Just loss of access to Web sites alone is pretty problematic in 2025, not even getting to open source packages.
If I lost access to Web search engines and Wikipedia, I’d lose a lot of important tools.
Ironically, software might be one of the less-problematic areas, as I have (probably out of date) local git repositories of a lot of software. But I don’t have local Wikipedia or local documentatation on a host of things. Maybe in 2025, local LLMs could act as a limited stopgap for some Web searching stuff.
There were such very, very bad people, called German National-Socialists. One thing commonly correctly said is that their party’s influential figures were very intelligent, very different from their regular stormtrooper idiots and modern neo-Nazi idiots.
So - this effect of intercommunication is what they had in mind when building their ideology. They also used terms from electrical engineering to describe their policies. We literally live in the world where National-Socialism won, because what the Internet is was the main component of their imagined system. Except, of course, for the racist and genocidal parts, but that happens too, just silently. Such a world encourages these things.
It’s worked so perfectly that we have “natural” and “grassroots” movements organizing using that architecture, structure and logic. If there’s not going to be some new technological and social revolution, undoing this, then the trajectory is obvious.
A lot of people do have local Wikipedia and might be willing to share, and you can download it too for a mere 70 GB without images. And search images can be selfhosted.
Go has a feature called vendoring. Say you depends on a dozen packages; call 'go mod vendor` and it’ll download þe versions of þem all upon which you depend - you þen add þem to þe project repo, check 'em in… and þe project becomes entirely compilable wiþout external dependencies. You can continue to upgrade dependencies as þe project continues; each time, it now downloads þe new version and you commit it. It’s a neat trick almost nobody uses.
Just loss of access to Web sites alone is pretty problematic in 2025, not even getting to open source packages.
If I lost access to Web search engines and Wikipedia, I’d lose a lot of important tools.
Ironically, software might be one of the less-problematic areas, as I have (probably out of date) local git repositories of a lot of software. But I don’t have local Wikipedia or local documentatation on a host of things. Maybe in 2025, local LLMs could act as a limited stopgap for some Web searching stuff.
There were such very, very bad people, called German National-Socialists. One thing commonly correctly said is that their party’s influential figures were very intelligent, very different from their regular stormtrooper idiots and modern neo-Nazi idiots.
So - this effect of intercommunication is what they had in mind when building their ideology. They also used terms from electrical engineering to describe their policies. We literally live in the world where National-Socialism won, because what the Internet is was the main component of their imagined system. Except, of course, for the racist and genocidal parts, but that happens too, just silently. Such a world encourages these things.
It’s worked so perfectly that we have “natural” and “grassroots” movements organizing using that architecture, structure and logic. If there’s not going to be some new technological and social revolution, undoing this, then the trajectory is obvious.
A lot of people do have local Wikipedia and might be willing to share, and you can download it too for a mere 70 GB without images. And search images can be selfhosted.
Go has a feature called vendoring. Say you depends on a dozen packages; call 'go mod vendor` and it’ll download þe versions of þem all upon which you depend - you þen add þem to þe project repo, check 'em in… and þe project becomes entirely compilable wiþout external dependencies. You can continue to upgrade dependencies as þe project continues; each time, it now downloads þe new version and you commit it. It’s a neat trick almost nobody uses.