91–100 of 105 posts
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Tangential, but what is "The Feynman Letters" here? I know of a book of some of his letters, but not about censorship/loss thereof.
Perhaps referring to this? I’m not entirely sure. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/mail-censorship/
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Yandex is getting more and more of my web queries lately. There's a definite irony there.
Google and Bing (so DuckDuckGo as well) seem to like searching for synonyms of search terms and returning the most popular results, thinking popular means relevant. I remember looking for something where I remembered the exact terms and not getting anywhere with them, but on Yandex it was the first hit.
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I've love to have a single letter from some of my ancestors.
I have one, actually, from my grandpa's generation. He told another family member about his time growing up in the early 1900s, riding trolleys and eating Walnettos (a strange Walnut-based candy bar). Then the Spanish Flu came around and the eldest sister just died at the breakfast table one day. Later, the family rallied together to care for each other after his father lost his job due to automation. He moved on to…
For us Russians, collective memory for almost all people starts with post-WWII era, usually 1950s. Old generation rarely told me about what was before - although i am old enough to vaguely remember some of my ancestors born around 1895 and spent a lot of time talking to those born around 1910.
One might think that it was about memories being overly heavy - indeed there was Commie and for some, also Nazi terror, hunger, and the stuff - before ~1956 an average Soviet starved at least for several weeks a year, and before ~1951, once in a few years, some relative always died of starvation - that was the norm, but real reason as i understand it, wasn't that. The reason is that there was almost nothing to tell. These people were illiterate peasants living very local-minded lives, without formal jobs (kolkhoz serfdom), without electricity or money, and with very little worldview apart from primitive propaganda pushed once in a while by visiting agitators.
Before WWII, there was almost nothing any of them could tell: only thing that could happen, was repressions, but those to who they happened, couldn't tell anything - they never returned - and their relatives usually forgot of them because it was too scary to remember. Apart from that, it was all the same - endless toil on a small plot of infertile land to produce as much food as possible to avoid kids dying next spring, and keep as much of it from kolkhoz eyes, and slacking off at kolkhoz forced work as much as possible to keep more energy to work on your own plot. Never leaving the village, unless forced out of it by Nazis or Commies (actually happened to my relatives - one day they were forced out of the village and it was razed, moved ~20km away, and left in the field, being issued some formal "compensation" in worthless money - had to dig a new earthhouse). That's the kind of stories i heard.
I can understand why they were not keen on telling them.
Stories of later generations had a lot more of "story" in them and i can understand they lived an actual life.
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The "custom range" feature simultaneously feels broken, gamed by spammers, and intentionally being scrubbed. I'm surprised they haven't completely removed it yet.
In general I suppose, but per my comment above in this particular case of the scb.co.th article (which mentions SARS crisis), the article was actually published 2021 not 2003, there was no gaming going on, simply Google's data-inference code got it totally wrong on the Siam Commercial Bank article. I don't want to see Google remove the search-by-date-range feature, it has tons of 100% serious legitimate uses (quote a…
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> The original post was about natural entropy on the internet. The post by He Jiayan was, but that post was taken down for violating regulations. TFA is largely about the censorship angle which He Jiayan specifically avoided talking about (not that it helped him). > If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it. Name one figure who was prominent in…
> Name one figure who was prominent in between 1995-2005 who you can't find any content about from that era when using Google's date filters. A single figure. The original post listed multiple people famous in China at that time (including Taiwanese celebrities) where even Bing and Google didn't get them old enough results. Sure, they return results that supposedly match the date filter, but if you actually read them…
Also, even Jay Chou, who I assume is the Taiwanese celebrity you're referring to, has a bunch of sources that are clearly from those dates:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/culture/81463.htm
https://westeastmag.wordpress.com/2002/09/08/made-in-taiwan-...
Why expect search engines to return historical data accurately? Modern search engines have a lot of tasks like combating CEO and returning up-to-date data, and they have no incentive to preserve history as old as 2005 as it’s very likely that any page from that date has been superseded by more relevant articles. The task of preserving history should be delegated to archive.org and search engines are just not well pos…
Why expect search engines to return historical data accurately? Modern search engines have a lot of tasks like combating CEO and returning up-to-date data, and they have no incentive to preserve history as old as 2005 as it’s very likely that any page from that date has been superseded by more relevant articles. The task of preserving history should be delegated to archive.org and search engines are just not well pos…
Did you read the post?
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Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hyste…
Oh please. The whole "no one is free anywhere, but at least those other people are honest about it" garbage. There should be a logical fallacy named after this sort of argument. People in the West are measurably, significantly freer than people in China. That doesn't mean the West is perfect. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors in government and in the private sector who want to introduce more systems of c…
Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh memes say that you're ironically buying into the overstated projection of Chinese control.
But to get back to the crux of the issue: "bad actors" in America (like Google) are not unlike Chinese censors in kind, only degree. That is the conclusion an honest assessment and comparison has to come to. And however much you may want to turn this into some sort of geopolitical pissing match, my message is not, "Let's be more like China," it's, "Let's be what we say we are instead of becoming more like China."
Wow - this explains a lot about why Chinese LLMs and AI struggle so much to get data, despite the supposed near-infinite databases: a lot of it is just gone , far more than anyone had ever proposed might be the case, because of neglect, censorship, walled gardens/apps killing everything trapped within, and chilling effects. You can't scrape what is no longer there, or was never written to begin with...
> supposed near-infinite databases: a lot of it is just gone Pretty sure megacorps still have their near-infinite databases around, in walled garden as always, but that's another topic. Censored contents are almost certainly soft-deleted. The problem is more about independent-ish sites, for example Tianya [1]. Think ancient BBS. Or newsgroups. If nearly all archive of these are lost it would indeed be very sad. [1] h…
Not necessarily. It's quite possible that, if no one accesses them, they got moved to backups with only one copy, and the backups may not actually be restorable in the case of disaster (it happens somewhat frequently even for backups of data you might actually care about, so imagine the effects of neglect on that).
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The original post was about natural entropy on the internet. Websites from 2005 that have disappeared or been redesigned so that you can't find their old content anymore, and the uselessness of search engines, domestic or foreign, for date range queries reaching that far back into the past. Even on the Internet Archive, the earliest working snapshot of Baidu Tieba is from 2006. You may think that it's impossible for…
> The original post was about natural entropy on the internet. The post by He Jiayan was, but that post was taken down for violating regulations. TFA is largely about the censorship angle which He Jiayan specifically avoided talking about (not that it helped him). > If the disappearance of old websites were entirely deliberate, you'd also need to explain why the West is in on it. Name one figure who was prominent in…
It really does illustrate the difference between information being forgotten and being deliberately censored. In the West the harder someone tries to censor information on the internet, the more amplified it is likely to get