I mean the engine already has a full machine state. I could just run firefox inside a VM and snapshot the VM to save the website in a idle-disconnected state. So it’s a matter of doing something more sane and efficient than this

You’d get a mostly empty page with a search box in the middle … and a few hundred megs of tracking software.

I understand a VM isn’t the same since at least it is somewhat self-contained.

But at the end of the day, a browser does end up showing you something and has a stable state waiting for your input. These stable moments are like checkpoints or snapshots that can be saved in place, the whole render engine state machine. And that can be saved at multiple times, similar to how internet archive takes periodic static snapshots of websites.

It should be trivial, a one-click action for the user to save the last couple of these checkpoint states to a format that can be consulted later and offline or after the website has gone. Whether that’s just saving “everything” it needs to recreate the machine state, or by saving only the machine state itself.

That doesn’t mean the whole website will remain interactive but it will at the very least preserve what was inside the scroll buffer of the browser

And that is a LOT better than just saving a broken link, or just saving a scrolling screenshot, which already would be an improvement over the current state of things.

It would also allow a text search of the page content of all bookmarked pages. Which would be huge since the current bookmark manager can barely search titles and very poorly at that.

The bookmarks system is long LONG due for a full overhaul

We can save entire operating systems in that way, the heavy burden is borne by the hardware, as far as the software is concerned it is to dump the memory snapshot of the engine into a file and reload it later.

I mean, it’s been almost 30 years and this aspect hasn’t evolved because of a long expired belief that we will be able to re-download it all later as if the internet wasn’t eventually going to churn over and all links will eventually break.

My LLM says this is what’s known as a “MORAL HAZARD”

Wish they’d make bookmark not suck so much that using them felt like a commitment to organisationnal chores. The bookmark system is largely unchanged since the netscape days.

You cant search texts inside bookmarks because they only store the url. Which will break. Instead of saving the html itself, as if we still only has hundreds of gigabytes.

It should have a library level search system, capable of not just symbol text but intelligent summarization, categorization, search by relecant, content discovery algorithm, rss feed support all fully local, offline capable.

The whole thing, metadata, html, inages, video, files, code, replay of the changes over time. Yes I should be able to replay clicking “read more” as I expand comments on facebook. I should not lose my work to a page reload ever again. And no that’s nor “too much space”. Web pages are largely text sent super efficiently it is not that much information even compared to a gigabyte.

We have computers, we have on demand video, we have AI, I’ve watched Khan academy and the countless others, it is not a tenable position to tell me this can’t be RADICALLY different because I’ve seen it. I know it can be better. We need to take out the old models and break the mold, the old business model is finished, has been finished for decades and decades but it lives on unchanged because of its own self-healing bureaucracy. It’s institutionalized way of doing things. This is the fuel behind the vapid and dangerous chainsaw wielding freaks who want to privatize it all.

It HAS to change and it has to STOP fighting against progress and change. And for that we have to make this future livable for the people who will be working there.

I understand very well what you mean and what the goal is, the problem is that it just doesn’t reflect the reality of what was happening in school. For fuck’s sake, not a single class in the entire duration explained how to do taxes or fix your car. It was all the most tepid and diluted of learning, thank fuck I had the internet to learn about the world because there was very little of that going on at school.

I really don’t know how it was even possible that so much filler, never ending school slop as appetizing as what they served at the cafeteria.

But really that’s not the worse of it, no, even thought it was VERY bad, the worse was the total suppression of agency, the lack of relevance, taking absolutely for granted that we could not escape and so there was never any need to even tell us what we’re going to learn or why or have any choices.

Every single day started with waking up too early, bussing around for an hour and then enduring this torture that would not even end one fucking minute at a time. I have a hard time even imagining how it used to be back then. If I had known how bad it was going to be I would have probably killed myself to save myself from this hellish horror. At least real physical torture wouldn’t have been so hopelessly boring.

If ee could talk to them we would give them money to buy their food in exchange for more obedience and convenience.

We could probably get some of them to participate in basic farm labour and keep some of them in check.

I work in industrial bureaucratic institution and yes, I wouldn’t expect any kind of good results or quality for a very long time if they suddenly pivoted to creative video making.

But we know it’s very possible, if you look at crash course or khan academt and the like, to have something not as tedious as book reading or sterile whiteboard live lectures.

It would be very hard to be worse than them.

Not as featureful, but my friends and I run our own xmpp server

Well, pre-recorded video should have LONG ago replaced in person lectures. And we could have had symbolic programs handles all exercises, exams, quiz most of the formulaic interactions that teachers use to bulk up their courses.

All those freed teaching hours could be pooled together to create the video content and refine it more and more.

Instead we’ve got teacher giving the same lecture 6 times a week. Exhausting and unnecessary. Their efforts would be much better spent with rapid one on one tutoring of only those who need help.

And that was all BEFORE we had AI to offload most of the mundane tasks.

I code for fun, have been doing so for decades and using AI as an helper has been amazing.

My coding skill in my cursed basic variants (VB6/VBA/vb.net)

translated overnight to basically any language that I want, it’s just amazing.

I can almost code in javascript by hand just from exposure, despite never formally trying to learn it

If students did useful things, self directed things, were allowed to discover and create, can you imagine how ducking crazy that would be ? Imagine if we didn’t largely waste the bulk of everyone’s youth on boring 1800s style lecturing toiling in mass education factories ?

Sure but that was not anywhere near the bulk of my time spent in school. Most of my actual learning occurred after school on the internet. School mostly made me accept that my most useful hours of my life would be consumed, and largely wasted, by external forces which I would have little to no control over and even less chances to escape from.

Thanks I’ll check that out

For me it is

“Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED”

which is the first result if you search youtube for “ted talk education”

He doesn’t really have a solution of mass manufactured education but he does highlight the problem real good

Actually, someone made a drawing version of this talk and it’s really good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

That information was at least available to capture.

With discord it was EULA-walled and anti-scraper locked

You mean NNTP ?

The disappearance of forum public discussion to unsearchable, unpreserved, discord semi-private discussion chambers is probably the largest informational catastrophe of the internet so far.