Without some way to generate revenue, people aren't going to publish recipes (for Google to scrape into their AI.) Maybe we could live without more recipes being fed into the machine, but there are many other types of content that will suffer the same fate.
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...
I find many software developers are solution-oriented instead of problem-oriented. Because that's a common theme in my head it's what I see here, whether that's what was intended or not.
I believe that developers who orient their thinking/work around the problem they're solving instead of the solution they're implementing generally have a better outcome.
I wonder if that's what was happening with the artists in the study? The "successful" artists were really focusing on what they were trying to achieve, putting their time and attention into that?
(But then this ties into other comments here about the criteria for success. Maybe success in software problem solving doesn't correlate that well with success as an artist. I think success as an artist comes down to being considered an artist by the artist gatekeepers, who are some combination of other artists and people who fund artists.)
I had a great experience using Kaitai in a previous job. We were decoding proprietary binary messages from Teltonika OBD GPS trackers. The online editor, https://ide.kaitai.io/, is really nice for developing and testing your definition. You can store multiple binary files in local-storage and you get a nice detailed look at the data and how your definition is parsing it.
The All The Music project is something like that, but for melodies. They created all possible melodies of a 7 note diatonic scale and wrote them to disk as MIDI files, copyrighting them in the process. The melodies were dedicated to the Creative Commons Zero so that people could freely use them without worrying about being sued by someone else who had used that melody previously.
> a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date
I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.
A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.
Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...
I think having an extended application process is the point. It selects for people who are good at university, rather than people who were good at high school.
> I decided to look everything up and document it here.
You can be a hero, too! I find this inspiring. It's nice to see such an accessible and pragmatic way of making a contribution to the community. My very first thought on seeing that was "I could do that!"
It would be nice to find something better than an ad-revenue driven web, but I'm not sure this is it. We'll find out I guess...