> And if we hadn’t quite got the message, her entry for “bad indexes” tells us to “see also automated indexing.” Go to “automated indexing,” and the two subhead

> And if we hadn’t quite got the message, her entry for “bad indexes” tells us to “see also automated indexing.” Go to “automated indexing,” and the two subheadings read “attempts to index like a human 254” and “fails 304–7.” And yet people keep doing it even though it produces an inferior result. “Cost,” you might say, “is reduced by using a computer, and the result good enough that we can get away with it.” And this is true of many fields where computers have taken over but do a worse job, such as music engraving (compare the old masters to the default or even moderately tuned output of just about anything other than Lilypond and there’s a huge difference if you’re a player; Lilypond, being deliberately designed to do better, does better, though it still needs some skill to produce truly excellent results) and typesetting of Bibles (readily observable in print if you’re looking for it and compare Bibles over time; and glaringly obvious in Bible software, which is uniformly awful for reading, a problem which I’m working on). It’s not limited to tech, either; in book-binding, for example, hot-melt glue is faster and significantly easier for manufacture, and so in mass production has entirely supplanted cold glue, despite producing a vastly inferior result. Does this justify a wistful yearning for the days of old when hearts were twice as good as gold and twenty times as mellow? People on this site are more aware than most of the ubiquity through time of this sentiment. But perhaps this time it’s different? I wonder how many sombre reflectors have thought that. Certainly it’s not new phenomenon for progress to be tempered by inferiority in some regards; further back in history, crossbows successfully replaced longbows, again because of a significantly reduced time to production despite inferior results—but not so inferior as to be useless. Progress is littered with such compromises. Often those compromises are eventually conquered, too: after another couple of centuries, they could make crossbows more powerful than longbows had been.