6 ms·
Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
by JohnMakin 6mo ago
Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web.
- isoprophlex 6mo agoThe sooner the current web dies, the better. Something better either rises from its ashes, or we lose... something that was already lost.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo agoor something way worse shows up.
- JohnMakin 6mo agoYea, I'm not sure how the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument really makes any sense
- znort_ 6mo agocontext. sometimes things simply have to be broken to give way for something better. ymmv.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo agoI think there's an unexamined assumption here that "the next thing" is always going to be an improvement but there is no, non-ideological reason to hold to this assumption. Ideally, we would be actively working towards making it so but what often happens is passively riding the current and calling it "progress".
- znort_ 6mo ago>unexamined assumption here that "the next thing" is always going to be an improvement but there is no, non-ideological reason to hold to this assumption i'm not making that assumption at all, so whatever. context: revolutions? if slop is a problem but is barely enough of a problem to collectively do something about it maybe letting it get out of hand would be a good motivation. i'm not advocating for this, just providing it as a possible context where the "this is really bad so let's make it worse" argument could "make sense". progress isn't just a technical issue, it involves people and people need motivation.
- dylan604 6mo agoWhen you get the something worse, the previous suddenly becomes much less worse. With the help of wrapping your memories with "remember when" nostalgia making things much more palatable, the something worse suddenly makes the previous better if not good.
- stronglikedan 6mo ago> you could argue Could you? I don't see it happening, but I could be wrong.
- janalsncm 6mo agoYou could, in the sense that it’s not illegal or impossible. I haven’t seen anyone attempt it though. You could argue that a person could argue any point, but I’d prefer people make the argument rather than argue about arguing it.
- dayofthedaleks 6mo agoYou could also argue that the web has failed and poisoning it into irrelevance is a vital service, motivating humans to collect knowledge into immutable sources. We‘ll call them ‘libraries.’
- Jtarii 6mo agoPissing on a pile of shit
- lxgr 6mo agoOn the other hand, one could argue that anything that can be destroyed by relatively clearly labeled satire, deserves to be.
- slig 6mo agoGrokipedia is already doing that.
- parliament32 6mo agoTo the web? It's fantastic for the web, these are the kinds of fun projects that make the web a worthwhile place to be. To slop generators? Yes, absolutely harmful, and that's for the best.
- r3trohack3r 6mo agoInteresting, but you could argue comments like this are actively harmful to the web.
- AlecSchueler 6mo agoBut the argument wouldn't be nearly as strong.
- dymk 6mo agoHard to say when nobody is actually offering arguments
- AlecSchueler 6mo agoIt would be difficult to have spent any time at all on this website in the past two years without hearing the arguments for why slop farms undermine trust online, poison future training data sets, worsen the signal to noise ratio and eat up untold resources.
- NonHyloMorph 6mo agowithe the addition of asking to consider that being harmful to the web is the ethical thing, that is what the argument of op was
- JohnMakin 5mo agohow so?
- anonymousiam 6mo agoIt's probably only harmful to the AI scrapers that train from the web. Most people will understand the purpose of this -- to poison LLM training in a humorous way, which is really easy to do. It exemplifies a major weakness in modern day AI.
- gojomo 6mo agoThis is unlikely to poison any LLMs, and unless the author says so, it is unlikely that their motivation is to poison LLMs, as opposed to providing whimsical entertainment.
- bstrama 6mo agoI were just drunk and idea seemed funny. That's the idea behind haha. But either way can't wait to see google ai overview cite us.
- dylan604 6mo agoyou mean like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038787
- gojomo 6mo agoMusing about a possibly-funny consequence isn't the same as the motivating reason, which I read as more whimsical from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042594 In particular, someone who was seeking training-set pollution likely wouldn't make the fanciful fabrications so blatant, nor open-source their prompt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038257
- wildzzz 6mo agoAny training data scraper that blindly takes stuff from websites deserves to have their model poisoned by this nonsense.
- SwellJoe 6mo agoI wouldn't. And, I'd think less of anyone who does make that argument. Anyone of reasonable intelligence can easily tell this is a parody of an encyclopedia. Saying this is bad for the web is like saying The Onion is bad for the web.
- Eisenstein 6mo agoWhat would you think of a person who said that they are already convinced that an opposing view could not be correct without even hearing the arguments for it?
- janalsncm 6mo agoFor the record, > Funny, but you could argue this is actively harmful to the web. Was not followed by an actual argument that it is harmful to the web. The comment was an assertion, not an argument. So we are left in the inconvenient position of rejecting hypothetical arguments, and others defending the philosophical possibility that a valid argument does exist.
- Eisenstein 6mo agoWithout the argument being explicit then there can be no retort to it, so closing your mind before hearing it demonstrates that the argument itself is irrelevant. One could thus conclude that the existence of a valid argument is not itself a condition for my question.
- janalsncm 6mo agoWe also shouldn’t close our minds to the possibility of an eigen-retort, one which covers all possible arguments already made or argued in the future regarding the consequences of this website on the health of the Internet. Someone who is aware of the eigen-retort would therefore not need to hear the argument. Since I haven’t heard either the hypothetical argument or the hypothetical eigen-retort yet, I’ll withhold my judgement.
- gojomo 6mo agoA web that is vulnerable to this would already be as good as dead. As an entertaining way to highlight the importance of upgrading our ways of knowing, playful (& open-source!) projects like this are likely to strengthen the web.