[HN Gopher] The web won't be nirvana (1995)
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The web won't be nirvana (1995)
Author : glimshe
Score : 90 points
Date : 2024-02-18 11:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newsweek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newsweek.com)
| yukkuri wrote:
| About the only thing he got right is the noise problem...
| technotarek wrote:
| Sure, but that's huge. And probably the reason some (or at
| least me) are becoming so disillusioned with the web. It's why
| I find it hard to believe/trust what I read from news to health
| advice to product reviews. The noise numbs us to the point
| where it all starts to feel worthless. This may be one reason
| ChatGPT et al feel so novel. They get rid of the noise. Of
| course, they are all built on the back of that noise.
| palata wrote:
| > This may be one reason ChatGPT et al feel so novel. They
| get rid of the noise.
|
| I think I disagree. LLMs are much better at increasing the
| noise than they are at getting rid of it. Worse: they are
| really good at making it look like they get rid of the noise.
|
| To me, LLMs have the potential to break the Web. Instead of
| search engines crawling the Web and allowing people to search
| its content, we may have to go back to trusting people: "I
| read this blog because I know who writes it". The day we can
| prove that LLMs were used to add tens of thousands of
| mistakes in Wikipedia (with a political agenda), will we
| still be able to trust Wikipedia the way we do today?
|
| LLMs have the potential to systematically and automatically
| destroy the Web.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| Wikipedia policy will hopefully prevent LLM generated
| garbage from corrupting it because some random web site is
| not a "reliable source" to add "facts" to articles. Today's
| Wikipedia is also remarkably effective at enforcing its
| policies. Most of its incorrect information scandals and
| notable long term vandal incidents happened in the 00s when
| it was still new.
|
| That's the positive side of its policies. The negative side
| is that it often reflects the biases of its "reliable"
| sources meaning it often gets the same things wrong that
| the mainstream media and academia get wrong.
| technotarek wrote:
| I was being specific when I chose an LLM product like
| ChatGPT, not LLMs generically. I do so because it is a
| product like ChatGPT that boils away the noise to the end
| user, for better or worse. That is, to grossly simplify my
| point, it provides a single answer / response, instead of a
| long list of potential garbage for which I must dig,
| ponder, assess etc.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| I have not had that experience.
|
| Yes most of what is on the web is not trustworthy so a Google
| search will not show trustable sources.
|
| Thus I look at known trustworthy sources e.g. traditional
| media where their biases are known. Or places like here which
| get some known reputation.
|
| Reviews long established places like Consumer Reports and
| Which . Reviews on sites I assume most are false - but I look
| at negative ones and see if there are some common problems
| that seem reasonable.
|
| I assume all influencers are liars or at least advertorials.
|
| One good rule is looking how the site/author gets paid for
| doing what they do. If not obvious assume that it is getting
| clicks.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| Except pre-web you didn't have to do that, at least not to
| the same extent. You don't think you're affected by the
| noise, but the reality is you've adjusted your behavior to
| compensate for it. The noise changed your whole outlook.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Really? You don't think a human teacher is better than
| education-by-software?
|
| I think (given the context of 1995 when we still had land-line
| modems, etc.) he nailed it.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> You don't think a human teacher is better than education-
| by-software?_
|
| almost everything I do at work, I learned online, not from an
| in-person teacher
| palata wrote:
| Did you learn to learn online, too, or did you get an
| education with in-person teachers?
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> Did you learn to learn online, too, or did you get an
| education with in-person teachers? _
|
| where's the dichotomy? I had an education but it's
| debatable how much learning happened.
|
| the bulk of everything I know how to do is self-taught.
| palata wrote:
| > I had an education but it's debatable how much learning
| happened.
|
| Sure, it is debatable. But honestly it's hard for me to
| imagine giving an iPad to a 6 years old and tell them to
| "learn on their own".
| tryauuum wrote:
| yeah I got that "learning how to learn" course from
| coursera :)
|
| just kidding, obviously I had to study english as a
| foreign language in a normal school first.
| baq wrote:
| It's _the_ problem. There is not a more important problem on
| the web.
|
| All that crying about google results deteriorating? It's them
| trying to filter out exponentially more noise being generated
| every time unit. LLMs made it so much worse.
|
| You want people to stop caring about something? Flood the web
| with plausible and crackpot arguments about it from both sides
| and watch people walk away from the topic in resignation. It
| used to cost something to pay a legion of trolls, now it takes
| a couple racks of GPUs and a manageable electricity bill,
| especially if you're a state actor.
|
| Noise kills utility of any information channel, twitter, HN,
| google, the web, you name it, it suffers. He probably couldn't
| have predicted LLM jammers, but I worry the internet's
| information capacity is about to peak.
| rpgraham84 wrote:
| Almost entirely bunk until you get to the last line.
|
| >A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration
| is legion and where--in the holy names of Education and Progress
| --important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly
| devalued.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That last line was kind of the summary or distillation of the
| entire article.
| andirk wrote:
| Common Internet discourse is often pure emotion to the point
| where the author doesn't even agree with it in person. With all
| the beauty that being connected has given us, we're about to
| see what the consequence of all of this is.
| raudette wrote:
| Cliff Stoll, the author of this piece, is best known for:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
|
| "a first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who
| broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National
| Laboratory (LBNL)."
|
| 1989 - it started with trying to find the root cause of a 75 cent
| billing error on their shared computer system.
|
| I highly recommend the book - I read it as a teen, and re-read it
| a couple years ago, it held up.
| traverseda wrote:
| I thought he was best known for having a massive amount of
| Klein bottles in the crawl space of his house, and using a
| little robot car to manage that inventory.
| Avicebron wrote:
| He had to pay for that house in Oakland somehow
| mmcgaha wrote:
| There is an entertaining nova episode on it too:
| https://youtu.be/PGv5BqNL164?si=XiELEABPvdfELy_I
| beeb wrote:
| Here's an alternate link
| https://piped.video/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164
| jmull wrote:
| A pretty great mix of sharply prescient and horribly wrong.
|
| Maybe a few straw men mixed in too, because I don't think there
| were many serious claims that computers would replace teachers.
| Computers and software were seen as supplementary.
| richard_todd wrote:
| There was a lot of excitement among tech enthusiasts in the
| mid-90s about virtual/cyber everything. I remember hearing
| regularly that soon we wouldn't need local mediocre teachers
| because everyone could be taught virtually in cyberspace by the
| best teachers on the planet. It's not hard to find tech demos
| from the era that are reminiscent of current-day VR/mixed-
| reality work. But by the time the internet became fast and
| universal enough, what had survived the dot-com crash had
| little of that flavor left.
| jmull wrote:
| My perspective is of someone in the educational software
| business at the time. The idea of replacing teachers wasn't
| really a thing there.
|
| We saw teachers as the co-primary users of the software. The
| other users were the kids, of course. So there was a lot of
| consideration, e.g., to how teachers would use the software,
| what they needed it to do, etc. Actually, the product leads
| were typically former teachers.
|
| It wasn't just us either. It wasn't a thing at the
| conferences I went to either. I think it would have come
| across as a silly/unserious idea.
|
| You could really only entertain it if you had no idea what
| teachers actually do.
| pmontra wrote:
| He missed Wikipedia and Amazon. Strangely he did not foresee that
| business pressure would have made payments feasible soon. The
| company I was working for was working with financial institutions
| on that only a couple of years later.
|
| Everything else is more or less accurate.
| OJFord wrote:
| Right about a lot, massively wrong about 'cyberbusiness' and
| 'virtual communities', which we today call 'business' and
| 'communities'.
|
| Perhaps the key thing missed was that attitudes would change? He
| may have been right for 1995 attitudes, but secure financial
| transactions online did happen and attitudes changed to accept
| them; meeting friends for coffee is still nice, but attitudes
| changed to accept a lot more casual chat, video calls, (web)forum
| interaction, etc.
| krapp wrote:
| The key thing he missed is not the change in attitudes, but the
| evolution in technology. He was assuming e-commerce must mean
| ordering cds in the mail, and reading e-books on low resolution
| CRTs. Predictions about the future tend to overestimate change
| in the short term but underestimate it in the long term.
| airstrike wrote:
| "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the
| future."
| michael_nielsen wrote:
| Stoll has written a lovely 2010 mea culpa, originally a (now-
| vanished) comment at:
| http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html,
|
| I saved the comment. Quoting:
|
| "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public
| as my 1995 howler.
|
| Wrong? Yep.
|
| At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic
| commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
|
| Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity:
| Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a
| Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as
| announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting
| for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system
| with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em.
| Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter
| century later, there's still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)
|
| And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of
| my own cringeworthy contributions.
|
| Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my
| thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff...
|
| Warm cheers to all,
|
| -Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"
| echelon wrote:
| He was wrong until he wasn't.
|
| A lot of his words fell flat as incorrect prognostications in
| the 2000s and 2010s, but now that we're in the 2020s, I feel
| the heart and soul of what he was getting at rings true.
|
| The bright-eyed luster faded, revealing the deeper truths.
|
| > Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result?
| Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles
| citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and
| anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
|
| Bingo.
|
| > Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has
| become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to
| ignore and what's worth reading.
|
| More true with each and every passing day.
|
| > Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the
| Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15
| minutes to unravel them--one's a biography written by an eighth
| grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the
| third is an image of a London monument. None answers my
| question
|
| Google is starting to feel like that, especially when looking
| for more than simple facts.
|
| > Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts
| clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for
| county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every
| press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that
| affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many
| voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
|
| Computers won't make people interested in municipal issues. At
| the national level, it's closer to team sports with all the
| betting and emotional rivalry.
|
| > Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're
| told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun.
| Students will happily learn from animated characters while
| taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when
| you've got computer-aided education?
|
| Schools continue to slide. Phones and tablets grant access to
| vast educational resources, but most kids don't use them in
| this way.
|
| > And you can't tote that laptop to the beach.
|
| Gotta find fault in this one, though. I've once or twice been
| goaded into being oncall during vacation. That's my own stupid
| fault, though.
| beej71 wrote:
| 100%. There are a lot of things the book got wrong, but how
| fucked up society got wasn't one of them.
| kurthr wrote:
| Went to the beach a while back and saw a family out on towels
| with kids. For the hour I was there, it was the two parents
| out frolicking in the waves as the 10? and 14?yr old spent
| the entire time on their phones, although they occasionally
| apparently commiserated with each other by showing a
| picture/video (of their parents doing something
| embarrassing?).
|
| Really, it wasn't that shocking. It's not like everyone loves
| going to the beach. Nobody was upset, just bored. But, it
| seemed the exact opposite of the age dynamic I expected. It
| could have just as easily been reversed, but I would have
| stil lbeen just a little sad.
|
| At the time (1995) this came out, people were worried about
| "piracy" on newgroups and murder for hire through
| pseudonymous accounts. Instead we got DMCA takedown fraud and
| SWATting.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's perfect that this article is suffixed with a notice from
| Newsweek:
|
| " To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, click here."
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| The brand was bought by a low quality clickbait farm long ago,
| ironically they'll never again publish anything substantive
| like this. I am surprised they got the archives and not just
| the brand name.
| gdubs wrote:
| I'm so grateful both to have grown up during the birth of the
| web, and to have read Stoll's books as a kid. I was introduced to
| his work through The Cuckoo's Egg, which had me absolutely
| riveted. And then read "Silicon Snake Oil". Regardless of which
| aspects of Stoll's predictions came true, I really appreciate his
| perspective. So many of the things he said in Snake Oil stick
| with me to this day. Like, despite all this technology around us,
| the importance of a good chocolate chip cookie recipe and the
| company of friends. Also learned a lot about writing from him.
| Like using short sentences.
| Zak wrote:
| What's interesting about this is not that parts it got wrong, but
| the parts it got right.
|
| The cacophony problem is still with us. With engagement-oriented
| social media, it's worse since extreme voices tend to get
| amplified where they might previously have been drowned out by
| all the noise.
|
| Search engines were great for a while, and often remain quite
| good; I can instantly get the date for the battle of Trafalger,
| and I trust that the answer DuckDuckGo provided by way of
| Wikipedia is correct. Few people would put up a web page to lie
| about that. LLMs, however eagerly lie about simple,
| uncontroversial facts. I asked a local copy of the Mistral 7b LLM
| for the date of the battle of Trafalger and got three different
| answers, all wrong. Both interacting directly with LLMs and
| search engines finding LLM-generated content are likely to
| further reduce our ability to quickly and reliably find facts
| online.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| >> Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana
|
| Wow, that didn't age well :) Like not one but dozens of
| predictions, all demolished and blown to pieces.
|
| But would the technology have remained at 1995 level, he'd been
| right. Crappy displays, terrible transfer bandwidth, no search
| engine ... few would take their "Internet Newspaper" to the beach
| if it weren't for smartphones.
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