The world wide web a legacy platform at this point. It’s treated as such by both the tech industry and average people. Most people use social media through apps. All the government organizations and banks are consolidating their services to apps. Nobody makes their own websites anymore.

The reality hasn’t sunk in yet for the rest of us, but it’s happening. We assumed it would be a forever thing once it was created. It turns out the world wide web is going to be brief historical period at the turn of the century that you tell your grandkids about.

Maybe some day the PC will go back to being a novelty appliance found in few living rooms. Where you have to power it up, sign on, and browse the few handful of websites in existence. When you’re done, you turn it off and go about your day again.

What a clusterfuck of a life.

The face always morphs so it looks like them from the corner of your eye, but like an off brand version when you look closer.

It was a late 20th century novelty symbolizing the heights of American culture and capitalism. By now much of the world has experienced McDonalds and generally fast food. Most of the developed world at least.

That era was the beginning of my disillusionment with the internet. It’s like every guy was angry for the rapist. Are they afraid for themselves… What are they hiding?

I gave it a try on a hobby project without double checking. I bought some parts I didn’t need. Good thing it was only about $20.

In hindsight a good portion of the diagrams I asked for were complete non-sense, but I wrote it off as poor image generation than having zero actual comprehension. It was trying to generate designs that didn’t exist because nobody does it that way. I later figured out after looking at diagrams from research papers where students built much simpler designs.

The world didn’t need as many programmers as we were led to believe. Showing text, images, and video is a solved problem. There doesn’t need to be a new framework every 6 months. They don’t need to throw out the last one to churn out a rehash of the same website so coders can justify their existence with some metrics of performance designed impress people who barely understand what they’re seeing, but nod their head in approval so nobody realizes they’re bluffing to hide their tech illiteracy. Everybody in the room is doing the same thing. The nerd with slide decks is grinning ear to ear at the approval. Maybe he starts to believe in the mythology that he might be a unicorn himself. It’s exercise in collective delusion. It needs to work because everybody involved is getting crazy rich. So the delusion must go on.

You don’t have your plumber come in every year and redo to all the pipes. Each time adding another superfluous section that serves naught but to make work for him. You sure don’t let him install a coin operated meter so he gets a cut of your water bill every time you need to flush, and then praise him like he’s the second coming of Jesus. He might be Jesus the plumber, but he’s no messiah. Maybe next years rework you’ll have him install a credit card swipe on your bathroom door.

Nobody is building entire trillion dollar multinational corporations around plumbing. Nobody is holding quarterly plumbers development conferences to announce the latest in pipework technology. In which the whole world streams it and watches in awe as they reveal the all new pipe join. Now for $999 a piece. You can’t call your plumber fast enough. Technology is cool but people can’t separate the science and engineering from the the trade work. They think the people making increasingly more cumbersome Rube Goldberg machines of code are the ones doing the science and engineering. Quite frankly I’m certain too many programmers think that too.

I’ve run this experiment before. ~90% of accounts sampled on the top 20 /r/all with not prior post history before 2-3 months got converted to cryptocurrency spam bots. Some of the remainder were porn spam. A few deleted accounts. A few seemingly real people. This was during the heights of cryptocurrency mania. Believe me or don’t. I can’t be assed with source dropping internet-pseud wankery.

Bot deception tactics have certainly changed since the prevalence of LLMs. I haven’t been paying attention to what the patterns have shifted to. Before these times, it was easily spotted because they were relatively simple.

I believe earlier this year someone on /r/theoryofreddit spotted closed networks of subreddits where bots engage with each other. Those are used to farm accounts on a massive scale.

Marty would be teenager from today. He’d be livestreaming Doc Brown’s experiment. He’d see his dad watching the dancing baby in the 90s and be like, “I’ve seen this meme, it’s classic”. They’d be like, “wtf is a meme”.

Zuckerberg whispered that in his ear, didn’t he. That’s what Facebook calls their AI department.

Apparently funded by Thiel.

It comes as no surprise to me at least. In recent years we’ve been hearing how these manosphere and right wing guys are funded by right wing oligarchs. I mean the basic production values are top notch. It can’t be explained simply by the widespread availability of professional film making equipment. Which is the explanation I hear often. You can pick a random content creator with no audience who has somehow procured expensive equipment yet they won’t be able to reach the same level of quailty because they don’t know what they’re doing. Plus they don’t have the money to buy production staff to run everything for them. That in itself gives a false sense of capability behind the characters.

That’s how it works right now. The whole world collectively works to enrich the few. Enough people are convinced they’re working for themselves.

I’d rather my hard work go to people who need it than some asshole who wants another yacht.

It’s all optics.

“Cordless” isn’t much of a word anymore because everything runs on batteries. Battery tech itself has come a long way.

Also when an appliance malfunctions. There goes my last paycheck. Maybe two…

Sometimes the implication is as much of a deterrent as the consequence.

SEO spammers force-multiplied by LLMs. It was inevitable.

A really bad thing is that nobody seems to know what SEO/blog spammers are. Social media is reading headlines and upliking the slop.

It still never ceases to amaze me how the adtech industry is a thing with all this. It’s fakery upon fakery to the Nth degree. Yet somehow it generates money.

No monitors above 1920x1200 and they must code in bright sunlight at least 8 hours a day. I’m convinced some websites look like ass because the developers haven’t look at anything below 4k. Maybe ever. Some may not have seen sunlight in years. Not everything needs to be made for dark viewing with white text everywhere.

I’m pretty sure this sort of thing was tried with the prior era of neural nets too. When the field hits a ceiling they grasp at the make-AI-teach-itself straw. It’s the Hail Mary pass. What if we keep stacking AIs on top of each other. Maybe they’ll somehow break out of their own limitations.

There’s a cadence. Once in a while a breakthrough happens. The tech is incorporated into the world. There are variations of the tech, but all have the same fundamental ceiling.

The AI Effect takes place. People forget about AI for a while. Time passes. A breakthrough paper is published. AI is upon the world once again.

Only this time with LLMs, it’s seemingly passed the Turing Test so people think it’s close to the fictional AGI. Not just recognizing handwriting, speech, or images. Or putting an annoying animated character on your desktop. This time it’s being freakishly good at predicting what the next words should be based on known sum total of human knowledge. Making it be creative isn’t it this time. That’s the ceiling.

I think this the way the powers that be control many narratives. Many distractions running all over.

People aren’t critical enough about what they’re echoing from what they think is coming from their own side.

I use old reddit too. Maybe there’s different tiers of banned.

I angered a right winger by saying he doesn’t like Lemmy because he doesn’t like the opinions here. Probably got all his friends to report spam that reply to a high tier ban.