Sorry if off-topic, but does this link work for anyone else? I haven't been able to reach archive.ph or archive.today from Canada in probably over 6 months, even with a vpn connected to different countries. However, the archive websites work fine when physically in some other countries like Ireland.
When I check isitdownrightnow.com which, I guess, should be definitive, both archive.ph and archive.today are always down (https://pasteboard.co/fjau0VrVphdn.png). However, people keep posting archive links like this here on HN, so I'm wondering if I'm missing something here.
According to my (admittedly limited) understanding of how the internet works, such a behaviour can't really be explained beyond some unlikely probabilistic explanation that I'm always hitting these links at exactly the wrong time. Is there some really sophisticated geo blocking I'm unaware of that could be occurring? Sorry, by now I'm just really confused about the whole thing..
For what it's worth, I just checked isitdownrightnow.com for archive.ph and it says it's down for everyone. Yet when I clicked on the archive.ph link I added to my post — https://archive.ph/Ppj5j — it worked fine.
From my reading of HN comments about this sort of thing over the years (I'm not a techie), the one thing that recurs is having ad blockers/VPNs etc. that seem to make archive.ph not work.
Okay, well that's interesting, it at least disproves the assumption that isitdownrightnow is definitive.. maybe they're subject to the same issues somehow, like if they're in the same geo.
I saw someone mention in another HN post something about DNS being a factor, that some nameservers could be blocking it. My understanding is that my VPN also reroutes the DNS though, so I figured I'd be okay once VPN is on. Unless the VPN also uses the same nameservers that block archive.ph..
It's helped a lot with paperwork, the way you can book trips, order and get stuff delivered, sign up for services online banking immediately etc.
But I agree with your point in that it's also highly overrated in terms of its importance generally, and largely distraction/entertainment based.
The real heavy lifters like running water and electricity, food production and transport, without which we'd devolve into chaos within 48 hours, are largely taken for granted.
People probably don't think about the fact that that every morning, you can get up in a nice heated house/apartment, use the toilet and not give it a second thought, have a hot shower and a nice breakfast, and that's probably more important than a lot of what, say, Facebook offers.
Let's see if it holds up better than the LK-99 stuff. Looks like there's been something like this before, not sure what happened with that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4521560
I've always found this notion to be a bit ridiculous and don't understand why it gets so much traction. Every time the LHC or CERN smash particles together, there's some software somewhere generating all the subatomic particles and their interactions?
Or there's some program busily conjuring up fake input for everything the JWST, or any other telescope, looks at? Or every microscopic observation, every chemical reaction or physical process is an elaborate simulation?
It’s a friendly analogy so we like it. A bit like, “we’re l just LLMs”, maybe we’re similar in some ways of working but I’ve never seen an LLM display ambition.
