how awesome that this exists. I was learning how CPU works and designing my own CPU w emulator like 20 years ago as a teenager by googling into obscure forums, blog posts and homemade cpu webring. I made an experiment not long ago "would I be able to find in google by myself all learning materials to do that again". The outcome of that experiment deeply unsettled me. Google just gives you shit and total garbage. Half of the results are AI generated, other half is sloppily written half assed abstract pseudo tutorial like nonsense on medium or other paid-for-engagement platform. My children would not be able to reproduce such self learning without watching some youtubers doing it or by accessing some curated paid course or by accidental stumbling upon "gems" like this i.e. from HN. We desperately need back old google and old internet and somehow save and preserve humanitys knowledge.
I am glad you followed up on this, to see if you could do it again! That matches my experience.
I remember feeling like the big tech corps had turned "consumer" into a pejorative and started relentlessly abusing their customers circa 2016 or so... Especially microsoft, post Windows 8. Consumer devices don't need to work. That's for pro devices. Consumer devices just need to sell ads, soak up user time, and let businesses market their goods for consumption!
The majority of search results from late 2019 or so and onwards have only degraded. Even on other platforms, like YouTube -- you get 4-5 real results, and the rest are "suggested for you", even if you've logged out. Google and Youtube both feel like "consumer" search engines, where advertising and eyeball time trump usefulness and user authority (i.e. the user being able to ask for what they want, and get it).
I agree. Its hard though, SEO people are malicious, persistent and with modern tech, have incredible tools.
And with hand curation, its hard to feel like its 'worth it' when instead of being able to build a community, your results are scraped and shown out of context.
If you have any thoughts on how to get that sort of culture back I'm open to it
tbh I have dreamt about what could be possible if we were making some sort of "closed doors" internet branch. You can access with a single account bound to you, invite only, something like PGP with a web of trust. Good "legacy" internet websites can be chained and indexed through some sort of thematical webring, with a good search and comment functionality added on top, as a global HN. Any external content is opt-in and vetted. Internal content with user rating system (not googles SEO algorithm ranked), i.e. allowing users to downvote nonsense bullshit into hell. robots on internal content are allowed through strictly controlled API that also pays original authors. Browsing automatically costs some "tokens" that are being paid towards owners of sites you visit so at least semi useful sites can sustain themselves and good ones make money, without spamming everything with ad banners or being incentivized to do ragebait-clickbait content. But thats all nonsense dreams, nobody will be willing to pay for browsing internet, even if high quality.
In the same vein, I feel like the 'fair source' movement makes sense - pay a fixed percent of profit and get access to a massive collection of licenced software.
Just like with yours though, allocating it fairly is centralized and very hard to make everyone happy. And nobody wants to pay for something that used to be free.
Part of me thinks we need a new protocol, and a new lightweight web built around markdown with absolutely no (client side) active content allowed.
What I'm not sure about is how to combat bad actors / spammers / low-effort pages and AI slop. I'm leaning towards some kind of git-like storage with history as a mandatory part of the protocol, and some kind of cryptographic web-of-trust endorsement system.
Sounds kinda like Gemini on top of IPFS/Dat/Hypercore. Imo some cool things but I'm not sure the problem is a technical one.
Content addressing has some real benefits in allowing something like the internet archive to be transparent (ie: it doesn't matter who hosts it). But that's mostly solving linkrot.
Searching through everything is still as hard as ever, and if the incentives are the same will be just as gamed. And people would have to make good content in the first place which is hard to justify without a good audience at the same time
Definitely a possibility - hopefully AI will similarly empower creation of better content instead of AI slop noise.
In fact I wonder if Claude.ai could come up with similar CPU teaching tools and a syllabus based on some of the great resources linked in this discussion.
