Hello, Pub-goers, it's been a while.
I went looking for some internet help setting up my new longbow, and 80% of the page one hits on DuckDuckGo were AI-generated web pages, uncanny nonsense pictures included. Google has been a burning pile of SEO garbage for years, but now DDG seems to be failing as well. The larger web is no longer a place to go for accurate information on anything. Supposedly there are new AI tools coming that can help fix the mess made by the first set of AI tools, but surely the circular insanity of this is obvious to all parties involved.
Right?
For now, the public library and knowledgeable locals are a better bet, at least until the botshit inevitably trickles down to printed material. I ended up borrowing a car and driving to the archery shop an hour away, and they showed me what's what. I needed a new target bag anyway.
The web was never a good or healthy thing for humans, but AI has shifted it into a phase of total epistemological failure. In a way, I suppose I welcome its coming collapse. If we survive, the real, living world--denuded and broken but still there--is waiting for us on the other side of this strange thirty-year digital dream. It's just such a shame that the end-stage enshittification of computing will burn through so much water, power, land, and human dignity in a desperate, psychotic attempt to keep the stock prices up.
Culture feels...slippery right now, untethered to value. It's like we are letting something nebulous but very important die out, and once gone, we will not get it back. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man in a long, long tradition of grumpy old men.
The garden is mostly dead again. Last year it was hail, this year it's a plague of grasshoppers that tapers off and then comes roaring back over and over again. I don't know if I'll try again, as it's simply too depressing. Maybe a hydroponic greenhouse like my father has is the only way to reliably grow anything any longer, but I hate the cost and complexity of the thing. Good soil just takes compost, water, and time (and lots of digging).
On the brighter side, I picked up a like-new copy of George Michael's _Faith_ on CD for a dollar at the thrift store. Listening to it for the first time in decades, the very wide dynamic range was immediately noticeable. After years of listening to highly compressed audio production, being reminded that music could sound like this was lovely, like eating vegetables fresh out of the garden after years of frozen stuff in bags.
Howdy, grumpy old man! That makes at least two of us :)
~bartender? Coffee, please, cream and sugar, yes. And a jar of home made lemonade as well. Thank you!
Archery, playing an instrument, using a morse key, and a multitude of other things are much better appreciated or learned under the knowing eyes of a teacher/practitioner. I'm doing archery myself, and I have resisted the idea to put up a target in my back yard. I will go to the archery range and meet with my fellow mates. Plus, just as a curious path in the delicate fabric of time and space, often I am now the one with the most experience. But yes, that place is only 12km down the road.
The big web, in my not so humble opinion, is going a bit to where it came from. Before search engines were a thing, curated lists of some thing of interest were the valuable pages. And web rings. :) And I can see some of that coming back. I myself keep "good" URLs in my local journal. Otherwise I will lose them quickly. I find myself scrolling down several pages of DDG or Google results looking at the domains. E.g. if I want to look up some information about public transport in some place, I have to wade through a long list of link aggregators and other clicky or shiny things. Annoying. I do use TorBrowser to get rid of most of the bling though.
So, cheers!
May the grumpy old men have a go at the juke box!
Trombone Shorty, maybe. "The craziest Things"
If being with you means I'm being a fool, I don't mind.
With BIG speakers, please, otherwise it's not BASS enough :)
Edit:
As an example of sites in my journal:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
https://www.notechmagazine.com/
someone else had mentioned them here not long ago.
It's been a long while since I last used search engines. It was even before the dawn of LLMs that the results thrown by search engines wouldn't work for me anymore, their content being watered-down and always aimed at complete noobs, the layout infested with ads, pop-ups, and burdened by megabytes of javascript -or god knows what- causing them to take solid minutes to load, only to immediately block the site with an overlay asking you to accept all cookies, subscribe to their newsletter, remove adblockers, whatever; it's like they thought it was a "good practice" to get in the way of the viewer as obtrusively as possible.
It is so that I haven't really been a witness to the pages written by AI all over the place, but I figued that would be the case. Long ago I turned to books, and while books are a less direct way to learn about a subject (you have to find good book that fits your needs, you have to browse it or read through it, and ultimately the information in the book will not replace practice!), it has shielded me from having to expose myself to this shitty state of affairs. Of course by books I mean pdfs I download on libgen and z-lib.
I also saw a post somewhere sometime disavowing search engines, suggesting instead that we learn about interesting sites by "word of mouth", which is what I've been doing. Instead of looking up something on a search engine, I travel the network of sites that I already know of in search for recommendations of sites for the things that I need. In the most desperate case I could look for a discord server on the topic, join it, and directly ask for resources there. For stuff that requires more visual aid, I usually go to youtube. I recently went in looking for videos on how to go harpoon fishing. In any event, I safely circumvent the need to use a search engine to look up stuff, a practice that hasn't returned any useful results for a long time, anyway.
* * *
I suggest you find yourself as many local, hardy species that you *see* are resistance to hail and plague. Look around, there ought to be plenty. I thankfully don't get any hail over here, quite the contrary, the sun can be too harsh. So I get the most hardy plants that do well on their own here, and let them occupy all the spaces. I can then use them to protect other plants that may be less resistant to the environment.
Don't lose hope!
It's actually pretty simple on the social/cultural/collective aspect.
Ego is a mental illness whose primary characteristic is blindness to itself. Sans that all important potentially self-correcting feedback, ego has nowhere to go but Crash'n'burn-ville, sure as a casino necessarily profits off payoffs less than true odds per the simplest of math.
That blindness is also impervious to elucidation from without: anyone holding up so much as a birthday cake candle of corrective instruction is met with egotic fools rushing in to publicly judge and cancel them, guaranteeing an internet-accelerated pace of haste to the bottom.
Good luck with your selves, self-focused/centric selves!