- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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Anyone else played around with reticulum?
Because it feels a lot like library-era internet.
It’s a store where there’s a pickpocket in every aisle, all the products are cheap fakes and the registers are programmed to cheat.
But line goes up. It goes up!
I read this in Tim Robinson’s voice for some reason.
Yep. All good things needlessly come to an end.
Objectively, a library under capitalism would rather be a bookstore. Theres no point to holding information because information isn’t profitable; replace that with entertainment. Steal some data so you can better target markets. Price out competition once you get large enough. Require paid membership to be given the privilege of renting the books once you have a monopoly.
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
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
Republicans on city councils in Texas are trying to force libraries to charge people for access, just like a gym.
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.
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.
Its a store and you’re the product
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 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.
It’s a dying mall.
Capitalism is a machine that turns all freely accessible public goods into paid products and services.
But hey, look at the GDP rising. Don’t you feel richer?
Not just the internet. Ever fucking thing is for profit
The social contract was that everyone was a custodian of that library. That’s how we got Wikipedia.
Social media and monetization broke that social contract. Another building was constructed beside the library. People were checking out books from the library and selling them at the market.
Now with LLMs, those books are being burnt. There’s a trillion dollar giga-sized building next to the derelict library and the fast becoming defunct market that is industrial scale mass producing pulpy books.
Wikipedia still exists, in fact it’s expanding every day…
And the fascists have been going after it wholesale.
it still exists and will likely continue for decades
Yeah, and communists, and pedophiles, and greens, and…
Wikipedia has always been the target of people trying to bend public opinion, that’s why it has the processes in place that it has, and [citation needed] all around.
Yeah and this is why my friends all have gibbity subscriptions: “its so much easier to find info instead of scrolling through reddit or a ton of google pages that are ads! I set my gibbity up to tell me the weather!”
Jfc people are stupid and I hate everyone and I must scream.
/rant.
“With Spotify, playlists are created for me!”
Bud, you’re letting someone else define your preferences, and giving up ownership.
ok but hear me out; I made some wild musical discoveries by having playlists generated based on a song, add it to the main playlist and do the same with some unkown song in said playlist until I have a big playlist of very weird niches combined.
Thats fine on the surface sure. However as previous person said, youre giving up your preferences to an algorithm and its eventually going to push you to corpo slop for profit as is the goal of all things capitalism. Do you trust the Facebook algorithm to feed you news? Streaming platforms are the exact same thing. Its very nefarious because it seems harmless.
I think people forgot how life used to be, and its really sad. Ask a friend or make a post for music recommendations. Go to local music stores. Use bandcamp. Search the web fkr music blogs. Theres unlimited potential and people forgot how to be humans.
I don’t actively listen to music anymore at the moment but the thing about a good algorithm is that (it seem like) it notices things about your preferences that you wouldn’t have noticed because of biases and also it has a database of stuff to pull out from whereas you have to go in blind and hope to stumble onto it.
I get the gut reaction of “algorithm bad” but not only is it not 100% corpo interests all the time, it’s just one of the ways to find new music. Also:
Do you think a local music store would stock only niche items that 99.999% of their customers won’t like? No but the advertising algorithm doesn’t care if you like weird shit, just that it can push something to you.Got a bit rambly but I guess I made my point.
Here’s what N. M. Klein wrote about the internet all the way back in 1998, likening it to a labyrinth.
I don’t say this often, but this text has completely changed the course of my life.
Some choice quotes:1998 is still a dangerously nascent stage in the Internet, while a trillion dollar nest of dragons sets up shop.
Inside, you have seemingly infinite choice, but practically no way out. In fact, you prefer being trapped a bit. That gives the story some bite. Why enter Happy Imprisonment? Because you slowly catch your breath. You expect to outwit the program.
Pockets of confusion in the system let the player imagine that there are ways to subvert it. It’s a Faustian sim-bargain. The player submits to the labyrinth, then pretends to cheat.
Simulating revolt is more fun, and a better investment. […] But consider what sim-revolt implies as a broader model for public life? We pretend that the labyrinth of the Web makes us free of the global corporate program that builds and owns it. We feel above the swamp of idiotic web sites. We know how to surf. The demon apparatus can’t get us. We can dig out of anything. We’re never trapped.
Recently, there is talk of voting on the Web. Is a cross between ergonomic fascism and the shopping mall the best frame of mind for making political decisions? Let us not mystify information delivery too much. Despite the services, it is not fundamentally democratic, only the freedom to chat. The server and the search engine are a feudal plantation. They decide for us, when to plant, when to hunt.
The labyrinth is a mood of passivity. It’s like saying you’re never really trapped in bad traffic. Just because we can subvert the Web by saying nasty things or engaging in cyber-sex in the margins, or downloading information cheaply, does not mean that we are subverting any core reality.He was wrong about voting.
It would make voting easy and accessible.
They don’t want that at all.
Everything I’ve seen about internet voting has shown me that making it even little bit secure and fair is basically impossible. Would be interested in some information to the contrary!
The fundamental problem with online voting is that putting the data online even in an isolated manner immediately creates the potential for a small attack to affect large numbers of votes, which is much lest cost effective an attack when they’re on paper and physically distanced.
Someone will inevitably mention the Tom Scott voting machines video, whenever this topic comes up, so it may as well be me today.
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?
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.
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 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
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.
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.
This… This makes me so sad.
I count myself lucky that I’m a non-academic that has access to a physical library at work.
