I'm not sure about wasting. Most of my surfing consists of unearthing gems, and I have to wade through a lot of noise and muck to find those gems, but the gems are there. If I could automate it, I would, but it wouldn't be the same.
A piece of code that crawls the net looking for something I would really enjoy is a hard problem, and I would have to code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly, and this means I couldn't share the program with others since it would be very personal and context specific.
I am aware of confirmation bias and filter bubbles, but it doesn't mean I don't like my own bubbles. It's just plain psychology afterall and we're all human, although I do try to break out of my comfort zone in terms of what content I consume, and regularly scout for different places to get my content besides The Bird Site, Reddit, FaceBuck etc
Completely agree with this - it's those gems that keep us addicted. If the internet were 100% time wasting garbage, I think it would be easy enough to quit completely. But that tiny percentage of good content, which can often be very good (some of the best and most worthwhile writing I have ever encountered has been posted on obscure forums), keeps you searching for the next "hit."
Personally, I would love to subscribe to a paid service that would produce a "daily briefing" of sorts with well curated highlights of the internet. Content aggregators have tried to get at this, but the signal to noise ratio is still way off. If someone could produce this product, I actually think it could be quite successful.
The quality to noise ratio on mostly social media platforms has become obscenely low over the past three years or so. I do think social media can be a force for good but it seems like the algorithms are best at perpetuating the lowest effort, spamiest content.
> code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly
Isn't this, in theory, what the "algorithms" are trying to do for you? They see what you interact with and try to optimize for "similar" content to surface these gems for you automatically, since it will keep you in their platform longer.
Can you give an example of such a gem? Normally I just rely on HN to provide me with interesting links, but lately it doesn't seem to give me the same kick it used to.
These people also have a cool demo of splitting a single program across two different computers (frontend and backend webserver in their case). Maybe a bit less convincing than the previous one, but something I intend to watch: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/uis-are-streaming-dags
These people have some really cool work on automatically solving physics problems (just linking to one of their talks as an example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhDgxkiR9c
I'm not the person you asked but I try to keep my gems in bookmarks, would love to share some. Obviously I don't know your interests so take it for what you will. I have many more than I'll post here if you want some.
Some of this came from HN, some from elsewhere.
This website lists the first references to some cultural icons on Usenet (for example the first time AIDS was ever discussed, first mention of a new TV cartoon "The Simpsons", etc.)
http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html
The Public Domain Review, a collection and analysis of interesting stuff in the public domain
https://publicdomainreview.org/
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. I have spent many hours browsing the incredible content here.
https://www.davidrumsey.com/
Restoration Mustang. A high quality long term journal of the restoration of a classic Mustang. Think like an /r/diy project but with way more detail and over a longer time scale.
https://restorationmustang.com/
The Renegade Gardener. Highly opinionated no-bullshit gardening advice. I especially love the "Don't Do That" section.
https://renegadegardener.com/
Garden Myths. There's a lot of misinformation and old wives' tales in gardening, this website cuts the crap.
https://www.gardenmyths.com/
Million Short is a search engine that lets you cut out the million (or 10,000 or 100,000) top results from a search, really good for finding gems. It also has an option for removing e-commerce websites from search which is a godsend.
https://millionshort.com/
A piece of code that crawls the net looking for something I would really enjoy is a hard problem, and I would have to code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly, and this means I couldn't share the program with others since it would be very personal and context specific.
I am aware of confirmation bias and filter bubbles, but it doesn't mean I don't like my own bubbles. It's just plain psychology afterall and we're all human, although I do try to break out of my comfort zone in terms of what content I consume, and regularly scout for different places to get my content besides The Bird Site, Reddit, FaceBuck etc