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I really wish I could describe GenZ what it felt like growing up in a miracle. My grandfather on my mother's side was a dentist. He had a grand encyclopedia collection and it was just this incredible thing. You could pick up a random book and go to a random page and just be regaled with information

There was a time where this kind of access was privileged and expensive and reserved for those with means. You would pick up encyclopedia book and understand how much this cost them. And how important it was that you had it collected by experts into a printed page. Information was not free.

Microsoft version of the encyclopedia, Encarta, was a miracle. And every year it was better and more curated and richer in multimedia and details. And I feel so sad you'll never experience what this felt like. You were living the golden age. All of humanity would have wisdom unlocked shortly.

When you lived in the year 2000, everything about humanity was solvable with technology. Hate and prejudice and war was just lack of information to the common people. We were going to solve everything. It was so easy it was so obvious.

It's meaningless to you, but even how I reflect on these moments with the encyclopedia, with Encarta, that taught me about the world that you would only ever possibly know studying the field's texts or talking with an expert. The fundamentals of building a dam. That wasn't something you could have.

I understand the young who think their hope has been crushed. And I sympathize. There was a world that I thought I was saving. And I didn't.

We are all the hero of our first story. Our story where everything is fixed and none are sad. But then you live your story and it turns out to be a lie. And that is when you become an adult.

⚠️ Fun fact – I built one of the features of Wikipedia that maintains it even today. Hope, in service, will make you do incredible things. You will rise to the occasion, on its back. Inspiring that in others is not wrong. 15 years later.

... Yeah. If only misinformation wasn't also free, and barely ever punished. If only you could make people care about the information they have access to in the first place. If we ever get real AI, I hope to Computer Christ it wants to keep humans as peta and not... Do what we arguably deserve.

yeah we fucked it.

We (collectively) thought access to information would change the world but failed to appreciate a difference between "data" and "information", and drowned people in just data