It's been a week since I had to get back into the groove at The Day Job^TM. The transition back wasn't too rough, though I wound up reassessing how I was doing some tasks. Not a bad thing. Hope your shift back into work mode (assuming you made that shift in the last seven days) was smooth.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Holes in the web — It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the World Wide Web is a vast store of human knowledge. It isn't. It's a repository of information and static, with a lot of human learning missing which, in turn, adds to the collective ignorance of generative AI tools.

From the article:

And beyond merely reflecting existing knowledge hierarchies, GenAI has the capacity to amplify them, as human behaviour changes alongside it. The integration of AI overviews in search engines, along with the growing popularity of AI-powered search engines such as Perplexity, underscores this shift.

A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks — This makes you wonder how much other information, both consequential and not, is trapped on those little plastic squares from an earlier time. And whether or not the software to read or convert those files still exists.

From the article:

This has created concerns among archivists, historians and archaeologists that future generations may face a sort of "digital dark age" when they look back for material from the past 50 years or so. Much like the Dark Ages of Europe that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, it's not that nothing happened. But if no records from the time exist, then it will be impossible to know what people thought, felt and how they lived.

Toronto’s underground labyrinth — A deep dive into the PATH, a rather unique, long network of walkways under downtown Toronto. I can't count you how many hours and how many footsteps I spent wandering around that over years when I lived in the city. Not one of either was wasted.

From the article:

Urbanists are normally sceptical about pedestrian tunnels, fearing that they kill off street life. This is a reasonable concern and may often be a decisive reason to avoid them. But in a downtown like Toronto’s, human density is so enormous that this worry seems exaggerated. The pavements of Toronto are still busy, even on weekends, despite hundreds of thousands of pedestrians going underground.

Robert Caro on the Art of Biography — I usually bristle when I hear something that being described as the art of. In this case, the description is apt. Robert Caro has turned political biography into an art form, and his description of writing about Lyndon Baines Johnson is fascinating.

From the article:

For me there were many obstacles in learning about Johnson's race for that goal, in learning about the young Lyndon Johnson and his early political career. Most of the obstacles were put there by Johnson himself. When he was President we saw what has been called an obsession with secrecy, and this obsession was striking, even when he was a young man—even when he was a college student, in fact.