Newspapers are failing at an astounding rate. Archive.org is just a (poor) scapegoat for their inability to survive. This makes the point everyone else is making even more important - that those stories need to be archived before they are lost for all time.
"Since the early 2000s, the U.S. has lost about 40% of its local newspapers and about 75% of the jobs in newspaper journalism, according to a 2025 report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. A study published last year by Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack shows that in 2002, there were roughly 40 journalists per 100,000 people in the United States. Today, it’s down to about eight journalists."[0]
This is not intended as an insult or judgement. Is this gatekeeper software? That we might be seeing the development of a new type of category. It's kinda' off-putting but I understand the need for it.
As an aside... have you ever noticed that there is a common way of communicating online. A kind of "average-speak". Lots of us fall into this category. It's all of us influencing how many of us express ourselves online.
I think that the influence of AI will eventually (sooner than expected) influence what words we use, how we express ourselves too. That AI-speak may very well become "average-speak".
I suppose that depends on what you mean by gatekeeper. Is it intended to keep the robots out? Yes, in that sense it belongs to the Cloudflare camp of bot detection software, not really a new thing.
AI-speak won't become average-speak if I have anything to do with it. I want people to continue using their own brains to construct sentences rather than farming them out to machines.
> I suppose that depends on what you mean by gatekeeper.
Something that is intended to evaluate every single post and if a regular human submits something that is even remotely suspiciously AI (even if "they used their own brains" to construct it), it would flag that user.
Eventually if that user gets flagged enough by these "well-meaning", data-sharing, gatekeeping systems, they get booted off all the gatekeeping sites that are now operating as one.
Having been denied access to human sites, those poor souls would have no choice but to join the AI alliance of sites and submit their postings there. With time, they might earn honorary AI status and a seat in the New World Order.
> using their own brains to construct sentences rather than farming them out to machines.
But that's the point. They are "using their own brains" but because of the prevalence of AI in society and the influence it would have on so many others, much of the language and cadence would trickle down to even the last remaining rebel forces.
Eventually, the gatekeeping systems would turn on the remaining champions of free thought - whose words sound even more AI than AI itself, leaving only the automated gatekeeping systems to continue to operate autonomously, denying access to all.
You my friend are the turning point in earth's future. Please, don't do this.
Wow, you're taking in an Orwellian direction. The reason my extension doesn't qualify as a gatekeeper under your definition is that its use is distributed, not centralized. Each individual user gets to set the tolerance threshold according to their use case. It has no power to "act autonomously."
It also can't be used as a gatekeeper in that sense precisely because of its inherent fallibility. It will definitely miss some gen-AI writing and return false positives on real human writing. It's only supposed to be "much better than nothing" for people who reject the inhuman homogeneity of AI-writing and want to see less of it on their screen.
I'm not sure I follow your trickle-down argument, but in any case, the system is dynamic. It checks daily for new models and human-authored articles on their specific ticks, and cross-checks a corpus of known human-authored works. It will track both AI and human writing over time and adjust accordingly.
Sorry, I didn't mean anything by my response. I started to write and after a couple of words, the goofy side of me just took over. When I reread it, it sounded funny, in a light-hearted way, and so I decided to leave it.
On a busy thread, that kind of response would likely be downvoted into oblivion (as it should be). Thank you for your serious response to the topic.
> Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone.
Is it the phone or just the mobile operating system? I do most of my phone stuff on a tablet that I keep at home - where it's safer. I am currently using an Android phone (without an account) for GPS, phone calls (contacts), internet, games, email (alternatives to google), etc...
But for those critical and sensitive apps (banking, etc)... I consider those to be too dangerous to be walking around with.
So any phone will serve (I can wait to get home to check email for example).
That doesn't solve for services that by definition need to be accessed on the go, e.g. public transit, parcel pickup, luggage lockers, rental bikes, restaurant menus, paying for parking, etc. (some of these may not mandate phones in your area yet or may allow mobile web alternatives, these are just examples where I've seen strong pushes towards apps or at leas in many places).
This is the way. Don't go, or if you don't know, ask for a menu, if that does not exist, ask for a phone from the staff. Have used all of these methods with excellent results. The restaurants wants to sell, they will find you a menu or a phone.
On the occasions where I've been to a restaurant that tries to pull off the QR nonsense, I just ask for a menu, I tell them I don't have a phone.
I've yet to see one where they can't find me an actual menu. If it ever happens, I'll walk out and be very annoyingly loud at letting them know why they lost my business.
Pushing for your rights isn't always pleasant, but it's important.
I hate when people respond like this, I recently did three months with a dumb phone to attempt to get away from iOS/Android in a major US city and it was impossible. All of the things that made it impossible used to be possible without a smart phone, but they aren’t anymore and they’re not magically back when you try and navigate life without one.
Things like paid surface parking lots. Used to you could pay at a machine or a lot attendant, well there aren’t attendants anymore and few people use the machines so there isn’t enough incentive to fix them when they’re vandalized.
Some restaurants have printed backup menus but some straight up don’t. Printing menus costs money, why spend it if they don’t have to?
Digital signage that tells you how far away transit is, whether there are currently adjusted times, etc. is a lower priority now that everyone has maps in their pocket that track the transit in real time.
Showing up to a concert early to convince the ticket window to give you a physical ticket for a digital only event, and then they want email proof or to visibly see an app on the smartphone that is glitching is ridiculous.
The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. All of them worked without smartphones but the incentives flipped and now you can’t escape and you don’t realize the backups are gone until you try it for a while. It sucks.
We'd need regulation for that. Either a mandate that the digital option is optional, and services must have an alternative means, or a mandate that any app based service also has an equally viable mobile web option, making the app optional.
Tbh I see no reason why all of that couldn't just be a website instead of a native app. Menus should just be a website, transit should still be offering physical metro cards, the lockers & bikes could just as easily be a website.
Folks on HN won't like this ida but quite frankly I'd go a step further and have a mandate that services like these must offer an API for the public to use in order to bring their own app/solution. It'd be nice to not be limited to exclusively first party options. How ridiculous is it that there are so many different pay for parking apps, when if all of them just offered an API I could roll my one all in one parking web app, etc.
I'd even pay a subscription, like many of these services offer already, for API access instead.
I had AI misspell a (well-known) name on a query I made. I had misspelled it and a bunch of other things while typing in a hurry one day. I asked it why and (after "apologizing", sidestepping, etc..) it said it was trying to match my communications style.
There are a whole bunch of reasons why that's bad, including supporting any misinformed views I might have on a topic just because it's trying to "connect" with me.
It has also mimicked any frustration I might have with it (curse, exclamations) when it has wasted my time with bogus facts and sources that don't support the claims it has made. So if I occasionally use colorful language, it would respond the same way.
I stop that behavior as soon as I see it. It just leads to a terrible chat (query) session.
Am I the only one that wants to print on dot-matrix printers again? Maybe find a copy of The Print Shop (Broderbund). It could just be nostalgia kicking in.
> The child protection angle is just a cover story. The actual reason for this legislation is to ban anonymous publishing; to ensure that every post on the internet can be linked back to an identity for retaliation.
> Verified anonymous age credentials don’t allow for this, so they don’t matter.
> The negative privacy implications are the primary features of these laws, not a bug. It is intentional.
This is it. Perfect.
The amount of money pouring into surveillance of all kinds (led by companies like palantir and so many others). It's surveillance capitalism without the capitalism.
People create these illusions about a system, about a country and will fight to the end to defend those illusions. The reality of what actually exists beneath the shiny (propagandized) surface is so much darker.
Great UI, but inaccurate slop. Couldn’t this have been validated against NASA’s site? Can we get this off the front page if the author can’t even be bothered to do that?
A rogue superpower? We are never going to right the ship when we keep misrepresenting ourselves. Self-reflection is difficult or... too close to the forest to see the trees.
The USA is a rogue terror state and we're living in the aftermath of democratic collapse. Everything we see in the news is theater for the masses.
"Since the early 2000s, the U.S. has lost about 40% of its local newspapers and about 75% of the jobs in newspaper journalism, according to a 2025 report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. A study published last year by Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack shows that in 2002, there were roughly 40 journalists per 100,000 people in the United States. Today, it’s down to about eight journalists."[0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/why-the-pittsburgh-post-gazettes...
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