I think we really are in the last moments of the public internet. In the future you won’t be able to contact anyone you don’t know. If you want to thank Rob Pike for his work you’ll have to meet him in person.

Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.

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squigz an hour ago | parent [-]

> Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.

There is no possible way to do this that won't quickly be abused by people/groups who don't care. All efforts like this will do is destroy privacy and freedom on the Internet for normal people.

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lll-o-lll an hour ago | parent [-]

The internet is facing an existential threat to its very existence. If it becomes nearly impossible to determine signal in the noise, then there is no internet. Not for normal people, not for anyone.

So we need some mechanism to verify the content is from a human. If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.

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squigz 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

> If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.

There is no technical solution, privacy preserving or otherwise, that can stave off this purported threat.

Out of curiosity, what is the timeline here? LLMs have been a thing for a while now, and I've been reading about how they're going to bring about the death of the Internet since day 1.

	▲	Gigachad 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		So far we have already seen widespread damage. Many sites require a login to view content now, almost all of them have quite restrictive measures to prevent LLM scraping. Many sites are requiring phone number verification. Much of social media is becoming generated slop. And now people are receiving generated emails. And it’s only getting worse.