[ablyveiled]

I wonder if internet access and instant-entry is /necessarily/ a distraction or impediment to deep thought, or it could be stomached to the effect of great productivity with an especially sharpened mind.

It saddens me that the most accessible repositories of information are those that, allegedly, dumb me down.

[chubot]

One thing I've found comically underestimated is books. It's not whether the information is physical or electronic, but what actual corpus of information is available.

There is A LOT of information in printed books that is not on the Internet.

There was a project to put all books on the Internet -- Google Books -- but that famously got tied up in lawsuits.

As a result, if your information diet consists of the Internet and not books, you're missing out.

I occasionally write something "obvious" from a book on my blog, and people are like "wow how did you figure that out" ?

---

For what Knuth is doing, he certainly doesn't need to read much on the Internet. Most of it is in books, or at the Stanford library (or whichever library he goes to).

He's probably so busy with books that the Internet seems UNINTERESTING.

If you want access to newer publications, the Internet is more efficient, but those are also available to the library. (Sadly, Scihub is the best source for those without university access.)

So yeah I'd say 3 main repos of knowledge are: the open Internet, printed books, and Scihub, and many people today only use the first one.

[superb_dev]

I've been getting deep into computer graphics recently, and having a handful of in-depth books on the subject has been immensely helpful. I don't have to spend time scouring terrible google results for answers when I don't even know the question

As an aside, ThriftBooks has been amazing for increasing my collection! I;ve gotten so many books for cheap

[chubot]

Yeah exactly, on top of the library, I buy old used books online, and they're dirt cheap, and dense with knowledge

No ads lol!

It's honestly sad to me when I see people scrolling through terrible web pages with tiny morsels of information, which are often "interested" or wrong.

[kristjank]

Internet provides first class access to third class information. Just a couple days ago I was seeking some information relating to my "Intro to DSP" course at uni. After an hour combing through a bunch of unclearly stated and poorly answered questions on various stackexchange subsites and SEO-optimized hellholes, I just libgen'd a book my professor's textbook cited and found my answer in a couple minutes.

The question was how the phases add or subtract when looking at a phase graph of a cosine wave modulated DFT transform, not exactly rocket science.

It seems like the internet has dumbed down to the point where its front page is very surface level and always requires additional research assistance in the form of SearxNG, AI chats, or turning to less SEO prone engines like marginalia or even wiby to get good and honest results. I don't think adapting to human toxic environments like the current internet is a good model for the future, when we already have the tools to filter the wheat from the chaff.

[pclmulqdq]

Most deeply technical (and not computer-related) topics on Wikipedia have only one or two technical authors. They give you a view of the topic that is not particularly objective or complete.

[burnished]

My experience is that its mostly an impediment, see socializing here instead of thinking deeply.

But I've also used the internet to great effect when getting up to speed on a research topic because I had lots of access to high quality texts and tools (citation manager for tracking, spreadsheet for glossary of terms). Notably that didn't involve any communications, just searches.