It's not just the library. I've been doing a lot of the stuff I did two decades ago as a teenager. Thrift stores, Half-priced books, the library, the mall. As a chronically online person, I can't explain the exact feeling of it. It's somehow both less and more. The internet was this amazing grand archive and forum. It was everything, but now most of everything has been stolen and sold off.
Edit: but yeah check out your local library. It likely has an events calendar online that you can browser for reasons to go.
Once its no longer financially viable, they'll let go. Right now its exciting and accessible. A lot of new people are online shopping when they never have before. I think eventually those people will get sick of it. The excitement of getting packages and filling your house with stuff you don't need will wane.
I don't think they will let it go. At the end of the day, people still need to buy stuff, and if they can do it from a phone, that saves them a trip to whichever physical store they would have gone to. Also, sometimes people need highly specific things that they can't get at nearby stores, or maybe there is a nearby store with the thing but they have to search to find out about it.
If they let it go, it'll probably be due to an economic crisis in which shipping is too expensive and no one can afford to buy anything other than groceries anyway. It won't be because people stopped wanting to buy stuff. And at that point, we'll be screwed because no one will be able to afford to maintain the internet either.
I think if we're going to get the Library of Alexandria back, we're going to need to build dedicated corporation-free online spaces where people can share information, and we'll need to figure out a viable funding model for that. Like, well, libraries.
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!"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
In his analysis, Marx identified four key aspects of alienated labour.
First, the worker is alienated from the product of their labour, which is appropriated by the capitalist and confronts the worker as a hostile power.
Second, they are alienated from the activity of production itself, which is experienced not as a fulfilling expression of creativity but as coerced, meaningless toil.
Third, this leads to alienation from their own human nature, or species-being (Gattungswesen), as free, conscious activity is reduced to a mere means of survival.
Finally, the worker is alienated from other people, as social relationships become reified and mediated by market exchange, fostering competition and indifference rather than community.
Looks like #2 and #3 apply directly to the situation in your comment.
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.
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.
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.
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 less cost effective an attack than 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.
because the internet is a store but it used to be a library
Joke's on you. It is a dumpster fire of long ai slop articles. the continous churning of slop is keeping the dumpster fire going with no end in sight .
The internet is Dead People. The internet is DEEEAAAAAD !
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well Spotify does endorse terrorist organizations (us military, ice) so I won't support them.
I'm also gonna say I don't agree. Its always corporate interest. You think google maps exists to be a nice little helper to find your way around town? Fuck no. They track your every move ,every single store you go to, then they buy data from credit card companies to get your buying habits and then start routing you directions past stores they think you will like. Or using Alexa in old folks homes to record them and then sell medications to them (this happened not long ago here on Lemmy). These are the less nefarious examples but it then leads to bots on Facebook influencing the way people vote and then bam, you have fascism and wars and people dead because of algorithms. It all leads back to it. Its dystopian as fuck and sounds insane but I am 100% right on this.
Sure, a music store won't have absolutely everything but that was just one of my options. I'm not blaming you for liking streaming and algorithms (just like 99.9% of the world now) I'm just trying to open your eyes a little on the real human cost of this type of thing. Its not a good road to go down. If you are fully aware (as you seem to be) then its not as bad, but still be careful.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
108 replies
I should visit the local library again
It's not just the library. I've been doing a lot of the stuff I did two decades ago as a teenager. Thrift stores, Half-priced books, the library, the mall. As a chronically online person, I can't explain the exact feeling of it. It's somehow both less and more. The internet was this amazing grand archive and forum. It was everything, but now most of everything has been stolen and sold off.
Edit: but yeah check out your local library. It likely has an events calendar online that you can browser for reasons to go.
You should before the tech bros turn into a store or subscription service along with everything else.
This is exactly how I feel about the internet: it should've been a reincarnation of the Library of Alexandria, not Wall Street.
Once its no longer financially viable, they'll let go. Right now its exciting and accessible. A lot of new people are online shopping when they never have before. I think eventually those people will get sick of it. The excitement of getting packages and filling your house with stuff you don't need will wane.
I don't think they will let it go. At the end of the day, people still need to buy stuff, and if they can do it from a phone, that saves them a trip to whichever physical store they would have gone to. Also, sometimes people need highly specific things that they can't get at nearby stores, or maybe there is a nearby store with the thing but they have to search to find out about it.
If they let it go, it'll probably be due to an economic crisis in which shipping is too expensive and no one can afford to buy anything other than groceries anyway. It won't be because people stopped wanting to buy stuff. And at that point, we'll be screwed because no one will be able to afford to maintain the internet either.
I think if we're going to get the Library of Alexandria back, we're going to need to build dedicated corporation-free online spaces where people can share information, and we'll need to figure out a viable funding model for that. Like, well, libraries.
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!"
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.
lol no, I remember altavista categories sending you to shops. But it was a sane environment. Now the world's gone crazy and the web with it.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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!"
Actual locus of Internet going from fun to shit.
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!
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
You're an artist and i hope you see the importance in that.
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.
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.
Me too. Me too.
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.
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.
That was a legit horror story
God. Yes.
Marx had a lot to say about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Edit:
Looks like #2 and #3 apply directly to the situation in your comment.
Dude knew what he was talking about.
I find this blinding so I went and got another screenshot for yas.
That's because it's bathed in light.
Lmao 😂
Anyone else played around with reticulum?
Because it feels a lot like library-era internet.
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.
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.
it still exists and will likely continue for decades
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.
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:
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 less cost effective an attack than 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.
Joke's on you. It is a dumpster fire of long ai slop articles. the continous churning of slop is keeping the dumpster fire going with no end in sight .
The internet is Dead People. The internet is DEEEAAAAAD !
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!
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.
It's a dying mall.
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.
Right but that doesn't really fit with the song
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?
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.
Yep. All good things needlessly come to an end.
Line up to tha mind cemetery now
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.
and they like it they like being cattle.
Its terrifying. People dont want to use their brains. If anyone has any shred of hope for humanity I'd be interested in how thats possible.
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.
Well Spotify does endorse terrorist organizations (us military, ice) so I won't support them.
I'm also gonna say I don't agree. Its always corporate interest. You think google maps exists to be a nice little helper to find your way around town? Fuck no. They track your every move ,every single store you go to, then they buy data from credit card companies to get your buying habits and then start routing you directions past stores they think you will like. Or using Alexa in old folks homes to record them and then sell medications to them (this happened not long ago here on Lemmy). These are the less nefarious examples but it then leads to bots on Facebook influencing the way people vote and then bam, you have fascism and wars and people dead because of algorithms. It all leads back to it. Its dystopian as fuck and sounds insane but I am 100% right on this.
Sure, a music store won't have absolutely everything but that was just one of my options. I'm not blaming you for liking streaming and algorithms (just like 99.9% of the world now) I'm just trying to open your eyes a little on the real human cost of this type of thing. Its not a good road to go down. If you are fully aware (as you seem to be) then its not as bad, but still be careful.
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.
Berners Lee invented the www and gave it away
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.
Not just the internet. Ever fucking thing is for profit
"gotta keep the poors uneducated as possible. easier to control them." - rich fux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EZtc-XtwJc
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.
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.
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.
We're just 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.