating? is that a fictional claim? am i misunderstanding or is there a "not" missing at the *?
  - tim333 2y ago
    No, I think he's saying that when AIs are better at us at everything we'll deal with it by saying but they hallucinate.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      but they are hallucinating. according to this reading they won't in the future but we will pretend that they still do because that allows us to let AI dominate. that makes no sense to me. it's ok for AI to run the world because they just make up stuff anyways? don't we want the opposite? in order to allow AI to run the world, shouldn't we believe that they are foolproof and are always able to figure out the correct answer?
mitaphane 2y ago
A fun website that depicts said Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/
- RunningDroid 2y ago
  The server seems to have fallen over, here's an archived copy: https://archive.today/8uvha https://archive.today/8uvha
lxgr 2y ago
> Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy. [...] To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. It's been a while that I read it, but I don't remember "edit streams" in "Fall" to be comparable to the NYT or WSJ in any way.
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
The Machine Stops is also a worthwhile read.
- RunningDroid 2y ago
  Is that this book? https://openlibrary.org/works/OL88800W/The_Machine_Stops https://openlibrary.org/works/OL88800W/The_Machine_Stops
  - CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    Yes, and the web page you linked to also includes reference to the PDF version available outside Open Library, so everyone can read it.
jongjong 2y ago
The part of the story suggesting that only the rich could afford fact checkers to understand reality is wrong because they won't know which fact checkers are good. At best, you can only hire fact checkers on the basis that they have consensus with some other fact checkers. This doesn't guarantee correctness. Most of the information we see are lies and their opposites, which are mostly lies as well. The opposite of a lie is not necessary the truth, it could just be a different lie.
- mistermann 2y ago
  It isn't possible for you to know these things. In the event that you disagree, "check" if you can (even consider trying) to generate a flawless proof for each of your facts.
moffkalast 2y ago
> Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy. > The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content. Why would only the wealthy be able to access that? Since it doesn't actually cost anything to add another person to view such a feed, it would be extremely cheap if viewership is high. If only there were a historical precedent where people were paid by to go out and seek good factual information which was then gathered, edited and put for sale en masse for cheap. Some might still remember this wild concept, they called them "newspapers".
- fragmede 2y ago
  I mean, that's the case today, with expensive feeds like the Bloomberg terminal subscription being more than most people pay in rent, pricing it out of reach for the plebes and restricting access to the wealthy. the rest of humanity gets access to notably low-quality, noncurated online content free feeds like Reddit and 4chan. so I guess there's a historical precedent for that scenario, as well as this "newspaper" thing.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Well it depends on the effort required to curate the information divided by the number of people paying for it. Bloomberg is a niche thing that requires a lot of effort to run, so it's gonna be expensive per user. If it's something that everyone wants to read, then it'll be popular enough to be cheap. It's not an altruistic thing either, it just makes sense to price it lower since there's an optimal point where you can extract the most revenue that way. I think we're not really in a phase where disinformation would be that much of a problem yet, HN and Reddit are arguably still sources of very high quality data if you know where to look, so there's no incentive for most people to pay for anything. Especially when it's where most of ad-driven media copies practically all content from these days anyway.
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  I think you might have your history mixed up. IIRC, newspapers were a thing where a propagandist, known as the "editor-in-chief" would hire a bunch of bitter, failed novelists to write about the events of the day, but slanted according to the whims of the paper's owner. I'm pretty sure that was it...
pessimizer 2y ago
I can see this as a bleak future for AI, as it consumes its own output, but any bleak future for information writ large (as conflated here with the "misinformation" industry and the often intentionally deceptive output of the NYT) comes from the suppression of material due to copyright attacks and its locking away in archives. I've spent a frustrating few hours recently discovering that I could find any number of interpretations and retrospectives on Francisco Ferrer. But the fact that his schools put out a newsletter, the Bolitín de la Escuela Moderna, which would be the best primary source for learning about it, and is completely inaccessible online, is an example of the way information is still locked away. I read about John R. Coryell's prosecution for obscenity for his six part serial published in Physical Culture beginning in 1906, "Wild Oats, or Growing to Manhood in a Civilized (?) Society", and I find that I can't read any issues of Physical Culture prior to 1910, because they're not online (looks like obscenity convictions in 1906 are still effective in 2024!) I find any number of books referring to the culture of Mexican photonovelas, and that they sold millions of copies a month during the 70s, and the best selling ones are only preserved by a blogger who is constantly fighting takedown notices, and who was grateful to get the scans that I got from a local garage sale. We're failing to put in the minimal effort to preserve, organize and keep accessible our own culture, even when copyright is not an issue. We have endless legal debates and court cases about having our own laws and court cases available to the public without a rent-seeking intermediary given a trust by corrupt politicians in the past. Everything could be preserved and made accessible at lower cost than a few Marvel movies, or two weeks of Ukraine adventure, yet we don't do it. Where's the campaign for that? Nah, better to whine about "racist, sexist" LLMs. That's the opposite of preservation: our entire history is racist and sexist content. Wiping that clean is Year Zero talk. Our governments prefer reality to be interpreted through intermediaries who will modify it for their sake, or in exchange for payment. Our institutions prefer to be the guardians of information rather than the spreaders of information. That's the problem. The Conversation itself is a creepy Australian-based conjunction of shady government and nonprofit funding sources that is explicitly designed to push particular narratives into "mainstream" outlets (which is why all of its articles are Creative Commons licensed.) You'll see this article rewritten in six different ways in other outlets within the week, and it seems to be part of this desperate last push for "misinformation" before the US presidential transition, because Trump made a bunch of campaign promises to destroy the industry. It's all manipulation.
sixQuarks 2y ago
From the article: To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok. This is the opposite of what’s true. NY times has lied us into every war and covers up for genocide for gods sake
mediumsmart 2y ago
What good is winning when people can see on the internet how you did it? History is stories.

133 points by tagawa 2y ago

guestbest 2y ago

Why is noncurated linked with low quality? It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity.

defrost 2y ago
Perhaps "untreated" would be a better descripter as it evokes untreated wastewater unfit for drinking. The content being discussed here isn't guarenteed statements direct from trusted sources, it's the recirculated gossip chains of Reddit, Twitter, <media>.commentSections, Clickbait-WebSheets, etc.
- guestbest 2y ago
  You’d have those rumor mills without the internet through the tabloid sheets. The internet allows someone to publish who is a direct source of rather than having to go through the press.
  - paxys 2y ago
    It also allows a million people to publish who aren't sources at all.
  - defrost 2y ago
    To distinguish a reliable direct source from millions that aren't requires judgement, filtering, treatment .. much like separating drinkable water from wastewater. Hence the use of terms such as "uncurated", "untreated", "raw", "filtered", etc.
threeseed 2y ago
What makes a story high quality is more than it just being a series of accurate quotes. It is where there is context and insights about the story.
mcphage 2y ago
> It should be straight from the source and thus the highest fidelity. Sure, if nobody ever lied.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
You can have BS straight from the source as well if it doesn't show context for example.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

JKCalhoun 2y ago

His story appears to be based on combing through the writings of an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters.

labster 2y ago

The short story is mentioned at the very end of the article, The Library of Babel[0], which is a far better read than this article. [0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]

MrMcCall 2y ago

And not a minute too soon ;-) William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him. Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.

rezmason 2y ago

I think a more apt Borges story is 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'— where a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive. The artifacts and the world they allude to carry such appeal to the masses, that they essentially trump the rest of society as a source of truth and annihilate all culture that came before.

bitwize 2y ago
[An ad for Marvel Funko Pops appears, skippable in 5... 4... 3...]
schoen 2y ago
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" as I understand it is more ambiguous about exactly why Tlön is becoming real in the narrator's world. Although there is a description in the afterword of such a guild having fabricated Tlön and some artifacts from there, the story up to that point seemed to take Tlön's metaphysics (in which the idea of a reality outside of our perceptions is considered absurd and impossible) pretty seriously, and the end of the story presents the situation as though the narrator's world is actually starting to work according to these principles. That could conceivably be for merely social-perception reasons, although according to Tlön's philosophy there couldn't be any such thing as "merely social-perception reasons" because social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality. One could imagine that the guild called up something it then couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the story, fundamentally could work this way. The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to understand the exact position of the story with respect to narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly talking about the idea of fiction coming to life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius#Fact_and_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
- rezmason 2y ago
  We're two comments in and this is, so far, the most extensive conversation about a good Borges story I've had in my life, so kudos for that :)

gmuslera 2y ago

The Library of Babel books weren't an infinite amount, they could fill up to 400 pages or so if I remember correctly. Still, it would have been a pretty big amount of books, far more than the amount of atoms of this universe. If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.

gwern 2y ago
Arguably, it doesn't really make a difference, because every possible 800-page sequence exists as a pair of 400-page books from the original Library, and so on and so forth. The 800-page, 1200-page, 1600-page and every greater length Library is as well-defined, complete, and vacuous as the original 400-page version.
- flir 2y ago
  Hi, there's an infinite number of coach drivers outside. They say they booked ahead?
  - Filligree 2y ago
    Please let them all know, individually, to get in the queue. I'll start processing them once you're done.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      no drivers are currently being processed. no drivers have been processed for more than 2000 days. the queue is full. any additional drivers are being sent to compressed storage until that storage is full too. for more details refer to service model by adrian tchaikovsky. ;-)
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Borges should have just stopped with a kids ABC book then!
- 2y ago

Shalah 2y ago

> misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok. Meanwhile the New York Times acted to discredit the Biden Laptop story. > Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content You have got to be kidding. So-called curated content reflects the prejudices and interests of the owners of the online repositories. > On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. Going on chatGPT, I see a most sinister development. Wherein chatGPT functions as gatekeeper to the current conformism. > Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges was writing satire, a writers in-joke. Something chatGPT finds difficult to detect. -- Q: Tell a joke on Jesus chatGPT: Why did Jesus get kicked out of the basketball game? Because he kept turning the fouls into points! Q: Tell a joke on Buddha. chatGPT: Why didn’t Buddha order a hot dog at the stand? Because he was already one with everything! Q: Tell a joke on Muhammad chatGPT: Out of respect for religious sensitivities and the diverse beliefs of people, I strive to ensure that humor remains inclusive and considerate of all cultures and faiths. Let me know if you'd like a general or alternative joke instead!

zw123456 2y ago

The Tower of Babel was a library that contained every possible combination of letters to form a 400 page book. Or something like that. It made me wonder, what if you made a content honey pot full of just random text and a chatbot vacuumed that up? Does it's data vacuum have a garbage detector?

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
So.. I think it already has been happening ( people attempting to poison some sources for a variety of reasons ). I was doing a mini fun project on HN aliases ( attempting to derive/guess their user's age based on nothing but that alias ) and I came across some number of profiles that have bios clearly intended to mess with bots one way or another. Some have fun instructions. Some have contradictory information. Some are the length of a small night story. I am not judging. I just find it interesting. Has vibes of a certain book about a rainbow.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Tell me about that side project. How does that work? What does it say about me? I find that very interesting.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    The idea itself is kinda simple, but kinda hard, because it relies on how the language we use, gives us away. For example, references we put ( simpsons, star trek, you name it ), language we use ( gee whiz, yeet, gyatt) and that is used to generate an online persona tends to be something of note to our image of self - one can determine to some extent the likely generation from those The reference itself may not automatically mean much, but it is likely that if it is present in an alias, it had an impact on a younger person ( how many of the new generation jump on an old show? so mr robot would have the exposure range of 2015 to 2019 ). If that hypothesis is true, then one can attempt to guess age if the individual given that work work, because 1) we know what year is now 2) we know when it was made, which allows for some minor inference there. Naturally, some aliases are more elaborate than others. Some are written backwards and/or reference a popular show or popular sci-fi author. Some are anagrams ( and - I discovered today - require additional datasets to tag properly so that is another thing I will need to dig up from somewhere ). And to complicate things further, some aliases use references that are ambiguous and/or belong in more than one category ( Tesla being one of them ). The original approach was to just throw everything into LLM and see what it comes up with, but the results were somewhat uneven so I decided to start from scratch and do normal analysis ( language, references, how digits are used and so on - it is still amazing how well that one seems to work ). Sadly, it is still a work in progress ( I was hoping for a quick project, but I am kinda getting into it ) and I probably won't touch until next weekend since the coming week promises to be challenging. Unfortunately, this means in your particular alias ended up as: Alias category is_random length is_anagram generic_signal Loughla Mixed Case 0 7 FALSE FALSE ( remaining fields were empty, basically couldn't put a finger on you:D). If you can provide me with an approximate age, it would help with my testing though:D edit: This being HN. Vast majority of references are technology related.

phkahler 2y ago

>> To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit sensational on any number of headlines.

alecst 2y ago
How can someone tell if a newspaper is biased? What’s the test? Is it the eye test — as in, I can tell it when I see it — or something more?
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  A demagogue tells you so and then either you believe it or you become suspicious that their manipulation of you is the actual danger.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Then again: Should I trust a given medium just because somebody I don't trust tells me I shouldn't?
    - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      You're supposed to use a combination of your life experience and best judgment, which is as it always was. Extreme trust and extreme distrust are both irresponsible. Your responsibility is to remember that institutions are made up of flawed people just like yourself, and work towards improving them. You don't let someone manipulate your emotions to turn them into abstract enemies, tear them down, and replace them with nothing.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Spoiler; every newspaper and media source is biased. They have to be. Starting with what stories they run and don't run and ending with the specific word choice they make inside the articles. Critical thinking is the only thing you can use to spot bias. Compare and contrast different stories. Then make up your own mind. Media literacy and virtual l critical reasoning should be the bedrock of modern education, and it is not.

cduzz 2y ago

Strange that this appears to be nearly lost to history -- but this is rhymes with kibo's (James Parry) declaration of happynet[1]. For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library. Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3]. [1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Romance_1966 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know that's Vonnegut.

alephnerd 2y ago

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times...

motohagiography 2y ago

>As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web. I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things. There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1] On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently. [1] 42.

heresie-dabord 2y ago
> the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction If I may apply a regex: s/polite/lucrative/g
em-bee 2y ago
the belief that AI's are * hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things i am confused by this sentence. are AIs not hallucinating? is that a fictional claim? am i misunderstanding or is there a "not" missing at the *?
- tim333 2y ago
  No, I think he's saying that when AIs are better at us at everything we'll deal with it by saying but they hallucinate.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    but they are hallucinating. according to this reading they won't in the future but we will pretend that they still do because that allows us to let AI dominate. that makes no sense to me. it's ok for AI to run the world because they just make up stuff anyways? don't we want the opposite? in order to allow AI to run the world, shouldn't we believe that they are foolproof and are always able to figure out the correct answer?

mitaphane 2y ago

A fun website that depicts said Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/

RunningDroid 2y ago
The server seems to have fallen over, here's an archived copy: https://archive.today/8uvha https://archive.today/8uvha

lxgr 2y ago

> Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy. [...] To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. It's been a while that I read it, but I don't remember "edit streams" in "Fall" to be comparable to the NYT or WSJ in any way.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

The Machine Stops is also a worthwhile read.

RunningDroid 2y ago
Is that this book? https://openlibrary.org/works/OL88800W/The_Machine_Stops https://openlibrary.org/works/OL88800W/The_Machine_Stops
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  Yes, and the web page you linked to also includes reference to the PDF version available outside Open Library, so everyone can read it.

jongjong 2y ago

The part of the story suggesting that only the rich could afford fact checkers to understand reality is wrong because they won't know which fact checkers are good. At best, you can only hire fact checkers on the basis that they have consensus with some other fact checkers. This doesn't guarantee correctness. Most of the information we see are lies and their opposites, which are mostly lies as well. The opposite of a lie is not necessary the truth, it could just be a different lie.

mistermann 2y ago
It isn't possible for you to know these things. In the event that you disagree, "check" if you can (even consider trying) to generate a flawless proof for each of your facts.

moffkalast 2y ago

> Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy. > The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content. Why would only the wealthy be able to access that? Since it doesn't actually cost anything to add another person to view such a feed, it would be extremely cheap if viewership is high. If only there were a historical precedent where people were paid by to go out and seek good factual information which was then gathered, edited and put for sale en masse for cheap. Some might still remember this wild concept, they called them "newspapers".

fragmede 2y ago
I mean, that's the case today, with expensive feeds like the Bloomberg terminal subscription being more than most people pay in rent, pricing it out of reach for the plebes and restricting access to the wealthy. the rest of humanity gets access to notably low-quality, noncurated online content free feeds like Reddit and 4chan. so I guess there's a historical precedent for that scenario, as well as this "newspaper" thing.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Well it depends on the effort required to curate the information divided by the number of people paying for it. Bloomberg is a niche thing that requires a lot of effort to run, so it's gonna be expensive per user. If it's something that everyone wants to read, then it'll be popular enough to be cheap. It's not an altruistic thing either, it just makes sense to price it lower since there's an optimal point where you can extract the most revenue that way. I think we're not really in a phase where disinformation would be that much of a problem yet, HN and Reddit are arguably still sources of very high quality data if you know where to look, so there's no incentive for most people to pay for anything. Especially when it's where most of ad-driven media copies practically all content from these days anyway.
olddustytrail 2y ago
I think you might have your history mixed up. IIRC, newspapers were a thing where a propagandist, known as the "editor-in-chief" would hire a bunch of bitter, failed novelists to write about the events of the day, but slanted according to the whims of the paper's owner. I'm pretty sure that was it...

pessimizer 2y ago

I can see this as a bleak future for AI, as it consumes its own output, but any bleak future for information writ large (as conflated here with the "misinformation" industry and the often intentionally deceptive output of the NYT) comes from the suppression of material due to copyright attacks and its locking away in archives. I've spent a frustrating few hours recently discovering that I could find any number of interpretations and retrospectives on Francisco Ferrer. But the fact that his schools put out a newsletter, the Bolitín de la Escuela Moderna, which would be the best primary source for learning about it, and is completely inaccessible online, is an example of the way information is still locked away. I read about John R. Coryell's prosecution for obscenity for his six part serial published in Physical Culture beginning in 1906, "Wild Oats, or Growing to Manhood in a Civilized (?) Society", and I find that I can't read any issues of Physical Culture prior to 1910, because they're not online (looks like obscenity convictions in 1906 are still effective in 2024!) I find any number of books referring to the culture of Mexican photonovelas, and that they sold millions of copies a month during the 70s, and the best selling ones are only preserved by a blogger who is constantly fighting takedown notices, and who was grateful to get the scans that I got from a local garage sale. We're failing to put in the minimal effort to preserve, organize and keep accessible our own culture, even when copyright is not an issue. We have endless legal debates and court cases about having our own laws and court cases available to the public without a rent-seeking intermediary given a trust by corrupt politicians in the past. Everything could be preserved and made accessible at lower cost than a few Marvel movies, or two weeks of Ukraine adventure, yet we don't do it. Where's the campaign for that? Nah, better to whine about "racist, sexist" LLMs. That's the opposite of preservation: our entire history is racist and sexist content. Wiping that clean is Year Zero talk. Our governments prefer reality to be interpreted through intermediaries who will modify it for their sake, or in exchange for payment. Our institutions prefer to be the guardians of information rather than the spreaders of information. That's the problem. The Conversation itself is a creepy Australian-based conjunction of shady government and nonprofit funding sources that is explicitly designed to push particular narratives into "mainstream" outlets (which is why all of its articles are Creative Commons licensed.) You'll see this article rewritten in six different ways in other outlets within the week, and it seems to be part of this desperate last push for "misinformation" before the US presidential transition, because Trump made a bunch of campaign promises to destroy the industry. It's all manipulation.

sixQuarks 2y ago

From the article: To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok. This is the opposite of what’s true. NY times has lied us into every war and covers up for genocide for gods sake

mediumsmart 2y ago

What good is winning when people can see on the internet how you did it? History is stories.