A multibillion-pound drive to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy is riddled with “phantom investments” and shaky accounting, a Guardian investigation has found.
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Agreed, but controlling information is the 21st century equivalent of owning the means of production in the 19th century.
@ReggieHere @kibcol1049
I bought myself a set of 1980s Encyclopaedia Brittanica a few months back for €100. Absolute bargain for post-apocalyptic reading materials. -
@ReggieHere @kibcol1049
I bought myself a set of 1980s Encyclopaedia Brittanica a few months back for €100. Absolute bargain for post-apocalyptic reading materials.Ha! I've been hoarding an old set of encyclopaedias as a baseline for when old knowledge gets 'reinterpreted'.
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Ha! I've been hoarding an old set of encyclopaedias as a baseline for when old knowledge gets 'reinterpreted'.
@ReggieHere @davep Good idea! And thank goodness for archive.org; you can easily ignore all the trash published after 2022.
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Always useful to have a source....
https://archive.org/
http://archivebyd3rzt3ehjpm4c3bjkyxv3hjleiytnvxcn7x32psn2kxcuid.onion -
The internet may well be the first thing to go in the event of a world war.....assuming that we've not all been locked out for having unregistered devices in the meantime of course.
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It's all important information, and the older texts often come with context that's completely missing from modern interpretations.
I noticed that the Hay festival is coming up soon for anyone who wants to stock up on apocalyptic hard copy
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@Thebratdragon @ReggieHere
Very cool. I've got some book amidst my vast pile of stuff containing 100 interesting engineering principles/designs from about 100 years ago. It's ace. -
Absolutely, and also published at a time when breaking even was sufficient return so more eclectic titles could get published.
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....and could get them from public libraries without having to buy a subscription with some rent-seeking web publisher.
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Ha, brilliant!
It's always been about information. Data has been a huge distraction.
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@Thebratdragon @ReggieHere @davep Yes. They do.
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All permanently available and copyable. It's a shame that so many companies and colleges dumped their hard copy for online subscriptions.
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@Thebratdragon @ReggieHere @davep People should really pay more attention to the "post-apocalyptic marketability" of their skills and knowledge. You don't want to be the useless drain on resources that gets eaten first!
(Me, I have a printing press with movable type and a little paper-making kit and the know-how to use it, along with bookbinding. My partner has a loom and knows how to spin and weave.)
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Yep, and thanks to the economics of the day, digitising everything looked like a no-brainer.
Fifty years on, with the world's knowledge increasingly locked up behind corporate paywalls it could be considered to have been a trifle hasty.
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@Thebratdragon @ReggieHere
We've got vets and farmers here, it's the stuff like ram pumps that will be magic."Appropriate technology" as the last Keith Addison put it.
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@Thebratdragon @ReggieHere @davep People should really pay more attention to the "post-apocalyptic marketability" of their skills and knowledge. You don't want to be the useless drain on resources that gets eaten first!
(Me, I have a printing press with movable type and a little paper-making kit and the know-how to use it, along with bookbinding. My partner has a loom and knows how to spin and weave.)
@heinragas @Thebratdragon @ReggieHere
Excellent stuff.I've got a reedbed wastewater system, solar panels with battery storage that will outlive me, an electric car, blackberries, walnuts and chestnuts, a freezer full of seeds, and stuff one doesn't talk about in polite company.
Looking at things like tents and sleeping bags etc too. We're in the boonies and I imagine "society" will go back to a more labour intensive/small scale food production model in the future.
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Weird that digital technology has still to come up with anything that matches paper and microfiche for long term preservation.
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@Thebratdragon @ReggieHere
I've been in IT for over 40 years (currently changing tack to batteries and heat pumps). I don't think it's built on obsolescence so much as information loss being an artifact of digitisation, especially when society crumbles. -
With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder whether the digital revolution was premised on replacing hard copy information, along with the archivists, registrars and librarians that managed it to create a new world in which human knowledge could be monopolised by tech corporates.
