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It's sad that we've made the internet so disorganized and crammed with advertising and crap that we now need tools to find actual information and summarize it f

It's sad that we've made the internet so disorganized and crammed with advertising and crap that we now need tools to find actual information and summarize it for us.

isoprophlex 1y ago
I've just watched our new lord and saviour, GPT-5 in agent mode, enter a death loop of frustration. I asked it to find an image online. Ostensibly an easy task... First it spent three minutes getting fucked by cookie banners, then it ddossed Wikipedia by guessing article names, then it started searching for stock photo sites offering an API, then it hallucinated a python script to search stock photography vaguely related to what i wanted. This failed as well, so it called its image generator and finally served me some made up AI slop. Ten minutes, kilowatts of GPU power, and jack shit in return. So not even the shiny new tools are up to the task.
ysofunny 1y ago
nobody made the internet in that way the internet was made to happen. and that is what happened. I would say I have seen 3 completely different internets. and I started keeping track in the late 90s after the dotcom boom made it truly global and everywhere
- gregorygoc 1y ago
  Well nobody sane claims that if carbon appears on a planet then conscious minds will suffer through ads and cookie banners. There is the internet, there was a decision point to subsidize bunch of stuff with ads and here we are. It could’ve looked much different if, for example, Google decided to launch a subscription and market figured out it is viable path forward and people would refuse to interact with ads crap.
- jlarocco 1y ago
  I meant "we" in the collective sense. No single person or group is directly responsible, but overall humanity hasn't done a very good job building the internet, in retrospect. It's almost a no-op for humanity. In the past we had disconnected, offline knowledge sources, like libraries and newspaper archives, and now we have them online, but we've packed it so full of spam and misinformation that it's hard to find anything and if you do, it's hard to trust it. Now we're making tools to summarize it all, and they're no doubt going to be just as exploititive as the stuff we've put into it, and also untrustworthy. It's easy enough to find people telling you what you want to hear online, and it's even easier with ChatGPT. Maybe people can't handle having access to all of the world's information.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  >I would say I have seen 3 completely different internets. and I started keeping track in the late 90s after the dotcom boom made it truly global and everywhere What 3?
gosub100 1y ago
it could easily tip the other way. we could collectively decide to use sites that either only use web 1.0, possibility with a carefully-curated set of extensions. This could be enforced by, say, browser extensions that refuse to load "bad" pages, or load copies of sanitized pages (like how archive.ph does).

It's sad that we've made the internet so disorganized and crammed with advertising and crap that we now need tools to find actual information and summarize it for us.

isoprophlex 1y ago

I've just watched our new lord and saviour, GPT-5 in agent mode, enter a death loop of frustration. I asked it to find an image online. Ostensibly an easy task... First it spent three minutes getting fucked by cookie banners, then it ddossed Wikipedia by guessing article names, then it started searching for stock photo sites offering an API, then it hallucinated a python script to search stock photography vaguely related to what i wanted. This failed as well, so it called its image generator and finally served me some made up AI slop. Ten minutes, kilowatts of GPU power, and jack shit in return. So not even the shiny new tools are up to the task.

ysofunny 1y ago

nobody made the internet in that way the internet was made to happen. and that is what happened. I would say I have seen 3 completely different internets. and I started keeping track in the late 90s after the dotcom boom made it truly global and everywhere

gregorygoc 1y ago
Well nobody sane claims that if carbon appears on a planet then conscious minds will suffer through ads and cookie banners. There is the internet, there was a decision point to subsidize bunch of stuff with ads and here we are. It could’ve looked much different if, for example, Google decided to launch a subscription and market figured out it is viable path forward and people would refuse to interact with ads crap.
jlarocco 1y ago
I meant "we" in the collective sense. No single person or group is directly responsible, but overall humanity hasn't done a very good job building the internet, in retrospect. It's almost a no-op for humanity. In the past we had disconnected, offline knowledge sources, like libraries and newspaper archives, and now we have them online, but we've packed it so full of spam and misinformation that it's hard to find anything and if you do, it's hard to trust it. Now we're making tools to summarize it all, and they're no doubt going to be just as exploititive as the stuff we've put into it, and also untrustworthy. It's easy enough to find people telling you what you want to hear online, and it's even easier with ChatGPT. Maybe people can't handle having access to all of the world's information.
0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
>I would say I have seen 3 completely different internets. and I started keeping track in the late 90s after the dotcom boom made it truly global and everywhere What 3?

gosub100 1y ago

it could easily tip the other way. we could collectively decide to use sites that either only use web 1.0, possibility with a carefully-curated set of extensions. This could be enforced by, say, browser extensions that refuse to load "bad" pages, or load copies of sanitized pages (like how archive.ph does).