I mean he's right, the old internet and the technology that underlies it still exists, and there's nothing stopping you from building and using sites that work independently of the big social media platforms/centralised services.
That said, I do wish this essay was a bit better contrast wise. Had to highlight some of the tables to read them at all, which isn't exactly ideal.
Not sure. Without commercialization and ads, there might not be the free high-quality web apps from Google. Things have two sides. But the complexity of the internet should have far surpassed the level that even large corps could influence, and therefore, the key might be culture instead of tech.
The Internet I grew up on was not the web. It was mail, newsgroups, IRC… maybe the article talks about that, but I don’t care as this is nothing the web can kill in any way.
I thought it was a cool essay because I've been using Gemini (the one mentioned in the article, not Google) in my terminal browser lately. And it has been a lot of fun!
But yes the whole "re-explain by negation" writing style does come across as AI-generated.
This essay returns 50% on Pangram, which matches my impression of it. The human-written bits do have real insight, but it's being buried in vacuous slop that makes it.
I understand from personal experience how addictive writing with AI can be. Universally when I looked back at the result a week after composing it, I saw it was what it was - slop - and did the responsible thing - throw that out and use my own brain to express those thoughts, or decide that thought needed more time in the oven before touching the page.
If the original author is reading this, I beg you to consider this instead of becoming another contributor to the internet's cacophony of slop.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] threadThat said, I do wish this essay was a bit better contrast wise. Had to highlight some of the tables to read them at all, which isn't exactly ideal.
Interesting
But yes the whole "re-explain by negation" writing style does come across as AI-generated.
I understand from personal experience how addictive writing with AI can be. Universally when I looked back at the result a week after composing it, I saw it was what it was - slop - and did the responsible thing - throw that out and use my own brain to express those thoughts, or decide that thought needed more time in the oven before touching the page.
If the original author is reading this, I beg you to consider this instead of becoming another contributor to the internet's cacophony of slop.
Useful in 1993 before the Unix machines in the computer labs were running Mosaic.