Really happy for you. It's disheartening how many people put off or choose not to have kids because they think some combination of climate disaster, famine, overpopulation, war or skynet will ensure a life of misery for their children.

There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.

That's the same conclusion I reached.

I'll keep publishing static websites, so I don't even have to worry about load and CPU usage. I don't care who reads it, the value for me is in writing.

I still haven't changed my mind on the "shall I have kids" problem :P

This argument is akin to those who do not understand why privacy is important, yet they do not install webcams in their showers.

"ideas are cheap" was one of the most succesful psyops of all time, so unbelievably wrong

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

Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.

ideas, sure - "i think we should build an open source OS."

ideas + execution - not really - (Linus Torvalds sharing his work on Linux and that taking off)

We don't want to share our thoughts, ideas, feelings and art with machines. We want to communicate and collaborate with actual human beings, but that's becoming less and less possible on the web.

Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.

"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.

But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.

That's why you don't share them, until comes a time when the ideabringers gets the money and recognition they deserve. Until then, good luck going knee deep in the sewers of ideas.

Yes - previously there was some chance someone reading the ideas on the blog would contact the author to thank them, or ask them to collaborate.

When laundered via LLMs whose pretraining destroys all credit, that can't happen.

he's missing out on any attention that his shared thoughts would bring? and all benefits that might bring if he's good at what he does.

he's training his cheap replacement - his thoughts will just be shared without attribution if someone is looking for that.

A lot of blogging especially in the tech space is driven by recruiting (startup blogs), or establishing a reputation as a thought leader (personal blogging, LinkedIn). So there were upsides that are now gone.

The downside, as stated in the message, is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content. It's not a direct harm in itself, but feels very tragedy of the commonsy

Is there some downside to the slave who is housed and fed for free? Are there any upside he would have were he not property of another man?

So only GitHub Copilot can read it then? Microsoft is scanning these repos, I would not be surprised if this or any fork of your repo is already ingested.

I think probably things along the lines of what's been called the 'cozy web': networks of smaller groups that don't publish to or expect responses from effectively the entire internet as a whole. (This kind of thing has always existed, it's basically the group chat with your friends but perhaps slightly bigger, but I think there's a bit of a trend of focusing on it more because of the feeling that the twitter/facebook attention and feed model is bad for your mental health. I've always felt the twitter model especially was pretty cursed so I'm glad there's some agreement building there).

It's still a work in progress of an idea.

I'm thinking more like mesh networks. I spoke of Reticulum elsewhere in this thread, but here I'm thinking I'd like the ability to easily join multiple TCP/IP networks (islands of connectivity) by social group (my friends) or by interest (pirate file-sharing group, my work intranet, a knitting community with their own IRC server, FTP, etc.).

Basically easy-to-use private & encrypted LAN overlays on top of the public internet. Each operator decides who to allow in or kick out of the network.

Wireguard solves the most of technical challenges, but it needs a frontend. The biggest concern probably is most software broadcasts their stuff across all interfaces, defeating the point of isolation between networks.

Because the photographer builds trust, over years, by not manipulating their images using AI. All trust is erased if anyone spots the manipulation.

With photos, I could see a cryptographic solution. Of course it would still need some kind of centralized trust, but it's doable if people cared enough. It could be applied by cameras themselves.

Disclosure

Yes. Some communities are weirdly against giving credit or keeping the credit (e.g. cropping off signatures from artwork), which I've never understood. It costs nothing.

What is the great crime behind Norway's sovereign wealth fund?

May I suggest you to look into mesh networks? I am a huge fan of Reticulum. Using it feels like being a pioneer, the scene is very welcoming.

The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow further.

https://reticulum.network/

That movie is ridiculous and still great. At least as a nostalgia pump.

And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.

"Let's echo 23, see what's up"

While we're here exchanging old man stories, I remember the web before blogs existed! I guess we can organize the internet into these eras, each of which was in some sense harder and more expensive to find available info than in the previous:

1. Pre-web. Internet is mostly about messages sent to individuals or groups. USENET organizes group discussion into browseable topic-oriented hierarchies, IRC does the same but with lists in fragmented networks. If the discussion exists at all, finding it is easy.

2. Early web. Dominated by topic focused websites, early online shops and personal home pages. Search engines suck and face strong competition from manually maintained topic-oriented directories (did anyone else here contribute to DMoz?), content discovery is mutual and webmasters help each other out by joining "web rings". DoubleClick and AdSense start to funnel small amounts of money to creators, but it's enough to offset hosting costs and in many cases can make web hosting effectively free or even yield a small profit. This encourages an explosion of website creation. Discussion moves off USENET onto phpBB forums. Every organization decides it's a cultural imperative to have a presence on the information superhighway. Finding information is easy as long as you can figure out what topic it belongs to.

3. Blogging and centralization era. The internet starts to rebuild itself around people as the primary object, not the topic or category. Directories die because websites can no longer be categorized by content. Web rings die for the same reason. IRC is replaced by instant messengers that are about connecting people with pre-existing friends, not mutual interest groups. Outside of institutional websites that exist to promote the organization, things become hard to find without highly centralized search engines because nobody is putting any effort into organizing or indexing what they write anymore: maybe you get a few tags if you're lucky. Spam, hacking and lack of SSO causes forums to centralize onto Reddit. This is the peak of the search engine era because you are forced to use Google to find anything. The power eventually corrupts the tech firms and they begin political censorship to benefit the left in 2015 [1]. Enormous amounts of information is deliberately made unfindable as part of a large-scale programme of social control.

4. Social media era. All the same problems as blogging except now the bulk of the content goes behind login walls that stop search engines from surfacing them. Video and podcasts start to matter more, both of which are unsearchable by default. Eventually video completely dominates, as few younger people want to read when they could watch instead. Firefox starts to replace IE6, and then Chrome. They bring ad blockers in their wake which starts to choke off ad revenues, so many websites from the web's first era go unmaintained and eventually offline. This is somewhat but not entirely compensated by the falling cost of web hosting. Social media remains because it puts people's faces next to everything, allowing clout farming and viral notoriety that can sometimes be monetized by becoming an influencer. The only part of the web's first era that really survives into this era is Wikipedia and Reddit, which by this time substitute monetary rewards for power tripping by a small group of ideologically driven moderators.

5. AI era. Information is so heavily scattered over so many tiny sourcelets and search engines have become sufficiently useless that full neural integration of knowledge is required, with LLMs issuing massively parallel and complex search engine queries as a backstop.

What can we predict for the AI era? Institutional websites will remain because institutions still have an interest in getting their agenda into LLMs, but visual redesign efforts will largely cease as traffic stats seen by executives show visits completely dominated by AI. There will be lots of conversations of the form, "why redesign our website to look more modern when 99% of traffic is AI which won't care?" Blogs will go the same way as the thematic websites they killed, disappearing as the authors age out. A lot of effort will be put into finding ways to block AI crawlers to create 'human only' spaces, especially by social media firms, but these will fail because AI will just be integrated directly into browsers and become unblockable - and anyway, the incentives to create will be ignored. ChatGPT style text oriented interfaces will last until inferencing capacity catches up, being eventually replaced by voice interaction and on the fly video generation for nearly all users.

Where we go from here is hard to say. Content creation was most pure in the web's first era, where people with knowledge were incentivized to share it with the world by the promise of a bit of fame combined with ad clicks to offset hosting costs. Ad blockers, social media and AI killed that world. You could however bring it back by producing a new platform that isn't like the web, one where AI and search engines are blocked via technological means (e.g. confidential computing). How much anyone would actually enjoy such a web is unclear.

[1] https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter...

This is better for you as an individual, but worse for society as a whole. As you've noticed, monetization is the weak spot. AI will not escape being ruined by monetization, but it might be harder to notice when it arrives.

Where is the information going to come from though? LLMs aren't primary sources, they consume and regurgitate.

I love Kagi, I am a paid user since day 1, but SmallWeb is a collection of English-speaking tech blogs, it cannot even begin to compete in diversity with the GeoCities era of the web. (to be fair: I've had Kagi employees telling me their dataset is growing larger and more diverse every day, so worth keeping an eye on it)

Sometimes I use Marginalia's "Vintage Web" search for niche topics; most results are dead blogs and old .edu personal websites that someone forgot to delete, still a vanishing minority of anything one could find in 2001.

If ChatGPT goes bust, they'll find another ChatGPT, not another Google. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see a popular competitor from China in the years to come. TikTok already took social media by storm, something nobody thought that was possible either.

I wonder how libraries, who have traditionally been the ones to archive the news, have kept up with everything moving online and now being subscription-holed. Hopefully it's not just the Internet Archive doing this, which has its own problems.

This is the root problem. The idea that Google is deliberately sabotaging search seems far less likely than the idea that the internet is mostly garbage and SEO slop.

Kagi pays Yandex for data. Yandex is definitely Russian.

If I recall correctly Brave scrapes the web via their users, cannot be individually disallowed in robots.txt and Brandon Eich is conversing in a pretty hostile manner in every thread about him or his company.

Thank you for your suggestion. I think I've discounted Brave automatically because my brain is numb to the dime-a-dozen chromium browsers out there. I'll definitely give the search a try!

They are repackaging bunch of search engine results, including Yandex (and paying for it).

Yandex is Russian.

I would not describe it as Kagi being indirectly Russian.

In my case: Russian state is my direct enemy and most likely to invade my country. And would do it if they would consider success likely.

Previous wars with Russia were obnoxious with very bad consequences, so I dislike idea of even very indirectly funding them.

And I support actions that are harmful to Russian economy, also when they are harmful to me - as long as it is not too badly balanced. As this is much cheaper than directly participating in war.

(I am from Poland)

PS

Yes, I understand that at some point there are some indirect effects that you cannot avoid.

I also understand if for some people paying Kagi that pays tiny fraction of that to Yandex that is paying taxes in Russia which funds their wars is too tenuous connection to care.

> Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human.

Yep. IMO, this is so far the biggest AI-inflicted damage to the web. A bit of anecdata - wikipedia (and all other wikimedia sites) are blocking my Firefox since about a week, with a "please respect our bot policy" message. Outright block, not even a captcha.

It took me a while to figure out they don't like me disabling some SSL ciphers, so now "JA4 browser fingerprint" is not matching user-agent. Funnily enough curl (what I would imagine a bot would use) pulls exact same URLs from exact same client IP, just fine.

Sure - it sucks, unfortunately the alternative is the sites going away entirely. When the load from scraper bots is constantly knocking the site offline the choices are literally to allow it to remain inaccessible for much of the time, put up a layer of defenses with all the user-annoyance compromises that entails, or just give up and unpublish the site.

Cloudflare specifically has a block for LLM and AI training bots now.

Not sure of the effectiveness but it's there.

Me, I'm just scraping the parts of the internet I like, toying with local LLMs… ready really to just shove off.

Your thinking too narrowly about the reward. Sometimes, it's just about the getting the knowledge out there that's motivating the creator, not anything tangible for themselves.

  javascript: `This should be "You're thinking".` ; 
  // to preserve the original character use and to avoid '...'...' parse foos
  // however `"...".` also possibly deserves a [sic] to critique the original 
  // i.e. ~grammar police say the period belongs within the quote marks, no?

Did the operators of HN mention anything about a reward structure for posting comments here? I'm sure you can see how that's still attractive to some.

The danger that's concerning people (rightly or wrongly) isn't that LLMs are going to be an intermediary to your website. It's that they'll be the only thing reading it. No one will ever read your post or know what you wrote. The only consumers will be LLMs, they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author (probably more due to expedience than any sort of malice; it's not like you're famous, are you?), and your idea might get embedded into a set of model weights somewhere. No human will see a byte of it.

Are you actually saying you'd be OK with that?

I mainly shared my projects for learning, discussion and bragging rights.

LLMs just use everything, generate similar code with no attribution and keep users from visiting, so no bragging rights or attention.

Worse, there are some PRs that seem fully generated ...

So i mostly stopped sharing and started pulling my old repos offline.

At this pace, i don't want to compete with a clone of myself in the future that will do my work for much cheaper.

Your level of thinking is defined by ICD-10.

Yeah, authors don't want to be recognized as authors, they don't want any reward for their work, they don't want to amass pool of loyal readers, interact with them, etc.

All they want is for halucinating AI to take excerpts of their work and compile it with random sh!t.

GENIUS

There are different types of writing. If we depend on people writing because it's enjoyable at some level, we're going to lose writing that's important but also a bit tedious.

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

Sure. But you can see that for some people (myself included), writing for peers is part of the joy? And that if instead a megacorp places an opaque computer program between the author and the readers, that joy might be ruined?

There had always been some incentive for manufactures to publish device documentation, and yet it has often been quite lacking either in quality or overall existence. I doubt LLM/agents being the readers will change that at all. What I expect AI scraping and using without credit will impact is people publishing their own unofficial help and guidance, and the affect there is likely to be negative. It won't stop all of them, but enough to be noticeable. Another possible negative is the manufactures documentation being AI generated without sufficient review, so possibly more erroneous than before, or intentionally not producing full documentation at all and expecting AI to fill the gap (MS seems to be heading this way: pushing "ask copilot" all over Azure instead of links direct to good reference material). All this would add up to a situation that is somewhere between "a little worse than pre-AI" and "an absolute shit show".

Manuals don't always well explain how to use their products with everybody else's products because there are too many to do that. But there are lots of people trying things out and might figure out the fine details on how to make various things work. They then publish these how-to pieces (which exist no where else) to the internet, or at least they used to when there were incentives to do so.

> Funny, I published information in the hopes that humans would benefit from it.

Sure, humans would benefit.

It took them searching, reading themselves, maybe even understanding something in the process, to complete a 360° revolution of their squirrel cages in time T.

Now they can omit searching, skip reading to the regurgitated answer, throw away understanding, and complete a full revolution in T/N, where N is a heuristic value directly proportional to the amount of skin in the AI hype.

But the catch is that the squirrel cage must run non-stop still.

People are way less likely to write if there is no one to read it. And blog were also monkey see monley do - people seen other peoples blogs and got inspired.

When people wont see others blogs, they wont start writing own. When there will bw no ome to actually read it, they will go to do something else.

Actually no. The original copyright laws were created in part because of the realities of needed profit motive to have high value writing done, time consuming compilation work done. It was even titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The thousands of years writing you are talking about was often funded by patrons, who kept the output in their private libraries to show off (and maybe lend out) for prestige. It was a horrible limitation of knowledge and ideas. Much worse than the profit motive, copyright based system that came after that spawned a new age of knowledge in which everyone had cheap access, and those that didn't had access to the (no longer just private) libraries.

I'm sure the billionaire class would love a return to patronage based libraries, NDAs on authors of books, and the elitism they would feel with a return to private libraries locking away all kinds of knowledge that would happen if patronage become the only way authors could make money (such as with AI just regurgitating their works, or if the stupid 'do away with copyright' people got their way).

It's definitely temporary. Remember there are no ad blockers for LLMs.

For the free to use LLMs, for sure. But if I pay $20 monthly, why should they enshittify it?

One you pay for yourself !

Very happy with Kagi personally

Google did not really lost to optimization, they enshittified to make you spwnd more time on search (and see more ads)

> I don't know kubernetes and never will.

He said, proud of his own ignorance.

By default I use Leo, and I do specify the distro. I tried to qualify by version, but when I do that I lose out on a lot of correct information for things that haven't changed in awhile.

Guessing this is the relevant part: "worst AI model I ever used"

Copilot can use any model like Sol or Opus and is just a harness so not sure why people say this.

I know Google started deteriorating. It was in 2008 or 2009. Up until then Google would return 0 results if it couldn't find a document with all the words you specified.

Then it started serving synonyms, attempted to correct spelling, and so forth. Instead of serving up that there was 0 results, it attempted to be "helpful".

For a while, you could enable "verbatim" search, but even that has gotten corrupted.

Their search quality has deteriorated ever since that change. It is sad.

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