Maybe it was better in big cities but when I was a kid researching papers on niche topics was tough because the local library had few books, mostly older ones, and I had to have my parents drive me there because it was too far to bike...
When we got 24/7 internet it was a game changer, it was like turning on a tap of knowledge on every topic. Of course the signal to noise ratio was higher back then...
I get what you're saying, but later in life I went to university, where I had access to better libraries, for which the quality and quantity of information is (to this day) greater than you can obtain on the internet [1].
Things like arxiv are a step toward that "tap of knowledge on every topic", but the overwhelming feeling I get from most internet content these days (and that includes LLM output) is that it's an inch deep and a mile wide [2]. A good book -- which can usually be found at your local library -- will vastly exceed the quality of what you can find on your own, if only because of intelligent curation.
Maybe I'm just a romantic (or just old), but for me, libraries are still where you do serious research.
[1] yes, I know that many university libraries have a selection of their content on the internet now, but usually this is behind a login, and it certainly isn't comprehensive.
[2] recent example: I've been working through McCullough's "The Great Bridge", and there are frequent occasions when I want to find out more information or see diagrams of what he's describing. The internet is, nearly always, completely useless for this. Tons of content on the Brooklyn Bridge, but it all says the same superficial stuff. Though I will grant that you at least can find some stuff like this now, if you try hard enough:
Going into university libraries fills me with awe and purpose.
Seeing a shelf of curated textbooks on a topic (eg non Newtonian fluid flow), gives me a feeling of depth. Each book represents years or decades of an authors life. And they condensed that wisdom into a textbook that could be consumed in a semester.
I would love to be a Knuth type character working in library and writing textbooks.
Yeah, there's a physical copy of my dissertation somewhere in the library system of my old school [1]. On a whim, I went to find it a few years after graduating, and it was (is?) in a special section of the library where there's nothing but shelves and shelves of old dissertations, going back for ~30 years (older than that, and they only have microfilm, IIRC). Thousands of black-bound volumes, with obscure titles on every possible subject.
Being in that space gave me exactly the feeling you describe. Each one is an artifact of years of a person's life, in book form. I guess that's true of any book, really, but it feels particularly acute for something like a dissertation. Every one of those unread volumes was a moment of long-awaited celebration (literally commencement) for a person. Humbling.
[1] I had to pay for that copy, but I digress. It doesn't kill the romance. I'm a sucker.
Unfortunately many universities are storing or downsizing their collections.
On one hand it seems logical that public domain books can readily be kept in digital form without taking up shelf space. On the other hand, the experience of browsing and serendipity that many find beneficial will be lost.
> because the local library had few books, mostly older ones,
I think this is an important observation. In the age of the Web, people might not appreciate what it means when your access to information on a topic is sometimes only through outdated sources, which is a bit different than not having access at all.
I was lucky that my mom frequently brought us kids around to multiple public library branches, but I definitely remember a lot of older books.
For example, a book explaining an electric circuits would involve photos of some kind of common household item large cylindrical battery cell with screw terminals, which I have never seen, not before, nor since. And pretty much any book on computers, robots, or electronics would be at least a few years old, usually several years or a decade or more. (This has improved, at least at my current local library.)
Another effect of being exposed to lots of older books is that, although my hair is still not gray, I'll sometimes inadvertently speak with anachronistic, old-timey language that predates me.
With the old public library books, I also got a dose of vintage subtle American propaganda (e.g., freedom and justice are good, and are American; dictators and secret police are bad, and are Nazi/Soviet), though the Cold War already seemed to be ending. I'm programmed to believe that that propaganda was a positive influence, but it's sometimes uncomfortable values, when one sees an overall citizenry that doesn't always seem to have been marinated as much in quite the same mix of programming.
Your public library didn’t have inter-library loan? Most public libraries have always been able to get you books not in their collection, you just have to ask.
Adding to the GP & sibling: Even in Los Angeles with some of the bigger libraries the IT/programming books were on the older (outdated?) side.. The more modern material was at the book stores like Barnes, Borders, or another one at the mall (I don't remember if it was B Dalton, Walden, or something else).. thankfully I could skateboard there after school or work and read them there for the evening since I couldn't afford them. Getting the internet and SNR of content back then was a game changer to me too.
Yup, I had no free resources on programming anything more complex than BASIC until I had reliable internet. I bought my first copy of Linux and a beginner's guide at B&N, for example.
I think it's fair to say that, particularly through the '80s and '90s, the IT/programming books were outliers in how fast they became outdated, because the field was just moving so very quickly. (It still is, to a large extent, but now we have the internet to disseminate that information.)
For research on most topics, from history to social sciences to particle physics, the books at the library (or available through interlibrary loan) would be plenty recent enough for anyone not already specializing in the field, and such people would likely already have access to at least a college/university library, and likely a variety of academic journal subscriptions (often through said college/university library).
Mine in a deeply rural area did not. Going to a library as an urban dweller would imagine was an all day affair. We generally did it a few times a year but that was part of a larger trip to go to "the better hospital" or what not.
> Your public library didn’t have inter-library loan?
Growing up before libraries had computerized databases, sure, they had ILL, but the books that weren't in their collection weren’t in the card catalog either, so you had no easy way of discovering that a book you might want outside of a library’s own collection (1) existed, and (2) was available through ILL. It wasn't until after the internet was generally available to the public that most public libraries I encountered had computerized catalogs with ILL availability.
I do this - I self host my movies/TV, ebooks, comics, photos, etc. and use tailscale to access it from anywhere. It's not really great for "mainstream" but for "tech enthusiast" it's very useful. Basically anyone who would consider buying a NAS (most consumer NAS devices can also run Docker containers these days)
I used to host an Arma 3 server using Kubernetes, I had a scalable set of headless clients to distribute the AI load. My friends called said it was the smoothest server they ever played on despite using hundreds of AI groups. With Tailscale I wouldn't have needed host networking enabled on the Pods, come to think of it.
The CPU controlled squads of enemy soldiers and vehicles the players shoot. Arma is a first-person shooter game. The game engine it uses is not heavily multi-threaded, but the multiplayer system has some weird quirks that you can exploit to distribute AI processing across multiple networked instances, either in a multi-core or multi-machine topology.
I had some of my family install Tailscale to access my tailnet. They can watch movies from my collection more easily than using Netflix, and we can share files through the client with a single click. I have other friends using it to play old-school dedicated server games without having to deal with CGNAT/hairpin NAT problems.
I'm the developer of a speech-to-speech tool for tactical radar control for a combat flight simulator (https://github.com/dharmab/skyeye). My users have often asked to expand it to ATC as well, usually under the impression that it could be done trivially with ChatGPT. I love that I can now link to your post to explain how difficult this problem is! :)
Being unfamiliar with DCS' architecture, I expected this repo to be in Lua or something. I was surprised to find a very polished, neatly structured, well-documented Go service, haha. Very cool!
Surveying a pipeline, canal, electrical/communication line, rooftop. Drones are standard tools for site survey; you can inspect infrastructure without the same risk of human injury.
I've been using fundamentally the same Linux setup for over ten years now. I think the biggest change it went through was migrating the audio system to Pipewire, which took about an hour to figure out and hasn't need attention since.
I have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.
100%. I'm not OP but have had similar experience. My basic UX hasn't changed beyond trivialities in pretty well over 10 years. Contrast that with SaaS and many modern mobile apps that get completely redesigned every couple of years whether you want them to or not, and you have zero control on even the timing of the update. I've found a lot of refuge in open source as complete redesigns just for the hell of it (or to justify a full-time job) are nearly unheard of, but there are definitely tradeoffs. Usually (though not always!) the UX isn't great, but it will be functional. As a person who prefers function over form (though does harbor an intense appreciate for the latter), this is often a good trade.
Exactly. Fedora on the desktop is wonderful, and on laptop is really good assuming reasonably supported hardware. I have a framework 16 and 13 and both run fedora really well.
My archlinux has moved from a bunch of scripts to just a window manager with Chrome. At the end of the day, you realize you don't really need all these gadgets and notifications but just a terminal and a browser.
SailfishOS is pretty decent on mobile, as in a simple system that moves slowly. You can get support for Android apps with an emulation layer. Even banking apps tend to work well. Sadly, to get a license from the US you'd need a EU IP address.
> The most recent DHS data released this week shows that fewer than 600 people per day have been booked into ICE detention facilities across the country during the first three weeks of February — well below the pace of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests a day that administration officials have said they want.
When we got 24/7 internet it was a game changer, it was like turning on a tap of knowledge on every topic. Of course the signal to noise ratio was higher back then...
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