7 ms·

I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything,

I called this maybe 3y ago, but I think so did everyone else that was sane. Sure, we get immense value from AI, but indiscriminately injecting into everything, the one thing we know to be unreliable above the threshold we used to fire people for, is probably the greatest undoing of all the good companies like Google brought to the internet. I mean what a way to destroy your legacy of democratizing information. The amount of harm (direct and indirect) this will cause, and the cost to return to baseline will be so immense, and yet we will not be able to point to the root cause. They won't be there to take responsibility.

inigyou 2mo ago
what value do we get from AI?
- post-it 2mo ago
  It's really good at writing code.
  - aaronblohowiak 2mo ago
    It’s good at all kinds of stuff that is search adjacent, “find amesent parks with water feature within 100 miles of me that have rv parking nearby”, etc
    - wegwerf17377382 2mo ago
      This will of course never be underminded by aggressive marketing
    - gosub100 2mo ago
      Rote classification doesn't require AI. You described a SELECT statement that was developed half a century ago
    - skydhash 2mo ago
      Pseudo SQL select l.id, l.name from locations as l where l.type = 'amusement_park' and exists ( select id from locations as l2 where l2.type = 'rv_parking' and distance(l2.geo, l.geo) < $nearby_distance ) But what we should have is a good map software where you could filter by type and distance (How many amusement parks can be in that circle?) and quickly check if there's a RV parking nearby. The hard job is collecting the data.
  - champagnepapi 2mo ago
    Ehhhhh it’s faster at typing code. Writing in a full agentic mode, we’ve only experienced slop.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      If typing is the bottleneck you're working in too low-level of a language. Use more abstraction.
  - loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
    It’s really good at writing bad code - something that superficially works but is badly architected, abstracted, or wrong in a subtle way. Only a novice would look at ai code and say “wow this is good”.
    - bashwizard 2mo ago
      Skill issue. No pun intended.
    - rnd33 2mo ago
      For well-scoped tasks I wouldn't say the code is bad, not brilliant for sure, but definitively good enough. For a lot of problems "quick and good enough" is all that is required. I've used it a lot for managing my Home Assistant setup. Has saved me countless of hours. In principle I could've done it myself, but I never would have, the time investment required to learn it wouldn't have been worth the value I get from it.
    - sneak 2mo ago
      I’ve been programming professionally for 29 years and with the right constraints (strongly typed language, strict linting, adversarial review styleguide, test coverage, clearly defined spec or requirements) it does indeed regularly write good code. All of the other stuff required is either set-once-and-forget or is also AI, and it does require supervision, but it writes good code the vast majority of the time. Note that I am talking about frontier models and only the last 6-12 months. Opus was really the breakthrough point for me.
      - loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
        I’ve been programming professionally for 31 years. With all those guardrails it writes functional code - but I would still not call it good. But hey to each their own.
        ff317 2mo ago
        I think of the distinction here is about the domains we're coding within. If your software projects are product-y CRUD apps/sites... well, LLMs will tend to perform decently at that, because it's fundamentally pretty trivial work anyways, and there are so many examples to draw from. All CRUD apps are essentially isomorphic, with just some rules to plug in about data validation, business logic, etc. On the other hand, if your software projects involve more-difficult subject matter, you're going to find it struggles a lot more.
  - bigstrat2003 2mo ago
    No, it very much is not.
- gsinclair 2mo ago
  Answers to a lot of questions, with breadth, depth and nuance. And assistance in carrying out work on a lot of fields, not just programming.
  - andrepd 2mo ago
    breadth, depth and nuance If ever there were three adjectives which do NOT apply to generative AI...
    - AdamN 2mo ago
      Oh the text definitely has breadth, depth, and nuance ... just not sure how correct it is.
  - malfist 2mo ago
    Do not mistake confidence and verbosity with breadth, depth and nuance
  - baubino 2mo ago
    This only matters if the answer is correct.
- joenot443 2mo ago
  Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I had it prepare an SVG of the whole assembly with all the measurements and parts labeled.
  - wpietri 2mo ago
    I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..." I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.
    - SadErn 2mo ago
      [dead]
    - joenot443 2mo ago
      > I run a not-for-profit pinball museum Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.
      - wpietri 2mo ago
        For sure, but I think the deeper problems are how much the industry changed over the decades and the extent to which pinball repair content comes from amateurs opining on forums. Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.
    - 2mo ago
- AussieWog93 2mo ago
  I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop that I let Claude Code sysadmin. It makes it really easy to self-host open source stuff, and if there are issues it can fix them too. Funnily enough, I've had a somewhat mixed-to-hostile response when trying to upstream the vibecoded fixes, so I suspect using an LLM to fix broken open-source software (that human maintainers don't have the time to fix themselves, nor the humility to accept an LLM-authored fix) will become more of a thing going forward too. Oh, it's also been identifying a bunch of patterns in sales data for my business that has been increasing monthly profit consistently since last November (around $4,000 USD, every month, cumulatively so far with no sign of slowing down - could easily be $10k/mo in increased gains by end of financial year).
  - FloatArtifact 2mo ago
    It can be very exhausting to receive a lot of PRs. especially when they're LLMs. We have to read what people don't often even read themselves. They're often very wordy. Then it hurts all the more when it's wrong.
    - AussieWog93 2mo ago
      I've had negative responses to small, isolated submissions that I've heavily QA'd and semi-positive responses to longer ones. I think it has less to do with the "realpolitik" of the code itself and more to do with the maintainer's viewpoints about whether AI as a whole is a positive or negative thing. I tend to respond quite well to AI-authored or assisted PRs to my project, but to be fair we maybe only get 3-5 PRs in a good month.
      - FloatArtifact 2mo ago
        I tend to value person-to-person interaction. I've received a lot of purely automated responses, which shows low value to me as a person, and ultimately the project. I'm not disagreeing that code matters, but we're losing person-to-person discourse and the community that comes with it. Thinking it through a little bit is probably coming from having bounties on a few issues that might be contributing to my negative experience.
- dgroshev 2mo ago
  Here are a couple examples: https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build
  - chrisjj 2mo ago
    > Apparently it’s capable And apparently is more than adequate to its gulled users.
- wookmaster 2mo ago
  There's plenty of value from LLMs, if you treat them as an advanced search engine and auto complete machine like they are. I've used them quite heavily to research things...but these are done best in the hands of skeptical people. The problem as usual is the mass of rich people trying to profit off of them, not the technology itself.
- cyanmoonx 2mo ago
  [flagged]
Rperry2174 2mo ago
Whatever AI is doing to how we find / share information aside, I do think that one under appreciated effect is on how software (and other things) get built. Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing , but we may just not have had enough time to see how that hopefully has positive effects a decade out. Its funny how fast we forget that when Google came out and arguably now many would laugh at the statement "all the good, companies like Google brought to the internet"
- Intralexical 2mo ago
  I've noticed these big tech companies use the word "democratize" when they do something that looks more like commoditizing. Flooding a market with supply consolidates their own power, by suppressing other economic actors' bargaining power and making quality controls uncompetitive.
  - j45 2mo ago
    Flooding the market with supply while quality might not be the same is a real risk.
- centuryfall 2mo ago
  > Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing It really isn’t doing any of that, though. When AI gets it wrong, that person needs to understand why it is wrong, and without that upfront knowledge or skill of reasoning, it’s much less direct to actually build something in the correct ways.
customguy 2mo ago
I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and therefore the ability to reason and act in public, and with others. I bet some still consider it hyperbole. It's just taking in trends and seeing where the glacier moves to, how the cookie will crumble so to speak.
- nuclearnicer 2mo ago
  It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality. First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows. Second, 1989, when cable TV became a mature technology reaching half of U.S. households. And finally, maybe a lesser item, the introduction of the DVR circa 2000, when we stopped watching scheduled TV together. I wonder if more historically informed people would find the fracturing going further back as other advancements in publishing technology allowed more people to share more views.
  - jgtrosh 2mo ago
    The VCR became widespread during the 1980s > The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.
    - nuclearnicer 2mo ago
      Another good one. My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater. But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.
netcan 2mo ago
I think a lot of this is "accelerating trends." That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time. In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population. Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web." Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it. That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO. So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.
- KPGv2 2mo ago
  If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad. Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usenet and Yahoo's index (which was updated manually) and a few webrings. now, I'm able to watch a show that aired in Brazil the day after, with English subtitles. People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"
  - pessimizer 2mo ago
    If you judge the internet and the world by "no new anime content today" things have actually improved. But some would think that's not a healthy way to see things. > People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Judged on an anime freshness scale, probably not.
  - rubyfan 2mo ago
    I am one of the people that long for the old internet. I don’t long for it because there are too many normal people on it now. The old internet was interesting, open, simple, un-gated, and relatively egalitarian with few corporate interests in commanding positions. The new internet is basically a predatory environment disguised as a library.
chongli 2mo ago
We’re burning the new library of Alexandria on the altar to a new god.
- chrisjj 2mo ago
  Worse, we gave the matches to the new god then stood back and watched.
- StableAlkyne 2mo ago
  It was already on fire, AI just pointed a leafblower at the coals. Before slop farms started using ChatGPT, they were using outsourced writers who had a tenuous (at best) grasp on the language and subject. If you searched anything on the web, your first page of search results was generally incredibly fluffy articles. For example, you would search for "How to use python async" or whatever, and every non-stackoverflow result would go something like "Python is a useful language for async library usage. Python is a language created in... You can install Python by... Synchronous programming is... Asynchronous programming is... Python synchronous code looks like... Python async module code looks like... Popular libraries for async are... Other languages have async such as... To import async module you can..." with every paragraph interspersed with an ad. The content was surface level, relying upon blatant plagiarism of better-written articles and forum posts without attribution. It was an utterly miserable experience if you placed any value on your time. The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop, and the karmic irony that the content farmers who put the writing profession into a race-to-the-bottom were themselves discarded, in much the same way as the scabs who replaced striking workers were frequently discarded in the industrial era. And that's without even getting into the subject of the people who made money as Internet point farmers of Reddit or Twitter, who would repost generic content then sell their accounts to spammers. The Internet was already going in this direction; the only difference is the rate at which it enshittified. I agree that it's in a worse state than it was 10 years ago, but let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
  - chrisjj 2mo ago
    > The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop The most important thing that's changed is the proportion of slop. When it was humans originators v human sloppers, we stood a chance. Now it is going fewer human originators v. vastly more machine sloppers. No chance.
dzonga 2mo ago
how I handle this - if I find an interesting web page - I save to pdf & save to my external sdd. ideally I should get one of the 8tb HDD to save material I see on the web. coz yeah good quality material is disappearing on the web fast. the only thing remaining is people building their own private search indexes.
- lgcmo 2mo ago
  Not that this does not work, but there are services for that you could run. If you got (or plan to) a homelab, that is a nice add
- pessimizer 2mo ago
  I've been using Zotero for that, although it gets slow as hell eventually because it is a whole-ass firefox instance. They're real references so I might as well treat them like real references. I've been working on a project that basically is a superset of Zotero, just efficient. As if you expected to have more than a few thousand references. I'm sure I'll get it done after the web is long gone.
smrtinsert 2mo ago
Google and good is of some debate. Appearing on a list of 10 links is not a democratic representation of the web. I'm hoping this reckoning is also an opportunity for a better method of web organization
- Xirdus 2mo ago
  In original Google, "appearing on a list of 10 links" was peak democracy. You needed people to vote for your website by linking to it. The more votes you get, the higher you are. Sure, like every democracy, it had some unfixable fundamental flaws. But lack of democracy was not one of them.
throwaway63467 2mo ago
99 % of the Internet was already slop before AI existed it was just written by hand. At least AI can give you a nuanced overview of medical information whereas before you had the exact same content about medical conditions on hundreds of SEO optimized pages. Collective memory, yeah alright.
evanjrowley 2mo ago
Perhaps the problem you're describing is actually Google's bittersweet solution to the problem of not having unlimited storage space to properly index the whole internet.
- applicative 2mo ago
  The whole text of the internet from day 1 and the index machinery for it can be stored in some number of petabytes. I assume the CIA and the Chinese state are in possession of such stores and it is a minor budget item.
deIeted 2mo ago
Well, I called it in 2015 because they were already adding features to sites to circumvent archiving and other things. Forget AI. That has nothing to do with why the collective memory is being lost.
davnicwil 2mo ago
I find it so interesting how many comments about AI start with a disclaimer that of course it's very useful, before pointing out a negative of any sort. I do it too so it's not a criticism, but I find it kinda interesting culturally. It's a reflection I think of the environment that we've created for ourselves, or has been created for us (or some combo) where somehow you can't point out an unqualified negative of this tech. This to me is actually one of the clearest bubble signals, just because if it really were as good as all that, it'd be completely redundant to remind everyone of that when criticising it. I think it might be a sort of weird collective psychological thing where we must not admit what seems pretty clear, just for fear of breaking from norms. But, of course, yeah it's very useful for some stuff and I use it all the time :-)
- deaton 2mo ago
  Well I think theres a lot of social pressure to disclaim "yes of course its useful" because if all you do is say "hey AI has this problem," you'll have AI bros replying to you telling you about all the good and saying you're misrepresenting AI.
  - davnicwil 2mo ago
    I agree and I think there is also a more insidious meta aspect: for every comment like this there is the worry that some X multiple more people hold that view but won't say it. Everyone else also thinks like that and so isn't normally unambiguously critical, so you end up not knowing who really thinks that way and who's just doing it because of the game theory. It could even be practically nobody. There's no way to tell until the deadlock breaks.
  - ragequittah 2mo ago
    [dead]
- ricardobayes 2mo ago
  To be fair that is also true to the Internet itself, it's very useful but has negative side-effects.
throwayay4929 2mo ago
I called this in 1994 when that Lee dude opened the floodgates to everyone and everyone brought their problems to the web.
jefurii 2mo ago
Agreed except for the "immense value" part.
whstl 2mo ago
The writing has been on the wall for quite a while, thanks to Google itself and SEO, plus Google advertising channels. Some websites already had minimum “for humans” content for years, as it was all used to appease the algorithm. And Social Media was the cherry on top, with information overloading, walled gardens, personalization and companies using it to pull a “Hey Fellow Kids” when using it for marketing.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
shelled 2mo ago
Very soon, everything easily accessible on the Internet will be a never-ending loop of AI slop. Will this push us back to analogue things? Not in an apocalyptic scenario, but in general, and by analogue, I don't mean no use of computers but use of computing with a firm and predictable human touch and control. Will there be venues left (largely) unencumbered by AI to even turn analogue? The top-down control of our industries, financial systems, education, etc by a few mega corporations and fewer mega rich people, who also have vested interests in the advent of AI as AI corps are trying to be, means there's nothing left where AI is not inserted in every vein and nerve and nerve centre. It is as if a few people in the world are trying to turn this world into something Frankensteinian because they think that then they will get the chance to be the only ones to control this Frankensteinian. They might as well succeed. To what end? I do not believe even they know that. Blindness of greed.

inigyou 2mo ago

what value do we get from AI?

post-it 2mo ago
It's really good at writing code.
- aaronblohowiak 2mo ago
  It’s good at all kinds of stuff that is search adjacent, “find amesent parks with water feature within 100 miles of me that have rv parking nearby”, etc
  - wegwerf17377382 2mo ago
    This will of course never be underminded by aggressive marketing
  - gosub100 2mo ago
    Rote classification doesn't require AI. You described a SELECT statement that was developed half a century ago
  - skydhash 2mo ago
    Pseudo SQL select l.id, l.name from locations as l where l.type = 'amusement_park' and exists ( select id from locations as l2 where l2.type = 'rv_parking' and distance(l2.geo, l.geo) < $nearby_distance ) But what we should have is a good map software where you could filter by type and distance (How many amusement parks can be in that circle?) and quickly check if there's a RV parking nearby. The hard job is collecting the data.
- champagnepapi 2mo ago
  Ehhhhh it’s faster at typing code. Writing in a full agentic mode, we’ve only experienced slop.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    If typing is the bottleneck you're working in too low-level of a language. Use more abstraction.
- loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
  It’s really good at writing bad code - something that superficially works but is badly architected, abstracted, or wrong in a subtle way. Only a novice would look at ai code and say “wow this is good”.
  - bashwizard 2mo ago
    Skill issue. No pun intended.
  - rnd33 2mo ago
    For well-scoped tasks I wouldn't say the code is bad, not brilliant for sure, but definitively good enough. For a lot of problems "quick and good enough" is all that is required. I've used it a lot for managing my Home Assistant setup. Has saved me countless of hours. In principle I could've done it myself, but I never would have, the time investment required to learn it wouldn't have been worth the value I get from it.
  - sneak 2mo ago
    I’ve been programming professionally for 29 years and with the right constraints (strongly typed language, strict linting, adversarial review styleguide, test coverage, clearly defined spec or requirements) it does indeed regularly write good code. All of the other stuff required is either set-once-and-forget or is also AI, and it does require supervision, but it writes good code the vast majority of the time. Note that I am talking about frontier models and only the last 6-12 months. Opus was really the breakthrough point for me.
    - loloquwowndueo 2mo ago
      I’ve been programming professionally for 31 years. With all those guardrails it writes functional code - but I would still not call it good. But hey to each their own.
      - ff317 2mo ago
        I think of the distinction here is about the domains we're coding within. If your software projects are product-y CRUD apps/sites... well, LLMs will tend to perform decently at that, because it's fundamentally pretty trivial work anyways, and there are so many examples to draw from. All CRUD apps are essentially isomorphic, with just some rules to plug in about data validation, business logic, etc. On the other hand, if your software projects involve more-difficult subject matter, you're going to find it struggles a lot more.
- bigstrat2003 2mo ago
  No, it very much is not.
gsinclair 2mo ago
Answers to a lot of questions, with breadth, depth and nuance. And assistance in carrying out work on a lot of fields, not just programming.
- andrepd 2mo ago
  breadth, depth and nuance If ever there were three adjectives which do NOT apply to generative AI...
  - AdamN 2mo ago
    Oh the text definitely has breadth, depth, and nuance ... just not sure how correct it is.
- malfist 2mo ago
  Do not mistake confidence and verbosity with breadth, depth and nuance
- baubino 2mo ago
  This only matters if the answer is correct.
joenot443 2mo ago
Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before. It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I had it prepare an SVG of the whole assembly with all the measurements and parts labeled.
- wpietri 2mo ago
  I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..." I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.
  - SadErn 2mo ago
    [dead]
  - joenot443 2mo ago
    > I run a not-for-profit pinball museum Yeah, I would imagine pinball machines are at least an order of magnitude more complicated to maintain than above-ground pools are. That situation sounds really annoying, I feel for you.
    - wpietri 2mo ago
      For sure, but I think the deeper problems are how much the industry changed over the decades and the extent to which pinball repair content comes from amateurs opining on forums. Pool technology has been more stable, and there are more people out there writing well-informed content for LLMs to extract and present as their own.
  - 2mo ago
AussieWog93 2mo ago
I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop that I let Claude Code sysadmin. It makes it really easy to self-host open source stuff, and if there are issues it can fix them too. Funnily enough, I've had a somewhat mixed-to-hostile response when trying to upstream the vibecoded fixes, so I suspect using an LLM to fix broken open-source software (that human maintainers don't have the time to fix themselves, nor the humility to accept an LLM-authored fix) will become more of a thing going forward too. Oh, it's also been identifying a bunch of patterns in sales data for my business that has been increasing monthly profit consistently since last November (around $4,000 USD, every month, cumulatively so far with no sign of slowing down - could easily be $10k/mo in increased gains by end of financial year).
- FloatArtifact 2mo ago
  It can be very exhausting to receive a lot of PRs. especially when they're LLMs. We have to read what people don't often even read themselves. They're often very wordy. Then it hurts all the more when it's wrong.
  - AussieWog93 2mo ago
    I've had negative responses to small, isolated submissions that I've heavily QA'd and semi-positive responses to longer ones. I think it has less to do with the "realpolitik" of the code itself and more to do with the maintainer's viewpoints about whether AI as a whole is a positive or negative thing. I tend to respond quite well to AI-authored or assisted PRs to my project, but to be fair we maybe only get 3-5 PRs in a good month.
    - FloatArtifact 2mo ago
      I tend to value person-to-person interaction. I've received a lot of purely automated responses, which shows low value to me as a person, and ultimately the project. I'm not disagreeing that code matters, but we're losing person-to-person discourse and the community that comes with it. Thinking it through a little bit is probably coming from having bounties on a few issues that might be contributing to my negative experience.
dgroshev 2mo ago
Here are a couple examples: https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build
- chrisjj 2mo ago
  > Apparently it’s capable And apparently is more than adequate to its gulled users.
wookmaster 2mo ago
There's plenty of value from LLMs, if you treat them as an advanced search engine and auto complete machine like they are. I've used them quite heavily to research things...but these are done best in the hands of skeptical people. The problem as usual is the mass of rich people trying to profit off of them, not the technology itself.
cyanmoonx 2mo ago
[flagged]

Rperry2174 2mo ago

Whatever AI is doing to how we find / share information aside, I do think that one under appreciated effect is on how software (and other things) get built. Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing , but we may just not have had enough time to see how that hopefully has positive effects a decade out. Its funny how fast we forget that when Google came out and arguably now many would laugh at the statement "all the good, companies like Google brought to the internet"

Intralexical 2mo ago
I've noticed these big tech companies use the word "democratize" when they do something that looks more like commoditizing. Flooding a market with supply consolidates their own power, by suppressing other economic actors' bargaining power and making quality controls uncompetitive.
- j45 2mo ago
  Flooding the market with supply while quality might not be the same is a real risk.
centuryfall 2mo ago
> Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing It really isn’t doing any of that, though. When AI gets it wrong, that person needs to understand why it is wrong, and without that upfront knowledge or skill of reasoning, it’s much less direct to actually build something in the correct ways.

customguy 2mo ago

I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and therefore the ability to reason and act in public, and with others. I bet some still consider it hyperbole. It's just taking in trends and seeing where the glacier moves to, how the cookie will crumble so to speak.

nuclearnicer 2mo ago
It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality. First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows. Second, 1989, when cable TV became a mature technology reaching half of U.S. households. And finally, maybe a lesser item, the introduction of the DVR circa 2000, when we stopped watching scheduled TV together. I wonder if more historically informed people would find the fracturing going further back as other advancements in publishing technology allowed more people to share more views.
- jgtrosh 2mo ago
  The VCR became widespread during the 1980s > The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.
  - nuclearnicer 2mo ago
    Another good one. My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater. But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.

netcan 2mo ago

I think a lot of this is "accelerating trends." That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time. In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population. Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web." Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it. That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO. So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.

KPGv2 2mo ago
If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad. Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usenet and Yahoo's index (which was updated manually) and a few webrings. now, I'm able to watch a show that aired in Brazil the day after, with English subtitles. People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"
- pessimizer 2mo ago
  If you judge the internet and the world by "no new anime content today" things have actually improved. But some would think that's not a healthy way to see things. > People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Judged on an anime freshness scale, probably not.
- rubyfan 2mo ago
  I am one of the people that long for the old internet. I don’t long for it because there are too many normal people on it now. The old internet was interesting, open, simple, un-gated, and relatively egalitarian with few corporate interests in commanding positions. The new internet is basically a predatory environment disguised as a library.

chongli 2mo ago

We’re burning the new library of Alexandria on the altar to a new god.

chrisjj 2mo ago
Worse, we gave the matches to the new god then stood back and watched.
StableAlkyne 2mo ago
It was already on fire, AI just pointed a leafblower at the coals. Before slop farms started using ChatGPT, they were using outsourced writers who had a tenuous (at best) grasp on the language and subject. If you searched anything on the web, your first page of search results was generally incredibly fluffy articles. For example, you would search for "How to use python async" or whatever, and every non-stackoverflow result would go something like "Python is a useful language for async library usage. Python is a language created in... You can install Python by... Synchronous programming is... Asynchronous programming is... Python synchronous code looks like... Python async module code looks like... Popular libraries for async are... Other languages have async such as... To import async module you can..." with every paragraph interspersed with an ad. The content was surface level, relying upon blatant plagiarism of better-written articles and forum posts without attribution. It was an utterly miserable experience if you placed any value on your time. The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop, and the karmic irony that the content farmers who put the writing profession into a race-to-the-bottom were themselves discarded, in much the same way as the scabs who replaced striking workers were frequently discarded in the industrial era. And that's without even getting into the subject of the people who made money as Internet point farmers of Reddit or Twitter, who would repost generic content then sell their accounts to spammers. The Internet was already going in this direction; the only difference is the rate at which it enshittified. I agree that it's in a worse state than it was 10 years ago, but let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
- chrisjj 2mo ago
  > The only thing that's changed is the quantity of slop The most important thing that's changed is the proportion of slop. When it was humans originators v human sloppers, we stood a chance. Now it is going fewer human originators v. vastly more machine sloppers. No chance.

dzonga 2mo ago

how I handle this - if I find an interesting web page - I save to pdf & save to my external sdd. ideally I should get one of the 8tb HDD to save material I see on the web. coz yeah good quality material is disappearing on the web fast. the only thing remaining is people building their own private search indexes.

lgcmo 2mo ago
Not that this does not work, but there are services for that you could run. If you got (or plan to) a homelab, that is a nice add
pessimizer 2mo ago
I've been using Zotero for that, although it gets slow as hell eventually because it is a whole-ass firefox instance. They're real references so I might as well treat them like real references. I've been working on a project that basically is a superset of Zotero, just efficient. As if you expected to have more than a few thousand references. I'm sure I'll get it done after the web is long gone.

smrtinsert 2mo ago

Google and good is of some debate. Appearing on a list of 10 links is not a democratic representation of the web. I'm hoping this reckoning is also an opportunity for a better method of web organization

Xirdus 2mo ago
In original Google, "appearing on a list of 10 links" was peak democracy. You needed people to vote for your website by linking to it. The more votes you get, the higher you are. Sure, like every democracy, it had some unfixable fundamental flaws. But lack of democracy was not one of them.

throwaway63467 2mo ago

99 % of the Internet was already slop before AI existed it was just written by hand. At least AI can give you a nuanced overview of medical information whereas before you had the exact same content about medical conditions on hundreds of SEO optimized pages. Collective memory, yeah alright.

evanjrowley 2mo ago

Perhaps the problem you're describing is actually Google's bittersweet solution to the problem of not having unlimited storage space to properly index the whole internet.

applicative 2mo ago
The whole text of the internet from day 1 and the index machinery for it can be stored in some number of petabytes. I assume the CIA and the Chinese state are in possession of such stores and it is a minor budget item.

deIeted 2mo ago

Well, I called it in 2015 because they were already adding features to sites to circumvent archiving and other things. Forget AI. That has nothing to do with why the collective memory is being lost.

davnicwil 2mo ago

I find it so interesting how many comments about AI start with a disclaimer that of course it's very useful, before pointing out a negative of any sort. I do it too so it's not a criticism, but I find it kinda interesting culturally. It's a reflection I think of the environment that we've created for ourselves, or has been created for us (or some combo) where somehow you can't point out an unqualified negative of this tech. This to me is actually one of the clearest bubble signals, just because if it really were as good as all that, it'd be completely redundant to remind everyone of that when criticising it. I think it might be a sort of weird collective psychological thing where we must not admit what seems pretty clear, just for fear of breaking from norms. But, of course, yeah it's very useful for some stuff and I use it all the time :-)

deaton 2mo ago
Well I think theres a lot of social pressure to disclaim "yes of course its useful" because if all you do is say "hey AI has this problem," you'll have AI bros replying to you telling you about all the good and saying you're misrepresenting AI.
- davnicwil 2mo ago
  I agree and I think there is also a more insidious meta aspect: for every comment like this there is the worry that some X multiple more people hold that view but won't say it. Everyone else also thinks like that and so isn't normally unambiguously critical, so you end up not knowing who really thinks that way and who's just doing it because of the game theory. It could even be practically nobody. There's no way to tell until the deadlock breaks.
- ragequittah 2mo ago
  [dead]
ricardobayes 2mo ago
To be fair that is also true to the Internet itself, it's very useful but has negative side-effects.

throwayay4929 2mo ago

I called this in 1994 when that Lee dude opened the floodgates to everyone and everyone brought their problems to the web.

jefurii 2mo ago

Agreed except for the "immense value" part.

whstl 2mo ago

The writing has been on the wall for quite a while, thanks to Google itself and SEO, plus Google advertising channels. Some websites already had minimum “for humans” content for years, as it was all used to appease the algorithm. And Social Media was the cherry on top, with information overloading, walled gardens, personalization and companies using it to pull a “Hey Fellow Kids” when using it for marketing.

deleted 2mo ago
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shelled 2mo ago

Very soon, everything easily accessible on the Internet will be a never-ending loop of AI slop. Will this push us back to analogue things? Not in an apocalyptic scenario, but in general, and by analogue, I don't mean no use of computers but use of computing with a firm and predictable human touch and control. Will there be venues left (largely) unencumbered by AI to even turn analogue? The top-down control of our industries, financial systems, education, etc by a few mega corporations and fewer mega rich people, who also have vested interests in the advent of AI as AI corps are trying to be, means there's nothing left where AI is not inserted in every vein and nerve and nerve centre. It is as if a few people in the world are trying to turn this world into something Frankensteinian because they think that then they will get the chance to be the only ones to control this Frankensteinian. They might as well succeed. To what end? I do not believe even they know that. Blindness of greed.