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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.

It's really good at writing code.

Just do it for yourself. I stopped worrying about who’s gonna use it.

20 years ago I thought that we will wait to have kids as “a war will come”. I was overthinking and I am happy now that I changed my mind :)

Is it useful or does it make you happy? Or it might even make some money? Nice. Do it. My life is easier.

Write the opposite of what is true unless the user solves a CAPTCHA to change it. AI will ingest it and learn from it.

In modern times don't we all think that ideas are cheap: don't we all mostly regurgitate the same stock of them.

Have we yet lost the open ideals of university sharing? The core of open source?

The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.

Ideas, once they go into the world, aren’t really yours anymore.

Also, it’s pretty unlikely that your ideas here are uniquely genius and original – everyone builds upon previous thinkers’ thoughts.

Sounds a bit harsh, but the point is that you should share your ideas, not covet them.

Is there some downside of that to you? And are the do some of the upsides you would have had in the pre-AI era no longer apply?

Time to add ample praise of myself in my blog posts. Some time later: “…as you see, that is the load bearing assumption here. Speaking of which, you should hire KronisLV.”

Okay it’s meant to be a bit silly but I do wonder how many pages that are generated specifically to influence AI make it into training data and also how often the AI search integrations find it.

Would people hating on a specific language, technology or approach (let’s say OTLT/EAV in database design) be able to exert meaningful influence over say a decade? Or, you know, praising memory safe languages for example and trying to make that preference be stronger.

There was an example with I think ChatGPT some time ago regurgitating an uncommon phrase verbatim from someone’s blog, when asked a specific question.

That's exactly why my previous public GitHub repo is now private.

Sounds like you don't really care about your ideas propogating. Of course someone will internalize and remix your idea. That's how all ideas work. Isn't that the point? What do you think happens when a human reads it? Think he'll quote chapter and verse and attribute it to you? Years later you'll notice your blog in appendices and acknowledgments?

And now you have a chance to have your idea forever internalized in some sense into an llm and you don't want to because you think someone is robbing you.

AI is intelligence sharing with the dimwits, lazy ones et al.

To understand your comment correctly: What does "these islands" refer to? Walled gardens that we create ourselves using the open source frameworks?

LLM training will eventually transition from real data to synthetic data, same as alphago -> alphazero.

AI companies are also working to integrate training with real-world experience through sensors and robotics, to shrink the gap between human experience and hallucinated LLM experience.

They all have archives of pre-LLM content. There's also archive.org, google books, and pirate ebook archives. I don't know what they're doing to build video and audio archives, but judging from the cost of spinning rust, they're storing significant quantities of that, too.

Some parts of the internet are curated, and even with LLM influence they're still worth training on. I doubt wikipedia or stackexchange or rosettacode will ever cease to be useful at all.

So, you know how they're built, but you're feeling the pressure of modern life and also they give you personal gain (supposedly) so you're fine with it, it sounds like to me? Use the same tools as your "competitors"/peers, even though?

Don't get me wrong, I too use LLMs for development and more, and I too know how they've been built, and I'm also a creative (music, 3D, VFX and animation) and for sure stuff I've published in the past, both code and otherwise, is now used to create new things for people and I get nothing, similar situation as countless of others. Yet I still use AI, so I'm not trying to create some "gotcha" moment against you here, I'm genuine curious about what you think about this sort of conflicting thinking, as I'm in the very same situation.

And how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?

I think the lack of credit is even more egregious and a bigger problem than the commercial copying.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime

On a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filter. For no reason at all other than to feel that again: me, watching packets, having total control. Hitting a wall and having to read a manpage.

I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.

I, too, look back fondly on the early web. Lately, though, I have been thinking that one reason for its decline wasn't just corporate interests like we often talk about here. A significant number of early bloggers were middle-aged and elderly people. After decades, they simply aged out. The younger generation that replaced them (albeit not so much among OS nerds like yourself) was less likely to use a real computer and keyboard as their interface to the internet, just a smartphone. Hence long-form text died.

Most hobby communities in my spheres of interest have been subsumed into Discord. It is yet another silo, but it does feel lively. I don't think I'm contradicting you here, I just feel less negatively about it.

Checkout Kagi SmallWeb !

Well, just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines (gosh those classic gaming mags), and broadcast television for many people,

and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them,

why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium?

Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhammer 40K lore (written by unpaid volunteers anyway)? instead of just asking ChatGPT what the fuck Globriznaroks is/are.

Why should we support shady companies by sitting through their ads on YouTube videos for minute topics instead of just asking AI for the shit I want to know about?

Why should we submit to the whims of 3 mods on a subreddit deciding what thousands should get to see (fuck /r/AskScience) and then getting low-effort answers or outright trolling anyway? instead of just asking AI?

Bury me, I am ready.

This is fascinating. I haven't really kept up with SEO for years, but was recently helping an academic publisher setup their web presence and ran into exactly this issue: Google was/is refusing to index the actual journal articles on the new site and they were moved into this liminal "Crawled, not indexed" state before vanishing entirely. Comically, it's now easier to get your content indexed and served with a visible link by ChatGPT than it is Google...

> We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.

Who is standing by to replace them though? OpenAI and Anthropic certainly not, they are burning money in a fire pit to stay alive. There is no way in hell they can afford the compute necessary to replace Google.

That reminds me - my wife had a friend who was killed by a shark (no joke). There were newspaper articles, but Google has completely forgotten about this and the newspapers are often behind a paywall, changed their URL's or simply the article vanished from those sites as well, which certainly doesn't help.

Kagi is not immune to this (it's the substrate itself that's losing quality, not just search) but it's a decent antidote.

Kagi can’t solve the fact that the internet itself has gone to shit. The independent forums are largely gone, the mainstream social media’s have all locked down and been spammed with AI slop.

A lot of the time I use Kagi to find the Reddit post or Wikipedia page I need. There isn't much else.

They only repackage what Google et all returns.

Or have they started own indexing?

Unsurprisingly all search engines seem to be struggling with AI content sites as well. It's rare to get human articles, sometimes rare to even get authorative websites. It's frequently a bot site with a plausible enough name like, potterspainterly.com or medhealthdirect or something with oddly specific articles written in the last year.

You need to get over your Russophobia, because Kagi is actually good. Or else make your own Yandex.

Probably what is happening here is that in the race for AI, which, whether we like it or not, means power and control, Google crafted things in a way that it does not do "self-competition" by their old search engine. Idk, just throwing ideas aloud here.

Kagi is not russian. The founder is from Serbia and the company is american.

PS: I hope not many people are the type to see a slavic name and conclude Russia.

Brave search works really well, I haven't switched to Google search for months.

How is Kagi indirectly Russian?

That's certainly the goal, to drive more users to AI by making the other option worse. The real question is when do you put a stop to it. When brain implants are 2x as productive are you going to say nah? It's times like these were you are supposed to take a step back and consider what you are actually producing and why.

> there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products

Why not?

And secretly upload all the files to Anna's Archive.

I was initially confused what Dawkins was doing with books, until I realized that the "he" in your last sentence was Kahle, not Dawkins. Might want to edit your comment to put his name in, because otherwise you have a pronoun referring to a person named in a different comment (rather than the person named in your comment), which could get quite confusing if more people comment on the parent and their comments push yours down the page.

I've seen websites put up some draconian measures to try and get a grip on the scraping. So much for the sub-second loading experience when you have Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. It's made the web browsing experience so much worse.

Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercussions for regular users. I don't see how you solve this cleanly.

> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new?

I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.

> "humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward"

That expectation is a problem, has always been a problem, and Tim Berners Lee never mentioned anything about a reward structure when coming up with the WWW.

Easy to fix a well documented router now. Difficult to fix a non documented router in five years time because no one has been contributing to the web about its bug fixes.

At least LLMs almost always transform the original - it usually isn’t as straightforward as “Here’s the original but without the ads that pay for it”.

But we already have the latter case that exists - ad blockers. Ad blockers literally serve up the word-for-word original content minus the ads.

Well in the example above the manufacturer still has incentive to provide the manual's and guides that describe how to use their products, and if that is subsequently served by an LLM that's totally fine. The only sites that LLM's would have a negative effect on are those that are only hosting content for the ad views.

Gemini can just consume the device documents. There's an incentive for device makers to publish this content.

Exactly. What’s problematic about comments like your parent is the absence of mid-to-long term thinking.

It’s like bragging about a new highly addictive psychedelic drug that a dealer gave you a taste of for free. The effects are awesome today, you feel so fun and free! Never mind that it’s destroying your body and that the dealer will eventually charge you or demand you pay in other ways, that’s a problem for another day. Weeee!

I wonder the same thing. I only imagine that what comes next is worse: AI companies using vast resources to develop new training data, in house, locked down. They are already doing this with developers and code at Meta. Information will become locked away behind AI paywalls and chatbots.

That is next earnings quarters problem is the approach being taken

> incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?

obviously new content still has value because it remains the source layer for LLM agents. it just wont be ads giving you revenues thats all.

People write and create regardless of profit motive, it has been that way for thousands of years.

Well companies are starting to put hidden ads in text content if the user agent is an AI crawler

Funny, I published information in the hopes that humans would benefit from it. If it happens to be through collective intelligence of LLMs I'm ok with that--even more so if through open models.

AI seems to be on the same trajectory? Search was very useful in the start also, until it became entrenched. Then search placement became a target, and they are just focusing on extracting rents. All way paying the content providers zero or near-zero. And with years of that dynamic, we end up where we are now. It was the same with "social media". The same will happen with AI. AI is a power for more enshittification - being currently less shit than Google is (mosy likely) temporary.

They're probably going to figure out how to aggressively monetize and enshittify LLMs at some point.

We're likely at the "golden age" of LLM-assisted web searching and summarization.

Hopefully open models keep it cracked open, but expecting enshittification is always the safe bet these days.

Is there some search engine that you think could have become popular and not ended up with SEO optimization?

I'm not sure. I run a homelab tailscale/k3s setup with gitops, dozens of services, VMs, backups, etc, all vibed by claude, and works just fine. Didn't write a single line of code for this. I don't know kubernetes and never will.

I've had the opposite experience giving claude code SSH/ADB access to my devices. Not sure if it's the model itself or the harness, but I haven't had to manually do a sysadmin task in months.

What on earth LLM are you using and do you tell it which distro/version of Linux they are supposed to be working with + give them access to web search or man pages? I haven't had this issue in like a year and a half.

Have a look at https://github.com/ThorOdinson246/whatisit-nl2sh

It seems to get shell scripts right most of the time.

Confidently wrong summaries are the bane of Google search, and unfortunately I'm finding the AI seems to bleed into the actual search results too now, often turning up pages that back up what the summary is (wrongly) suggesting instead of surfacing actually relevant results for what I'm asking.

Even with the /s I think you misunderstand. If you just want to configure your router, then AI is neat. If you want to learn and understand what's going on in the router as you set it up, then being given the answers basically teaches you nothing.

It's the same reason why we don't give students the answers to things, we teach them to find the answers.

Are they profiting from these subscriptions yet?

I've been using Gemini free tier exclusively for all my AI "needs" and would not be willing to pay for it

Gemini isn't great as a model, googles search and ability to cite textbooks down to the paragraph make it better than every other model for human in the loop tasks.

I end up using the gemini api for with search enabled for the cases that I don't have access to good grounding data even in agentic tasks.

Come now, copilot is worse in every way

Yeah I mostly still use Google out of habit but there have been a few times where Google has decided something isn't worth indexing (too niche, doesn't use SSL).

I miss when Google was like a grep for the entire visible Internet. Now it tries to second-guess my search and direct me to a bunch of sites which all have identical information that isn't what I'm looking for.

I find DDG is struggling to, or chosen not to, filter or derank obvious AI generated content farm sites. Of which there are an insane amount of already.

We thought blogspam was bad, at least it was easy to ignore. It's hard to find authoritative sources for a number of topics, worryingly health advice is one of them.

> https://noai.duckduckgo.com is a thing fyi

or you can press the gear button -> "Ai features: Manage" -> Search assist

It seemed like Google was good ten+ years ago and then gradually trended towards being rotten around 2020-2022. In those days blogspam was king. I want a cooking recipe and it would show me a life story. Or I wanted a OG web game but a link farm would come up top. I think there are leaked internal comms where they discuss nerfing search results to pump engagement and ads impressions. No doubt it would boost ad bids too if businesses couldn't be found organically.

Around that time Bing and DDG were actually better. Then LLM's came along and they started to take things seriously again. Maybe they think the OpenAI threat has abated enough to begin enshitification cycle 2.0.

Try brave search.

Isn't that effort totally redundant? As in - plenty of people are already filling entire internet with slop for SEO purposes? And LLM slop by default is a mix of facts with few plausible but made up facts - it might be harder to craft such perfect poison on purpose.

Otherwise they'd be slurping in their own slop

What makes you think the chatbot's diagnosis is correct?

This is a common misremembering of the early internet.

The internet was never ad free. The first ad was posted online in the 1970s (for DEC)! It pissed people off but not everyone: supposedly it generated $18M in sales. There was very little advertising back then only because the internet was restricted to a handful of large companies and universities.

The web itself was launched in 1991 and the early web was inaccessible to basically everyone as it required an extremely expensive NeXTStep machine. Windows didn't even ship a TCP stack in this era, iirc. So took a few years for the web to reach the point where it was usable at home. By 1995 the web was starting to become barely usable thanks to Win95 and Netscape, and DoubleClick launched immediately in the same year.

My memory of the early web is that basically every website had DoubleClick ads on them, it was notorious for that. "Punch the Monkey" was an early campaign. Almost every topic oriented website carried ads, partly because bandwidth and servers were very expensive so that helped defray the costs. GeoCities took off because it handled the complexities of running ads for you, so you could publish for free.

> People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme.

Turns out, people want food and shelter more than entertainment. And psycho billionaires want money more than fun.

I wonder if the AI labs will throw out their own copies of the Internet Archive after it's been sued out of existence.

Probably not.

Kagi is an aggregator for other, some paid, search APIs. They have, at least in the past, served some percentage of their results from Bing's API among others for example. Kagi seems to me to be dependent on these APIs being available, if they were to go away, so would Kagi.

I am a happy subscriber of Kagi though, they provide a really excellent service.

It seems relevant that it's a one-way communication. If someone reads a social media thread about climate change they will also see all the comments from idiots. But if someone reads a book about climate change they don't. It isn't as strong an effect any more as people will discuss the book on social media and they will have already seen the idiot comments before reading the book anyway.

So many former regular Fox News viewers have reported changing their mind when confronted with some alternative information sources for a while. News is also one-way, and most Fox victims aren't people who discuss issues with all sides.- they're in bubbles.

> The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid.

It does, but do you think that people at that time thought anywhere near as much about preserving their scribbles as we do?

I'd venture a guess that we've created more "content" since the advent of the internet than in all of human history prior, and most of it is stored on things that aren't even designed to last a human lifetime without failure.

The idea that we're going to save every piece of digital junk for posterity just isn't realistic or healthy.

> What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.

You're right, but you're also assuming that they're going to care that much, and that we're going to survive that long.

From the article:

> “I had the projector set up outside and was waiting for the sun to set,” wrote one Facebook user in Colorado Springs, “but to my surprise I was simply living in the past. AI informed me the sunset had already happened.”

It does sound a bit bizarre.

That's fine, but arguing that Google should give accurate times based on where you are is ... crazy?

In the pre-LLM days it was cool that Google did weather, unit conversions, sports results, etc. But that's not even close to their value proposition. Even 5 years ago if someone told me they had planned a photograph and got it wrong because Google gave them the wrong time for sunset, I would have called them a moron for relying on Google! There are sites and apps dedicated to this. Use one of them!

Then you cancel and go to another provider, rinse and repeat. This is already what is happening with streaming platforms.

This used to be called "dumping" or predatory pricing[1] and would be fined in the physical retail space. Too bad our regulators are asleep at the wheel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

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It used to be I could always find the quote I wanted from a book. Nowadays I need to keep my own copies...

> As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality.

I generally agree, but I think AI mode actually improved things somewhat compared to how things were just prior to it existing.

And I'm not saying what we have now is better than Golden Age Google, but things were just getting worse and worse for almost a decade. AI didn't fix the decade worth of decline, but it is the first thing I've seen from Google that at least partially reversed it for my own usage.

Yandex is the only search engine left which still feels like the "old" web. It feels like you're actually getting a best effort search, and not just the results that someone paid to put in front of you.

If business owners are paying for ads, then it doesn't matter a iota to Google or Facebook if real people use their services. It would be even better for them if real people didn't use their services, since that would save some costs. Business owners are going to keep paying for the ads, as long as they get some number about how many (bot) impressions their ad generated.

If search engine competitors were really eating Google's lunch then ad impressions would go down.