Posted by speckx 1 day ago
I recently wrote about the dead internet https://punkx.org/jackdoe/zero.txt out of frustration.
I used to fight against it, I thought we should do "proof of humanity", or create rings of trust for humans, but now I think the ship has sailed.
Today a colleague was sharing their screen on google docs and a big "USE GEMINI AI TO WRITE THE DOCUMENT" button was front and center. I am fairly certain that by end of year most words you read will be tokens.
I am working towards moving my pi-hole from blacklist to whitelist, and after that just using local indexes with some datahorading. (squid, wikipedia, SO, rfcs, libc, kernel.git etc)
Maybe in the future we just exchange local copies of our local "internet" via sdcards, like in Cuba's Sneakernet[1] El Paquete Semenal[2].
Where are the explanations what all of them mean? What is (nothing) vs `maxi` vs `mini` vs `nopic`? What is `100` vs `all` vs `top1m` vs `top` vs `wp1-0.8`?
Mini is the introduction and infobox of all articles, nopic is the full articles with no pictures, maxi is full articles with (small) images. Other tags are categories (football, geography, etc.)
100 is the top 100 articles, top1m is top 1 million, 0.8 is (inexplicably) the top 45k articles.
My recommendation: sort by size and download the largest one you can accommodate in the language you prefer. wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08.zim is all wikipedia articles, with images, as of 2025-08 and it's a paltry 111G.
Kiwix publishes a library here, but it's equally unhelpful: https://library.kiwix.org/
I thought about this in another context and then I realized: what system is going to declare you're human or not? AI of course
In terms of proof reading, I just mean proof reading, not rewriting anything. especially not using the output verbatim for suggested fixes. And the author should ensure they retain their writing style & be assertive with their discretion on what corrections they should make.
I can't speak for the OP's experiences, but my early schooling years were marked by receiving a number of marked down or failing grades because my handwriting was awful, it still is, but at the time no matter what I did, I couldn't get my handwriting to stay neat. Writing neatly was too slow for my thoughts, and I'd get lost or go off topic. But writing at a pace to keep up with my thoughts turned my writing into barely understandable runes at best, and incomprehensible scribbles at worst. Even where handwriting wasn't supposed to count, I lost credit because of how bad it was.
At a certain point I was given permission to type all of my work. Even for tested material I was given proctored access to a type writer (and later computer). And my grades improved noticeably. My subjective experiences and enjoyment of my written school work also improved noticeably. Maybe I could have spend more years working on improving my handwriting and getting it to a place where I was just barely adequate enough to stop losing credit for it. Maybe I have lost something "essential" about being human because my handwriting is still so bad I often can't read my own scribblings. But I am infinitely grateful to have lived in a time and place where personal access to typing systems allowed me to be more fairly evaluated on what I had to say, rather than how I could physically write it.
I can imagine it’s hard to see the nuance if you’re ESL but it’s there.
It feels great to use. But it also feels incredibly shitty to have it used on you.
My recommendation. Just give the prompt. If if your readers want to expand it they can do so. don't pollute others experience by passing the expanded form around. Nobody enjoys that.
If I'm finding that voice boring, I'll stop reading - whether or not AI was used.
The generic AI voice, and by that I mean very little prompting to add any "flavor", is boring.
Of course I've used AI to summarize things and give me information, like when I'm looking for a specific answer.
In the case of blogs though, I'm not always trying to find an "answer", I'm just interested in what you have to say and I'm reading for pleasure.
I do understand the reasoning behind being original, but why make mistakes when we have tools to avoid them? That sounds like a strange recommendation.