I expect this is why BIND 9 has the 'servfail-ttl' option. [0]

Turns out that there's a standards-track RFC from 1998 that explicitly permits caching SERVFAIL responses. [1] Section 8 of that document suggests that this behavior was permitted by RFC 1034 (published back in 1987).

[0] <https://bind9.readthedocs.io/en/v9.18.42/reference.html#name...>

[1] <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2308#section-7.1>

For you sanity, only deal with FQDNs;

    divisiveness this kind of stuff will create

Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated.

And who can blame them (us). It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite. And each little snippet worms its way into your brain (and well being) one way or the other.

It's just been too much for too long and you can tell.

Its odd to me to still use "luddite" disparagingly while implying that avoiding certain tech would actually have some high impact benefits. At that point I can't help but think the only real issue with being a luddite is not following the crowd and fitting in.

In fact, it's easier than ever to see the intended benefit of such a lifestyle.

They didn't say to avoid certain tech. They said to avoid takes and news headlines.

Your conflation of those two is like someone saying "injecting bleach into your skin is bad" and you responding with "oh, so you oppose cleaning bathrooms [with bleach]?"

Your bleach scenario is confusing to me, its also you arguing against something completely unrelated to the discussion here.

As someone who’s read a newspaper daily for 30+ years, that is definitely not true. The news has always tried to capture your attention but doing so using anger and outrage, and using those exclusively, is a newer development. Newspapers and broadcast news used to use humor, suspense, and other things to provoke curiosity. When the news went online, it became focused on provoking anger and outrage. Even print edition headlines tend to be tamer than what’s in the online edition.

It really isn't that hard, if I'm looking at my experience. Maybe a little stuff on here counts. I get my news from the FT, it's relatively benign by all accounts. I'm not sure that opting out of classical social media is particularly luddite-y, I suspect it's closer to becoming vogue than not?

Being led around by the nose is a choice still, for now at least.

I mostly get gaming and entertainment news for shows I watch, but even between those I get CNN and Fox News, both which I view as "opinion masquerading as news" outlets.

My mom shares so many articles from her FB feed that are both mainstream (CNN, etc) nonsense and "influencer" nonsense.

I have no news feed on my phone. I doubt on android it is any harder to evade. Social media itself is gone. The closest I get to click-bait is when my mother spouts something gleaned from the Daily Mail. That vector is harder to shift I concede!

Simulacra and Simulation came out in '81, for an example of how long this has been a recognized phenomenon

So we emotionally convince ourselves that we have solved the problem so we can act appropriately and continue doing things that are important to us.

The founders recognized this problem and attempted to setup a Republic as an answer to it; so that each voter didn't have to ask "do I know everything about everything so I can select the best person" and instead were asked "of this finite, smaller group, who do I think is best to represent me at the next level"? We've basically bypassed that; every voter knows who ran for President last election, hardly anyone can identify their party's local representative in the party itself (which is where candidates are selected, after all).

Most people I know who have strong political opinions (as well as those who don't) can't name their own city council members or state assemblyman, and that's a real problem for functioning representative democracy. Not only for their direct influence on local policy, but also because these levels of government also serve as the farm team or proving grounds for higher levels of office.

By the time candidates are running with the money and media of a national campaign, in some sense it's too late to evaluate them on matters of their specific policies and temperaments, and you kind of just have to assume they're going to follow the general contours of their party. By and large, it seems the entrenched political parties (and, perhaps, parties in general) are impediments to good governance.

The accidents that let it occur may no longer be present - there are arguments that "democracy" as we understand it was impossible before rapid communication, and perhaps it won't survive the modern world.

We're living in a world where a swing voter in Ohio may have more effect/impact on Iran than a person living there - or even more effect on Europe than a citizen of Germany.

Voting on principles is fine and good.

The issue is the disconnect between professed principles and action. And the fact that nowadays there are not many ways to pick and choose principles except two big preset options.

It’s quite easy actually. Like the OP, I have no social media accounts other than HN (which he rightfully asserts isn’t social media but is the inheritor of the old school internet forum). I don’t see the mess everyone complains about because I choose to remove myself from it. At the same time, I still write code every day, I spend way too much time in front of a screen, and I manage to stay abreast of what’s new in tech and in the world in general.

Too many people conflate social media with technology more broadly and thus make the mistake of thinking that turning away from social media means becoming a luddite. You can escape the barrage of trolls and hottakes by turning off social media while still participating in the much smaller but saner tech landscape that remains.

A luddite would refuse the covid vaccine. They'd refuse improved trains. They'd refuse EVs. etc. This is because ludditism is the blanket opposition to technological improvements.

the luddites were a labor movement opposed to the negative externalities imposed by rapid industrialization of formerly-craft/artisinal markets. it was a movement that stood for the protection of workers rights and the quality of goods produced; it was not opposed to new technologies. what it did oppose was the irresponsible use of those technologies at the expense of workers and consumers.

what you're referring to is probably more accurately described as primitivism.

That’s a very unfair accusation to throw at someone off the cuff. Anyway, what you wrote is not what a Luddite is at all, especially not the anti-vaccine accusation. I don’t think you’re being deliberately deceptive here, I think you just don’t know what a Luddite is (was).

For starters: They were not anti-science/medicine/all technology. They did not have “blanket opposition to all technological improvement.” You’re expressing a common and simplistic misunderstanding of the movement and likely conflating it with (an also flawed understanding of) the Amish.

They were, at their core, a response against industrialization that didn’t account for the human cost. This was at the start of the 19th century. They wanted better working conditions and more thoughtful consideration as industrialization took place. They were not anti-technology and certainly not anti-vaccine.

The technology they were talking about was mostly related to automation in factories which, coupled with anti-collective bargaining initiatives, led to further dehumanization of the workforce as well as all sorts novel and horrific workplace accidents for adults and children alike. Their call for “common sense laws” and “guardrails” are echoed today with how many of us talk about AI/LLM’s.

Great comic on this: https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/

Then I am very proudly one. I don't do TikTok, FB, IG, LinkedIn or any of this crap. I do a bit of NH here and there. I follow a curated list of RSS feeds. And I twice a day look at a curated/grouped list of headlines from around the world, built from a multitude of sources.

Whenever I see a yellow press headline from the German bullshit print medium "BILD" when paying for gas or out shopping, I can't help but smile. That people pay money for that shit is - nowadays - beyond me.

To be fair. This was a long process. And I still regress sometimes. I started my working life at an editorial team for an email portal. Our job was to generate headlines that would stop people from logging in to read their mail and read our crap instead - because ads embedded within content were way better paid than around emails.

So I actually learned the trade. And learned that outrage (or sex) sells. This was some 18 or so years ago - the world changed since then. It became even more flammable. And more people seem to be playing with their matches. I changed - and changed jobs and industries a few times.

So over time I reduced my news intake. And during the pandemic learned to definitely reduce my social media usage - it is just not healthy for my state of mind. Because I am way to easily dopamine addicted and trigger-able. I am a classic xkcd.com/386 case.

Case in point: if you ask for expertise verification on HN you get downvoted. People would rather argue their point, regardless of validity. This site’s culture is part of the problem and it predates AI.

Customer asked if reporting these kinds of illegal ads would be the best course. Nope, not by a long shot. As long as Google gets its money, they will not care. Ads have become a cancer of the internet.

Maybe i should setup a Pi-Hole business...

Also can you set Windows not to allow Ads notifications through to the notification bar? If not that should also be a point of the law.

Now I bet somebody is going to come along and scold me for trying to solve social problems by suggesting laws be made.

... which doesn't sound impossible. It's also entirely possible that the value of Section 230 has run its course and it should generally be remarkably curtailed (its intent was to make online forums and user-generated-content networks, of which ad networks are a kind, possible, but one could make the case that it has been demonstrated that operators of online forums have immense responsibility and need to be held accountable for more of the harms done via the online spaces they set up).

If you have that you will never get scared by a popup in Chrome.

On the actual open decentralized internet, which still exists, mastodon, IRC, matrix... bots are rare.

Any platform that wants to resist bots need to - tie personas to real or expensive identities - force people to add AI flag to AI content - let readers filter content not marked as AI - and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked, one strike and you are dead forever

The issue then becomes that marking someone as “posts unmarked AI content” becomes a weapon. No idea about how to handle it.

Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members only sections on the same forum) were good at filtering out low value posters.

There were bots, but they were not as big of a problem. The message amplification was smaller, and it was probably harder to ban evade.

So do it. Forums haven't gone away, you just stopped going to them. Search for your special interest followed by "Powered by phpbb" (or Invision Community, or your preferred software) and you'll find plenty of surprisingly active communities out there.

I'm probably just jaded as most of the forums I visited back in the day became ghost towns during the 2010s. I should make more of an effort here

Been running for over 20 years and pick up new randos every day or two.

IME young people use Discord, and those servers often require permission to even join. Nearly all my fandom communications happen on a few Discord servers, most of which you cannot join without an invitation, and if you're kicked (bad actors will be kicked), you cannot re-join (without permission).

It would certainly be fun to trick people I dislike into posting AI content unknowingly. Maybe it has to be so low-key that they aren't even banned on the first try, but that just seems ripe for abuse.

I want a solution to this problem too, but I don't think this is reasonable or practical. I do wonder what it would mean if, philosophically, there were a way to differentiate between "free speech" and commercial speech such that one could be respected and the other regulated. But if there is such a distinction I've never been able to figure it out well enough to make the argument.

People left and never came back.

But those bots were certainly around in the 90s

You're training yourself with a very unreliable source of truth.

Intentionally if I might add. Reddit users aren't particularly interested in providing feedback that will inevitably be used to make AI tools more convincing in the future, nobody's really moderating those subs, and that makes them the perfect target for poisoning via shitposting in the comments.

I don’t just look at the bot decision or accept every consensus blindly. I read the arguments.

If I watch a video and think it’s real and the comments point to the source, which has a description saying they use AI, how is that unreliable?

Alternatively, I watch a video and think it’s AI but a commenter points to a source like YT where the video was posted 5 years ago, or multiple similar videos/news articles about the weird subject of the video, how is that unreliable?

Personally, I don't think that behavior is very healthy, and the other parent comment suggested an easy "get out of jail free" way of not thinking about it anymore while also limiting anxiety: they're unreliable subreddits. I'd say take that advice and move on.

If bots reference real sources it's still a valid argument.

Some people, quite some time ago, also came to that conclusion. (And they did not even had AI to blame)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

Any day now… right?

If the next generation can weather the slop storm, they may have a chance to re-establish new forms of authentic communication, though probably on a completely different scale and in different forms to the Web and current social media platforms.

Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.

I am no big fan of AI but misinformation is a tale as old as time.

Why not? Surely you can ask your friendly neighbourhood AI to run a consistent channel for you?

Even if I'm 100% certain it's not AI slop, it's still a very strong indicator that the videos are some kind of slop.

I do the same on my websites. It's embedded into my static site generator.

Very related: https://practicaltypography.com/

Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.

Down with that foul fifth glyph! Down, I say!

I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".

It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.

My first post took around 6 min & a dictionary. This post took 3. It's a quick skill.

No LLMs. Ctrl+f shows you all your 'e's without switching away from this tab. (And why count it? How many is not important, you can simply look if any occur and that's it)

I rEgrEt that I havE not donE thE samE, but plEase accEpt bad formatting as a countErpoint.

(Assuming you did actually hand craft that I thumbs-up both your humor and industry good sir)

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Disparition_(roman)

In fact, your comment is part of the problem. You are one of the people who want to be outraged. In your case, outraged at people who think racism is a problem. So you attack one group of people, not realizing that you are making the issue worse by further escalating and blaming actual people, rather than realizing that the problem is systemic.

We have social networks like Facebook that require people to be angry, because anger generates engagement, and engagement generates views, and views generate ad impressions. We have outside actors who benefit from division, so they also fuel that fire by creating bot accounts that post inciting content. This has nothing to do with racism or people on one side. One second, these outside actors post a fake incident of a racist cop to fire up one side, and the next, they post a fake incident about schools with litter boxes for kids who identify as pets to fire up the other side.

Until you realize that this is the root of the problem, that the whole system is built to make people angry at each other, you are only contributing to the anger and division.

It's not built to make people angry per se - it's built to optimise for revenue generation - which so happens to be content that makes people angry.

People have discovered that creating and posting such content makes them money, and the revenue is split between themselves and the platforms.

In my view if the platforms can't tackle this problem then the platforms should be shutdown - promoting this sort of material should be illegal, and it's not an excuse to say our business model won't work if we are made responsible for the things we do.

ie while it turns out you can easily scale one side of publishing ( putting stuff out their and getting paid by ads ), you can't so easily scale the other side of publishing - which is being responsible for your actions - if you haven't solved both sides you don't have a viable business model in my view.

Anger increases stickiness. Once one discovers there are other people on the site, and they are guilty of being wrong on the internet, one is incentivized to correct them. It feels useful because it feels like you're generating content that will help other people.

I suspect the failure of the system that nobody necessarily predicted is that people seem to not only tolerate, but actually like being a little angry online all the time.

I think blaming it all on money ignores that this also serve political goals.

Groups spend money to manipulate public opinion. It’s a goal in and of itself that has value rather than a money making scheme.

For example, the 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US election, was I suspect mostly people trying to make money, and more importantly, was completely dwarfed by US direct political spending.

There is also a potentially equally, if not larger problem, in the politicisation of the 'anti-disinformation' campaigns.

To be honest I'm not sure if there is much of a difference between a grifter being directly paid to promote a certain point of view, and somebody being paid indirectly ( by ads ).

In both cases neither really believes in the political point they are making they are just following the money.

These platforms are enabling both.

I don't see anything like outrage in GP, just a vaguely implied sense of superiority (political, not racial!).

This is one level of abstraction more than I deal with on a normal day.

The fake video which plays into people’s indignation for racism, is actually about baiting people who are critical about being baited by racism?

But Facebook cannot "require" people do be angry. Facebook can barely even "require" people to log in, only those locked into Messenger ecosystem.

I don't use Facebook but I do use TikTok, and Twitter, and YouTube. It's very easy to filter rage bait out of your timeline. I get very little of it, mark it "uninterested"/mute/"don't recommend channel" and the timeline dutifully obeys. My timelines are full of popsci, golden retrievers, sketches, recordings of local trams (nevermind), and when AI makes an appearance it's the narrative kind[1] which I admit I like or old jokes recycled with AI.

The root of the problem is in us. Not on Facebook. Even if it exploits it. Surfers don't cause waves.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@gossip.goblin

No, they do not. Nobody[1] wants to be angry. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, "today is going to be a good day because I'm going to be angry."

But given the correct input, everyone feels that they must be angry, that it is morally required to be angry. And this anger then requires them to seek out further information about the thing that made them angry. Not because they desire to be angry, but because they feel that there is something happening in the world that is wrong and that they must fight.

[1]: for approximate values of "nobody"

I disagree. Why are some of the most popular subreddits things like r/AmITheAsshole, r/JustNoMIL, r/RaisedByNarcissists, r/EntitledPeople, etc.: forums full of (likely fake) stories of people behaving egregiously, with thousands of outraged comments throwing fuel on a burning pile of outrage: "wow, your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/father/mother/FIL/MIL/neighbor/boss/etc. is such an asshole!" Why are advice/gossip columns that provide outlets for similar stories so popular? Why is reality TV full of the same concocted situations so popular? Why is people's first reaction to outrageous news stories to bring out the torches and pitchforks, rather than trying to first validate the story? Why can an outrageous lie travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on?

You’re literally saying why people want to be angry.

My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.

But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.

Yes, I think this is exactly it. A reaction that may be reasonable in a personal, real-world context can become extremely problematic in a highly connected context.

It's both that, as an individual, you can be inundated with things that feel like you have a moral obligation to react. On the other side of the equation, if you say something stupid online, you can suddenly have thousands of people attacking you for it.

Every single action seems reasonable, or even necessary, to each individual person, but because everything is scaled up by all the connections, things immediately escalate.

I don't wake up thinking "today I want to be angry", but if I go outside and see somebody kicking a cat, I feel that anger is the correct response.

The problem is that social media is a cat-kicking machine that drags people into a vicious circle of anger-inducing stimuli. If people think that every day people are kicking cats on the Internet, they feel that they need to do something to stop the cat-kicking; given their agency, that "something" is usually angry responses and attacks, which feeds the machine.

Again, they do not do that because they want to be angry; most people would rather be happy than angry. They do it because they feel that cats are being kicked, and anger is the required moral response.

At some point, I think it’s important to recognize the difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. Social media seems adept at exposing revealed preferences.

If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Regardless of what words they use.

And for example, I never heard anyone who was a big Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones fan who said they wanted to be angry or paranoid (to be fair, this was pre-Trump and awhile ago), yet every single one of them I saw got angry and paranoid after watching them, if you paid any attention at all.

Because their purpose in seeking it out is not to get angry, it's to stop something from happening that they perceive as harmful.

I doubt most people watch Alex Jones because they love being angry. They watch him because they believe a global cabal of evildoers is attacking them. Anger is the logical consequence, not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is that the perceived problem is solved, i.e. that people stop kicking cats.

We can chicken/egg about it all day, but at some point if people didn’t want it - they wouldn’t be doing it.

Depending on the definition of ‘want’ of course. But what else can we use?

I don’t think anyone would disagree that smokers want cigarettes, eh? Or gamblers want to gamble?

None of these people said to themselves, "I want to be angry today, and I heard that Alex Jones makes people angry, therefore I will watch Alex Jones."

A lot of people really do, and it predates any sort of media too. When they don't have outrage media they form gossip networks so they can tell each other embellished stories about mundane matters to be outraged and scandalized about.

But again in this situation the goal is not to be angry.

This sort of behaviour emerges as a consequence of unhealthy group dynamics (and to a lesser extent, plain boredom). By gossiping, a person expresses understanding of, and reinforces, their in-group’s values. This maintains their position in the in-group. By embellishing, the person attempts to actually increase their status within the group by being the holder of some “secret truth” which they feel makes them important, and therefore more essential, and therefore more secure in their position. The goal is not anger. The goal is security.

The emotion of anger is a high-intensity fear. So what you are perceiving as “seeking out a reason to be angry” is more a hypervigilant scanning for threats. Those threats may be to the dominance of the person’s in-group among wider society (Prohibition is a well-studied historical example), or the threats may be to the individual’s standing within the in-group.

In the latter case, the threat is frequently some forbidden internal desire, and so the would-be transgressor externalises that desire onto some out-group and then attacks them as a proxy for their own self-denial. But most often it is simply the threat of being wrong, and the subsequent perceived loss of safety, that leads people to feel angry, and then to double down. And in the world we live in today, that doubling down is more often than not rewarded with upvotes and algorithmic amplification.

Things that they have no fear about, and so do not register as warranting brain time.

> eager to get to the outrageously stuff.

The things which are creating a feeling of fear.

It’s not necessary for the source of a fear to exist in the present moment, nor for it to even be a thing that is real. For as long as humans have communicated, we have told tales about things that go bump in the dark. Tales of people who, through their apparent ignorance of the rules of the group, caused the wrath of some spirits who then punished the group.

It needn’t matter whether a person’s actions actually caused a problem, or whether it caused the spirits to be upset, or indeed whether the spirits actually ever existed at all. What matters is that there is a fear, and there is a story about that fear, and the story reinforces some shared group value.

> It's a pattern of behavior which old people in particular commonly fall into,

Here is the fundamental fear of many people: the fear of obsolescence, irrelevance, abandonment, and loss of control. We must adapt to change, but also often have either an inability or unwillingness to do so. And so the story becomes it is everyone else who is wrong. Sometimes there is wisdom in the story that should not be dismissed. But most often it is just an expression of fear (and, again, sometimes boredom).

What makes this hypothesis seem so unbelievable? Why does it need to be people seeking anger? What would need to be true for you to change your opinion? This discussion thread is old, so no need to spend your energy on answering if you don’t feel strongly about it. Just some parting questions to mull over in the bath, perhaps.

Thank you for raising this idea originally, and for engaging with me on it.

Why are you so insistent that people don’t do what they clearly seem to do?

Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?

Is it the apparent lack of (actual) agency for many people? Or the concerning worry that we all could be steering ourselves to our own dooms, while convincing ourself we aren’t?

I’m not rejecting the idea that people fixate on stimuli that produce anger. The question is why they do that, and the answer is unlikely to be “people just want to be angry”.

> Why is that hypothesis so unbelievable?

Because it runs counter to the best available literature I am aware of and is a conclusion based on a superficial observation which has no underlying theoretical basis, whereas the hypothesis I present is grounded in some amount of actual science and evidence. Even the superficial Wikipedia article on anger emphasises the role of threat response here. Mine isn’t, as far as I can tell, some fringe position; it is very much in line with the research. It is also in line with my personal experience. “People just want to be angry” is not.

It is important to understand that the things people try to avoid through gossip, exaggeration, and expressions of anger are not all mortal threats. They can also be very mundane things like not wanting to eat something that they just think tastes bad. So make sure not to take the word “threat” too narrowly when considering this hypothesis.

I don’t have any skin in the game here other than an interest in the truth of the matter and a willingness to engage since I find this sort of thing both interesting and sociologically very important. If you or anyone have some literature to shove in my face that offers some compelling data in support of the “people love feeling angry” hypothesis, then sure, I would accept that and integrate that into my understanding of human behaviour.

Many people seek being outraged. Many people seek to have awareness of truth. Many people seek getting help for problems. These are not mutually exclusive.

Just because someone fakes an incident of racism doesn't mean racism isn't still commonplace.

In various forms, with various levels of harm, and with various levels of evidence available.

(Example of low evidence: a paper trail isn't left when a black person doesn't get a job for "culture fit" gut feel reasons.)

Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered, with the goal of discrediting the position that the fake initially seemed to support.

(Famous alleged example, in second paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#... )

Not sure how I feel about that, to be honest. On one hand I admire the hustle for clicks. On the other, too many people fell for it and probably never knew it was a grift, making all recipients look bad. I only happened upon them researching a bit after my own mom called me raging about it and sent me the link.

Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.

I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...

The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).

The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.

I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.

The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.

I see this way more often on GitHub now than I did before, though.

Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards.

Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9

Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...

  Because I could not stop for Death –
  He kindly stopped for me –
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove – He knew no haste
  And I had put away
  My labor and my leisure too,
  For His Civility –

https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893

Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.

Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.

Of course there are still "trusted" mainstream sources, expect they can inadvertently (or for other reasons) misstate facts as well. I believe it will get harder and harder to reason about what's real.

You get it wrong. Real-world content will become indistinguishable from "AI" content because that's what people will consider normal.

This is "innocent" if you accept that the author's goal is simplify to maximize engagement and YouTube is helping them do that. It's not if you assume the author wants users to see exactly what they authored.

We truly live in wonderful times!

Answer? Probably "of course not"

They're too busy demonetizing videos, aggressively copyright striking things, or promoting Shorts, presumably

Yes. And I think this is what most tech-literate people fail to understand. The issue is scale.

It takes a lot of effort to find the right clip, cut it to remove its context, and even more effort to doctor a clip. Yes, you're still facing Brandolini's law[1], you can see that with the amount of effort Captain Disillusion[2] put in his videos to debunk crap.

But AI makes it 100× times worse. First, generating a convincing entirely video only takes a little bit of prompting, and waiting, no skill is required. Second, you can do that on a massive scale. You can easily make 2 AI videos a day. If you want to doctor videos "the old way", you'll need a team of VFX artists to do it at this scale.

I genuinely think that tech-literate folks, like myself and other hackernews posters, don't understand that significantly lowering the barrier to entry to X doesn't make X equivalent to what it was before. Scale changes everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

[2] https://www.youtube.com/CaptainDisillusion

Just have video cameras (mostly phones these days) record a crypto hash into the video that the video sharing platforms read and display. That way we know a video was recorded with the uploader's camera and not just generated in a computer software.

There aren't that many big tech companies that are responsible for creating the devices people use to record and host the platforms and software that people use to play back the content.

It is that it is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from not-slop.

There is a different bar of believability for each of us. None of us are always right when we make a judgement. But the cues to making good calls without digging are drying up.

And it won’t be long before every fake event has fake support for diggers to find. That will increase the time investment for anyone trying to figure things out.

It isn’t the same staying the same. Nothing has ever stayed the same. “Staying the same” isn’t a thing in nature and hasn’t been the trend in human history.

But I would claim that "trusting blindly" was much more common hundreds of years ago than it is now, so we might make some progress in fact.

If people learn to be more skeptical (because at some point they might get that things can be fake) it might even be a gain. The transition period can be dangerous though, as always.

But today’s text manufacturing isn’t our grand.., well yesterday’s text manufacturing.

And pretty soon it will be very persuasive models with lots of patience and manufactured personalized credibility and attachment “helping” people figure out reality.

The big problem isn’t the tech getting smarter though.

It’s the legal and social tolerance for conflict of interests at scale. Like unwanted (or dark pattern permissioned) surveillance which is all but unavoidable, being used to manipulate feeds controlled by third parties (between us and any organic intentioned contacts), toward influencing us in any way anyone will pay for. AI is just walking through a door that has been left wide open despite a couple decades of hard lessons.

Incentives, as they say, matter.

Misinformation would exist regardless, but we didn’t need it to be a cornerstone business model with trillions of dollars of market cap unifying its globally coordinated efficient and effective, near unavoidable, continual insertion into our and our neighbors lives. With shareholders relentlessly demanding double digit growth.

Doesn’t take any special game theory or economic theory to see the problematic loop there. Or to predict it will continue to get worse, and will be amplified by every AI advance, as long as it isn’t addressed.

How many people were getting quote tweeted on Twitter with deep fake porn of them before Grok could remove the clothes off your person with a simple prompt?

"Great question! No, we have always been at war with Eurasia. Can I help with anything else?"

If I just feed it to 10 pandas, today, they're all dead.

And I suspect that humanity's position in this analogy is far closer to the latter than the former.