Fascinated that the author shares an experience of discovery in libraries. The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.

Libraries are certainly declining in their traditional form. I find it odd that everyone has a digital resources in their pocket yet libraries are squeezing out physical books to make way for more and more computers. Try to find paper copy of the Sony founder's book.... that will be £50 on amazon. Prohibitive. No library within a 10 mile radius has a copy.

I remember joyfully discovering Tony Royce's book in my library a few years ago. That enlightenment will never happen now. Primary knowledge is being lost, churned crude will forever lubricate the delusions of those who have no facility to collate the basis of our understanding.

> The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.

back in the reasonably early days of the web (I would guess ~2000) I stumbled across a webpage that said "I used to collect random interesting snippets in a shoebox, here is the internet version of it". I was delighted enough that I actually wrote to the author to compliment them on helping keep the web interesting, and though I haven't thought about it in ages it clearly made enough of an impression on me that I remembered the author's name. and it's still up! https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/index.htm

AIs are fantastic for discovery. Just today I asked Chatgpt to find blogs 1) about old school newspaper cartoons 2) that have been writing for more than 10 years and 3) are run by one or two passionate people rather than a team. Within seconds Chatgpt found 7 candidates. Within another handful of seconds it gave me RSS links to the ones I wanted.

This is incredible!