ChatGPT was able to decrypt this in about 12 seconds with no context, which I found interesting.
You can do it yourself in about the same time too https://www.dcode.fr/cipher-identifier
Readit Newsvonunov commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward
One of the things I've been wondering about with the 'digital detox' trends or one of the younger generations getting dumbphones instead of smart, is why haven't the papers found some way of turning back the clock to explore capitalizing on that when it's supposedly hard to sell news now. 24 hour news is decades old at this point and the constant firehose of events from every location on the globe is tiring especially if only a tiny fraction is directly relevant to you. I'd be interesting if they could make a more attractive 'news/analysis product' like a newspaper or the evening news broadcast which is distinct from what is readily available from all the other sources.
Any day now some smartass is going to start selling analogue newspapers like hotcakes. Speaking of, I wonder how much I can get neohipsters to pay for hotcakes on the street. Slapjacks, I'll call them . . .
vonunov commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward
Search engine indexes being turned into copyright enforcement levers also significantly killed the net as it created scarcity in info dissemination for the sake of maintaining info asymmetry.
Go ahead and try to find JLG equipment/service manuals on the open net anymore. I'll wait.
Those rental boom lifts and so on? Are these it?
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acsapps.jlg.com+filety...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:csapps.jlg.com+filetype...
vonunov commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward
Typically LLMs don't put spaces between em dashes and the words that surround them—which is the correct orthography, I should point out. Humans often put spaces around them when they shouldn't, like in the example you quoted. I don't know if it's AI or not, but if you ask an AI to use a sentence with an em dash in it, it won't include spaces.
How can "correct" have any meaning in style-preference territory? Chicago doesn't put spaces around dashes. AP does. Oxford follows Chicago, and the rest of the UK uses spaced en dashes instead. For typewriting -- and, by extension, typing -- this well-established convention appears (attested in Garner's Usage, if you're wondering). Chicago always spaces ellipses . . . and AP doesn't, no matter how ugly it looks next to a period. ... Who's correct?
I've seen some variation in such formatting/style from LLMs, so that can't be totally reliable. Doesn't need to be, though. LLMs tend to subject dashes to a distinct flavor of abuse:
- In all the places they don't belong; nearly all can be replaced with a comma, a period, or nothing at all, with no loss to style or tone
- In few of the places they might belong, and conspicuously absent whenever there's a parenthetical phrase to offset
- Obnoxiously dramatic, excessive, and pointless
vonunov commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward
vonunov commented on CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-... · Posted by u/planetjones
It's an easy thing to say without giving specific time frames. At least when Elon makes grand pronouncements he risks getting it horribly wrong.
"told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools."
Here's a time-frame a bit more specific then "in the coming years", but still vague:
"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years"
Repeating a comment I've read on HN before: Following on from cutting down entry-level jobs must imply cutting down on all those next levels up as well. Minimising the number of people coming through Gate 1 will necessarily reduce the number of people going through Gate 2 (yes, you can hire in people to go straight through Gate 2, but they'll have had to go through Gate 1 somewhere).
In the not-too-distant future, AI could replace up to 47% of jobs or more!
If you think AI art/writing is bad, you should have seen what the people who produced it were producing before.
[textbroker moment]
Oh, and even more aptly, do you remember "spinning"? This was a manual job, if you can imagine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
vonunov commented on Tell me about your favorite tree (a slow-web proposal) nannnsss.omg.lol/2025/tel... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
> I figured this is a good place as any to see if anybody else has been exploring this question
Sure, tons of articles about similar efforts if you search for the term 'small web'. In particular, I like gemini and tildes (tilde.town, tilde.team, tilde.club, etc) which are actually pretty neat if you take the time to ssh in and checkout the ecosystems they've built. The tildes in particular might surprise you, gemini can be a bit of a ghost town if you don't know where to look though.
Tildes technically aren't public since you have to login to them, but they're not that different from social media in that respect (and since membership usually involves messaging the server owner personally, it's hard to imagine bot activity getting too bad). Gemini is public but you have to use a (usually terminal-based) browser program in order to interact with it and usually self-host a gemlog if you want a 'website' on it.
These communities make me happy because you tend to find people who use xmpp or IRC or alternative platforms there and kinda get away from the enshittification loop. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm sure since this is HN I'm going to get some very snarky responses for mentioning these things as alternatives, but my experiences with exploring the communities around these technologies have consistently made me smile, which is downright weird in the current year. It's got me considering checking out usenet, which I'm too young to have used before outside of direct downloads.
In retrospect, it's funny because all of the things I mentioned are technically 'not the internet', which might honestly be your answer.
technically not the web*
vonunov commented on Tell HN: Beware confidentiality agreements that act as lifetime non competes · Posted by u/throwarayes
So far it seems maybe?, but according to the article some courts and agencies are pushing back. Well the FTC was at least in 2023.
California bans anything that is effectively a non compete.
They tried: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/... (see top note)
Not sure how that's going.
(People [sorry, no citation] are saying this study is bad and invalid, but I think maybe English majors should be able to manage a bit better than that, even if it is Bleak House, and even if they were blindsided with it, and especially if they plan to become English teachers. So I still get at least some qualitative value out of it myself.)