YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Much of modern internet content is far worse than cable advertising in the 90s. I remember when I was a kid; I'd aggressively mute the commercials because I hated the idea that someone was attempting to influence me. The modern internet is orders of magnitude worse buy nearly any measure. The nastiest, most outrageous content is plastered on every wall. Every single person has an angle. Every bit of content meant to pull you in one direction or another, and given the addictiveness of novelty and powerful emotions, we keep coming back for more. It's an absolute disaster we don't know how to walk away from.

>95%???

That low?

In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.

And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..

The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.

It didn’t generate a link (sources) when it claimed it was in stock

It seems that it generated a page with a plausible answer for a very long tail subject for which the random part of the generation could become prominent. We used to say that it hallucinated the answer. Another term is confabulation.

If only the nursery had a MCP server /s

Not being able to trust your tools is certainly dystopian...

Did you consider that the website made it up and fed it to ChatGPT?

It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.

Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.

This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?

This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!

I don't think it is a verification problem. It wasn't like before in the days of controlled media and radio there wasn't a narrative to push, it's just that most people didnt have any awareness of alternatives. Nowadays people are more aware of alternative viewpoints or perspectives. The solution isn't to try and force one approved source of truth, but to just assume everyone is trying to push their version of the truth and examine it critically.

My understanding is that this is the way France operates where you assume all the media is hostile and you view it all critically. In America this is a bit of a shock because for a long time we had trusted arbiters of truth and now that they are less trusted we've been trying to look for alternatives rather realizing it should all be examined critically.

There's also the other side of it, poisoning the AIs... https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/moscow-based-g...

"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda."

in 2024.. hopefully filters when training have gotten better, but maybe not..

Why does it have to be an adversarial country? Why does it have to be a country at all? Couldn’t it be the mayor of some town? Or a PR team at a fast food franchise group? Or one of SBF’s polycule members?

The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.

This is classic FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.

It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.

This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…

I'm always skeptical of random comments pulling Israel into the conversation that doesn't have anything to do with Israel.

Should they just not report on it?

Trying? Actively doing.

You don't need propaganda to know that the Iranian Mullahs aren't your friends.