> I have to sit through hours of stuff I don't care about to find the nuggets that are useful.
> This is NOT confined to software conferences.
It's not confined to anything. This is a problem any time you want knowledge of any kind. Nobody in the past wrote a book thinking of you specifically having whatever problem in the future.
Consider Ben Waggoner's answer here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-equivalent-of-the-names-of...
Imagine the question is "what were the Norse constellations?" (It's not the question originally asked, but it is the question being answered.) This is the type of thing that might have been formally documented. But if it was, all such documentation was lost. Instead, the knowledge is distributed through every cultural artifact ever produced by the Norse:
> Here's the thing. We do have some astronomical manuscripts written in Iceland, in Old Icelandic. However, they're translations of Greek or Latin works
> Most of these are found in Icelandic treatises on computus, the medieval art of reckoning the calendar and determining the dates of Christian holy days; these also contain some astronomical lore. But they're not useful guides to what the pre-Christian, pre-book culture Norse would have thought about the stars.
> Most of the constellation names are direct translations of the Latin names. Aquarius is Vatnkarl (“water-man”), Pisces is Fiskarnir (“the fish”)
> Some of the texts refer to constellations that I don't think are even visible from Iceland, such as Centaurus and Ara, so clearly they're not "native Norse" texts.
> And yet. . . every so often, one of these translations will slip something in that's not in the original.
>> Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, wife of Perseus, sits in the Milk Ring [Milky Way], there where we say "wolf's jaws", in between Pisces and Cassiopeia and Aries
> And boom, there's a constellation name that has nothing to do with Greek mythology: in normalized spelling, úlfs kjöptr, "wolf's mouth" or "wolf's jaws."
If you want to answer this simple question ("What were the Norse constellations?"), you need to read... everything. We got lucky in this astronomical treatise -- it included information that wasn't supposed to be there. Epic poetry isn't unlikely to make some kind of reference to the stars. Maybe we could tease something out of a folk song. Maybe there's a picture somewhere with a caption on it. Maybe there's an ancient anthropological study of the Norse by some other culture, that happens to mention a constellation of theirs.
Everything is like this. Try studying any language independently and then sitting in on a class. It will either be mostly stuff you already knew, with stuff you didn't know scattered randomly through, or it will be mostly stuff you didn't know, with stuff you learned long ago scattered randomly through, presented as new and challenging. It probably is new and challenging -- to the students in the class, who have been through a curriculum designed to lead them to this one.
There is no way to make the world give you only information that you think is relevant, because "information you think is relevant" is a concept that only exists in your mind.