In November 2022 OpenAI revealed ChatGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) chat interface that would answer questions, write poetry, whistle and dance, all based on data it had scraped and trained on from the internet (copyright be darned). It can be useful (it helped me write some code for this blog) and it can be silly/weird/dangerous (giving famously bad answers, of which there are too many examples to name).
But it also, more insidiously, provided a new tool to spammers, scammers and their ilk.
People were already complaining about Google search results getting worse, and now it’s filling up with AI-generated junk. That same junk is also serving to help train future LLMs and you see where this is going: an internet-wide ouroboros of spammy, misleading nonsense choking out anything written by actual humans.
My observation on this, coming as we near mid-January of 2024, is already old news. I just wanted to record it here for posterity. Let’s check back and see how things have evolved by year’s end.
If you think the twist is that this isn’t actually fun, you’re half right. But also half wrong!
Today, my internet connection went down, as it does on a roughly weekly or bi-weekly basis. This has been going on for some time, and I’ve contacted my ISP’s tech support for help to no avail. I will not name and shame the company for now, but they are bad and should feel bad.
Anyway, usually power-cycling the router fixes the connection in a few minutes and I move on. Today, only the wired connection seemed to revive. I know this because my phone was complaining about no Wi-Fi and I noticed those ominous yellow lines on the pair of Echo Show 5s in the bedroom that mean. “Hey, where did the internet go?” I foolishly decided to test by asking the living room Echo what time it was. Normally, the closest device will answer, and the others stay quiet. Occasionally it gets confused and the next closest answers instead, but it’s pretty reliable.
If you have an internet connection.
If you don’t, the device you speak to and all other devices will all report connection issues, but each one will be just slightly off from each other, so you get this weird echo (lolz) effect with all of them jabbering at you. It’s funny how quickly it goes from sort of cute to driving you mad.
A second reboot of the router fixed the issue.
But if I could, I’d use the HomePod’s saucy Australian male voice on every device, because hearing that echo through every room would be amazing.
From the Galaxy Brain newsletter, on companies like Meta (Facebook) and Twitter charging for verification:
I don’t know if Charlie Warzel knew where the preview of his newsletter would end and where the pitch would begin, but it couldn’t have been placed more perfectly for maximum ironic effect.
This bit puzzles me: “Like almost every journalist working today, he’s won a few awards.” There are a few ways to interpret this:
A sarcastic jab suggesting that anyone who calls themselves a journalist is going to get some sort of award handed to them by someone, as a kind of participation prize. “Who wrote a good story? YOU wrote a good story!”
A non-sarcastic observation that most journalists today are such hard-working people that most of them end up winning awards.
Something else that got lost in translation.
Really, I’m leaning toward the third option, because the first seems too nakedly hostile to be plausible, and the second goes too far the other way, elevating journalists in an odd way that suggests a kind of superiority. “Don’t you wish you were a journalist? You’d have awards!”
The strange, random things you see.
Creole Ned is a web logger (or blogger). Like most bloggers posting today, he has won no awards at all. But his hair smells nice most of the time.
Since getting the internet connection upgrade, I occasionally check to see how the connection is running.
Just now, I did two tests on the Mac mini. Here are the results:
speedtest.net using a BCNET server (this is the service used by many post-secondary schools): 74.97 Mbps download, 21.01 Mbps upload, 12 ms ping
fast.com (provided by Netflix): 53 Mbps download, 20 Mbps upload, 4 ms ping
Now, I’m no internet scientist, but it seems to me even allowing for some variation between different sites, I shouldn’t be seeing a difference of nearly 22 Mbps when conducting tests literally within a minute of each other. And tests earlier in the evening were even lower from fast.com, peaking around 43 Mbps.
Even though this is kind of terrible, I’m not overly concerned right now, because for most of my purposes, the speed is still fast enough that I’m not left squirming in my seat saying, “Faster, faster!” And the speedtest.net result is actually very close to my expected speed.
But eventually I may start squirming, and if I do I’ll run a bunch of tests over multiple days and times and take the results to my ISP and say to them, “What’s going on, you big lovable corporate entity?” And they may just LOL or whatever, concluding the saga on a lighthearted note.
I don’t mean old as in tired and passe–though others might make that argument, with some justification–but rather, it’s actually been around a good long while now.
I recall articles in computer magazines (almost as quaint now as the pre-internet days) in 1994 were touting two major developments in the tech world: the forthcoming release of Windows 95 (originally known only as “Windows 4”) and the rise of this new form of online communication known as the Internet.
I was already a regular participant on some BBSes (my roommate in the late 80s had a BBS running off four Commodore 64s) and participated in early forums that were part of FidoNet. Looking back it seems hilariously primitive. You connected to the host, downloaded all of the new messages on the forum, made your replies, then uploaded them and…waited. The conversations were not only not real-time, they weren’t even same-day. It would typically take two to three days for the turnaround. It didn’t prevent people from hurling insults and contributing little, of course, but it helped.
By comparison, my first cable modem and the actual internet–first introduced to me as a separate “premium” service by my ISP–was like stepping into the future. Your connection was always on (!) and you could visit multiple sites at the same time. There were multiple sites!
A big part of the early days for me revolved around gaming and one of the first games I got into online was Tribes, released in December 1998 (I bought it a month later). It got me into a gaming group and I still regularly converse with members of that group twenty years later. Back then I had the reflexes of a thirty-something, so I was already behind the curve, but I held my own. I read a bunch of gaming sites, many of which are either gone now after living on in a zombie state for awhile, like Voodoo Extreme, or have been abandoned after the parent company vanished, like PlanetQuake, which is still up, but hasn’t been updated since 2012 (its parent company, GameSpy, was shuttered the next year).
And then you have something like Blue’s News. Not only is the site still being updated regularly (by the same person, no less), but visually it is unchanged. Yes, the site looks pretty much exactly like it did 20 years ago. It was my home page for a long time, but I haven’t regularly visited any dedicated gaming site since consoles entrenched themselves as the primary way to game. There’s something both admirable and awful about not changing your website design for 20 years (for the record, I find the look today to be pretty ugly. Dense, small text on a dark background is not my idea of readability. On the plus side, the layout is about as straightforward as you can get).
The internet is an inescapable part of our lives now, and much of it is a terrible place. Facebook and Twitter serve as staging platforms for hate, enabling the spread of misery, violence and death. The wealth of information is vast and impossible for any single person to even begin to sift through. You choose your interests, put your faith in Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo if you really want to go full rebel) and hope for the best. Sure, you can find stuff through the recommendations of friends, but most of those will come via Facebook, anyway. And there’s always the echo chamber effect, too.
In the olden days the array of content was exponentially smaller. Sites themselves were smaller and updated less frequently. Messages downloaded as pure text at a rate slow enough to read as it downloaded. It wasn’t better, per se, but it was simpler. And in a way, that made it better. Or it created the illusion.
Fun Fact: this site turns 14 years old (!) on February 4th. In my first post I ranted about sites using white backgrounds. How things change. 😛
It started a few days ago when I went online to check how my monthly internet/TV bill was divided between the internet and TV parts, as I am looking into the possibility of cutting the proverbial cord. As it turns out, the TV part is about $60 per month. I then drifted over to looking at the various internet plans to compare to what I have now, and discovered my current plan no longer existed, but a new plan that was both faster and cheaper, was available.
My ISP had not notified me of this. IMAGINE THAT.
I called and a tech came out today for her last appointment before heading off to spend Christmas with the family or whatnot.
Here are the results of the initial internet connection in 2011 and the results of the speed test today, post-upgrade.
2011:
2018:
Sadly, Telus’s star rating has not similarly improved over the last seven years. But now I can reap the benefits of getting exposed to horrible social media even faster than before. Onward to the future, what little we have. Hooray!
In case you had trouble finding depressing things on the internet, Bijan Stephen has an article on The Verge that handily links to several sites that trade specifically in the despair and hopelessness online: The feeling of online is ennui
It highlights how you can feel so alone and cold when in the midst of a billion babbling virtual voices. In the era of an American president seemingly spending more time making typos and complaints on Twitter than actually doing his job (perhaps a good thing), it’s not surprising that stories (and sites) like these would pop up.
Screenshots of despair is my favorite, partly because it’s a blog and not a Twitter account, but also because the humor mostly derives from being out of context, which makes it seem a little less hopeless and awful (though the blog author asserts “I am trying to break your heart.”)
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to–no, no, that’s not it.
(That’s a whole other chapter of “Makes you feel old,” realizing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released 51 years ago. I remember when its release on CD [remember those?] was a big deal and even that was 31 years ago now.)
No, 20 years ago I got broadband. It was 1998 and Rogers was my ISP because back then there wasn’t really a choice. I got Rogers@home, their broadband service, allowing me to experience the world of high speed internet.
And disconnects. And outages (sometimes for more than a day at a time). And speeds that would go from very fast to slower than dial-up.
It was both amazing (“I don’t need to tie up a phone line to get on the internet!” “The internet is always on!”) and amazingly frustrating (see the aforementioned issues above).
It opened me to a world of online gaming, from which I think I’ve just finally cured myself, having let my WoW sub finally lapse after more than ten years with little interruption. But back in the early days, Tribes, a multiplayer-only first person shooter, simply wouldn’t have been the fantastic experience it was without broadband.
Broadband let me start exploring news online instead of having to sit down in front of the TV for the news hour and watch what the broadcaster wanted me to watch. I still get my news online. It’s so much better.
It was also an age before YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media. In some ways this was better. Most ways. Nearly all ways, if you really think about it. There were forums for different games and hobbies, but with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of users rather than millions. You got to know people. There were a lot fewer funny cat pictures and even with broadband most of them were still small and horribly compressed.
The internet itself was still young and awkward. Websites had animated gifs and midi music. Sites were spartan or ugly or both. Spugly. But it was fresh and new and exciting.
Today, Blue’s News has literally the same design as it did back then. If you want a retro taste of what once was, that’s your active go-to right there. It used to be my home page back around then, too. It predates my high speed internet by two years. Zounds.
A few years after I got broadband I jumped ship to Telus and their ADSL. It was a bit slower but much more stable (well, not so much in that first year but it’s been solid since). The speeds today are a lot faster than they were in 1998, but web pages now serve so much fancypants content even before you include the singing/dancing/popping-up/sliding-in/good-chance-of-carrying-malware ads that it doesn’t necessarily feel a lot faster. And then you download a 50 mb file and wonder why it won’t start downloading only to realize it finished in a fraction of a second.
Fiber (or fibre, if you prefer, this post is being written in Canada, after all) is becoming more widespread, though not yet in my neighborhood. I wonder what that would feel like, speed-wise? Would I even notice? I actually don’t download a lot of stuff anymore. Mostly I just need the connection to be there and be reliable. Still, if it becomes an option I’ll probably go for it. Maybe ridiculous speed will open up new possibilities, the same way broadband did for me back in 1998. Or maybe it’ll just make it easier to exceed my bandwidth cap.
