OT: World-Wide Alzheimer

[admin]

A prehistoric promotion blurb about XYplorer which I removed from all original sources on 2006-05-25 is still popping up in countless online places on every new release, also today: "XYplorer is an Advanced File System Explorer targeting everybody who..." Google finds almost 1 million pages replicating this stone age piece of information. How long will it survive? We need a digital Darwin, a new evolution theory of information history. Which info bits survive and replicate, which will perish? Which will evolve (mutations / copy errors) to stronger, fitter texts, better adapt to ever changing semantic / technological environments? Etc. And I personally would like to learn: How can I extinguish a particular species of information? How to break into a recursive copy cycle and change the DNA? How to be the informational gamma ray that alters the sequence?

[PeterH]

I'm afraid if you knew how to, you could earn much more money than with XY

[kunkel321]

I suppose in this case, "fitness" is actually "clickiness."

And instead of "random mutations" of the digital code, it's likely to be intentional alterations of meta-data driving the propagation. Automated data bots that have been running unchecked for too long.

[admin]

I suppose in this case, "fitness" is actually "clickiness."

And instead of "random mutations" of the digital code, it's likely to be intentional alterations of meta-data driving the propagation. Automated data bots that have been running unchecked for too long.

It's likely that ever-growing parts of the web content will be stale information generated by bots through copying and resampling. Informational replicants, in Blade Runner terminology. (Blade Runner is becoming a historical movie...)

Whatever, when you visit a software page to download a piece of software that was published today, there is no way to tell if the information text is actual and not many years old and completely outdated. The web is a mountain of sediments and using it needs the mindframe of an archeologist. The Indiana Jones approach to surfing...