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| Fri May 22 05:52:39 UTC 2026 | The information age is dead. |
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Okay, local woman shouting at clouds time here. The latest Google I/O really strengthened my ongoing hate for this entire LLM grift, and oh look, I have a blog I can rant on.
It disturbs me deeply that the generation of computer scientists and engineers before me connected every computer, university and library in the world, and made that wealth of information accessible to anyone who could get to a terminal, and in the span of the last decade we've functionally destroyed it. We let techbros push their massively overhyped language models, which were and still are years from being even remotely efficient or practical, run rampant on the web and irreversibly pollute that wealth of information. What was this even for? Assuming this technology ever gets to the point that it doesn't consume more energy resources than entire US states to function, what are we being given here? Instead of finding the information you want with a simple string or boolean search, you get a large language model to interpret your request, then disseminate and present that information to you in text or speech. That's it. Was it worth it? There's no need to make a webpage look presentable, or tweak the user experience to feel just right anymore. All you need is data that can be interpreted by an agent and presented to end users through a closed, privately owned interface. I won't even bemoan the loss of webpages as a paradigm, this is a hobby and format I adore, certainly, but if that's genuinely the future I can almost see the appeal. But so long as these models are owned by tech companies, why would I or anyone else ever be okay to let these things know everything about me? A text field I can use to search for the information I need is more than enough for me, I still think that's the greatest innovation of my lifetime. The information age is dead, just let Google decide what you need to know, or what you should do with your day. I think algorithmic curation was the beginning of the end, and I'd really like to see more discussion about that in particular. I never needed my iPod to think about what I might like to listen to next, that was my job. There was and still is genuine joy and satisfaction in exploring and finding new artists and sounds I like. Why am I supposed to want Spotify's algorithm to do that for me, especially knowing they're selling my interest profile to advertisers and they get to decide what gets pushed or not. That's genuinely dystopian, it's a paid service and yet I'm still the product. Thank fuck for Bandcamp still being around, because once it's gone I genuinely don't know where I'll be able to find music without the feeling of some algorithm trying to disseminate my interests into a market profile, I swear I can feel when these things are working. With physical media and stores disappearing at a faster rate than ever because of these tools, I think that's going to happen sooner than later. Being on the YouTube front page used to mean something. Everyone saw the same things, because they were doing well and that's what you saw. If you weren't into what's popular, then you could reasonably find something you did with a quick search query. Now, everyone gets their own front page curated for them. No one sees the same thing, and I genuinely think I miss that. It feels isolating to know that the things I see when I launch the site are completely unique to me, especially when I didn't even get to curate it myself. Don't get me wrong, curated feeds are great, and having a separate page for the creators and subjects you've subscribed to makes perfect sense. But none of that needs a curation algorithm. If you use a YouTube account you might not know this, but if you go to YouTube today, without being signed in and with no cookies for the site, you don't even get a front page. You just get a search bar, and a pop-up telling you to look something up before it can show you thumbnails. They won't even serve you content until they can set their addiction algorithm on you, that's fucking scary to me. tl;dr the dead internet theory is real and we killed the information age. i'm mad about it because i'm a stupid hipster, but you also probably shouldn't let yourself be a product for tech companies. do with that what you will. |
kibachee 2026 |