Sarah Jamie Lewis
In the context of research, searching for anything on the internet is terrible now - especially with the willingness of search engines to simply make up, ad the run with, a concept from the query.
And if the thing you need was created more than a few years ago - especially if it was more ephemeral than a published paper (e.g. workshop slides, a blog post, uploaded seminar slides etc.) - you will almost certainly need to access an archived version of it because the original is long gone.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
A lot of older personal sites of academics are rotting, or simply gone - as people retire, and departments get renamed and rotated, many of those sites don't make it back online (or they do but all the links are broken), and all the old references no longer work.
And there is also a period where everyone in certain domains just uploaded postscript tarballs of slides/notes/etc. - good luck finding archived versions of those.
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@sarahjamielewis Used to think the Internet was a remembering machine. Now it's just as much a memory hole machine if not more.
Rich Felker
@z3r0fox @sarahjamielewis It's a remembering machine for material that will be used against you by hostile parties, and a memory hole machine for material you could use to do good.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
I also think there is a general trend of moving stuff off, and no longer publishing, information openly - both because it's increasingly expensive to do so outside of centralized silos (try spotting the difference between a ddos and a web crawl these days) and because of the general sense that the primary consumer of such information will be the same AI models that make up concepts and spew them at you during search.
So more and more public information is silo'd and unsearchable.
shellsharks
@sarahjamielewis Adding to this, I've seen a few people lament the very explicit theft of their ideas/content, and I don't mean by AI crawlers for use in these big LLMs. There are individuals out there who just slurp up someone's entire blog, run it through some AI to *slightly* modify it, then repost it as their own. 404 Media had a big scoop on this happening to their content, and several indie bloggers I follow on Fedi have said the same thing happened to them. 😩
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