"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Look at this shit (first paragraph of body of article):
"Automatic watches are admired for their intricate mechanics and timeless appeal, but even the finest timepieces can sometimes run fast or slow. If you’ve noticed your automatic watch gaining or losing time, you’re not."
First search result on DDG. Thank you, automatic watch expert and real person Hnin Oo Thazin. We may need a whole ass new internet.
https://mtscwatch.com/blog/why-your-automatic-watch-runs-fast-or-slow-and-how-to-fix-it
This existed before LLMs grew popular. It’s sweatshop written filler, to game Google’s algorithm since it ranks long answers higher.
Unfortunately, this SEO “style” with giant padded answers may be why newer LLMs write the way they do, as they were trained on it.
yeah that all makes sense
It is an interesting question why explanatory and instruction-type websites all seem similar. In this article we will take a deep dive on how this came to be the case.
I read an interesting analogy recently:
Imagine the world before cars. Now imagine an American company suddenly releasing 100 billion cars all over the world for everyone to drive. There are no roads, signs, lights, rules, laws or pedestrian crossings.
That's kind of the situation with AI now.
Whenever I need to look up general information, I filter to only show pages from before 2022. It removes the AI trash instantly.
Most general topics haven't changed appreciably in the past 3 years.
thats great, the internet ended as a way to research a topic 3 years ago :(
Books are being written with AI. Legislation is being written with AI. Lawyer arguments are being written with AI. Scholarly research is being written with AI.
Pretty sure it's not just the internet.
I imagine a future where children speak of the "before times" and how when there was information on a thing called "paper" and how it wasn't created by slop generators.
It was happening well before AI with shitty content-scraping “solution” sites. Some even put [SOLVED] in the page title. AI is just a compounding problem.
Yes, and AI was trained on all of that garbage. It's like they took all the problems we had before and bred them together.
Why your watch runs slow (2025 updated)
while I dislike that youre asking we constrict our collective digital sphincter in order to take less of a massive diarrhea shit on everything that AI is and represents, you've got a point
Reported to SlopStop.
I don't think we can overestimate the impact this "knowledge collapse" will have yet. Thank goodness for the fediverse, not that it is immune but holy shit the rest of the internet and ALL of corporate social media sure has gone to the dumps fast hasn't it....
The general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
I think it is tantamount to a mass delusion that people refuse to think about the fact that social media will tear society apart unless it is structured in at the very least a semi-decentralized federated fashion not under the control of one or two massive corporations. It feels like for my whole life I have had conversations like this with people and most often people just don't care, they would rather be under a more convenient and more centralized authority. Regardless it is no less surreal to me than it must be to those people in denial about this that we are seeing the unavoidable consequences of refusing to understand a crisis of centralization rip our societies apart into violence and bigotry.
Thank goodness for before:2023. For instance, this particular search has no requirement for modern answers.
This is why I hasted my self hosted adventure. I have to selfhost before everything go to crap
and "sobering" is literally the last fucking thing I need to be happening to me in 2025
As someone who actually knows a thing or two about automatic watches, I decided to give it a read. While the info is actually not as awful as I thought (no hallucinations surprisingly), I still would not recommend it as a guide, even if it were written by a human. Especially this part:
2. Demagnetize:
If your watch suddenly starts running fast, have it demagnetized.
While, yes, a magnetized movement will cause it to suddenly run fast, demagnetizing a movement isn’t completely harmless. If you’re wrong and the movement isn’t magnetized and instead a different type of damage, attempting to demagnetize it will actually magnetize it, and the combination of a magnetized movement plus whatever other damage caused the movement to run fast suddenly could be far worse. I think an added disclaimer would be helpful here. There are ways to test if a movement is magnetized, that should be mentioned. Blanket recommending demagnetizing a movement without a disclaimer is dangerous. I know this is written by AI and not a human but that part really bugged me.
Considering you gave the article a high factuality rating, may it be supervised AI output?
I mean, it’s still missing a bunch of important info, it’s just that it’s not saying anything incorrect necessarily. In general anyway I’d just always steer clear of LLMs though regardless of the situation.
well thats the thing, its crap written by an LLM. I read the first paragraph then went and found an article written by a person, but Id say a good percentage of people would read the whole damn thing and take it as fact.
personally ive always objected to the term hallucination for these LLMs fucking up. its not hallucinating, its shitty computer code outputting shitty output
for what its worth, I just needed to manually wind my watch a bunch. I just had it bequeathed to me and didnt know anything about them. keeping time now of course
In the age of SEO and AI slop, may your niche hobby or interest never become trendy.
Unfortunately canning and recipes in general are now concerning and I have to worry about food safety so much more!
Between SEO garbage and AI slop the internet is fucked. As a 42 year old dude who fell in love with the internet and programming in the late 90's and made a good living at making websites up until about 5 years ago it really hurts. Nothing is left of what I loved about it. The giant conglomocorps have taken everything over and turned it all to shit. Oh well... Old man shakes fist at sky I guess...
We may need a whole ass new internet.
I'd be down if we left the clearweb to the corpos and moved all the human interaction to maybe something like Usenet or I2P.
I would say I'd even be down to learn Gopher protocol, but I looked up their website and they have their own memecoin, so I'm hesitant based off that alone. Even if they say it has no intrinsic value.
As opposed to a manual watch that I have to advance every second?
(yes yes I'm sure they're referring to a watch you don't have to wind but like, who has ever referred to anything as an "automatic watch"?)
Everybody says automatic watch. Like literally everyone from common consumers straight down the line to horologists.
This is to differentiate watches you have to wind. It's automatic winding rather than manual winding. It's lingo that has stuck around since watches became a common item. All watches were manual winding at first. Then the automatic winding watches came out. Then the quartz battery. We still have all these types of watches but to differentiate they're called quartz, automatic, manual.
yeah so thats just what they're called. its the parlance for a watch that winds itself. you used to have to wind them every day of course, then these came along and "automatic winding watch", shortened to "automatic" has always been the term industry and marketing have used. sometimes they are called self-winding, but Ive heard "automatic" nearly every time. there's also quartz movement, which uses a battery