I recently was searching for some tips on overlanding routes. So many sites are just long strung together SEO word salad.

I've been saying for quite a while now that the Internet was best in the '90s and early 2000s back before it was commercialized, even despite all the "under construction" gifs and whatnot. The signal/noise ratio has only continued to drop since then.

Thanks, scientists, couldn't have known that without you.

Recently I was looking for info (in finnish) how to prevent car windows from fogging. I found a really weird website all about car windows, but it kept confusing car and house windows. It instructed to clean car windows by "opening the window and cleaning between the panels".

It was obviously ai-generated, but I couldn't figure out why. They weren't selling anything, there were no ads and no links to other websites or services.

Edit: I found the site again, I cannot spot anything nefarious, but proceed with caution: https://www.lasinvaihto.fi/

I need an AI Firefox extension that detects badly translated AI text and automatically blocks those domains.

For a time I thought this Fediverse thing would help or change things or something, but honestly...the Internet is just plain boring now...and it's pretty clear what is causing that: AI / SEO trash content, social media's rise, and commercialization of the Internet generally.

One day I was even feeling nostalgic so I went back to where I spent hours upon hours of my youth: EFNet on IRC...there was basically nobody there and of the few channels I saw some were even Trump-leaning weirdo "communities".

It's basically finished. I can't even find a decent place to procrastinate or hang out anymore on this POS. It's all just a giant ad surface and e-commerce portal. The fucking owners won.

The most annoying aspect of this is when you know actual information has to be out there, but it is being drowned out by dozens of sites reposting the less relevant and low quality information... And then you go to search in another language and you see substandard machine translations of all the garbage you were just fleeing, lol.

Turing tests solving turing tests solving turing tests

The whole webring idea needs to come back. Human curated recommendations of good resources and pages. So long as these pages remain in the control of humans and dedicated to curation and are decentralised, unlike the search engines, then they’ll be reliable.

Plugging in some social and community organisation, perhaps like a wiki, and you could get even more out of it.

This isn't shocking at all. The markets for obscure language content are incredibly small so there's no incentive for most to spend resources on it. I'd argue mediocre machine translation is better than nothing at all in many cases, but for unsupervised training it does pose a challenge.

Translation is very different from generation.

As a matter of fact, even AI generation has different grades of quality.

SEO garbage is certainly not the same as an article with AI generated components and very different from a translated article.

Too good not to be ruined by humanity

AI is going to fuck up everything we’ve ever done.