Morimura Seiichi (1933-2023)
Japanese author Morimura Seiichi has passed away; see, for example, the AP report by Mari Yamaguchi.
Make the Wayback Machine the real internet
Tom Scocca – Indignity: “The Archive Is the Thing That’s Worth Browsing Now. I was trying to find a lost article on the internet. It had been published 14 years ago on a website that stopped updating 5 years ago and had bounced between different platforms during its existence. Somewhere along the way, something broke, and the original URL led to a 404 error page.So I went to the Internet Archive, pasted the URL into the Wayback Machine, and clicked on an early snapshot of the page There, through a slightly janky aperture, was the story I was looking for. A day or two earlier, I’d been looking up an online video game I’d previously written about.
I’d published the item five years ago, with a link to the game, but now that link brought up a frowny-face page logo in Chrome with a “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN” message. Through the Wayback Machine, though, it was still playable, albeit with a dead zone for steering where the top edge of the game neared the Wayback Machine frame. The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine have been helping people do these sorts of things for a long time…Link rot and the general instability of the publishing and hosting businesses—and of their underlying tech—have always been breaking down the pieces of the internet, even as the internet kept expanding.
Whenever you stumble over one of the resulting gaps, you can more often than not fill it in with the Internet Archive’s snapshot of what used to be there. But what happens when the entire internet is one big series of gaps? The information system everyone has relied on all these years seems to be caught up in a transition from “constantly breaking” to just “broken.” The current platforms are either unusable or on their way to unusability, caught up in their individual yet identical cycles of what Cory Doctorow diagnosed as “enshittification“…
Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth
The New York Times [free to read]: “Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?…The new A.I. chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus, too.
Embedded deep within their responses to queries is Wikipedia data and Wikipedia text, knowledge that has been compiled over years of painstaking work by human contributors. While estimates of its influence can vary, Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of A.I. models. “Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist,” says Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia this month and who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches and other information businesses. Is it already too late to live in a world where knowledge is created by humans?
Yet as bots like ChatGPT become increasingly popular and sophisticated, Vincent [Nicholas Vincent, who will be joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia] and some of his colleagues wonder what will happen if Wikipedia, outflanked by A.I. that has cannibalized it, suffers from disuse and dereliction. In such a future, a “Death of Wikipedia” outcome is perhaps not so far-fetched. A computer intelligence — it might not need to be as good as Wikipedia, merely good enough — is plugged into the web and seizes the opportunity to summarize source materials and news articles instantly, the way humans now do with argument and deliberation…”
Why Gen Z is flocking from Twitter to LinkedIn
Fast Company: ““The bird is freed,” tweetedElon Musk on October 27, 2022. But these days, the bird is not flying high with Gen Z. The recent Twitter acquisition has led to an exodus of Gen Z users flocking to other social media platforms—even to professional ecosystems like LinkedIn. I know because I’m a member of Gen Z myself. As a recent college graduate looking for a job, I scoured the web (including Twitter) for professional guidance but was dismayed by the sensationalized career advice I found. Then, I found a community on LinkedIn and launched The Final Round, a podcast that helps job seekers advance past “the final round” interview. Over the past year, I have interviewed dozens of recruitersfrom leading companies like McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs, and Google and I have connected with other young workerswho are turning away from Twitter towards LinkedIn, TikTok, and even newsletters…
Gen Z uses Snapchat to communicate, Instagram to keep up with friends, YouTube to laugh and learn, LinkedIn to find jobs and build personal brands, Facebook for groups, birthdays, and events, and TikTok because, well, it just brings us pure joy,” says Neal Sivadas, a Gen Z LinkedIn Top Voice and author of the Find Gen Z Series. “But there’s one mainstream platform that we don’t really know what to do with, and that’s Twitter.”
