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>where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information, And they're doing a terrible job. Look at

>where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information, And they're doing a terrible job. Look at how fast link-rot makes websites useless. Look at how fast interactive websites built not even 10 years ago using modern technologies at the time (flash) are becoming impossible to run, especially if they depended on a server-side component returning data from a server that no longer exists. It's already extremely difficult to get data off of a 50 year-old computer. Based on evidence so far, once the people die off that actually used them, it doesn't look good for retrieving information from them in the future if other hard drives are found. Yet we can easily look at a picture developed 100 years ago and understand it without any special technology. Same with books printed 200 years ago. The "information age" is only about generating and disseminating information as quickly as possible. Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.

bonesss 8y ago
> Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time. For some stuff, yeah. But there are specific archive-oriented system designs and storage formats made from the ground up for independent access. The hard working employees of national digital archives, museums, aerospace, and basic research see the importance of re-usable, re-verifiable, high quality data. "Digital Permanence" is an achievable goal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence]. My personal opinion is that we likely overvalue some of the fluff on YouTube, from a generational perspective... Losing things not forward-encoded to the sands of time like so many cultural touchstones before them is a natural part of the creative destruction of culture. 250 years from now, even a massive movement/moment like "Motown" will have been worn down to a nub of understanding. I think that's good, because it'll make room for new stuff. No one cares about our vacation slides ;)

bonesss 8y ago

> Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time. For some stuff, yeah. But there are specific archive-oriented system designs and storage formats made from the ground up for independent access. The hard working employees of national digital archives, museums, aerospace, and basic research see the importance of re-usable, re-verifiable, high quality data. "Digital Permanence" is an achievable goal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence]. My personal opinion is that we likely overvalue some of the fluff on YouTube, from a generational perspective... Losing things not forward-encoded to the sands of time like so many cultural touchstones before them is a natural part of the creative destruction of culture. 250 years from now, even a massive movement/moment like "Motown" will have been worn down to a nub of understanding. I think that's good, because it'll make room for new stuff. No one cares about our vacation slides ;)