[Themaintainers] an observation on the maintainability of the www

[dan at geer.org]

Longtime colleague Bill Malik wrote (and gave me
permission to quote it here) as follows:

> Older web sites are falling into disrepair as organizations focus
> their marketing dollars on newer content rather than normal
> maintenance and consistency.  This phenomenon, called 'web rot'
> as you know, means that content that was easily accessible a few
> years ago is now unreachable.  So along with the pollution of new
> content with LLM-amplified sludge, the older content is eroding.
> Trustworthy training data may be more scarce in five years than
> it was five years ago.
>
> On a parallel track, newer web content (and related apps) are
> generated by LLMs so their provenance and QA are now faith-based,
> and problems cannot be diagnosed with anything other than adding
> more gobs of LLM-curated code segments.  So we are being guided
> by misguided, undocumented, unmaintainable apps.

I am passing it along under a banner of how the
maintenance of history is getting harder, not easier,
in the face of ever cheaper compute.

--dan