This is how I feel completely, having also grown up online all the way from BBSs onwards. I literally don't even have websites to visit any more. I get on my computer, scan hacker news for a bit, check twitter for a few minutes, scan some world news site, and thats it.
I still spend a lot of time programming (and thus a lot of time on the computer) but other than that, absolutely nothing appeals. Its a wasteland in my mind.
I have said it for a while, Hacker news is the last place that still feels like the old internet, but even then I'm not a huge fan of it. Some days I open it up to see just 30 stories about LLM's, something I have little to no interest in.
While sites like Neocities are trying to keep the old web ideals alive, even there it can be difficult to find much of value.
The fediverse still has a sense of community to me, and there are alt-webs like geminispace. All of it is anti-capitalist and anti-AI which should at least delay their eventual consumption by the rot, although holding it back entirely is impossible.
As tired as I am seeing the constant stream of LLM stories (and even worse, vibe-coded projects) on HN i'm getting just as tired of the regular posts complaining about how much the internet sucks as well. HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit") but lately it seems like nothing left but vitriol and bitterness. I feel like I need to limit my exposure to this place the way I do other social media platforms because it's just too toxic.
> HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit")
Reddit is full of the same hundred jokes being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with a good pun to make their life complete.
And HN is full of the same hundred low-effort circular arguments, logical fallacies and pointless fence-painting debates being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with some witty retort or outlandish extrapolation in order to appear intellectual and ahead of the curve.
It's basically the same picture, and if we're talking about the spirit of the "old internet" that everyone seems to miss, Reddit hits it far better than HN.
Yes, I’m running out of websites that I value enough to spend my time. I have a large list for weekly and monthly reviews. I walk thru them periodically but the lists are rapidly diminishing in size
I have RSS feeds I use to pull out my long-reads to consider knowledge, when I'm not doing wiki walks, that helps give me the 'novel world expanding hit' from the web.
I've started to go to tiny forums like forums.bladerunner.net and hobby-specific forums like rpgpub and vogons to hang out at the water cooler around others.
Awhile back, I dropped into Libera.chat's lobste.rs room and asked about this topic, which got no traction, but we ended up chatting for a bit, I was given the classic noob treatment. One user complained I was a bot at first, then asked me absurdist non-sequitors to haze the newbie, another user complained that they should close membership off from randos like me (and another user argued with him that they need new members eventually), and a third user told me not to post more than a few sentences without using a pastebin because their terminal IRC client looks ugly.
So I had a very nostalgic web 1.0 world: 1)the angry troll trying to kick me out 2) the tired mod trying not to tap the sign 3)the grumpy greybeard who never left emacs and 4) nobody really addressed the topic I was hoping to talk about.
If that's not congealed 199x internet exchanges, I don't know what is! It was very nostaglic and comforting in a way, the only thing it was missing was some erectile dysfunction pop-up windows and a gaudy internet radio widget.
The web as we know it is out there, I saw it on the lobste.rs libera chat just a few weeks ago! So maybe you have to go as far as islands like fediverse and simplex which are so isolated, most of the users there only want to talk about the tech itself, but , fellow web rando, have some hope, because I didn't go out there and I found some true internet recently, it can happen to you too!
Ask your search engine or LLM to help you find small-medium sized forums ased on hobbies you like, and start lurking, just like we used to 20(!?) years ago.
I can’t help feeling like this is the last gasp of the old internet. Those tiny corners of expertise can so easily be eliminated through a few months of “AI! SHINY!” and there’s no coming back. I’ve seen a couple of other communities decimated by AI. The participants start posting AI slop and then remarkably quickly everyone else just stops commenting. It’s awful.
I have utterly abandoned Anthropic as a customer because of these writing style / behavior changes. It is insufferably bad, and it is impacting code quality.
Switched over to Codex 5.6, and dude, we are BACK.
Craziest part of the dolphin story is before he got the NASA funding and subsequent debauchery.
In the 50s when he started to study them, he learned that you cannot open up their brains while they were still alive and poke at them. Apparently killed 5 or 6 of them that way before trying different ways to study them.
I dunno... I don't think he knew how to hold his acid. I mean, I never had a near death experience on acid or knew anyone who had a near death experience on acid but Lily had three.
I think Lilly may have been sort of primed for intense psychedelic experiences. He had angelic visions as a child, and had a very religious upbringing. He was also a very imaginative person, so perhaps that influenced his trips a lot.
I think it is not just "intense" it is whether you realize you had more or less the same experience that everybody else has when they take hallucinogens because it is written in our nervous systems or whether you believe you are "special" and receiving a unique message.
People in traditional cultures believed pretty much the same things before the empire [1] sent soldiers and scribes to your ancestor's village. Seen that way the old religion is "written into our nervous systems" and having the experience of a revelation is absolutely routine and ordinary and doesn't make you special. But if you grew up in a rich family and the skids were always greased for you it is easy to come to that conclusion.
I've known a few people, so far always male, who developed delusions of grandeur (e.g. they are the anti-christ [2]) around the time they took hallucinogens and it often is the beginning of a series of relationship problems, involuntary commitments, criminal charges and other misadventures.
[1] ... like those people who send in the Death Star and blow up your planet if you resist
[2] in the bible "anti-christ" is like "anti-racism", like anything that is against Christ is anti-christ, so if I tell some Christian that they should skip out on church and, i dunno, play video games or smoke weed or dance around my maypole, I am an anti-christ, not the anti-christ.
"Some Christian" is likely uncool. Some [people who are labelled] antichrists are cool. That's more about what happens when you extrapolate into the future.
Nepobabies (maybe Lilly) are mostly uncool. Being able to hold your acid is cool. Mostly. That's about timing, too, but there's also a purely social component.
Thinking you're special when you are not is uncool. Signalling that you think you're not special when everyone around you think you are is ...also uncool.
Why would the mods disagree?
There is no "empire of cool" because empire is uncool
Cool is neither social nor antisocial. Cool might be a [re]productive mix of both. (Maybe some would prefer "barely sustainable" here, that reintroduces "timing" as an essential ingredient)
Regarding your first paragraph, I don't think the psychedelic experience is predetermined by the substance. There are common traits we all experience on a substance of course, but everyone has a different nervous system. Maybe Lilly even had a touch of schizotypal personality disorder, I don't know. Based on what I've read from Robert Anton Wilson it seems like Lilly was always a strange person, and difficult to understand. I see a bit of narcissistic grandiosity in him. In all his interviews and writing he never really acknowledges his research failures, for example. I think these personality traits could have contributed to his far out experiences and strange belief system. I think he really liked being seen as out there.
I wanted to read it, the topic is super fascinating. But it's almost time for work, and I will have to sift through a lot of Claude's jabbering for the better part of the day. I just couldn't stand it, I found myself starting to skip ahead more and more, not actually reading. Sad.
Every day I witness the crazy wonder that is network knowledge / devops + agents from my colleagues. Things that were not possible become possible, assuming deep expertise. I feel for mathematicians like the author, but it will pass once the more creative possibilities reveal themselves and the shock passes.
You're just getting older and realizing something about yourself. The only way to preserve your attention is to guard it like a jewel. It is a learned behavior once you enter the real world.
I still spend a lot of time programming (and thus a lot of time on the computer) but other than that, absolutely nothing appeals. Its a wasteland in my mind.