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