A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it.

People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions.

Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article.

In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN:

Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/

Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/

There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write…

I was asking seriously. Other than that student newspaper editorial, I have not found any other coverage except news articles blindly restating Dr. Jones' comments and outraged editorials predicting the end of university standards. And naturally, most of the online comments follow the lead of those editorials.

That student newspaper editorial is the only source I've seen for important parts of the story, including the nature of the spring 2022 class, the increased class load, and Dr. Jones' previous evaluations.

I, too, have anecdotes; I spent many years around UTAustin's CS dept and had several friends in the dept undergrad office. I take as dim a view of faculty evaluations as anyone, but one of the things my friends always told me was that something is seriously wrong if any significant proportion of a class comes in to make official complaints. From the start, this story doesn't smell right.

In fact, I know of one instance where an adjunct faculty was asked not to come back for another semester: he was in the process of failing almost everyone in a required computer architecture course because they weren't the EE grad students he was familiar with.

(The growth of non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty is a wildly concerning trend that has quite a few faculty, particularly adjuncts, upset. If you're familiar with Bret Devereaux (https://acoup.blog), he is currently looking for a new position because his current contract has not been extended.)

This is quite an interesting phenomenon, though it's more unique. I find those kind (can't come up with a sensible qualifier... the best thing that comes to mind is "upper middle class normie journalism") of pieces incomprehensible on the higher strata of the parsing tree. I understand the words (which is not always the case with fiction, eg Blindsight - there are pages where I need to do multiple dictionary lookups, English is not my native tongue thou), the sentences more or less clearly denote facts or ideas, but... the more I read of them the less they make sense together.

Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical.

Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data?

[0] https://acoup.blog/

I spend large part of my life on reading about things that are interesting, even if not directly useful.

I would learn about it from brilliant https://acoup.blog/ - I think that it was mentioned there somewhere.

I think this specific case I have seen first mentioned in work by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Kopali%C5%84ski

"Kot w worku, czyli Z dziejów pojęć i rzeczy" - with short text on wide range of topics, ranging from art forgery (and interesting case of art forgery so old so it was precious historic treasure anyway) to topics such as disease eradication.

(for example as result of Ever Given I learned plenty of things about container shipping, even if it is not something directly useful - for example this video showing unloading process of container ship is rally interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INsf6XHdfAA - shows crane picking up truck-sized containers, dropping them into truck, then immediately following process)

Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving.

However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a little bit more.

Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six live births for the population to replace itself.

And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able to, including children as soon as they were able.

More here:

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/

You can read more about the drop in child mortality rates here:

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-brief

> That makes me curious if military tactics of the time also had regional variation and if the relative strengths of various regions came from their awareness of certain tools being effective. Bringing in a foreign army with its foreign techniques might have been like bringing small pox to a population- they’d have no defense the first time around so if you’re fast you get them all.

I highly recommend...the author's blog for very in depth articles about this subject including

- this one on mounted warrior cultures and how they often dominated https://acoup.blog/2020/02/28/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-iv-desert-power/
- this long series on why the legion ended up dominating the phalanx https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/