12 ms·

Question to anyone reading this: What is your answer to "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved"?

scrollaway 8y ago
I'll skip over what I'm actively working on because I think this deserves a mention: I'm a hobbyist digital archivist. This is something where most people can likely make a meaningful and long-lasting impact, that nobody else could if they didn't. Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not. Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly. The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival? It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.
- dhruvkar 8y ago
  I tend to do the same with all physical pieces of paper I receive, whether or not it feels useful at the time. Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy. I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion. Why do you do it and what tools do you use?
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    > Why do you do it To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software. > what tools do you use? I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write my own tools.
    - marviel 8y ago
      On the flipside of this, thanks to archivists such as yourself, I've saved myself some time by developing a research perspective that first assumes ideas I've come up with may have been independently discovered in the past. This may be obvious to others, but for me it has been a game-changer for getting "to the meat" of problems, so to speak. Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption. [1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite
      - selestify 8y ago
        How do you usually go about doing your searches for prior knowledge?
  - ilian 8y ago
    Which tools do you use to organize the digital artifacts you create? And how do you organize them?
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      Archive.org! I upload everything. I organize best I can within my own disks/google drive (and sometimes public S3 buckets), but that stuff is too likely to go away within my lifetime to even begin to make a difference long term.
MrsPeaches 8y ago
Teaching kids in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) how to build their own electricity generation systems. Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1]. We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it. We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-population-without-access-to-electricity-globally-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul... [2] https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/
MrQuincle 8y ago
This problem would remain a problem forever? I'm happy enough if I can help a problem be solved faster. If I can make it happen that some strategic technical solution happens ten years before it would have been without me, I'd be extremely satisfied. But there's no way to know. I tend to work the other way. Some day we will have smart homes. How would they look like and how can I work towards that vision? Or, what restricts ubiquity of wearables? In my opinion wireless charging over a considerable distance. Then I contemplate how I would do it. For example embedded in ceiling lights with infrared lasers and a positioning system. And I talk about it in case someone else also finds it an interesting idea, because I've so little time on this planet...

scrollaway 8y ago

I'll skip over what I'm actively working on because I think this deserves a mention: I'm a hobbyist digital archivist. This is something where most people can likely make a meaningful and long-lasting impact, that nobody else could if they didn't. Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not. Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly. The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival? It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.

dhruvkar 8y ago
I tend to do the same with all physical pieces of paper I receive, whether or not it feels useful at the time. Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy. I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion. Why do you do it and what tools do you use?
- scrollaway 8y ago
  > Why do you do it To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software. > what tools do you use? I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write my own tools.
  - marviel 8y ago
    On the flipside of this, thanks to archivists such as yourself, I've saved myself some time by developing a research perspective that first assumes ideas I've come up with may have been independently discovered in the past. This may be obvious to others, but for me it has been a game-changer for getting "to the meat" of problems, so to speak. Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption. [1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite
    - selestify 8y ago
      How do you usually go about doing your searches for prior knowledge?
- ilian 8y ago
  Which tools do you use to organize the digital artifacts you create? And how do you organize them?
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    Archive.org! I upload everything. I organize best I can within my own disks/google drive (and sometimes public S3 buckets), but that stuff is too likely to go away within my lifetime to even begin to make a difference long term.

MrsPeaches 8y ago

Teaching kids in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) how to build their own electricity generation systems. Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1]. We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it. We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-population-without-access-to-electricity-globally-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul... [2] https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/

MrQuincle 8y ago

This problem would remain a problem forever? I'm happy enough if I can help a problem be solved faster. If I can make it happen that some strategic technical solution happens ten years before it would have been without me, I'd be extremely satisfied. But there's no way to know. I tend to work the other way. Some day we will have smart homes. How would they look like and how can I work towards that vision? Or, what restricts ubiquity of wearables? In my opinion wireless charging over a considerable distance. Then I contemplate how I would do it. For example embedded in ceiling lights with infrared lasers and a positioning system. And I talk about it in case someone else also finds it an interesting idea, because I've so little time on this planet...