Personally I find that I prefer badly written english or auto-translated stuff written in languages foreign to me over ai generated or even just ai polished works I've seen. There is just so much more character, depth and variance there vs ultra ai generic or slop text.
That being said this project seems focused on content farms not people who just need a little help writing so this whole conversation is a bit of a side tangent.
One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.
Capable doesn't mean capable of office work though, I could see someone with a language disorder doing electronics and have trouble with words, not numbers. Or someone who has trouble with written words specifically doing most of their learning with classes and videos.
Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.
> like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.
this is such an incredible way to phrase what it all looks like to the rest of us. and i suspect the people doing it, just like those with obvious cosmetic surgery, have no idea how weird and off it looks.
I have a similar coworker, but he's not great at prompting, so 10% of the time the AI version of himself makes confident assertions that he did not intend and are clearly not true. Genuinely no idea what I'm supposed to do about it.
Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.
Yeah I hate it when people do that and I always call them out on it.
Unfortunately our company is trying to be "AI First" so they'll just point to that and continue their bullshit.
Our company literally promotes AI slop over personally made content even if it's mediocre crap. All they care about is rising usage numbers of things like copilot in office.
I mean, I know it is probably tongue in cheek but that never-asked-question was particularly out of place. Massively generated AI contents are usually not THAT thoughtful anyway.
The broad list seems to just be a hater list. It's not trying to cover cases of deception (passing off AI material as if it's something else), as it includes sites which are very open about what kind of content is on there.
Would you say the same about a block list that blocks anything else? I don't care how obvious an ad is, I don't want to see it. Same with social widgets or cookie consent banners, or newsletter sign-ups.
But I wouldn't call the person that maintains the news letter popup block list as "newsletter hater"
>Would you say the same about a block list that blocks anything else? I don't care how obvious an ad is, I don't want to see it. Same with social widgets or cookie consent banners, or newsletter sign-ups.
He's not complaining that widgets for his favorite social network site is getting blocked, he's complaining that anything vaguely related to social networks are getting banned. Some of the sites on that list are stuff like chatgpt.com, which might be AI related, but clearly doesn't fit the criteria of "AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines".
The purpose of the broad list is removing AI-generated content from search results, so that the user doesn't have to wade through (as much) slop to find the human-created content they're looking for.
While I applaud the honesty of sites that are open about their content being AI generated, that type of content is never what I'm looking for when I search, so if they're in my search results it's just more distraction/clutter drowning out whatever I'm actually looking for. Blocking them improves my search experience slightly, even though there is of course still lots of other unwanted results remaining.
Granted, I definitely count as an AI hater (speaking of LLM's specifically). But even if I weren't, I don't think I'd be seeking it out specifically using a search engine; why would I do that when I could just go straight to chatgpt or whatever myself? Search is usually where people go to find real human answers (which is why appending "reddit" to one's searches became so common). So I see this as a utility thing, more than a "I am blocking all this just because I hate it" thing. Although it can be both, certainly.
So there is a spreadsheet of websites. That is very interesting. There was an article here sometime ago about a media group who have so many super SEOd websites. They all have common footer text. I searched and added as many as I could find in uBlacklist. I have a gist listing them and how I searched for them. You might find that useful.
Oh good point I also overlooked that with the anti ai list.
The big anti ai list also seems to be focused on hiding links from ddg/bing/google where this new more focused list just blocks sites. I tend to like block ones vs hiding because they pop up a nice warning no matter where I came from and I can still decide to ignore it if I want so they is more user agency instead of just quietly hiding a unclear chunk of the net from search engines.
Oh neat! I went and shared this with some Brazilian friends of mine. They tend to like stuff like this so I think it will make them happy.
I know I enjoyed checking out some sites you have in that list (using translation) so thanks!
I love browsing outside the anglosphere but it can be challenging sometimes finding curators that find regular new sites or posts to check out when other languages aren't part of your regular browsing routine.
One other thing people might like about the conversation is that it has a bunch of regional subsections so it isn't overrun by US news like a lot of news sites. Well outside the US section of course. I know I personally appreciate having another source of informed writting that also covers local factors and events.
10tons tends to make smaller scale games and you feel it sometimes but I've had a great time with quite a few of their other shooters too. You used to be able to get this bundle for cheap from fanatical sometimes, not sure if that is still the case. They are best known in the modern era for Tesla vs Lovecraft which doesn't show up in this bundle.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/428/10tons_Shooters/
There have been a few attempts to make open source versions of Crimsonland and I had a good time with Violetland
https://github.com/ooxi/violetland
The kagi smallweb site has an alternative feed that is less high traffic that only includes appreciated (liked) articles. It's not ideal for a lot of people since it's still pretty high traffic and not a lot of users use the main site with the button to appreciate things.
https://kagi.com/smallweb/appreciated
You can find a few alt feeds for the kagi small web by going to the site and clicking the top right rss button. There are ones for videos, code and comics and a link to the full opml file.
https://kagi.com/smallweb
That alt feed has a lot less gristle - nice! Kagi should update their Github page because I don't see any documentation for it.
I've had a few requests for rss feeds but alas I've been focusing on comments-related features. Is anyone else interested in an rss feed for HN x smallweb? I may get the ball rolling if there's some more interest.
That being said this project seems focused on content farms not people who just need a little help writing so this whole conversation is a bit of a side tangent.
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