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.
Maybe that’s an American spelling? (spits derisively on the deck)
To the scummiest vessel I’ve ever seen
I know, I know, I should set up a terrarium virtual environment. But sometimes that’s such a bother.
Someone should have a channel where they’re living at the bottom of the cliff with their gf who’s like “I feel like a bag of Cheetos.” One momentous climb later. “Oh I just ran out of Reddi-Wip for this dessert thing I made.”
Wow. Just for comparison, this is what Wikipedia has to say about Chernobyl:
long-term death estimates range from 4,000 up to 9,000 (per the 2005 and updated 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 cases in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe
I took a folding bike on a visit to Toronto and used GM in cycling mode. I guess it wasn’t too bad in the downtown area? But then I forgot to set it back to driving mode on the way home and it picked a rather whimsical route for a car. I thought it was just trying to stay off highways to avoid the notorious Toronto rush hour at first, but eventually, it wanted me drive through the woods on a “trail” that was barely discernible as such.
Now that you mention it, I have family in the Bay Area and had an incident with them too!
I was visiting and had a small econobox rental (I forget the exact model). I said hey, we should take this thing up to someplace with a lot of giant redwoods. I’ve never seen huge trees! And so I looked around on the map and saw a Big Basin Redwoods State Park that sounded promising.
The first leg turned out just great. But after touring the park, it was still early afternoon and I thought maybe we can go to Santa Cruz and have dinner before swinging back? The GPS at that point said I basically needed to backtrack down the same road for a ways, but that sounded boring. I was a tourist. I wanted to see new sights! So I had it choose an alternate route down China Grade Road. I still remember that name. Omg. It was a logging road with aggressive dips and switchbacks with huge drops if you missed one.
As a bit of a epilogue, a couple of years later, I was reading “The Never Game” by Jeffery Deaver, and at one point, the protagonist is hunting for someone at Big Basin. After not finding them, he decides to check along a nearby logging road. Hey I’ve been there man! Don’t do it!!
TIL MapQuest is still around.
Years ago, I had one of those standalone GPS mappers that used it for its database. It always gave you the option to choose between shortest time and shortest distance. Generally, I went with the former, but this one time we were heading home and not in any special hurry, so I said let’s try shortest distance just for kicks.
Next thing you know, we’re on a hunting trail in the Adirondacks in a Geo Metro that was definitely NOT rated for it and my wife was absolutely freaking out while the kids were getting tossed around in the back. Good times.
Here’s your $5K………credit towards a fabulous new $3M Trump Tower condo!