At the end I might have said the NYT and the rest of the MSM. But the NYT has pretenses, e.g., the highly self-esteemed NYT, and most of the MSM has little more face claim to validity than a pitch by a salesman of rusty used cars.

But the NYT is to me the worst of the sores on my back side from the media. I recently sent a carefully drafted letter to the publisher of the NYT explaining my complaints with his work and saying his paper was "dead to me". It is.

I would applaud the many links at HN to seemingly interesting NYT stories except, as I explained, I no longer can take seriously anything published by the NYT that is not signed by someone with their own credibility and independent of the NYT. As I explained to the NYT publisher: His paper has long tried to mislead me; I hate that; and they can't do it anymore because I just won't read their articles. I won't do it. It's over for me. I won't let myself pay any attention to their stuff. I have no more patience with their deceptions. I have better alternatives. Life is too short to do more mud wrestling with NYT nonsense; it's better just to ignore it. It's kaput for me. I can't know what the NYT has in mind for me, if anything, but I know I don't want it. Much the same for the rest of the MSM that, however, has been claimed, used to follow the NYT as their highly esteemed, revered leader.

Memo

To: The NYT and MSM

Subject: The Internet

Body: The Internet is here! Now even just one person alone can publish for 100 million readers without even a square inch of paper or a single drop of ink. Might want to think about the consequences of that situation.

Possible consequences: Lots of fragmentation of the media business with something for everyone and next to nothing for everyone -- that is, for each reader, there is at least one good publication, and there is no single publication for all or even nearly all the readers. Anger a reader, e.g., can anger some readers by misleading them, and they can be gone in a single click.

> I like your idea of archiving and summarizing articles you find interesting and meaningful.

For me, the keys are: (1) Good exploitation of the hierarchical file system on my computer, HPFS on Windows. (2) A good text editor that has a powerful macro language (KEdit). (3) A dirt simple way to jump to (go to) the more heavily used parts of the hierarchical file system tree -- a command line macro G <token> where there is an environment variable of the form <token>.MARK (set from a file a maintain with my editor when a console window opens) with value the tree name of the a particular heavily used part of the tree. E.g., I can type

G ASP

thus make current a
file system directory with
such information on
some hundreds of references on
Microsoft's ASP.NET software
for building Web pages. For the
software for my startup, I have
now well over 5000 articles of
technical documentation, and I
can find and get to each one
quickly. Indeed, commonly
my source code comments
have my file system tree names
of relevant documentation,
and one keystroke in my editor
invokes a macro that
displays the documentation.
Right, the editor macro reads
and
parses
the line with the tree name, keeps
the tree name, and discards
the comment delimiters, right,
with the comment delimiter
tokens determined from the
file type.

Then some more command line scripts
and editor macros make it easy to
grab and save content and
abstract and index it.

There is one more in a sense above all the rest: I have a little command line script FACTS
that basically just uses the editor
to open a file FACTS.DAT (the
script does check to see if the file
is already open and, if so,
does not open it again and instead
un-hides it and
raises it to the top of the Z-order).
Then this file has little notes, often
as short as a Tweet. Each note has, right, some key words.
Usually there
are links as Internet URLs or local
file system tree names.
So, there are phone numbers,
e-mail addresses, user IDs,
passwords, street addresses,
open hours of businesses,
just things I want to remember,
etc.

What is astounding is (1) how
useful it is and (2) how few bytes
it has. So, since 9/2/2005, the file has
2,128,672 bytes and 3811 entries, e.g., an average of about one entry a day. It is shocking what an effective memory aid that little thing is and even
suggests that maybe real AI
will need much less memory than
one might guess. So, right, I have
a few, simple editor macros to help
me use that file, and with only the 2,128,672 bytes the simplest, least
efficient text search and select works fine.