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- cross-posted to:
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I Walk the corner to the rubble,
That used to be a library, line up to the mind cemetery now,Ugh. I get it, but I dislike poetry that avoids grammar to make something seem deeper than it is.
I walk to the corner
To the rubble
That used to be a library.
Line up
To the mind cemetary now.
It was just another form of enclosures where the wealthy locked off huge areas of the commons floor their own private gain and forced the rest of us to get a subscription
Wait, what? Now it’s easier than ever to find information on the internet, what difficulties do people have?
Is this person the one who writes “pls help me” in YouTube comments and doesn’t ever explain their problem or come back?
I strongly beg to differ
3 years ago, when I searched for something I found it. Even the esoteric little details buried in an old forum weren’t that hard to find
Now? It’s fine if you want the most common information, but it’s impossible to find the little details
And those little details are critical for developers. A single sentence can give you an answer that could easily take hours or days to figure out
Programmers aren’t only switching to AI because it’s easier… The old way of doing things has been crippled
I just checked, my man pages are still there.
Cool, those would be common information. Easier to find than ever
Hell, if you search it it’ll come up multiple times. Hell, the AI summary will include exactly the lines I’m looking for. Hell, I probably don’t even bother, most of the time I’ll just click through in my IDE and read the relevant bit of the source code myself.
If the answer is in the man pages, the problem is so simple I won’t remember there was a problem
I’m still going to need that single forum post where the author of a framework makes an offhand comment that tangentially hints at the cause of the bug I’m hitting my head against
No amount of man pages are going to tell me I need to downgrade a library, or change a configuration value no one bothered to properly document
That was never easy to find, Google was never good at finding tangential hints. And nowadays you can ask a (local, if you want) agent to analyze the whole library and tell you where the library is crashing. Or open a github issue with the framework to have the author, or the community give you the hint. Good luck doing that on sourceforge.
That was never easy to find, Google was never good at finding tangential hints.
It absolutely used to be, it was a huge part of my workflow. You put in the framework/library and one or two related terms, and it would bring up pages of information. If you dug through that, maybe make the terms more general once or twice, you literally would find some random forum post that gives you exactly what you needed. Usually someone else who solved the problem, but occasionally it was just a little detail in something unrelated. Or sometimes there just really was nothing, now it’s all the time
Hell, you used to be able to paste the error directly with the project name and get that specific error through the stack and line numbers. Now, it just sees an error message and abstractes it into “any error message”. After the first few results, it’ll be random stack errors now also from completely different projects
And I have tried to use a local LLM to dig through results, the problem is the information no longer comes up. Between sites closing themselves off to prevent scraping and Google intentionally demolishing their search capabilities, that entire branch of development skill is just gone
It was a stark change, just around 2 years ago I noticed it happening, and it’s only gotten worse
At this point you really need an AI to read through the source if you don’t want to do it yourself
I guess you could contact the developers, but it’s generally faster to figure it out yourself, so I never got into the habit
Yeah, digging through that is the opposite of easy…
Easier than the alternative multiple times over… and these were examples of how powerful it used to be. These were esoteric problems that couldn’t be worked around, either new libraries we were using to do something wired or legacy code we had to interface with
Like I mentioned, normally you could just Google the stack trace and find a discussion on your error immediately. AI is a decent replacement for that at least
It is not easier to find information; real information exists still, but it has been drowned out by garbage. Consider Borges’s “The Library of Babel”, or watch the Fractal Philosophy video concerning “surviving a dead Internet”.
There is also the issue of knowledge being paywalled. Consider the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto and its context.
I have no problem finding all the information I need, from the documentation of this weird python library, to the opening hours of my local restaurant, to the composition of a weird moon of jupiter, to the latest shenanigans of that politician.
I don’t care about tiktok content being fake and Instagram being taken over by bots, there never was useful information there anyway.
Consider that yours is not the only use case of the Internet.
My original question was “what difficulties people have?”. Try answering that instead of being /r/iamverysmart.
I provided you two good resources to answer your question in my original comment.
Yeah, I’m not watching a video for an answer the can fit in a comment.
If you watched the video, you would know the answer would not fit in a reasonably sized comment.
Its never been easier to get free software, and if anyone is telling you the internet used to be easier to parse then they were not there in the beginning.
Gopher sites were great for finding information, if the information was actually there. The tree structure made drilling down to what you needed very straightforward. Mind you, the internet was also small enough that I had downloaded and pribted a book that listed every site and a short description of what it contained.
Yep. All good things needlessly come to an end.
I think the thing I miss most about the old internet was the fact that many people just produced things without worrying about getting paid all the time. Websites were basic but fun, people uploaded funny videos just for laughs, and sites like Reddit were hardly heard of.
This still exists, it’s just niche. Having a little personal website with all sorts of silliness and whatever you create is incredibly popular among the techie furries.
Yeah but I want to return to the days when normal people used the internet for fun, not just the freaks.
Heeey! We’re nice freaks! Besides, you’d be surprised to find how many of us are decently normal.
Like, not me, but there are at least a dozen.
“One of us! One of us!”
Normal people never used the internet for fun until Facebook lol. It was all freaks during the alleged golden age, that’s what made it great.
I know, I just wanted an excuse to hate on Furries.
The internet was also a place you went to, and you could actually turn it off or walk away from. Now it’s everywhere and stitched into our entire lives.
“We had computer rooms, and the Internet should have stayed in those.”
I still write and release open source software projects despite full well knowing they will likely have 0 users and that AI could replicate it in 1% the time I took. Doesn’t matter. I do it cause programming is what I love to do. I think it’s really sad that a lot of people have forgotten that’s the purpose of doing this kind of stuff. It’s not like we were ever gonna see a cent for it anyways. One of my projects was downloaded about 8000 times. That’s nice. Too bad it’s a project I discontinued because I no longer use it. No refunds!
What kind of projects are you working on? I really need to start some of my own or contribute to other projects but I’m not even sure where to begin.
Are you using Linux / Wayland? Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun using gtk4-layer-shell in creative ways. Imo a great way to come up with projects that you’ll enjoy and be motivated to finish is to explore something totally novel and see where it takes you. An even better way is to recognize that feeling of ‘I feel like my computer should be able to do X’ and then make it possible. My last project of that variety was a system to stream videos from torrents as soon as possible after the download begins. Can start watching a 10gb video file all the way through in full quality with no buffering after like 30 seconds of downloading if you fiddle with the torrent and analyze the video file as it’s being written. Unfortunately I won’t be releasing this one as I learned that it would be quite bad for swarm health, but it’s cool for personal use.
That is cool, and KDE Plasma is my home these days. This is all very relevant to my interests and I suspect it is to more and more others lately too.
Thanks for contributing even if it doesn’t get a ton of attention. You never know when your novel approach to something will end up being THE idea someone needed to solve their own problem.
I love people like you. I can t believe I was talking to my partner about this very case of FOSS programmers who do it just to scratch an itch but still benefiting others and the world more than any sycho-corpo can ever hope to
I have a few projects like that and I used to create itch.io pages for them (at least for those related to gamedev). I’ve discontinued all of them years ago but recently I started getting notifications about people paying a dollar or two for them for no reason.
You’re an artist and i hope you see the importance in that.
A programmer that does it for the love of the game! Here’s to hoping more people (yes human ppl, not agents) follow your example! These are the things that keep me vested in tech in the first place
Something that I get angry about occasionally is how so many people have had their hobbies stolen from them. Like people who’d tinker about in their spare time making music, now feeling like they have to monetise it, and feeling the stress of not being able to supplement their failing income because they’re just one artist in a sea of artists, someone without a major label giving them a push.
I don’t blame the people at all, we’re all just trying to get on in this increasingly shitty world.
I do a little radio show once a week. It’s reasonably popular, but not so much that I could ever think about giving up the day job, and my day job’s pay isn’t too bad in the grand scheme of things. But even I’m at a point where I’ve set up a Patreon where if anyone wants to kick in £3 a month, they can. Ultimately it just helps with the running costs of my VPS and domain renewal, and will hopefully give me enough to be able to pick up a new midi controller.
It’s fine, and people are happy to help out because they get to be a part of something they enjoy, but I hate that there’s been an increasingly vocal bit of my brane over the past year or so that’s been telling me that if everyone who listens paid £3 a month, I’d be ‘earning’ an extra £450 (give or take). According to my stats, the episode from a couple of weeks back is up to 250 listens on the podcast feed. That’s £750…
It’s my hobby. It’s a thing I enjoy doing. But if I’m not careful it’ll veer far too closely towards something I have to do, and that’ll kill it.
Marx had a lot to say about this:
I think about this peach vinaigrette story a lot in that context: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/142qfal/uusername_unavailable_offers_us_a_cautionary_tale/
Please forgive the Reddit link.
God. Yes.
That was a legit horror story
I have this debate all the time with people - so many people say things like “creators need to be paid else they won’t produce content” like nah that’s the whole problem. They produce shit content because they get paid. Flash era, newgrounds etc had so much more soul
More like “mob-controlled gambling den” than store.
The pioneering days of the internet are over. We left the Golden Age of the web and are now in the Mafia-controlled phase as you pointed out. If history continues repeating itself it’ll be decades before anything gets better.
deleted by creator
Under a digital model libraries generally have to keep paying for digital licenses to books. So capitalism is making inroads against tax dollars and actively nullifying the majority of benefits of digital books.
The US, the most capitalistic country on the planet, has thousands of free libraries.
If you invented them today they’d call you a commie terrorist
Republicans on city councils in Texas are trying to force libraries to charge people for access, just like a gym.
I mean, probably, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have them and many were built by one of the most famous capitalists in history.
Yeah. I’m just saying we’re lucky they got “grandfathered” in to our current late-stage capitalism. For now anyway.
Fair enough
I taught myself most of what I know now from reading Wikipedia for hours and hours as a kid. It goes surprisingly deep into most topics.
They don’t want you to know this but the stores used to be libraries too, and then some fuckhead didn’t like the poors being on his commons and said “yes, private ownership is the best way to manage distribution of these communal resources!”
I wish the internet WAS a store. It’s a lavatory these days, full of shit and scribbled texts on the door aiming to rot your brain and to destroy democracy.
Hey there, now… it’s destroying more than just democracy.
Hey now, it doesn’t just destroy, it also builds fascist movements!
It’s a dying mall.
Its a store and you’re the product
It’s a store. Profit and greed are a huge factor in what the internet has become. We used to have people paying for hosting so they could provide information to the public for free. Now every fucking moron wants to make money by making ‘content’, it predates AI, by a lot.
This is canonically accurate as in the beginning, it was basically universities that had the connections from “the Internet”. Of course, the defense dept had it first and then probably couldn’t figure out and gave it to smarter people. The rest is history.
Burners Lee invented the www and gave it away
Line up to tha mind cemetery now
I find this blinding so I went and got another screenshot for yas.
That’s because it’s bathed in light.
Lmao 😂
“gotta keep the poors uneducated as possible. easier to control them.” - rich fux
