5 ms·

I could never be a historian or archaeologist. I'd go insane thinking about all the lost history we will never know about. So few materials can last thousands o

I could never be a historian or archaeologist. I'd go insane thinking about all the lost history we will never know about. So few materials can last thousands of years. Makes me think about all the digital data created in the past 20 years. How much of that will still exist in the next 20, never mind 2000.

MattGaiser 5y ago
This is why it would be something I would love to do. I would get bits of knowledge all my own and get my own personal puzzle to solve.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  I did it for awhile before before returning to tech. It's a fun field in many respects, but it's an absolutely terrible career. Much less puzzle solving than you might imagine though. Most evidence is far too underdetermined for that.
jjulius 5y ago
I dunno, I kinda think that the ephemerality of life and everything in the universe is kinda beautiful.
shakna 5y ago
I recently tried to find an archive of popular chain emails from the 90s... They're gone. Most of the popular data from that era just wasn't collated by anybody. The data hasn't survived 20 years. How little will exist in 100 years? Let alone 2000?
firecall 5y ago
I think this is how it should be. Take keeping Birthday Cards for instance. The person sending you the card didn't intend you to keep it forever! When I give a gift, I don't intend it to be kept forever! When I make something; I don't expect it to last forever. When I tweet something, I don't want that to be tweeted forever. In fact, I run an auto tweet delete bot. Things should be transient. The few scraps of history that we do found have value in their scarcity. If society preserved everything, we'd be crushed and destroyed under its weight. We can say the same of societies rituals as well. We must constantly reinvent to progress for the better of us all. One of Steve Jobs first actions when he returned to Apple was to dispose of the archives. (He gifted them to a University I think)

MattGaiser 5y ago

This is why it would be something I would love to do. I would get bits of knowledge all my own and get my own personal puzzle to solve.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
I did it for awhile before before returning to tech. It's a fun field in many respects, but it's an absolutely terrible career. Much less puzzle solving than you might imagine though. Most evidence is far too underdetermined for that.

jjulius 5y ago

I dunno, I kinda think that the ephemerality of life and everything in the universe is kinda beautiful.

shakna 5y ago

I recently tried to find an archive of popular chain emails from the 90s... They're gone. Most of the popular data from that era just wasn't collated by anybody. The data hasn't survived 20 years. How little will exist in 100 years? Let alone 2000?

firecall 5y ago

I think this is how it should be. Take keeping Birthday Cards for instance. The person sending you the card didn't intend you to keep it forever! When I give a gift, I don't intend it to be kept forever! When I make something; I don't expect it to last forever. When I tweet something, I don't want that to be tweeted forever. In fact, I run an auto tweet delete bot. Things should be transient. The few scraps of history that we do found have value in their scarcity. If society preserved everything, we'd be crushed and destroyed under its weight. We can say the same of societies rituals as well. We must constantly reinvent to progress for the better of us all. One of Steve Jobs first actions when he returned to Apple was to dispose of the archives. (He gifted them to a University I think)