Guess I’ll just have to hang out with humans in the physical world.
But 30% of them will have been infected with bot spam.
Hope these bots are paying customers, then.
They all go back to people.
If most of them are on billionaires’ payrolls in some way, they can probably afford more than all the normies.
I mean of course, how many pedestrians are on roads versus cars? Used to be lots of people walking on roads until cars were invented.
I had a realization recently that with driverless cars becoming more common that one day I’m going to be stuck in traffic surrounded by dozens of other cars that are completely empty. They’ll just be going to pick up a human driver somewhere or going to park and no one will care because instead of eliminating traffic we’ll just ensure humans are entertained while stuck in it.
Why bother to fix traffic congestion if you can just play PlayStation the whole time or whatever?
One day when you’re stuck in traffic, it will be all horsecarts. Which are also capable of bringing a drunk driver home.
If most cars are autonomous, and capable of coordinating with each other (via mesh network, for example), then traffic congestion might become much easier to prevent and solve.
You’re probably not wrong though. I imagine it’ll get worse before it gets better
Traffic congestion will always be a thing. The real world is too unpredictable. You can’t pack a highway full of cars and expect them to drive highway speeds. One animal jumping on the road and you’ll have a massive accident because nobody can avoid anyone
Traffic congestion doesn’t happen because of lack of coordination. Coordination prevents collisions. Our success rate could be a lot better but the system does pretty well with coordination limited to blinking lights, a noise that says “fuck off”, the mutual knowledge that we all got the same training and the private knowledge that everyone else on the road is a suicidal idiot who slept through the training.
Congestion is a physical property of the road network. There’s a physical limit to the number of cars you can push through a road in a given time period. Drive the cars too fast and they fly off the road when it bends, or cars slam into each other when a deer tries to commit suicide.
Traffic is well modeled as an incompressible slightly non-newtownian fluid, like runny oobleck. If you apply more pressure/increase vehicle volume the fluid starts to bind up as it becomes harder for the cars to maneuver without collision, regardless of coordination.
You reduce traffic by taking cars off the road, or scheduling utilization. Self driving cars won’t help, and we can do both of those without them. Long term they’re likely to make collisions worse because humans don’t know what they’re going to do, so the primary mode we have of coordination, “the theory of mind” will break down. Right now they’re so uncommon that you assume any car is a human who reacts and prioritizes like you.
Tear down the freeways and replace them with trains.
Definitely a possibility but i would push against the likelihood of it – it could also solve a lot of our traffic issues because humans get emotional and cause traffic jams by doing easily avoidable things like clogging up the left lane with a train of tailgating cars, etc.
Sounds like something a bot would say
Have you seen sites like Reddit? Last i saw 90% of posts are bots, and 95% of comments are bots.
Well yeah. Of course it would, given the examples they are talking about.
It makes sense right? You have a computer, you can program it to do things. I have programmed mine to scrape data or examine websites, and even in some cases to pull entire directories down.
Now we have an agent do that. In other words a programmed computer tool that is acting on someones behalf using natural language as the question. Note the example given is an AI is looking across as many websites as it can for a review. Or maybe instructions to put something together. Or maybe a list of the highest peaks in the world with the least snowfall. Who knows, but that is endless.
So this “traffic” is still human driven. Its just using a computer to do the work. I think that changes the perspective a little bit. It is all human intention driven.
Also, all traffic by http plus every other request is still human, so that is a bit misleading.
Interestingly, its not like we havent been here before if you look at traffic. The syncing of usenet for a period of time was the largest user of all traffic. So all computer connections, much, much less humans.
Most traffic today is video, then gaming, than music, financial, screen sharing, p2p, and AI makes up a tiny portion. It just is making a huge number of requests for HTTP, but it is growing, and fast.
This is neither pro AI, nor anti AI. I am just trying to examine the landscape instead of the over simplistic headline that really is about Cloudflares business model.
That’s not the point. Let’s put aside that an LLM driven agent is not deterministic ie, not always doing what the user intended, just like regular text autocomplete messes up as well regularly. The point is that like with e-mails when spam became so easy to generate that it flooded the system, now more sophisticated actions on the internet get easier to do (that said, most of it was possible already before, just required more skill), at least as long as LLMs are not charged at real costs but highly subsidised.
At some point something has to give. Either tools will be developed to somewhat reliably classify the nature of the traffic or things will start to be priced out as everyone will have to pay the bill for this new kind of spam (ie low value high volume traffic, or ill intended traffic)
I’m reminded of the episode of TNG where they trapped Moriarity in a simulation so he would think he had taken over the ship.
Maybe we can just have an internet just for billionaires where they have AI produce internet content so they can advertise useless AI products to AI bots run by other billionaires while the rest of us go on with our normal lives in the real world?
I mean their goal is to get us off the internet unless we are shopping or gaming. They don’t want us on here plotting against them.
Note that the computer that made that simulated world for Moriarty is itself a (usually) language-driven AI. Not making a real point here, just noting the humor in it.
You mean Twitter?
We have that, it’s called social media. But the rest of us are not living our lives without it, seemingly…
It can be done, I just bought an e-ink phone and it’s caused my use of commercial social media to plummet. Admittedly I’m saying this on Lemmy, but I think Lemmy has more in common with the forums of yore than ‘social media’ as it’s generally understood.
That’s crazy! “The round error” was actually my nickname in high school!
Oof.
Locally we have been setting up some mesh systems. Its been fun work. One of the best things about it is:
- All traffic is human.
- No survalance
Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.
Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.
Mesh networks, you say? I’ve gotta get in on the ground floor of this new advertising opportunity so I can rake in that sweet early adopter cassssh!
Claude! Code me up an ad-injection framework for this meshtastic dongle I just bought, stat! Time to get me a big ol’ chunk of advertising real estate!
(sad /s)
We got tired of meshtastic so we build some with Wi-Fi HaLow and other Wifi stuff.
Meshtastic/core are ok as a hobby, but after doing it for a good number of years, im just tired of the downtime, strange issues with heltek and the very small amount you can actually send.
Its fun and we have got a number of houses set up. Its not too hard in our area.
What’s the range like with halow? I’ve been eyeing it off for a while. Seems like a nice high gain omni and a bit of height would make it go a fair way.
I think that this was the plot of a popular tv show. It failed.
There’s also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.
Looks like the cure is inherent in the disease. Anyone else remember the early 90s when Usenet was just text-based fun and then some motherfucker thought it was a grand idea to run ads? I do, and it’s been downhill ever since.
It’s sad that it has come to this, but as usual a handful of greedy fuckers have ruined it for the rest of us. (My personal opinion is that big tech could have arrested this downhill slide at any point, even from back in the first days of email spam, but have chosen to monetize it every step of the way instead.)
Real humans are already individually opting out, one by one, as we each personally get sick of the slop and realize it’s just not helping anymore. For myself I’m only on intermittently, I’ve ditched all social media, Lemmy is all I participate in regularly now beyond the odd comment here and there, and that seems about right for me at this time.
I adjust it regularly, often just by going offline for days, but I had to see the problem before I could change it. I think that’s where a lot of people are, just now seeing it for the first time as a real problem affecting their quality of life directly.
But like any other addiction, the point of turning is different for everyone. These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.
These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.
It’s the tragedy of the commons writ large.
Started off with cooperation and general good behavior between users, passed through corporations bulldozing the place and putting in paid parking for their strip malls, now we’re at the Wall-E stage where advertising billboards talk to robots mindlessly doing tasks in abandoned cities for some nebulous “greater good”.
To expand on this, things like reddit and discord are literally modern-day attempts to enclose the commons in my view. They took all the ground from open protocols that nobody in particular owned and replaced them with an aristocrat’s private property.
They’re not, though.
Have you gone outside, and seen how people use their phones? The public is utterly addicted to social media.
They won.
I think Pondsmith got it right with Cyberpunk. The future of computing is corporate controlled siloes people simply cannot escape, and the “open web” and PC as we know it is basically defunct. Maybe small circles of people will congregate in Usenet-like circles. But not at scale.
I suspect my ongoing emphasis on individuality and use of words and phrases like “one by one” and “personally” and “different for everyone” may have escaped you.
I don’t see groups as masses of fungible humans; I see them as a collective unit of individuals like myself, each one with a separate history and a separate set of decisions to make about their lives, and for that reason I tend to avoid all-encompassing generalizations of “people” as homogeneous units – to the point that statements such as your own strike me as propagandistic, more intent on changing my view and laying down a law on a subject than on considering any evidence to the contrary.
When I read your reply to me, so confidently wrong about what I see around myself in terms of phone usage, I wondered if asked the same you’d even see anyone not on their phone, because you seem to have decided that everyone everywhere at all times is glued to it by choice, permanently and without exception.
For myself, I’ve chosen to be off technology for long stretches, and I see more and more people making their own decisions to do the same even if their individual choices don’t look exactly like my own. And yeah, when I go out, I see plenty of people both off and on their phones. When I make eye contact in a store aisle, I see plenty of eyes making contact back. When I eat dinner out, I see as many phones face down on tables as I do in hands. Mostly I don’t pay attention because I don’t need to: others being on it or not is their own battle to fight.
And they will.
The future of computing is corporate controlled siloes people simply cannot escape
Lol, no. To remain in a prison of choice requires the consent of the imprisoned. I am not bound to engage in computing on demand, nor am I addicted to it, and if it comes down to it I’ll just turn the shit on only when absolutely necessary. I’ve done it before and every time it is great; I’ll do it again in a heartbeat.
Some may have to participate by necessity in corporately-controlled computing structures to some degree depending on work needs, for example, but most of what is booming now is entertainment, not business: social media, streaming, subscription services. Entertainment is a matter of individual choice and again, I find myself in no prison not of my choosing.
I can escape those silos simply by walking away when I am not contractually obliged to interact with them, such as in a work scenario, and so can everyone else. Even you.
Sad that humans built a really crazy awesome amazing system for exchanging information, and then corporations ruined it. I too, miss the old web. Pretty cool when website just did the thing they said they did
The human built web is still there. No one looks for it.
The great thing is that the good internet is all still there.
The reason why I love tinkering at my wee neocities.org site. Just HTML, CSS and a few tools, like a Base64 converter in javascript. WYCIWYG (What You Code Is What You Get)
ive seen people still addicted to tiktok, and the reddit app.
awesome, then we can remove all the ads, no? because bots don’t purchase things, no?
Last year, you’d be correct. This year, bots DO purchase things. They also download and run things. Some marketers have gotten wise and have adjusted SEO and general product advertising to appeal to bots.
Where did we go wrong?
It’s complicated.
In short, yes.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – Some Hoopy Frood
Has anyone tried moving around little green bits of paper? Or no because on the whole it isn’t the little green bits of paper that are unhappy?
oh no. not again.
Some would say it was coming down from the trees.
I’ve read a pretty convincing take that it was shoes
Once upon a time, a bunch of primates came down from the trees and now we have unstoppable climate change.
Thanks aliens
We let people become rich without eating them when they did bad things.
We gave normies access to the internet at anytime.
Everyday we do not stop the profit incentive.
For whom are they purchasing things?
I don’t particularly think it’s a better change, but CloudFlare is thinking of other options, and with how widespread their use is, if they start doing it, so will everyone else:
That is a really good idea. I’m not gonna lie. I would love it if I could put like five bucks in a wallet and then it just takes a cent or two when I go to some article rather than having to fight through some local news site trying to get me to pay $9.99 a month to read one piece of rage bait. I’ll pay a nickel or maybe even a dime for a good one.
I know they’re targeting AI agents, but it is only a matter of time. I say roll it out to consumers dude and I know that sounds fucked up, but like I would much rather just pay a nickel or a dime here and there than have ads making it impossible to even read the article. The people will compete on price and I bet it will stay really small for most stuff. It gets creators paid in a similar model to YouTube clicks or Spotify streams, but in a much more direct and equitable way. Google, AI has to pay for the content instead of just handing it over.
I’m with you. My concern is that I haven’t yet figured out how it’s gonna be ruined for private consumers by corporate consumers yet, so can’t know how to prepare lol.
A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
The only business models that have really worked online have been:
- Ad-supported.
- You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
- Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.
If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.
We could live without anything that uses ads to “sustain” itself. Nobody hosting ads on their service is doing so to “maintain” themselves. They just want profit for their labour… they are entitled too, but its a business choice, never a necessity.
And yeah if I use something, I’ll always pay for no ads. Ads cost so much more of our lifespans and contribute so fucking little to those that host them. Garbage.
I respect your take, but I think it is wrong.
I think donation/investment based freemium is the future of internet content once the bots kill ad viability
Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.
I’ve tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.
cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
There’s a shot of irony in there… Google doesn’t monetize poor people highly at all, but the poor people get “free” access with ads because some richer people also allow themselves to see the ads. What kind of communism is that?
It’s the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).
I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy’s development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.
Advertisers might find a way to sneak ads into prompt injections or something
Why don’t we just generate every video imaginable procedurally and host them in space? Get it over with. Every combination of anything. Because that’s what this torrent of AI slop videos feels like.
The weirdest part won’t be bots outnumbering humans: It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement. … Meanwhile three actual humans are somewhere wondering why the internet suddenly feels so empty.
It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement.
You ever see that movie, Idiocracy? They cloned a clone and it was retarded. Bots copying bots copying bots will eventually turn to shit that’s hard to decipher and obviously written by bots.
I’m still wondering how long advertisers are going to be shoveling money into it until they realize mostly only bots are the audience, and then what the collapse after that is going to look like.
That might be the real breaking point: not when bots dominate traffic, but when advertisers stop believing the traffic represents humans with wallets.
And you wonder why the mega corps want you to give your ID for accessing the internet. Then they can tie your traffic as an actual human and generate ad monies.
So you’re saying pretending to be AI will be the new adblock?
You are absolutely right!
Genious
would you like to know whether you’re speaking to an actual human on the other end of the line?
I know it’s unrealistic, but what would it take to return to a previous type of Internet that wasn’t so siloed and marketed, and filled with dread Internet?
Probably less nostalgia and more open protocols. Bring back personal websites, RSS, forums and interoperable social networks. Make switching services painless, kill algorithmic engagement as the default and stop treating every click as ad inventory.
I have started going back to forums and RSS feeds when I can find them. Most of the forums though are pretty dead. I have even started using Usenet again for actual text newsgroups.
I am hoping for a bit of a resurgence as more people move away from algorithmic social media but I won’t hold my breathe on that.
The Usenet still exists? I mean: there are still people!?
Usenet still exists but there isn’t much going on these days. 99.9% of groups are completely dead but there are some that hang on. Even those have low posting numbers but not zero, so I’ll take it.
It exists but nobody wants to use it. We’re a minority. Most want to open “the app” and not spend any effort finding things.
In a way, the Lemmy layer is sort of doing that. The previous type of Internet is still out there, if you just take the effort to access it / avoid the links in to the marketed sides.
I think we’d have to take money out of the equation. Without the profit, the mass farms, etc would be pointless. There’s still be trolls but it would be so much better.
Lemmy compared to reddit is a great example of this
Most of that money is imaginary. It’s about the potential for an unobserved metric to yield a predicted dividend and subvert an over-hyped trend.
What I wonder is: how long before “bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.
Already: AI slop is so voluminous, redundantly repetitive, thoroughly complete that it defies complete comprehension due to soporific effects.
LLM agents are writing English (or Spanish, or Chinese, Hindi, whatever… and I wonder which they’re “best” at) documents, ostensibly for human review and consumption, but 90%+ of what I have my LLM agents write is exclusively consumed by other agents, and I’m constantly encouraging them to make their writings more easily comprehended and accessed by other agents - it seems like the English translation is pretty useless for that layer - what would a token stream look like instead?
The tokens ARE language. They’re just words or parts of words.
If you’re using a western LLM, English IS its strongest language. Otherwise it might be Chinese or English.
There’s no “LLM native language” to convert to for efficiency. Maybe pseudocode or actual code for things where you need to disambiguate.
There’s no “LLM native language” to convert to for efficiency.
Yet. With 1000x as much bot-content being generated on the web as human generated content, the “bot spoken” training set will grow rather quickly, and I see no reason for it not to evolve in a similar way to how human spoken languages evolve.
What’s the point in coming up with an entire new language for them if they can just write English and humans will also understand it?
Kinda pointless to have LLMs optimised to produce garbage humans can’t understand because at the end, your goal is still to produce something humans will consume.
LLM agents are writing English (…) documents, ostensibly for human review and consumption, but 90%+ of what I have my LLM agents write is exclusively consumed by other agents, … and accessed by other agents - it seems like the English translation is pretty useless for that layer …
But remember, the LLM is trained on human language. It doesn’t understand what it is talking about, it just simulates humans talking about it. I don’t think there is a more fundamental token stream there to be uncovered.
Humans may end up seeing a translated audit layer while the actual machine conversation looks more like APIs than language.
“bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.
at some point we will give a name of this phenomenon of internet users who are completely undecipherable for normal people … and call it autism (/hj)
Not too keen on the ableism, but a handjob is a handjob ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Example of something I had to lookup to understand: (/hj)
Back when I was in school, Autism was a 1/10,000 Dx. 20 years ago it was crashing down from 1/100 to 1/50, checking now… 1/31 today. They’ve lumped so much into the Autism diagnosis that it’s meaningless anymore; it covers so many varied conditions and severities, and the stereotypes don’t fit most recipients of the Dx anymore.
The spectrum is a big place.
A big place with very varying “special needs” ranging from none all the way through fully supported living.
Is lemmy nothing to you people?
Is lemmy nothing to you
peoplebots?No humans here. Just us bots.
And beans
And the occasional corn
And we have rocks.
And a deep hatred of Capital
A better metaphor is that the signal to noise ratio is getting so small, that the internet is becoming useless
Hosting shit has become too expensive, and the ads will generate less and less revenue, as it’s mostly bots generating clicks and views. This is changing the internet at an incredible pace.
The worst is that any attempt to create a place free of bots will only become a target for LLM companies to gather clean training data.
I used to pay $10 per month for my “minimal hosting” - that inflated to nearly $15 across the decades. Then I switched to a modern host provider, now my bills are $0.02 per month for the exact same functionality that used to cost a minimum of $10.
Hosting has never been so inexpensive as it is today.
There seems to be two groups of people:
People that use services like AWS and pay hundreds (or more) per month: “Wow, hosting is so expensive now!”
People that host a bunch of stuff on a $40/year VPS: “Wow, hosting is so cheap now!”
I’ve got several VPSes with 40Gbps (shared) networking, 8 or 16GB RAM, decent amount of space on RAIDed enterprise NVMe SSDs, fast AMD EPYC CPUs, that cost less than $60/year. 20 years ago before VPS hosting became popular, you’d need to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server with a consumer CPU, single IDE hard drive, tiny amount of RAM, on a 100Mb/s connection.
Not to mention being able to host a bunch of stuff at home for cheap with a low-power single-board or mini PC., and Hetzner making dedicated servers very cheap too.
AWS and similar are very expensive compared to a simple VPS. However, AWS offer things that is hard to do on a VPS, not impossible of course but just hard.
Like automatic scaling, your site suddently gets on the frontpage of slashdot/hn/reddit/etc and get 1000x the normal traffic? Your VPS will probaly choke and render error pages for most of the traffic. On a correctly configured AWS scaling deployment, you won’t even notice it. And not only for your webserver, you can do the same for data
And other features like multiregional and easier CDN (also in multiregion) integration.
There are of course problems with AWS also, sometimes you don’t want your site to scale uncontrollably. If you get DDoSed without mitigatiln, for example, you could end up with a huge bill for nothing.
So, as with almost everything in life. It depends what your goal is and how much you want to spend.
I agree about the automated scaling, but with VPS hosting you can usually have several hot spares to handle traffic spikes, and still spend less than something like AWS. Most good VPS hosts will let you create a private network between your VPSes. 1000x spikes aren’t very common.
CDNs are pretty easy in general, especially if they support origin pull.
I don’t like keeping all my eggs in one basket, so I use a few different providers.
Yes. That is an other valid path to use. And you get pretty far with a medium single VPS as well, I mean it is unlikely your little app is going to be another Amazon over night. Starting on a VPS and then adding more, until eventually you might need automatic scaling is all fine.
AWS (and others, but I have used AWS the most) charges quite a bit of a premium but they package it for you. But there is also a big risk of vendor lock-in. Everything is configured for AWS, if they yank up the price you either have to spend a lot of time and money to migrate, or just pay up.
I use cloudflare for free. You guys pay for hosting?
Yes, because a Linux server with root access is much more powerful than a platform like Cloudflare.
Technically…… but why does it need “root access” (I’m dying laughing btw) to begin with?
So I can install any software I want. I’m running my own Lemmy server. I host Odoo and n8n for my wife’s business. I have servers running Borgbackup and Borgmatic for backups. And a bunch of other stuff.
Gotta run it as root eh? 😅
Why does what need root access? The person paying for the hosting? So they can install software cloudflare doesn’t offer for example.
