"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Look at this shit (first paragraph of body of article):
"Automatic watches are admired for their intricate mechanics and timeless appeal, but even the finest timepieces can sometimes run fast or slow. If you’ve noticed your automatic watch gaining or losing time, you’re not."
First search result on DDG. Thank you, automatic watch expert and real person Hnin Oo Thazin. We may need a whole ass new internet.
https://mtscwatch.com/blog/why-your-automatic-watch-runs-fast-or-slow-and-how-to-fix-it
I don't think we can overestimate the impact this "knowledge collapse" will have yet. Thank goodness for the fediverse, not that it is immune but holy shit the rest of the internet and ALL of corporate social media sure has gone to the dumps fast hasn't it....
The general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
I think it is tantamount to a mass delusion that people refuse to think about the fact that social media will tear society apart unless it is structured in at the very least a semi-decentralized federated fashion not under the control of one or two massive corporations. It feels like for my whole life I have had conversations like this with people and most often people just don't care, they would rather be under a more convenient and more centralized authority. Regardless it is no less surreal to me than it must be to those people in denial about this that we are seeing the unavoidable consequences of refusing to understand a crisis of centralization rip our societies apart into violence and bigotry.
and "sobering" is literally the last fucking thing I need to be happening to me in 2025
Is the fediverse good? Can you find information that was posted here by searching in DDG/Google/...?
I think that what is lost about reddit from reddit specifically being such a shitty company that has so desperately enshittified itself to the point of comic absurdity in what feels like a blink of an eye is that... reddit is the start of a great concept. Of course any system can be gamed, we all could just be dogs on the internet pretending to be humans, but most of the time the upvoting and downvoting along with the multilayered threaded conversations allows for conversation, links and facts to surface that I find harder to find in other places and in general surprisingly sophisticated compared to other places on the internet, so yes!
Of course there is only so much here, which is where you come in!
Yes, actually. I know Kagi in particular has a fediverse "lens" that filters results to things found here. Unsure if anyone else has implemented that yet, or how deeply it scrapes fedi for results, but it's there.
Regardless everything that is posted here is publicly visible so any search engine that wanted to could scrape results from here.
I forgot what I was searching but a few days ago the top result on DDG was a Lemmy post. I was impressed.
This is why I hasted my self hosted adventure. I have to selfhost before everything go to crap
And the craziest thing, is that I got ads in my servers logs. Some company think it is a good thing to advertise in http headers and cookies while scanning all ports
Thank goodness for before:2023. For instance, this particular search has no requirement for modern answers.
In the age of SEO and AI slop, may your niche hobby or interest never become trendy.
Unfortunately canning and recipes in general are now concerning and I have to worry about food safety so much more!
Can't speak for canning, but for the recipes in particular, I was really shocked at the state of things the first time I looked at a recipe on an English website (not my first language).
I only look at recipes in my native language, partly because of the fact that this bullshit is not yet generalised and a fair few website have them still in a good format.
If that's not the case for you, maybe translating a foreign recipe would help? Don't know how long for though...
Canning now boils down to for me, "only use the sites you know are safe" and it's annoying.
Maybe it's just back to physical cookbooks again!
https://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/canning_and_preserving-1887.pdf
Here, knock yourself out.
Between SEO garbage and AI slop the internet is fucked. As a 42 year old dude who fell in love with the internet and programming in the late 90's and made a good living at making websites up until about 5 years ago it really hurts. Nothing is left of what I loved about it. The giant conglomocorps have taken everything over and turned it all to shit. Oh well... Old man shakes fist at sky I guess...
No no no no. We are legion. You are not alone. Let them have it. Here, have some popcorn while we watch our ship of Theseus go down in flames. Beautiful isn't it. Now, what would you like to build next? Imagine the possibilities!
Same age, same story, same feeling. But somehow, I think we should cheer each others up.
ah, I think we just need to adapt. there has always been counter culture, and every opportunity to suck any culturally relevant thing dry will happen, as you've observed. so, new spaces need to be cultivated ya know? I think lemmy is one of em to a certain extent, although it is already a little under siege
As someone who actually knows a thing or two about automatic watches, I decided to give it a read. While the info is actually not as awful as I thought (no hallucinations surprisingly), I still would not recommend it as a guide, even if it were written by a human. Especially this part:
2. Demagnetize:
If your watch suddenly starts running fast, have it demagnetized.
While, yes, a magnetized movement will cause it to suddenly run fast, demagnetizing a movement isn’t completely harmless. If you’re wrong and the movement isn’t magnetized and instead a different type of damage, attempting to demagnetize it will actually magnetize it, and the combination of a magnetized movement plus whatever other damage caused the movement to run fast suddenly could be far worse. I think an added disclaimer would be helpful here. There are ways to test if a movement is magnetized, that should be mentioned. Blanket recommending demagnetizing a movement without a disclaimer is dangerous. I know this is written by AI and not a human but that part really bugged me.
well thats the thing, its crap written by an LLM. I read the first paragraph then went and found an article written by a person, but Id say a good percentage of people would read the whole damn thing and take it as fact.
personally ive always objected to the term hallucination for these LLMs fucking up. its not hallucinating, its shitty computer code outputting shitty output
for what its worth, I just needed to manually wind my watch a bunch. I just had it bequeathed to me and didnt know anything about them. keeping time now of course
Whenever I need to look up general information, I filter to only show pages from before 2022. It removes the AI trash instantly.
Most general topics haven't changed appreciably in the past 3 years.
thats great, the internet ended as a way to research a topic 3 years ago :(
Books are being written with AI. Legislation is being written with AI. Lawyer arguments are being written with AI. Scholarly research is being written with AI.
Pretty sure it's not just the internet.
I imagine a future where children speak of the "before times" and how when there was information on a thing called "paper" and how it wasn't created by slop generators.
We may need a whole ass new internet.
I'd be down if we left the clearweb to the corpos and moved all the human interaction to maybe something like Usenet or I2P.
I would say I'd even be down to learn Gopher protocol, but I looked up their website and they have their own memecoin, so I'm hesitant based off that alone. Even if they say it has no intrinsic value.
You don’t think they wouldn’t ruin that too if that was by some miracle where all the human capital went?
Their plan is to make your internet useless and your PC unaffordable so you have to subscribe to their AI and ask it everything; so they can know everything about you and get ahead of stories that make them look bad, from time to time maybe even kill people.
You will own nothing, and they will force you to like it.
perhaps we can just make Otherworld Wide Web and still use http and everything but its https://oww.funwebpage.net/ NO DUMB CORPO CRAPPE ALLOWED
Why LLMs exist and how to delete them?
It was happening well before AI with shitty content-scraping “solution” sites. Some even put [SOLVED] in the page title. AI is just a compounding problem.
while I dislike that youre asking we constrict our collective digital sphincter in order to take less of a massive diarrhea shit on everything that AI is and represents, you've got a point
Yes, and AI was trained on all of that garbage. It's like they took all the problems we had before and bred them together.
This existed before LLMs grew popular. It’s sweatshop written filler, to game Google’s algorithm since it ranks long answers higher.
Unfortunately, this SEO “style” with giant padded answers may be why newer LLMs write the way they do, as they were trained on it.
yeah that all makes sense
It is an interesting question why explanatory and instruction-type websites all seem similar. In this article we will take a deep dive on how this came to be the case.
So I have noticed a new trend of websites hitting the top of the search results on duck duck go.
The website is always 3 names in a row or more like 3 random words, pretending to a be a blog writing about something.
Then it is usually a bullshit paragraph and then a bunch of seemingly unrelated affiliate links because it is just grabbing anything barely related to what you originally searched for.
Seriously hampered my ability to find out anything about the bread maker I was looking at other than the cost of replacement parts.
Search engines have been made a joke.
We need a publicly funded and democratically controlled search engine. As long as there's a profit motive, enshitification will follow.
As opposed to a manual watch that I have to advance every second?
(yes yes I'm sure they're referring to a watch you don't have to wind but like, who has ever referred to anything as an "automatic watch"?)
This is to differentiate watches you have to wind. It's automatic winding rather than manual winding. It's lingo that has stuck around since watches became a common item. All watches were manual winding at first. Then the automatic winding watches came out. Then the quartz battery. We still have all these types of watches but to differentiate they're called quartz, automatic, manual.
yeah so thats just what they're called. its the parlance for a watch that winds itself. you used to have to wind them every day of course, then these came along and "automatic winding watch", shortened to "automatic" has always been the term industry and marketing have used. sometimes they are called self-winding, but Ive heard "automatic" nearly every time. there's also quartz movement, which uses a battery
Everybody says automatic watch. Like literally everyone from common consumers straight down the line to horologists.
Reported to SlopStop.
I’ve said it before, but a whitelist search engine would be preferable for information. Immediately disregarding any website created after 2023 seems like a decent start.
I read an interesting analogy recently:
Imagine the world before cars. Now imagine an American company suddenly releasing 100 billion cars all over the world for everyone to drive. There are no roads, signs, lights, rules, laws or pedestrian crossings.
That's kind of the situation with AI now.