Not quite that old, more in the 2000 range based on when I had my PC that I used it on. This was a GUI app for Windows. Wish I had an idea, that was like… too long ago.

They can, they only know two words though, both offensive.

No, I don’t see mention of it being an application but like Dogpile is a web-based collector.

I did a search myself, but (given how searching sucks now) couldn’t find anything. Lots of hits for search engines themselves, but getting past that to other methods back then is difficult.

It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you’d load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.

Well, yeah. This side of it.

Actually comparable for a lot of specialty dice. Which do tend to be a lot.

The writing experts call this “write ugly”. Get it down somewhere, out of your head. Only then can you look at it, evaluate it, edit it, etc.

Bob Ross taught painting the same way. Start with something, anything. Change it if it’s wrong, let it lead you. Happy little accidents. But if you never open the paint…

I know the name, but no, it was an actual program on the computer.

Make the missing pieces. Various ways to do that, from hand drawing it in if you’re good or the picture there is simple. Do a reverse search to find the puzzle box photo or the original image it came from and use that. AI, if you’re not against that, could probably fill in that pretty well. Or just leave it, chances are depending where the pieces are most people may not even notice.

I can’t remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.

Edit: more specific - It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you’d load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.

The reason I mention it is because we’re sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you’d have something like what Google was at its peak before “do no evil” got painted over.

Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines’ databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.

If they had said it came from AI, the heads would have said to run with it. Same guesswork, but a computer can’t be wrong in their eyes.

But 17, probably not.

I get why it’s better in so many ways. But for the topic of this particular post, it could have made things worse. As in a return trip soon after once you get moving. Whereas physically disturbing things sometimes encourages completion.

Part of good website design back then was to set up the webpage so it shows the structure first, then fills in over the rest of the time, and also why interlacing was used a lot for images, so you could see the image gradually form over the load time vs. top to bottom or nothing at all until the end.

If you’re really old enough, you remember being able to read the BBS text as it came in.

And then the opposite, atoms are mainly empty space too. As Sagan said, matter is composed chiefly of nothing. But also as Feynman pointed out, when we feel something, like the arm of the chair that our hand can’t go through, that’s not actually matter touching, but the forces within resisting each other.

Reality in both directions gets weird if you start looking at it, and yes, we can understand the concept of scale, but to really “see” it is not possible.

Epic Spaceman did a video talking about the scale of the galaxy, and it’s stuck in my mind since then. If the galaxy was the size of the US, our solar system would be just outside of Denver, and it would be the size of a thumbprint (the SOLAR SYSTEM). And even that requires you to grasp the true size of the US from coast to coast, which is itself difficult even knowing the distance.

Technically you might be right. Normally the 10^80 atoms is referred to as amount of atoms in the known universe, but that’s calculated by known galaxies, and we know of structures larger, as well as speculate if there’s an edge at all. But still, the jump from 10^80 to 10^120 is a lot.

Obviously you don’t know much about velociraptors.

That’s just a matter of circumstance. How many of them would stay that way if you knew them?

I usually don’t have a problem with persons individually. But as a herd animal, people suck.

As have many others, since it’s a close and similar star to the Sun. Andy Weir said the main reason for using it was to have similar stars close enough to each other to make the spread believable.

Anarchy, avoiding the conditions.

The why of mass is “just” more material within the same unit area.

What always gets me is how adding one more of the pieces of matter, specifically another proton, changes the very properties of that atom, sometimes dramatically.