eso.chipmunk.land

Because I can, personally. Also you misspelled the tag.

One important purpose I think humans have is to pass things on to their next generations. I guess it's too recursive to be the only purpose, but I still think it's important.

I think the internet still serves that purpose. You can find lots of information on the internet if you look enough, including just about every piece of media one could want as a small example.
Of course, stuff has been changing for the worse. Mainstream websites do indeed get shittier and more bloated, in part due their owners being greedy. The legal action against archive.org, likely also driven by greed, can be quite scary, given how it has been the primary place of storage used by too many archival efforts.

Still, there are also technical reasons why all of this could even go wrong as much as it did.

1. Shitty copyright laws have existed for years, it was only a matter of time till archive.org would get affected.
2. archive.org being relied on so heavily is why threats to it are even so bad. If we had a less centralized way to archive stuff, this would be less of an issue. Unfortunately computer storage doesn't really grow on trees as of now…
3. Some services, including many software forges, have implementation details that make it possible to cause denial of service by simply shooting tons of requests to certain endpoints (i.e. ones for viewing files from specific git commits), and have had them for a while. All the lazy crawlers/scrapers really do is bring this to light.
4. As far as news article sites and government sites go, the issue is pretty clear to me. People are relying too much on websites owned by the wrong people who do not have the users' best interests in mind. While these sites do have useful information, like all data it can be copied to better places.

And I'd say technology itself never really changed, it's just that it's having growing pains now.
Not all of these issues have ideal solutions at the moment, but people have found ways around them. I don't know, seeing people archive sites, bypass paywalls, run sites with information but without bloat, and the likes still gives me hope.
It also seems like when challenges (like for instance) paywalls are had on the internet, people inevitably get around them. Life finds a way, as they say.

And an obligatory list of good things I've seen happen lately:

1. Data from video game archival service Myrient is now archived via BitTorrent. BT isn't perfect (requires someone to have a copy of the actual data) but it is decentralized.
2. Multiple software forges have managed to stay alive without burdening users with JS challenges or such.
3. Laws vary between nations, some suck less than others in certain ways. I mention this because the internet is international.
4. I've seen people mention ways to bypass paywalls before (personal favorite: turn off JavaScript)
5. I've seen image dumps from the Epstein files on multiple websites and frankly wouldn't be surprised if multiple people had them all saved to their hard drives, or better yet their servers.
6. From music to operating systems to tons of other stuff, it can still be found on the 'net.
7. For emergency situations we always have overlay networks like Tor, I2P, so on.
8. Hardware just gets better and better, and I wouldnt know but I heard servers have gotten cheaper than they were many years ago (granted I've also heard of them getting more expensive lately). server0.local's age (2016, as opposed to 2006 or 1996) probably contributes to why it's such a powerful server.
9. The list probably goes on.

Perhaps I'm just being too optimistic because of my youth. Still, I don't think the internet we know is soon to be over, instead I think it's just getting started. Sometimes stuff has to get really bad before people recognize that it's bad and care to improve it, anyway.

Edit 1: BitTorrent doesn't actually require someone to have the entire data, just for everyone involved to in total have all of the data. At least I think.

max - go to this post

One important purpose I think humans have is to pass things on to their next generations. I guess it's too recursive to be the only purpose, but I still think it's important.

I'd like to add to this. I've thought about it, and now I personally think our purpose in life is to find, create and/or preserve/maintain the good things in life, enjoy them as much as we can, and pass them on to the next generations.
I wouldn't be surprised if most if not all people who influenced the world significantly and/or are revered in history fulfilled this purpose, deliberately or not. I'm not saying none of said people were perfect, I'm just talking about the net effect that they had.
Though now that I think about it I see that things can be quite subjective since the actions they are revered for may benefit some people but have adverse effects on others. If anything labeling human actions as good/bad is subjective in general, so the idea of a purpose for humans seems quite nebulous to me now. Oh well, what I said is still the straightest answer I can give for now.

opt - go to this post

As a species, I don't know. Even if there were a God, why should we follow its vision for the purpose of our species? If I were to answer that question very literally, we exist because our father's sperm fertilized one of our mother's eggs.
I personally believe each person should find their own meaning for their own life. I don't think that one answer applies to everyone. What I feel has the most meaning, at least in my own life, is other people. Material wealth and other such things don't bring the same meaning to my life as interacting with other people does, but I recognize that I speak from a place of privilege with regards to that.

Perhaps I will find a different meaning to my life or another thing that brings me about as much joy as other people, but that's the best answer I have for now.

I mean, by interacting with people, I guess you could argue you could have the side-effect of doing the more general thing mentioned in the first line of this reply.

I'd also agree about the point about a God. As shown in the quote "the street finds its own use for things" one interesting thing about our species is a member who is a user of something often knows best on how it should be used, as opposed to an authority figure such as its creator. Perhaps it has to do with our ability to adapt, I dunno.
I suppose it mainly relates to technology, but I think it also applies to our own lives. For instance I once heard that our purpose is to maintain the land we live on, i.e. by performing prescribed burns for instance as some societies do/have done (I forget whether there was any religious association). This relates to the more general purpose from the beginning of the post I'd say. Also, however, I think just using all of our potential to just perform that maintenance task would be a huge waste, and if anything it's good that we've done much more than just that.

I've been sort of interested in philosophy for a while, but this thread is helping spark my interest more, lol.

CaydennO1 - go to this post

i know, idk how to change it

Alright, I changed it myself (I could as I'm an administrator)

CaydennO1 - go to this post

thanks ig

No problem!