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As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in a

by tw4l 6y ago

As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is quite useful. From the same post: "They are using a range of technologies, making feeds available over the Internet, and partnering with the Internet Archive, the Software Heritage Foundation and the Bodleian Library. These are mostly things which will get used in the foreseeable future, and should be applauded for that reason."

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
>> They drag the 200 platters out into the 24hr sunshine, plug the solar panel into the Raspberry Pi, point its camera through a magnifying glass at the first frame, and let the QR app they happen to have on the Pi's micro--SD card do its thing. A couple of seconds later they have the first 2,900 bytes on the USB drive. It takes another couple of seconds to move to the next frame by hand. So they sit there for 383 days scanning a frame every 4 seconds to decode the entire archive. Except there's only sunshine enough for the Pi half the year, so it takes rather more than two years. Then they need to start the Pi building all that code... >> Of course, this is ridiculous. No-one will decode this archive in the foreseeable future. Yes, no one will be digging code out of Github right after the apocalypse. But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed? I could see the archive being of immense historical value.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  The Pi isn't going to work after 200 years. Its flash will be wiped. Never mind aging on all the other parts.
  - jedieaston 6y ago
    Presumptively, the Tech Tree will have some way of bootstrapping a system capable of decoding the tapes. They say in the introduction that it’s nearly useless to access the tapes without a computer and that they expect whoever is reading this is to have a computer that is centuries more advanced than we have now. Maybe they just zip tied a ThinkPad to the tape reader and pray that it can eat whatever happens to it in the vault.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed?" -Thanks to flash memory cell charge leakage, I'd be surprised if the micro-SD card or USB drive kept its data for more than 3-5 years. They're designed for low cost, not longevity. -The electrolytic caps will probably have dried out and failed by 50-100 years. -The plasticizers used will have evaporated away by a century, leaving any plastic or rubber components brittle and crumbly. -The lead free solders used in modern electronics are prone to the "tin whiskers" phenomenon. Not sure about the mitigations or timeframe for growth but a couple centuries is far, far longer than any reasonable design timeframe, making it a distinct possibility in my mind. -At 1000 years, I'd wonder about diffusion effects in chips wrecking the circuits. It would be interesting to do a calculation to see how long that would take for an unpowered chip at room temperature.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Right, so it wouldn't be a 2020 computer. It would be whatever new computer they've built.
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      By then, why would they need code from GitHub? Given that they will won't even be able to run it in any shape or form.
      - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        To study history and culture. And who knows, there may well be algorithms we came up with but which no one ever re-discovered.
rezendi 6y ago
Archive Program director here - it's really not a PR stunt, we genuinely believe it will be of significant historical value and quite a good chance it will be of practical value. Much of that is "if we forget technology which we realize somewhere down the road we actually might want to use again." History provides plenty of examples of this, and it's particularly important with a technology which mostly lives on ephemeral media that only lasts a few decades. Even if you do expand your speculation to post-disaster scenarios, though, while it's true the archive wouldn't be an instant reset button, it would help greatly accelerate the recovery of technology. It's worth noting that it will come with a slew of (human-readable, not encoded) technical works regarding subjects ranging from modern software engineering to microprocessor design to photolithography to power systems, which we call the Tech Tree, along with a guide and index to all the stored repos. Wherever its inheritors / discoverers may be in terms of technological advancement, and especially if they have modern-ish hardware (which can last much, much longer than most storage media), recovering the archive's contents will be a lot faster than rediscovering them from scratch. (Also worth noting we'll be storing "greatest hits" copies of the ~15,000 most-starred / most-relied-on repos, along with a sampling of several thousand repos with few/no stars, in a selection of places like Oxford's Bodleian Library; our hypothetical future tech seekers won't have to go all the way to Svalbard for those.) I don't want to stress the doomsday scenarios too much, though, despite our ongoing pandemic. I think the most likely outcome by far is that progress will continue; the archive may be useful to recover a couple of otherwise forgotten technologies that suddenly become important / interesting; and it will ultimately be chiefly of interest to historians. That historical value is a key reason why it casts such a broad net. I too have a couple of fairly unsophisticated pet projects in there that the future won't be interested in individually - but collectively is another matter. One of the most interesting things our advisory committee told us is that history is replete with lists composed by wealthy people of the books they thought most important, carefully preserved for posterity, whereas what modern historians _really_ want is ordinary people's shopping lists, of which almost none survived. That's one reason there are millions of repos in the Arctic now, instead of eg just the most-starred 100K: some of those may be the modern technological equivalent of Renaissance shopping lists, for the historians who may take a particular interest in this (possibly) especially wacky and volatile era. I know it's an inherently cinematic and dramatic project and so it's tempting to call it a PR stunt ... but I assure you, it's not, and, speaking personally, I would never have gotten involved with it if I thought it was.

by tw4l 6y ago

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

>> They drag the 200 platters out into the 24hr sunshine, plug the solar panel into the Raspberry Pi, point its camera through a magnifying glass at the first frame, and let the QR app they happen to have on the Pi's micro--SD card do its thing. A couple of seconds later they have the first 2,900 bytes on the USB drive. It takes another couple of seconds to move to the next frame by hand. So they sit there for 383 days scanning a frame every 4 seconds to decode the entire archive. Except there's only sunshine enough for the Pi half the year, so it takes rather more than two years. Then they need to start the Pi building all that code... >> Of course, this is ridiculous. No-one will decode this archive in the foreseeable future. Yes, no one will be digging code out of Github right after the apocalypse. But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed? I could see the archive being of immense historical value.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
The Pi isn't going to work after 200 years. Its flash will be wiped. Never mind aging on all the other parts.
- jedieaston 6y ago
  Presumptively, the Tech Tree will have some way of bootstrapping a system capable of decoding the tapes. They say in the introduction that it’s nearly useless to access the tapes without a computer and that they expect whoever is reading this is to have a computer that is centuries more advanced than we have now. Maybe they just zip tied a ThinkPad to the tape reader and pray that it can eat whatever happens to it in the vault.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "But what about 200 years after the apocalypse? Or maybe just 1,000 years from now, no apocalypse needed?" -Thanks to flash memory cell charge leakage, I'd be surprised if the micro-SD card or USB drive kept its data for more than 3-5 years. They're designed for low cost, not longevity. -The electrolytic caps will probably have dried out and failed by 50-100 years. -The plasticizers used will have evaporated away by a century, leaving any plastic or rubber components brittle and crumbly. -The lead free solders used in modern electronics are prone to the "tin whiskers" phenomenon. Not sure about the mitigations or timeframe for growth but a couple centuries is far, far longer than any reasonable design timeframe, making it a distinct possibility in my mind. -At 1000 years, I'd wonder about diffusion effects in chips wrecking the circuits. It would be interesting to do a calculation to see how long that would take for an unpowered chip at room temperature.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Right, so it wouldn't be a 2020 computer. It would be whatever new computer they've built.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    By then, why would they need code from GitHub? Given that they will won't even be able to run it in any shape or form.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      To study history and culture. And who knows, there may well be algorithms we came up with but which no one ever re-discovered.

rezendi 6y ago

Archive Program director here - it's really not a PR stunt, we genuinely believe it will be of significant historical value and quite a good chance it will be of practical value. Much of that is "if we forget technology which we realize somewhere down the road we actually might want to use again." History provides plenty of examples of this, and it's particularly important with a technology which mostly lives on ephemeral media that only lasts a few decades. Even if you do expand your speculation to post-disaster scenarios, though, while it's true the archive wouldn't be an instant reset button, it would help greatly accelerate the recovery of technology. It's worth noting that it will come with a slew of (human-readable, not encoded) technical works regarding subjects ranging from modern software engineering to microprocessor design to photolithography to power systems, which we call the Tech Tree, along with a guide and index to all the stored repos. Wherever its inheritors / discoverers may be in terms of technological advancement, and especially if they have modern-ish hardware (which can last much, much longer than most storage media), recovering the archive's contents will be a lot faster than rediscovering them from scratch. (Also worth noting we'll be storing "greatest hits" copies of the ~15,000 most-starred / most-relied-on repos, along with a sampling of several thousand repos with few/no stars, in a selection of places like Oxford's Bodleian Library; our hypothetical future tech seekers won't have to go all the way to Svalbard for those.) I don't want to stress the doomsday scenarios too much, though, despite our ongoing pandemic. I think the most likely outcome by far is that progress will continue; the archive may be useful to recover a couple of otherwise forgotten technologies that suddenly become important / interesting; and it will ultimately be chiefly of interest to historians. That historical value is a key reason why it casts such a broad net. I too have a couple of fairly unsophisticated pet projects in there that the future won't be interested in individually - but collectively is another matter. One of the most interesting things our advisory committee told us is that history is replete with lists composed by wealthy people of the books they thought most important, carefully preserved for posterity, whereas what modern historians _really_ want is ordinary people's shopping lists, of which almost none survived. That's one reason there are millions of repos in the Arctic now, instead of eg just the most-starred 100K: some of those may be the modern technological equivalent of Renaissance shopping lists, for the historians who may take a particular interest in this (possibly) especially wacky and volatile era. I know it's an inherently cinematic and dramatic project and so it's tempting to call it a PR stunt ... but I assure you, it's not, and, speaking personally, I would never have gotten involved with it if I thought it was.