That would make an excellent new shower thought! I suppose some of that would be due to obsolescence, and some from the physical degradation of digital media. We seriously need to get back into the stone tablet game or there will be nothing left to mark our civilization in a millennium than a whole bunch of porcelain toilets scattered around in the rubble.
You might find this an interesting read.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/
It posits that life may have got its start as an entropy-increasing mechanism. But I still see your point that in its present form, it seems to produce a lot of complex organization.
Wow, there is a lot to think about in this comment thread! It’s going to take a lot more showers.
I’m not an information theorist, but I do wonder sometimes if nature prefers a more chaotic data organization? Even when you look at lower levels than the Internet. Hash tables seem to be winning over tree structures. Randomized network protocols are winning over orderly ones. And even if you look at AI, this used to be a broader term covering other topics such as expert systems which tried to condense human knowledge and a very low entropy way.
If there’s an inherent bias towards disorganization, where does it stem from? I guess there can be a somewhat better average performance, even if the worst case can be really, really bad. There may also be better resilience? Organized systems tend to fall apart very quickly when something goes wrong.
And the internet itself is a layer of order over its decentralised physical infrastructure.
That’s fair. But you can have different layers of order that manifest in various human pursuits, and the Fediverse seems a fertile ground for exploring such ideas.
In the early days, the Internet was just a bunch of institutional networks all linked together, with little islands of data that may have had some internal organization. But no big picture view existed, and it never really emerged.
It seems to me that what’s happened in recent years is individual companies that offer some sort of information service have been centralizing and gatekeeping their product more and more, which does bring some order but at the expense of what makes a decentralized network powerful in the first place.
It seems like this problem stands to get worse too, as researchers see a need to protect their work before an LLM comes along and makes the big discovery on their backs.
Heh, I had actually forgotten about that. It seems almost quaint compared to where we’re at now.
Yes, the internet is decentralised in every way, not only its infrastructure. Even unorganised.
What’s intriguing to me about the fediverse is it’s trying to layer some order over a decentralized physical infrastructure. I think that’s so cool and really want this sort of idea to work!
Not all of humanity uses the DD system.
Yeah that’s fair. I think even my university was using a different system, and of course there’s a lot more out there than book knowledge.
Indexing the internet is a big job. We had data centers even before A-not-I. And people were complaining about how much energy they use. Had we known then how much worse this is going to get very soon….
Artificial Unintelligence does not do that job better btw. It doesn’t do the indexing at all. It just wastes energy. And, as another commenter pointed out, it actively makes the situation you describe worse.
I may not be quite as cynical about AI in its present state, as I feel it has helped me find solutions that had been evading me. I do think it is massively overhyped, however, and am concerned about the directions it’s heading. Concerned a lot, actually.
That is just so depressing. It’s eating its own garbage to create more content. Like some image that’s been run through multiple passes of lossy compression with different algorithms.
Ah, so you’re saying it’s more of an enshitification thing that killed the search engines? I can believe that to an extent.
But as the amount of content on the Internet has increased, it’s also become more difficult to narrow the queries to get what you’re really looking for. The main thing for me with AI is it allows you to refine the search without discarding the context of what you have already tried.
If the content were more organized to begin with, though, I suspect you could drill a bit deeper into the knowledge tree and then apply your conventional (non-AI) search over a more relevant branch?
Not anyone can come to the library, put books around, and game/pay the book finding process to make sure their books come first.
Well, as I recall, things weren’t quite idyllic in the conventional library scene either. People were always moving books around, making librarians furious. Every field trip to the library always began with that lecture. “For the love of all that is holy, do not put books back on the shelf. Let us librarians take care of that.” And once I got to universities with their reference collections, I found that people were purposefully hiding texts in other sections so that they would have exclusive access when they returned. Fun stuff.
I can so relate. The mistakes. The regrets. The guilt. The anxiety. The sleep disorders. I’ve got it all in spades.
I don’t know what to tell you? I’m working on it myself. Sometimes I think of people who stepped in and helped me through difficult times in my life, and then I try to pay it forward even in small ways to other people I meet who are themselves in a bad place. I find this therapeutic.
I suppose on the bright side, my past has made me a humble person who is not quick to judge others. But there’s a fragility there too, and I fear for how I would cope with whatever new challenges await. These are rather uncertain times.
Maybe you can take some comfort in knowing you’re not the only one in this funk? I think you’ve actually made me feel better about it a little bit. Anyway, best of luck to you that you find your way.
I know, I know, I should set up a terrarium virtual environment. But sometimes that’s such a bother.
Ah yes, good old Theia! That was quite the reveal wasn’t it? Reminds of when they finally found that the giant object that wiped out the dinosaurs struck somewhere near present day Cancun.
Nice!
Actually, when I moved to a new town, I found a BBS that was a bigger deal than those hobby ones my friends were running. It had lots of people on it at a time and hosted a popular MUD, for example.
Then one day I was logging in and saw 2 options: bbs and ppp. What the heck is ppp? Well I got on the bbs and everyone was going nuts. It’s the Internet man! They became the first isp in town and they’re actually still around.
Funny thing is though, when I first got on I didn’t think much of it? The web was still in its infancy and you kind of had to know your way around. Eventually, I found my way to some ftp server (umich?) with a giant amount of warez and then I was in heaven!
My mom died of dementia. My sympathies. It’s so hard on families. Better to burn out than fade away, as they say.
Yeah, if there was any doubt that an outer moon could contain liquid water, Enceladus’ active geysers firmly ended that speculation.
Europa’s ocean may be on the order of 100 km in depth. By comparison, Earth’s average about 4 km. That would make Europa have far more water than Earth despite being smaller than our Moon.
It seems as more data come in, it’s getting more and more likely that subsurface liquid water is common in the outer solar system, and that many other moons have varying amounts of it. Even Titan may have water someplace below its surface lakes of liquid methane. The inner solar system is more of a desert, and we are lucky to have what we have.
If you want more mind-blowing stuff, check out discoveries being made about exoplanets (planets around other stars). These were only detected in the 90s, but there are thousands we know about now, and there are some absolutely crazy examples among them.
In the 80s, my nerdy friends were already having LAN parties and some of them set up BBS’s over spare land lines, which were sort of like an early social media just for your immediate friend group but not connected globally or anything.
Fast forward to the present day, and one of said friends invited me to a discord that was modelled after his old BBS. It’s actually active and fun to catch up with everyone who’s found their way back.
Apparently, the invention of the VCR in the 80s brought an end to 70s porn cinemas, and this was one tech development few people regretted, including those employed by those establishments.
Well let’s see. I was a nerdy kid in the 70s, so I should be qualified for this. I have to say though, my wildest dreams set a pretty high bar. I dreamed of cities in space and in the oceans. And on land, we’d build giant fusion-powered arcologies modelled after the space cities that recycled everything we used. We’d spent most of our time in these cities connected by tunnelled maglevs while the rest of the world returned to a more natural state and became a giant wildlife/archaeological park.
But I’m trying to think of what would have blown my mind to learn about back then that actually happened. I think from a technological perspective, I never saw the marriage between computers and telecommunications becoming all that it is today. I had a vague idea of something like a video cell phone, but the idea that you could grab a movie off it from some distant giant computer complex and throw it up on a big screen in your home would’ve made me giddy. And just the quality of the image and the fidelity and depth of sound that could come out of tiny speakers would’ve been shocking. Sound systems were really, really shitty in the 70s. And TVs. Well, let’s just say there was a reason you went to the cinema.
The science nerd in me would also have been blown away by discoveries made since the 70s. Birds are dinosaurs? There were real life hobbits running around on some island in Indonesia? There are ocean moons in our solar system? And if I showed up to explain all this to my kid self, he would not have believed my age when I told him. Medicine is keeping us younger now.
As a Gen X whose brain cells were supposedly fried in childhood breathing tons of leaded gas, I look upon my Gen Z offspring and have to say, a drop in intelligence is not at the top of my list of concerns for that generation. They seem a generally dispirited bunch. So much depression, anxiety, and isolation, coupled with bleak future prospects. I just want to give them all a hug, honestly.