2023-07-16 20:10 UTC
Replies (8)
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@gadgetoid@fosstodon.org 2023-07-16 20:44
@eaton@phire.place archive.org’s way back machine has saved my bacon for some real obscure stuff, - palm m500 thumb board drivers - but often just as fruitless 😭 The click farms are infuriating though.
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@ieure@retro.social 2023-07-16 21:37
@eaton@phire.place Yeppppp. This is why I immediately download and save the manual for any new thing I buy, during the narrow window where it's likely to work.
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@grissallia@aus.social 2023-07-16 22:09
@eaton@phire.place I find this bitterly ironic, in that a chunk of my working life (1991-2000) was spent in a business that was solely built on distributing service manuals, and one of the biggest fights I had with my dad was predicting that digital distribution would ultimately kill our business. We were turning over ~A$1M p/a when I quit in 2000. I was, sadly, mostly correct (it's still running, barely, distributing rare manuals digitally).
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@raiderrobert@mastodon.social 2023-07-17 03:08
@eaton@phire.place the busted jQuery from 2013 is what gives me hope that it has an answer somewhere if I can only find an old jQuery bundle to inject into the page. It's been around long enough to be before the entire site was made with JS and had the lifespan of a fruit fly. I still remember when all I had to do was ask Google for filetype:pdf of something and I'd find records...now it's all content farms with PDFs of garbage.
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@nk@sns.neonka.info 2023-07-17 04:18
@eaton@phire.place The information was always valuable. Yesterday you did not have the tools to find it on the web, today you don't have the tools to find it in this AI noise, tomorrow there will be something new.
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@crunchysteve@aus.social 2023-07-17 05:05
@eaton@phire.place It strikes me that the clickfarms have no benefit to anybody other than those who own copyright on a service manual. For want of a better term, packet transmissions and processor cycles cost money. If those AI clickfarms are just randoms, what's their payday. If they're copyright owners, we know what their payday is - people give up trying to find the manual and pay for it. On a network with billions of users, the data costs of running a few clickfarms has a payday in real sales. Why do we, as a species, always seem to trust the guys with money to always be the ones doing the right thing? They rarely are, look at what Elon's doing to twitter.
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@bosak@flx.masto.host 2023-07-17 22:42
@eaton@phire.place I feel your pain. A terrific crowd-sourced, federated solution to the problem would be for every Mastodon user to commit to scanning in some old manual they have lying around to PDF and posting it with a specific hashtag like #manual. Just one apiece and we'd have lots of them. Oh, wait, that's right. You can't post a PDF on Mastodon. Sorry, never mind.
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@wesruv@tech.lgbt 2023-07-18 22:33
@eaton@phire.place Cut to 10 years from now when it's broken React code with variable names in plain view because the API changed. 🌈 🦄✨progress🌟