If the internet you knew and loved is gone, mourn it, move on, find a new thing to love. Or create it.

That is the tagline. In the phrase, "survival of the fittest," "fittest" means "most adaptable," at least according to the Merriam Webster English dictionary.

The adaptability of an organism might be an important fitness factor, or it might not. There are organisms which have survived largely unchanged for millions of years.

An adaptable organism might stay around for longer - or it might be outcompeted in the short term by less adaptable organisms.

Sure, “survival of the fittest” in the short term is obvious, but it’s hardly worth pointing out.

>or it might not

To determine that it is not, would by definition imply an observation that it is no longer fit.

In other words, how do we know that it is not adaptable? We'd see that it no longer propagates, and is therefore unfit.

Can you think of a case where these two synonyms are not inseparable in meaning as pertaining to evolution?

I can't. I think Darwin meant exactly this.

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

-- Douglas Adams, "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet"

https://douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

There is a complete trifercation of ML: 1. ML Engineers: the high priests, with access to 10K GPU hours, designing novel Transformer architectures using Tensorflow / PyTorch / JAX. 2. Data Scientists: conducting SFT on pre-trained models via the HuggingFace APIs + MLOps & model optimization (eg via TensorRT). 3. GenAI devs: building LangChain orchestrations and RAG prompt flows using off the shelf LLMs commoditized behind APIs - no stats or linear algebra required.

Too many are jumping on this GenAI bandwagon, which will result in a massive hype-cycle trough of dissalusionment and potential VC AI winter.

Furthermore, GenAI is a local maxima on the path to true AGI. COT / REACT heuristics lack the integrated differential aproach of Hybrid AI, ignoring everything previous generations of researchers focused on: problem solving, planning, probabilistic logic, reasoning etc. For true AGI, we need some focus on: 1. concept representation. 2. goal formation. 3. code introspection and self-modification. GenAI is a big distraction from that kind of R&D.

> being bombarded with tons of AI-written books, pornography, music, video, audio, images

I don't come across any of these unless I am very actively looking for them.

> try googling any historical figure and you'll find some bullshit AI generated image of them likely before the actual one.

I just tried, and there wasn't a single AI generated result in the top 5 pages.

I don't go on Twitter/X. I only subscribe to Reddit communities that I am genuinely interested in and which stay spam free. I frequent other sites like HN that have a very high ratio of signal to noise. I don't waste time on garbage SEO-bait blogs.

I'm not even putting in that much effort to have a sane online experience. If I can do it, so can you.

> I don't come across any of these unless I am very actively looking for them.

AI generated "hero" images are pretty common on blogs and other blog-like sites. I run into them all the time by just clicking links on HN. "AI" generated garbage has made me both more blind to them and more annoyed by the whole concept of a "hero" image.

Edit: here is and obvious example I found, just now: https://betterschooling.in/collection/education-and-healthca.... Literally the next post I clicked on after writing this. Look at how fucking terrible and obviously AI that hero image is. FFS, the "patient's" head is an exposed brain the best I can tell.

I was wasting time on YouTube the other day, and I come across a video (I think about the Alien franchise), that had a huge amount of AI generated images and videos. The video started with a message saying it was a remake of a previous one that apparently had some copyright strikes against it. It was disgusting and unwatchable.

The (go to) alternative for the authors would be a post without images which is by no means any better.

They're garbage.

> The (go to) alternative for the authors would be a post without images which is by no means any better.

It would be far, far better for authors to post without images.

I mean, FFS, if you've got something good and relevant, sure use a "hero" image, but if you're going to use dreck, please don't bother.

I haven't bought a new phone. I was thinking about it but, at the end of the day, what I want is a phone that's my tool, not my new best friend.

Don't get me wrong - I've got nothing against AI. I love phone apps/functionality that will, for instance, allow me to point my camera and click, then show me a lovely hi-res, non-blurry image of the people/scene I want to capture. Getting rid of the shake in my short video clips will, I'm sure, be fantastic! But don't tell me that this was achieved with AI - just go do it in the background and leave me in peace.

But I don't need a phone that boasts about its capabilities. And I don't need a phone that will nag me to do this thing or that thing to improve my life experiences. I've got a perfectly serviceable mother who's more than happy to do that sort of nagging!

added to my quote book.

I’m sure someone else will make another post just like the OPs in a few years wishing for days gone by before <insert new thing here>.

"I miss the early days of LLMs" is a certain post in the future.

I think that AGI is inevitable, but I don't think it will arrive before 2050.

I suppose that you could make some money selling "AI-Free" products and services, like cage-free eggs, nitrite-free foods, and so on. Certified "Legacy" books, BAI, before AI.

As you note, the dream of replacing expensive and unruly humans with unpaid, compliant robots is extremely attractive to most large businesses.

Customers do not want to interact with LLMs. They don't want products produced by LLMs. They don't want to read, watch, play with or listen to AI-produced content.

I skim headlines, etc. A growing list of keywords makes me go ... skip!

Of course, there is that gnawing feeling that I'm missing interesting stuff. But that is the price of clinging onto my sanity.

I'm hoping for: it too will pass. We've had AI winters before, and perhaps this winter we'll pull the plug on the data-barns in order to keep the lights on and stay warm. Even EVs need more charging since the cold reduces their effective range.

Accept it and move on. Cultivate community in your life, let go of the ways that technology no longer serves you.

You've been using the Internet since the 1970s?

You are right because it does feel like shit. I'm not experiencing it with AI, but I did experience it several times with technology already. Not a good feeling!

And OP is right because that's what you can actually do - moving on. The thing you like, in the form you liked it, is already gone forever. What you can do on a human level is to take this experience, grieve for what has been lost to you, and later find a way to move on. What I can say is that I always something that ignites that spark in me, no matter how many times I have felt that I have lost it.

(SCNR)

And the second type of AI fatigue isn't even about the AI technology itself, but it seems like at the same time that people adopt AI in their workflows they often seem to raise their tolerance for made up nonsense. That's not really a problem with AI because we ought to maintain quality standards no matter what tools we use, but so many people were willing to forfeit quality for volume and convenience at the same time as using AI.

But seriously an awful lot of things are mostly AI free, HN included. At least most content on HN is human even if we talk about AI.

There's little hope for the future.

We'll see what happens when the tide gets low.

Long-term I hope my project will end up in the training data. The more systems will train on it, the easier it is for end users to write code in which they use my project.

Compared to 4 years ago, these improvements are amazing.

The downsides you mentioned are valid. I just use Google and Stackoverflow a lot less so don’t care. For the rest I click Wikipedia or Reddit before other sources. Isn’t it for years already like this? You just learn over time what sources to click and what sources to ignore.

If the world is about to become a loud miasma of AI nonsense, I’ll just build thicker walls around the human-built and human-curated parts. It’s just damn unfortunate for those outside those walls. There will be very few public spaces left if they are prey to automated grift, but we can still make the private ones nice and pleasant.

I spent a lot of today messing around connecting Anthropic's MCP system to Emacs and while the LLM's tendency to overwrite my code with its own was annoying, it was fascinating to play with it.

I spent a lot of the early days of the Internet arguing with people who thought it was ruining everything, with terrible art, and disgusting spam, and pervasive anonymity. Maybe they were right: but I realised that for me the better conversations, and better progress, were to be had with those who explored those boundaries to understand them better rather than those who reeled away from them. After some anguishing, I feel the same now. The fear is as much a habit as it is a fixed response.

Maybe that's just how I cope, but then again -- that is what you asked.

You do you. You can opt-out of the internet, for example. Among the rest of us, millions (billions?) are happy with this development.

> How do you all cope?

By not being so reactive and making a little bit of effort to go look for what you like in place of being a fulltime passive consumer.

Twitter is a shitshow but that is biologically generated nonsense! And the hot take engagement is spreading to linkedin leading to borification of these platforms and my minimal use of them.

Rivers that were once poisonous are now swimmable.

People move back to city centers and get rid of their cars.

If generative AI has negative effects on society (yes), we can and we should fight back. Giving up now won't do anything other than guarantee the awfulness continues.

If you make a small list of such sites, forums, podcasts, you'll have save and maintain the last few corners that exist.

Dang’s salary?

HN is the only forum I can think of where not only are the economic incentives between users and owners mostly aligned but there’s a paid moderator who is part of the community (as opposed to the faceless moderation teams of Twitter/Facebook/etc).

All the forums I loved died mostly because of owners shutting them down or giving up on moderation but YMMV

The reason was that they decided to remove web search from Google search.

Google is still useful for searching Google sites however.

Personally I'm kind of OK letting some other search engines bloom along with some human curation.