Too late.

The good internet still exists, and is pretty damn good even now. The problem is social media and a handful of bad-but-popular sites.

I tell people this every so often, but in terms of percentage of the world population, there are far more people on the good internet than there were back then. The problem is, with the advent of smartphones, social media use exploded, and Facebook and Twitter became gigantic, far exceeding the size of the good web. Your aunts and uncles with little net savvy and a bucket of bad opinions swamped Facebook, and never really changed. The popular tech media, which tends to follow the biggest crowds to the exclusion of all else, began treating Facebook as if it were THE internet. It’s the tyranny of crowds.

Once it became evident that you could be successful by doing it, everyone started chasing the favor of those largely clueless users. Google began to prioritize a handful of websites like Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and their own Youtube, and largely gave up the fight against SEO abusers like Fandom. Sites that had been considered internet utilities decided to cash in.

There are still fun web games being made, if you know where to look for them (some places to look: Vole.wtf, Neal.fun, Ferry Halim’s long-running Orisinal and hey Newgrounds is still around). There are great free web hosts still, like Neocities and Nekoweb. (Although note, I just learned that Angelfire shut down in April.) A version of the old good Google still exists through the Web search option, a.k.a. udm14, but now there’s multiple other search engines that aren’t so bad. There is the Fediverse, of course. And if you look around you might find out about these awesome things called tildes, free Linux machines you can apply for a shell account on just to mess around, often with internal chat, bulletin boards, web space, community games and even weirder things like Gopher and Gemini (not Google Gemini) sites.

All these things exist. You just gotta know where to find them, amidst all the suck out there. They CAN be hard to find, but that’s one reason why I linked to some of them above. Seek out sources of links! Metafilter, the venerable community weblog, is one of them. A few other places to look: Andy Baio’s Waxy, Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs and even Mozilla’s own Ten Tabs. You can also find a good RSS reader to keep up with many websites at once.

It takes work to find things now, it is true, it takes the realization that you can’t be passive about finding the good things out there. But, truly, it’s always been like that. The good days of Google were an aberration. The natural order of the internet is, the great stuff has never been, and will never be mainstream.

The term came from Usenet, after AOL opened up internet access to its users.

Spotted a typo, it refers to “Apache Foundation’s OnlyOffice,” when that product is OpenOffice (as one can discover by following the link). This is different from the OnlyOffice mentioned earlier in the paragraph.

I verify this, some years ago when my laptop’s hard drive died, I installed Ubuntu Linux from a USB drive (with a live image on it) to a USB drive. It took a while for it to boot but it worked and I used it as my main machine for a couple of months.

But beyond that, there are Linux distros made specifically for running off of external media, Puppy Linux is an example.

I have an acquaintance (not sure if qualifies as a friend) who made news for getting fired for, when they were ill, asking an AI to get a quote out of an article for them, which it just out-and-out made up and got them fired. They aren’t stupid, but maybe a bit too trusting. The world lambasted them, which is a huge shame because they do really good work. One strike, you’re out.

So I am not unsympathetic to people who get, in essence, betrayed by AI. (not literally so, because AI is not a person) But yes I think people should be very careful, more careful they they’re being now certainly.

They also should be ready for if it all falls apart, as training costs increase and becomes harder. Already websites like IMDB are putting CAPTCHAs on their site just to browse it. It used to be an accommodating site to scripts that used it to gather information automatically, but those days seem to be over now. Expect to see that more and more, and in the process, the web becomes that much more annoying to use for plain old human readers too.

I could be really cruel right now, I could point out to people how this is chickens coming home to roost, how it’s always been grossly subsidized and underpriced, how the game was always getting users, companies, the country, the whole damn world hooked on these slop machines and then once they’re reliant on them to jack up the price hugely. I could be really mean about this, I could lord it over people, I could point out how they’ve been dupes this whole time and in the process traitors to all of humanity.

I could. i think I will.

Like the Steam Deck?

Thank you!

But on the other hand, all the reasons that people hate corporate OSes apply much more to Microsoft than Apple. Microsoft is the company that puts ads in their OS and is built entirely out of proprietary tech, and has been more vocal about shoehorning AI into everything.

LOL at Windows being marked as less corporate than MacOS. They should absolutely be at least tied.

Don’t I feel like a fool for trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.

“Ever heard of skills,” wow thanks for beginning with a dismissive statement that implies all of this you’re saying is not only true but obvious. This is not the way to respond to people with strong objections.

Your response is really unimpressive. My point is that LLM training, as it now stands, doesn’t seem like it can possibly adapt to an internet that isn’t full of free information ripe for the taking. If people come to rely on LLMs, how will they get the information to keep up with further advancements in, well, anything?

Assuming that everything on F-Droid is open source: F-Droid, Syncthing Fork, Termux, Linux Command Library, Jerboa, DuckDuckGo, KDE Connect, Librera Reader, Material, NewPipe, NewsBlur, Pedometer, PeerTube, Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection, Tusky, VLC and Warpinator.

Because it’s nice, and if you ate it first you wouldn’t want to have as much of the healthy stuff that came before. Not everything has to have an objective purpose. Nice things are nice.

Assuming that’s true, and that’s a BIG assumption… What makes you think that would matter? AI has no interiority; it isn’t a thinking blob, it’s a text generator. Think of it as a fancy Markov chain.

Even if it were true, where in the chain do new principles, new techniques, new concepts enter into it? All these forms of generative AI can do is regurgitate what’s been fed into it. The worst thing you can train an AI from is AI-generated output.

Yes, the age of all programming is over, because no new libraries or languages will ever be invented and LLMs will this always know everything there is to know about coding based on what’s already been written which will never go obsolete.

Honestly, mocking these things is SO EASY.

If you can’t log into Windows you can’t change its OneDrive settings! What’s more, the user had no idea what was causing the problem, be it OneDrive or something else, until he did that troubleshooting! And, just setting up a new phone shouldn’t make your computer unbootable for any reason! Geez, way to victim-blame there.

I’d say part of it is likely raw userbase size. Like how even the most positive, well-meaning fandoms turn toxic at the edges when they get large enough.