Post #372939

2026-02-23 03:29 UTC

if we actually followed through on internet enabling universal access to human knowledge, LLMs would be a much more ridiculous idea. if somebody built decent full-text search on top of anna's archive, you would be a fool for typing the same query into chatgpt. why would you ever want some lossly compressed version of the same thing that fits into VRAM and makes shit up? the fact that half the anti-slop machine arguments are just thinly veiled copyright apologia is actually the thing rapidly pushing us in the opposite direction. and i do mean a lot of the actions people take against LLMs are actually actively making things worse. try accessing the internet from a country where you need a VPN to bypass censorship, a lot of big websites now block you for looking like an AI scraper if you don't have a residential IP. it's a disease and i worry we are going to give up on that dream and throw away all the potential that the internet had to protect ourselves from it -- if we keep making information harder to access, that only brings us closer to the future they want, where a corporate chatbot is the primary mode of interaction with a computer for most people. they already have the training data. the best way to fight back is to pirate more books.

Replies (3)

@nyx@social.xenofem.me 2026-02-23 03:38

@fisk@little.tinypuppy.dog I don't think the "internet" is going to go away necessarily insofar as it has had the social function of being a means for universal access to information but I do think that we haven't gone far enough with it and that the past 30 years has largely been a mirage of the future we could have that requires both technical alternatives (things that are actually P2P and not just a simulation of it that's allowed to happen within corporate and state networks) as well as a change in the social conditions where everyone recognizes the need for us all to be active participants in the production of information. the internet was always going to end up like this once it became more widespread because the culture broadly had not caught up to it and was still one of passive consumption. I only hope that more people who aren't tech nerds will start to realize this as the internet becomes a blatant apparatus of propaganda and surveillance that is acutely miserable to use

Open ##2660207
@condret@fedi.absturztau.be 2026-02-23 04:33

@fisk@little.tinypuppy.dog the reason why i'd want to use LLMs then is TL;WR. i don't want to read an entire book. i want my question answered for what i want to do.

Open ##2660213
@scathach@stereophonic.space 2026-02-23 06:08

@fisk@little.tinypuppy.dog One of my someday :blobcat_starstruck: projects when I get the hardware will be to build a full-text search engine off of all of annas archive and, if possible, the internet archive

Open ##2660214