Fuck AI

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.

In the age of SEO and AI slop, may your niche hobby or interest never become trendy.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"?)

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.