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> When Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was harder to imagine a greater destruction of scholarship. Dude. We're not talking about losing secr
by throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
> When Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was harder to imagine a greater destruction of scholarship.
Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge. We're talking about losing pictures of cats.
There is nothing on the internet that's so valuable that we couldn't live without it. Real research, real knowledge, makes its way out of the internet. And besides, most of the internet that we can actually discover is cached in search engines.
- DanTheManPR 4y ago>Dude. We're not talking about losing secret ancient knowledge. We're talking about losing pictures of cats. But we're literally talking about book lending, and preserving the old knowledge of the early internet. However lofty and pretensions the analogy may seem, comparing it to the burning of the library of Alexandria actually does seem like a better analogy than "we're just losing pictures of cats"
- Mike_12345 4y agoInternet Archive stores much more than pictures of cats. Books, magazines, technical manuals, documents, software, movies, music, images, documentaries, concerts, etc. These are files that users upload. The web crawler is just one part of it. You will find the most obscure things that practically cannot be found anywhere else. Stuff that would otherwise be permanently lost. https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/ "Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more." "As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds over 36 million books and texts, 11.6 million movies, videos and TV shows and clips, 950 thousand software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.5 million images, 251 thousand concerts, and 780 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine."