[ This post is my proposal for a talk at WHY, the 2025 edition of the quadriennial Dutch hacker camp. Hope to see you at Geestmerambacht! ]
This talk follows on from presentations I did at 37C3, EMF 2024 and 38C3. Here’s the video of my 38C3 talk, which features significantly fewer spiders than the EMF one, but does still have sheep and goats:
Wikipedia tells us that low-background steel is steel produced before the detonation of the first nuclear bombs. Yep, you guessed it, this is a talk about Large Language Models. LLM outputs have quickly spread like radionuclides, threatening everything from the scientific record to the existence of the Internet as we know it. In this talk I’ll discuss practical small web approaches that we can use to build a new Internet that doesn’t suck quite so badly. There will also be memes ;-)
Have you noticed how the good stuff on the Internet is increasingly hidden behind bot checks, subscriptions and paywalls? And that it’s getting harder and harder to find things online due to LLM pollution? Welcome to the club! You are in the right place.
In this talk I’ll highlight some of the most egregious examples, consider how we can best preserve low background information for future generations, and how we can use small web techniques like a domain of one’s own, self-hosted blogs and static site generators to bootstrap a new infosphere that doesn’t rely on a handful of hyperscale operators.
I’m particularly interested in how we can federate and syndicate search, learning from protocols and standards like RSS and ActivityPub. As part of the talk I’ll give you some practical tools and approaches to try, like…
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Let’s have fun building the new Internet together!
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