A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing
So … can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they’re doing bad things and are the reason why we can’t have nice things?
Hmmm … a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company … how could that possibly go wrong!!!
Truth is any economic difficulty has been used as an excuse to force workers in line. That employees weren’t always under management’s thumb was always running higher ups the wrong way.
That things worked fine during the pandemic only showed that the idea could always have worked. It took a fatal pandemic to force them to give it a chance. Only way to keep it is to organise.
Cunts.
Interesting. I’ve never spoken to someone from Japan about it.
Yep. Been dealing with tradie problems just like this the past few months. Was sometimes shocked at what they’d leave behind for me to clean up.
Seriously I think you’re absolutely right it’s one of those things everyone is so used to we don’t even realise how bad it is compared to other places.
Yea … and apart from obviously dilapidated or traditional housing … just about no one else is just powering through the cold like we do. Which is weird, because we love our homes and houses (apparently).
Yep … it’s total bullshit. Talking to foreigners, migrants, tourists etc will sober you up on this. They’ll tell you how they’ve never been as cold as they are in Aus, despite coming from Northern Europe or Canada, and that our houses are made of cardboard.
Then we have a landlord based housing system and a totally inflated market just to ramp up the absurdity.
We wouldn’t need AI in the first place if we could just find the information we need.
I’ve commented on this before … but it almost seems like that is the point, or an opportunistic moment for Google … turn the internet to shit so that we “need” the AI and that Google have a new business to grow into. Capitalism at its finest.
Also there’s a fair bit of effort going in to making local LLMs.
Yea it’s definitely interesting but my gut feeling is that open source or local LLMs (like llama) are false hope against the broader dynamics. Surely with greater Google-level resources comes ‘better’ and more convenient AI. I’d bet that open/local LLMs will end up like Linux Desktop: meaninglessly small technical user base with no anti-monopoly effects at all. Which, to open the issue up to “capitalism!!”, raises the general issue of how individualistic rather than organisational actions can be ineffectual.
The insidious part missing here is that AI search destroys the internet. You no longer search for other people’s pages or content … you simply search for “the answer”.
Sure there might be links and footnotes, but the whole product is to reconstitute the internet into something Google (or whoever) own and control from top to bottom. That is the death of the internet and some of the values which built it in the first place.
Ideally for Google, we all become “information or content” serfs to their AI “freehold”. Every “conversation” we have with the AI or otherwise is more training data. Every post or article or report or paper is just data for the AI which we provide as service to suckle at the great “AI search”.
And lets not fool ourselves into thinking that there isn’t real and convincing convenience in something like this. It makes sense, so long as AI can be useful enough to justify the easiness of it.
Which is why the real issue isn’t whether AI is “good enough” or “not actually intelligent” … that’s a distraction. The issue is what are the economic implications.
AI is hard to train and to keep up to date and it’s hard to improve on … these are resource intensive tasks. Which means there’s centralisation built right in.
AI consumes and stores data in a destructive way. It destroys or undermines the utility of that data … as you can just use the AI instead … and it is also likely lossy (thus hallucinations etc).
So … centralised data eating technology. If we were talking about liberties or property rights or IP or creativity or the economy … an all eating centralising pattern would be thunderously fearsome. Monarchism, Imperialism or colonialism … monopolisation … complete serfdom. It’s the same type of thing … but “just” for information technology … which is maybe not that significant … except how much are we all using the internet for anything and how much are our livelihoods linked to it in someway?
While there’s a bit of a focus here on what it’d “mean” for Apple to do this … more broadly, which streaming services don’t have ads by now? Prime and Netflix do, I know that much.
Basically it seems the industry has done exactly what cable did IIRC … once they’ve got you by the balls they’ll squeeze you as dry as they can.
Apart from finding a local hardcopy rental shop (I have and am trying to use it as much as possible), or you know, just not watching, “reverting” back to piracy is likely the only way to react here.
Very happy to see it come to wikipedia!!
But I think it also needs some polish. The contrast is too high and the blue on black of the hyperlinks is too garish for sure.
well the central site of the web ring could be searched for any particular page that’s part of the ring, and that search could be surfaced on any page that’s part of the ring.
The full set of pages could be decentralised and cached across all members for robustness, and even include each page’s own description and recommendations for every other page if they like.
And then, of course … rings of webrings with as many levels of aggregation as people are interested in maintaining, again with decentralised caches of pages, their links and descriptions (all human curated of course) that can all be searched whenever a member page or aggregating page opts into it.
Tech capabilities have advanced since the 90s enough now that basic text search in a web page over a small data set is not hard or too much to ask.
And nested rings of rings of rings are scalable because at each level the data will just be links (and descriptions or names if available) while it would be on the user to navigate the various layers however they wish until they find something they’re interested in.
Sorry … I don’t know what that is
I mean, the search doesn’t have to be centralised at all … basic search facilities could include the text search in the browser for any page, but made more user friendly and just for the webring you’re navigating or something.
It was never broke, why fix it?
Totally fair! I don’t claim to know what I’m talking about! I’m just riffing on what I suspect would work for me, but also motivated by what I feel is a relatively urgent need to create some robust and diverse human curation of the internet. So in a way I’m not really interested in remaking web rings, but more coming from the perspective of what else can be done with the same general idea along side webrings.
I’m aware of it (and while not being super enthused about it, I can my personal interest growing over time as the internet keeps tracking the way it is).
But how does it help with a page recommendation system? Is there a strong culture of that sort of thing on Gemini?
That seems interesting!
In the end, I’m wondering if all the pieces are here on something like the fediverse but just need to be connected. I haven’t thought about this at all until now (so I’m just riffing here) … but the essence of such a system seems to me:
Point 3 seems to be the unclear part. A “ring” is obviously a bunch of connections (not unlike a linked list). But other structures probably have a lot to provide here, especially if they’re amenable to some basic search facility.
The idea comes up again and again on the fediverse. It feels ripe for some app/platform to kinda nail it.
I’m not sure this is it or even something that does exactly the old web ring thing. I think a simple enough system for the human curation of web pages in a standardised way that can easily be consumed and aggregated would go a long way though. The fediverse feels like its close to something.
Really not sure what you’re getting at here.
Went to look expecting to hate it … while there are probably some bugs to be ironed out I think it’s nice and in a side-by-side I’d probably prefer the new one by a decent margin … it seems cleaner and easier for my eye to move around looking for what I’m interested in.