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Yep, back when we still believed the lie of "Don't be Evil", and before the tech darlings of yesteryear ruined society by turning all of technology into a surveillance panopticon just to sell us a few more ads.

I hate the future we inhabit compared to what could have been.

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At my university library, there are a bunch of books from the early 2000s already with titles like "Web Content Mining with Java" (Tony Loton, 2002) and "Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques" (2001, Han Kamber (and 2006 and 2012)), as well as a whole lot of others. (Though most of these books are more about introductory statistics and using databases).

The seeds of the current world were already being sown some 20 years ago.

I remember when "data mining" had a negative connotation :(

I think "data mining" must have had less of a negative connotation when they wrote those titles 20 years ago.

I think "Don't be evil" was actually real for a couple of years.

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