📢 New Essay: The Boring Internet

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg I hate to do this because the content of the article is excellent.

But the shape of it, or at least some parts of it, is very similar to ChatGPT's preferred prose style.

Did you get assistance from an LLM? If you did, no shade because you used it for something good. But you should disclose it. If you did not, well, it's proof that some rhetorical patterns are hopelessly tainted now.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@ska no ai on this one, and my preferred AI is claude, when I do use it

if i do use ai on writing I will 100% disclose it

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg Thanks for clarifying. If you like, I can point you to the few elements that made me question. If not, feel free to ignore me.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@ska i don't find that useful, i'm going to write how i write. i write differently on an essay than a blog post. it doesn't bother me much if people think it's ai, the point is the movement and the meaning. if you have advice on that, i'd like to hear it.

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg Unfortunately, I don't. On a good day, the quality of the prose I am able to output when creative writing is roughly equivalent to an LLM's, so I have writing lessons to give to no one.

[tg@indieweb.social]

@ska I've done some general reading on how they write. you can't do reversals (not this, that!) and you can't use triads (this, other, thing). And we all know you can't use em-dashes even though my natural style is to use all of those because I think they're effective. sigh

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@tg Yeah. Fast-paced enumerations, too. Word. Word. Word. Word.

I really hate that they took good patterns and apply them everywhere without discrimination, which now make them sus when humans apply it where they belong.

[nickchomey@mastodon.social]

@tg @ska

fwiw, I had the exact same sense while reading that fantastic post. Not to an excessive degree - I just thought there was a tasteful amount of it used to tidy up what had been hand written.

I'm glad no Ai was used, yet perhaps even more disappointed that some manners of writing are now forever tainted

I just subscribed to your rss feeds, via feedly which I've recently revived and am cleaning up. Sad that Current is apple-only. A PWA would be ideal, and aligned with your ethos...

[multisn8@mastodon.catgirl.cloud]

@tg Brilliant, thank you: You once again manage to crystallize distinctions (here: services vs. protocols) and draw hopeful observations from them; Reading this makes me cry.

One comment: Using the boring internet sometimes depends on privilege at the moment. Learning how to set up servers and interact with less-explored protocols often requires a huge time + energy investment. I find that easy to forget.
(I don't think that privilege dependency is fundamental: Software improvements can reduce failure modes and increase compatibility; I've also been thinking about self-updating small server boxes to physically hand out to friends who want their own file storage and fediverse instances. Though those would be instances of social privilege. Hm.)

[nickchomey@mastodon.social]

@tg @ska

On a related note, I've found myself wanting to double down on my preferred writing style in response to LLM style taking over.

I tend to be very long-winded, and surely flirt with the line of run-on sentences/comma splices. But, to me, that's better than all of the 3-6 word "punchy" sentences that llms prefer. I'm allergic to it now

Likewise, Ive always used hyphens in place of em dashes. Cant be bothered to figure out how to insert one of those, and certainly won't going forward

[tg@indieweb.social]

@nickchomey @ska for a while if i reached for an em dash i'd replace it with a comma or a colon

[nickchomey@mastodon.social]

@tg @ska

I don't think a colon fits at all. Comma perhaps. My hyphen-as-em dash seems to be the appropriate way to handle it - at least that's what I'll continue doing.

An example (picked at random) of how my style differs (and not saying that you should change anything)

> This is the old machinery. Not pure. Not beautiful. Not easy to use.

This is the old machinery: not pure, beautiful or easy to use.

No idea which is more correct or effective. But yours just reeks of LLM, even if it isn't

[nickchomey@mastodon.social]

@tg @ska

Here's chatgpt's take on it! Hah!

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is your AI chatbot for everyday use. Chat with the most advanced AI to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster.

ChatGPT (chatgpt.com)

[gemini0@labyrinth.zone]

@tg thank you for writing this, i tried to express the same ideas in my own way in a post on here and just got lectured about how the internet is better now, actually, just because more people from more countries are using it...
i didn't mean i didn't want to communicate with those from foreign places, i just want those damn corporate entities to stop shoving ads and other nonsense down my throat and let me use the internet connection i'm paying for for my own purposes.
i don't mind CDNs, those are important for those in other countries, but i sure do mind things born entirely out of "number go up". i'm not going to pretend like corporations have building a real, proper, thriving community in mind across multiple continents, when they're flooding the communities with bots and other spam.

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

@tg recently I've been thinking about writing about how many of the "boring" parts of the internet (ip addresses, domain names, DNS, the cables under the ocean, the network routers, TLS certificates) have various kinds of corporate and/or national and/or nonprofit owners who interact with each other in complicated ways

it opened up a lot of complicated questions about governance (for ICANN etc) that I didn't feel super well-equipped to answer but I think it would be cool to explore

[boramalper@mastodon.social]

@b0rk @tg I’d love to read it if you write it

[tg@indieweb.social]

@b0rk very interesting indeed. definitely over my head and ability to fire these neurons to put a few thoughts together