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None of these documents were actually published on the web by then, incl., a Watergate PDF bearing date of Nov 21, 1974 - almost 20 years before PDF format got released. Of course, WWW itself started in 1991.
Google Search's date filter is useful for finding documents about historical topics, but unreliable for proving when information actually became publicly available online.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Achatgpt.com&tbs=cdr%3...
So it looks like Google uses inferred dates over its own indexing timestamps, even for recently crawled pages from domains that didn't exist during the claimed date range.
I wonder why they do that when they could use time of first indexing instead.
Plus other sites that link to the content could also give away it's date of creation, which is out of the control of the AI content.
I believe I learned about it through HN, and it was this blog post: https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/
It kind of reminds me of why some people really covet older accounts when they are trying to do a social engineering attack.
According to the article, it was the founder himself who was doing this.
All AI is doing is making it harder to know what is good information and what is slop, because it obscures the source, or people ignore the source links.
(wrote up in https://www.latent.space/i/139368545/the-concept-of-low-back... - but ironically repeating something somebody else said online is kinda what i'm willingly participating in, and it's unclear why human-origin tokens should be that much higher signal than ai-origin ones)
Apparently, comparing low-background steel to pre-LLM text is a rather obvious analogy.
If you have a thought, it's likely it's not new.
i claimed swyx heard it through me - which he did
but we appreciated that, we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"
- Sir, this is an elevator.
Why is anybody still surprised that the AI bubble made it that big?
If Einstein came up with relativity by standing on "the religious non-sense and superstitions of the medieval ages," you'd have a point.
- (1) A lot of developing can be just chores around managing scaffolds and repeatable work, and due to this macros, autogenerated code and other tools have been a thing at many layers for a long time; and
- (2) I remember copy-pasting from Google/StackOverflow (i.e. mostly search + pattern matching with some minimal reasoning) being criticized as a low-effort mode of development during the 2010s, before ChatGPT and AI assisted coding tools took over that part.
So yes, I'd argue a huge amount of software development problems can be solved without ever actually reasoning from first principles, AI tools just made that more visible.
They have so many ways of saying "God" without saying God.
You might be missing the point of science.
It's ultimately an endeavor of finding testable descriptions of the world in the face of being fallible. It's not about the "why". It's about "how" the world is. No faith required. "Why" the world is is a philosophical question and perhaps a religious one. But that has nothing to do with testable theories.
Any scientific theory gains credibility by providing ways to test it. Each such experiment that fails to disprove the theory increases confidence in the theory's validity. There is no faith required for any of that and no god either. If you can predict that conditions A and B lead to C happening, and I can try it and see that indeed C is happening, then you have science going on, without any faith.
Scientists only do safe experiments that will 100% verify the findings they are paid to attain.
Nobody will do peers review of whatever study unless its controversial- in which case they will come out of the woodwork to "discover" how correct/not THAT wrong their peers were/are still.
It is nonsense that we consider what comes from such a system to be "knowledge" - Modern science is many things, faithless science validating experimental theory -> that is not a real thing.
We do not see nearly so far though.
Because these days we are standing on the shoulders of giants that have been put into a blender and ground down into a slippery pink paste and levelled out to a statistically typical 7.3mm high layer of goo.
I think all we can expect from internet information is a good description of the distribution of materials out there, not truth. This is totally within the capabilities of LLMs. For additional confidence run 3 reports on different models.
Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
[24] “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. [25] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. [26] And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. [27] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Capitalism, freedom of expression, the marketplace of ideas, democracy: at their best these things are ways to bend the wisdom of the crowds (such as it is) to the benefit of all; and their failures are when crowds are not wise.
The "slop" of capitalism is polluted skies, soil and water, are wage slaves and fast fashion that barely lasts one use, and are the reason why workplace health and safety rules are written in blood. The "slop" of freedom of expression includes dishonest marketing, libel, slander, and propaganda. The "slop" of democracy is populists promising everything to everyone with no way to deliver it all. The "slop" of the marketplace of ideas is every idiot demanding their own un-informed rambling be given the same weight as the considered opinions of experts.
None of these things contributed our social, technological, or economic advancement, they are simply things which happened at the same time.
AI has stuff to contribute, but using it to make an endless feed of mediocrity is not it. The flood of low-effort GenAI stuff filling feeds and drowning signal with noise, as others have said: just give us your prompt.
The industrial age was built on dinosaur slop, and they were giant.
Whether or not the optimization functions align with human survival, and thus our whole existence is not a slop, we're about to find out.
"...began to fall in 1963, when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted, and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature."
What we're seeing now is something more like the peak of summer. If it ends up being a bubble, and it burtst, some months after that will be "AI Winter" as investors won't want to continue chucking money at problems anymore, and it'll go back to "in the background research" again, as it was before.
Also that winter comes after September (fall)
https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
I think there may be a way to disable this, but I don’t care enough to bother.
If people want to think my posts are AI generated, so be it.
It depends if you put the space before and after the dashes--that, to be clear, are meant to be there--or if you don't.
(Similarly, French puts spaces before and after . ? !, while English and German only put spaces afterwards.)
Didn't know! Woot, I win!
Why does AI have a preference for doing it differently?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Hair_spac...
Typographers usually add space to the left side of the following marks:
: ; ” ’ ! ? / ) ] } * ¿ › » @ ® ™ ℓ ° ¡ ' " † + = ÷ - – —
“ ‘ / ( [ { > ≥ < ≤ £ $ ¢ € ‹ « √ μ # @ + = ÷ - – —
1. (letterpress typography) A piece of metal type used to create the narrowest space. 2. (typography, US) The narrowest space appearing between letters and punctuation.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hair_space
Now I'd like to see how the metal type looks like, but ehm... it's difficult googling it. Also a whole collection of space types and what they're called in other languages.
- vs – vs —
Compiler error while working on some ObjC. Nothing obviously wrong. Copy-pasted the line, same thing on the copy. Typed it out again, no issue with the re-typed version. Put the error version and the ok version next to each other, apparently identical.
I ended up discovering I'd accidentally lent on the option key while pressing the "-"; Monospace font, Xcode, m-dash and minus looked identical.
Like this:
"You can't believe everything you read on the internet." -- Abraham Lincoln, personal correspondence, 1863
So, it’s not unambiguously s substitute for either is essentially its own punctuation mark used in ASCII-only environments with some influence from both the use of em-dashed and that of en-dashes in more formal environments.
chatgpt
vs
chatgpt before:2022-01-01
give me quite different results. In the 2nd query, most results have a date listed next to them in the results page, and that date is always prior to 2022. So the date filtering is "working". However, most of the dates are actually Google making a mistake and misinterpreting some unimportant date it found on the page as the date the page was created. At least one result is a Youtube video posted before 2022, that edited its title after Chatgpt was released to say Chatgpt.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search.
the only place I've ever had any issue with AI content is r/chess, where people love to ask ChatGPT a question and then post the answer as if they wrote it, half the time seemingly innocently, which, call me racist, but I suspect is mostly due to the influence of the large and young Indian contingent. otherwise I really don't understand where the issue lies. follow the exact same rules you do for avoiding SEO spam and you will be fine
Yes, it is because of the other side of the coin. If you are writing human-generated, curated content, previously you would just do it in your small patch of Internet, and probably SEs (Google...) will pick it up anyway because it was good quality content. You just didn't care about SEO-driven shit anyway. Now you nicely hand-written content is going to be fed into LLM training and it's going to be used - whatever you want it or not - in the next generation of AI slop content.
Slop did not originate from AI itself, but from the feed ranking Algorithm which sets the criteria for visibility. They "prompt" humans to write slop.
AI slop is just an extension of this process, and it started long before LLMs. Platforms optimizing for their own interest at the expense of both users and creators is the source of slop.
It misidentified what the actual bug was.
But the tone was so confident, and he replied to my later messages using chat gpt itself, which insisted I was wrong.
I don't like this future.
What you're describing is not the future. It's a fireable offense.
Also, the AI slop is covering almost every sentence or phrase you can think of to search. Before, if I used more niche search phrases and exact searches, I was pretty much guaranteed to get specific results. Now, I have to wade through pages and pages of nonsense.
Some of the science, energy, and technology subreddits receive a lot of ChatGPT repost comment. There are a lot of people who think they’ve made a scientific or philosophical breakthrough with ChatGPT and need to share it with the world.
Even the /r/localllama subreddit gets constant AI spam from people who think they’ve vibecoded some new AI breakthrough. There have been some recent incidents where someone posted something convincing and then others wasted a lot of time until realizing the code didn’t accomplish what the post claimed it did.
Even on HN some of the “Show HN” posts are AI garbage from people trying to build portfolios. I wasted too much time trying to understand one of them until I realized they had (unknowingly?) duplicated some commits from upstream project and then let the LLM vibe code a README that sounded like an amazing breakthrough. It was actually good work, but it wasn’t theirs. It was just some vibecoding tool eventually arriving at the same code as upstream and then putting the classic LLM written, emoji-filled bullet points in the README
I find it a bit annoying to navigate between hallucinations and outdated content. Too much invalid information to filter out.
Actually, it came out in 2015 and was just low budget.
just use Kagi and block all SEO sites...
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=britney+spears+before%3A2010...
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