Sometime in the last two months I noticed myself going straight to ChatGPT, and Gemini flash when my free credits ran out. And ocasionally some Reddit threads.
I just purchased a monitor, from among the cheaper 4K 27" ones I could find. I’m in India, so they may not be the same models you’d get in places like the USA: maybe the situation is better there. When trying to compare them, or even find reviews of them, I could not find anything useful through a search engine. Exactly zero useful things. Not a single review of my four candidates. Oh, a couple of video “reviews” probably in Hindi… but I have learned to utterly scorn that category as consistently devoid of content; and a couple of “review” sites… with only copies of the first-party marketing material.
This part of the web seems to be just dead.
As for LLMs, well, I’m sceptical that they actually are all that much better: where is the information coming from? I’m deeply suspicious that they just look better. It’s well-established that they’re magnificent at conning.
For my own experience, I’ve tried DuckDuckGo’s Assist a few times, which is GPT-4o, and I haven’t been impressed with it. Almost everything it comes up with is superficial, or wrong.
Even if you search for english reviews.
I don't think "AI" will help at all with this since it's trained on the same polluted space.
Anything an LLM came up with was superficial and/or suspect.
Before bed in a box was a thing I built my own. 4” of high density foam base, 3” of med density latex, 2” of low density latex on top. I swapped out the top layer a few years back, but the core is still going strong ~14 years in, and it’s still my favorite bed I’ve slept on.
One tip is you’ll want some kind of cover for your latex, since long term exposure to air will cause it to degrade.
Again, this was 14 years ago, no idea if the product quality has fallen off or there’s a better place to get it now.
Being truly critical of any product would reduce their chances of getting merch, trips, and other gifts from brands.
So we just get more losers and no winners
No win for the website creators
But hey ! Now you can ask ChatGPT, Copilot or whatever for the same thing !
We are surounded
A good example of how this spawned articles that are absolutely useless: https://www.partitionwizard.com/news/
All those articles have nothing to do with application they're trying to sell, but they do (did) bump the pagerank.
Many companies do this, which has polluted search results for issues to the most common denominator, making it impossible to find that 1 post that actually has a working solution.
And now we've reached the next stage, those pages are no longer written by humans, but entire websites are being generated for the purpose of selling you stuff.
I was searching for the name of the bitter part in a peanut, and stumbled upon this website:
https://www etprotein com/parts-of-a-peanut-anatomy-of-a-nutty-snack/
We have entered a situation where there is no longer 'no answer', there is always some answer out there, simply to sell you stuff.
In the past if you searched for Brand X at Retailer Y, and they didn't carry it, you'd get no results. Now they autocomplete Brand X's name, and show you a whole bunch of products related to Brand X, with no indication that they don't carry it.
Difficult to find anyoone who will acknowledge this given the amount of mooney involved.
One search engine website pitched itself as having a mission to "organize the world's information". However search != organisation. The information the company was searching did not belong to them. It was outside their control. It generally remains disorganised.
The mission was actually to copy the world's information, intermediate access to it and sell advertising services.
The company did not sell "organising services" to information publishers. It sold online advertising services to advertisers.
Intermediating access to information was nothing more than a tactic to asemble audiences for advertising. The mission was to sell online advertising services.
Organising information for web publication is still an unsolved problem. (The problem of vast amount of disorganised information on the web remains unsolved.) Information that is organised is more easily searched. If organised well-enough, it can be generally be browsed without searching.
Utrustworthy, unethical coomputer nerds found ways to make money from the disorganisation. They became wealthy and were celebrated as being "successful". ^1 As such, it is difficult to find anyone who will acknowledge that relying on "search", where the algorithm is properietary, secret and can be still gamed by "SEO", etc., was deeply flawed. Flawed not in the sense of it offered no opportunity for making money. Flawed in the sense it ultimately does not work well for locating the information sought by the searcher.
If the wealth from intermediating access to information via "search" begins to dry up, then perhaps the fundamental flaws of web search will (again^2) be acknowledged.
1. NB. No one has been successful in organising the information published on the web.
2. As they were in the 1990s when one search project claimed (falsely) it wanted to counter the effects of advertising on "search" and remain in "the academic realm" only to then become the dominant web advertising services company.
It makes sense that product searches might be effective because product infomation tends to be organised.
Otherwise those countries would be SO fucked! So you can rest assured that their governments have worked tirelessly to prevent that from happening.
I think I'm going to dream of riding flying pink chocolate unicorns tonight.
Face it, we depend on a global economy. Every now and then something changes, and we adapt.
Maybe it’ll be better this way.
I'm hoping that good webrings can hold the integrity of human networks on the web.
Today? Run just a plain Apache without a domain name, just a plain old IPv4 and listen on ports 80/443. In seconds you'll get hit by a barrage of exploit attempts, scanners, god knows what. And manage to get something successful, you'll get a few emails that say "pay us X dollars in BTC and we'll leave you alone", and if not you'll get booted off the net if you don't hide behind Cloudflare.
Discovery is also not a thing any more. The old "rings" have long since passed, RSS feeds went down the drain with Google Reader (IMHO, that decision effectively killed off the blogosphere), and Google Search got completely poisoned with SEO.
The Internet has become the Wild West. Law makers have begun to notice but unfortunately they're so utterly braindead that fierce opposition to their regulation attempts is the only choice possible, so nothing happens. Rinse and repeat.
I might be naive about getting hacked, but it's been up for 5 or 6 years now and nothing bad has happened.
Edit: actually closer to 12 years total now, wtf I'm aging?
Generally there has to be an ROI for someone to really want to go after you.
If you think you can hack this server, you probably can! Please don't. I've invited you into my home for tea; please don't break my dishes to show me why I should've kept them in a safe.
You're lucky it's that and not CSAM, a friend of mine had that happen and that took a lot of resources to properly clean up without him getting v& in the process.
That phrase struck me as odd. I had to reread the comment. I already associated the metaphor with the 1990s web others are lamenting as gone. They refer to the WW of content; “wild” referring to sparsely populated lands. Your WW is “wild” or diverse lawlessness, vandalism and unruly (human) behavior. I suppose both are true—were true.
https://172.93.49.252/settings
This website has some forgotten www features that are becoming rare thanks to Big Tech, Big CDNs, and their followers:
1. It does not require SNI (SNI was added to TLS in 2003)
2. It publishes a stable IP address. See https://172.93.49.252/submit/
One can use an IP address _or_ a domain name (any domain name will work) to reach it
3. It is available via HTTP as well as HTTPS
For old time's sake, try requesting via HTTPS and then HTTP and see if you notice a speed difference
To get a starting list of potential web sites, freely available DNS zone files (public information) remain available
Every major www search engine has used these files at some point
People often refer to DNS as the internet's "phone book"
If that is true, then DNS queries are "directory assistance"
The actual phone book is the zone files
Perhaps we need a wiby.me for DNS to select from all those NS and A records that go undiscovered
djbdns has a program called "random-ip"
random-ip|sed 1q
This can often lead to a discovering random website
The type of website that is worthless to so-called "tech" companies and their online surveillance advertising "business model"
Large amount of content has already moved behind walled gardens. AI is going to kill blogs etc. That doesn't leave much. Bit of niche stuff like lemmy/bluesky/hn I guess?
Both are however in line with my personal experience and observations regarding how people around me are using the web now.
I find myself using web crawling in LLMs a lot more, and search a lot less. My reasoning follows, and I think most people would agree.
- When I’m looking for some relatively obscure information which I’m not sure where to find or which would require hours of research for me to find, I use ChatGPT (usually o3 with deep research) and refer to citations for more information regarding a topic. This saves me hours of investigating, which I usually don’t have for something that’s just a curiosity. A friend also used deep research to find papers highly relevant to a topic he was working on for his med PhD in minutes, claiming that just searching through PubMed to find such papers would take him days - and probably less successfully.
- When I’m looking for something specific in regards to a topic I’m relatively familiar with, I use search (usually Kagi, unless at work where it is banned!) to quickly find reference material.
- LLMs (and engines like Kagi) let you skip through the SEO spam you’d usually skip through when using Google, as well as letting you search more easily (due to better natural language understanding than classical query engines). The quality of search results had been diminishing for years (geeks4geeks ranks higher than SO on Google), so it’s not surprising people turn to tools which produce better results. It’s like being shocked that people are driding cars instead of riding donkeys.
A particular example is that I looked up a DTC that my car was throwing. I googled it first, and got a results page consisting of forums that said nothing, paywalled generated sites that also didn’t provide any info, scammy Scribd clones hosting diagnostic manuals for the wrong car model and ad-ridden garbage sites that just claimed “oh it could be anything, just take it to a mechanic”. ChatGPT gave me an exact (and correct) answer in seconds.
This is an expected result of what we have done to the web, and it should surprise nobody. I’m only sad that genuine, small online communities are dying in favour of walled gardens, but that’s an entirely separate discussion.
I need to switch everything to a font with crossbars on the upper case I.
In this case, the organic content will lose against the invading crawlers, either way. If they build a fort against the bots, they go undergound and remain unseen by their customers. If they don't mind bots, bot summaries would become those forts, with the same effect.
So ultimately the websites have to realize that bots are the only customers they can expect. Humans are long gone, as no human would ever need to click a link, if they are fed with the summary walls.
To realize this, start a blog and see how tough it is to get any meaningful attention to your great content.
essentially whats happening here is that LLMs have removed the NLP barrier to automating information flow. thats what agentic systems are under the hood, once you realize alot of the "agentic" stuff boils rule-based engines and hand built state machines. and it will be until the next AI winter gives us proper dynamic modelling of an envirenment, rather than static next token prediction
i think RAG replacing the traditional reverse indexing will mean information wont be tightly linked to webpages anymore. meaning no ad revenue and SEO dying. which i think is good for the internet, because ad revenue just encourages information rent-seeking. this obviously assumes AI RAG is reliable.
i think without the ad revenue profit motive, information needs to be generated some other way. journalists and bloggers need to be supported somehow. crowdsourcing like patreon and stuff could help, but that just shifts the capitalism from optimizing for sensationalist clicks, to optimizing for cult of personality, which i think will become the norm for information generation unfortunately. everyone will have to make content, rather than news to do this for a living.
but i think that wont have the pull that ad revenue does. so i think information generation shifts alot more to amateur bloggers and taxfunded government mouthpeices
for actual services, i think we get more supercharged APIs like MCPs and that makes economic activity much less frictionless. its hard to know if this will just be a quantitative change or an evolutionary one
ones this is the labour displacement. how would all the people who were doing the jobs caused by the impossibility of NLP automation make a living? i think going back to the idea the "agentic" is just rule based engines with automated NLP, which is similar to coding (which is just making rule based engines with automated Formal Language Processing) i think "prompting" (designing, implementing and maintaining rule based engines in natural language) will become the new coding (which, again, was the same thing but making rule based engines in formal languages). essentially LLMs are just the next evolution of compilers, and people will learn to use them as such.
what i have no idea about is what sort of evolutionary change this will bring up, the way compilers brought when they replaced writing machine code. i think formal language programming will still be done by people, like machine code is still written, but the newly unlocked natural language coders will far outnumber them. so then what will be unlocked by this higher level of programming? like what will be the internet of the LLM era?
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