This post is published at https://artemis.sh/2024/01/17/duplicate-information.html and has been reproduced here:
In the world of the digital, many of us have been tricked into thinking that something only needs to be said once. If someone has stated something, then stating it again is noise. Provides no purpose. Does not benefit anyone. The extension of this follows: I should not write something, on the off-chance that someone else whom I don't even know about has already written it, perhaps better. The fear of being more incomplete than an imagined other-expert. But an utter void of information is more incomplete than your works will be, and there is value in saying what has been said.
precisely why i wrote this post on the 'AGB Emulater' recently, as well as this document about early-days DS homebrew-loading techniques back when they were still relevant.
the latter is an interesting case to me - a lot of information and context about the pre-R4 era of DS homebrew hardware has been bit-rotting over the years, and often people who weren't active in that scene at the time are surprised when i describe some of it to them. if you're proximate to something unfolding that you find interesting, write what you know down somewhere, and save copies of whatever unique tools or documentation you can - even if it's somewhere private that you can reference or choose to share with others later.
many people's introduction to computers nowadays is through machine interfaces that deliberately make it easier to passively consume content rather than author it, so the activation energy it takes to actually author and archive (let alone share) things that aren't tailored for the likes of social media and smartphones that bury the filesystem may be sufficiently high that the work may not get done without conscious effort (especially in an age where a lot of research and development is happening in Discord guilds, community wikis being eaten alive by Fandom, or webpages that search engines are getting worse and worse at finding...)
also good to post solutions to problems you encounter so we don't end up like that one xkcd