6 ms·

It's interesting how the author settles on plain old files as the data access paradigm. A file cannot be yanked from under your feet, like a link can. It remain

It's interesting how the author settles on plain old files as the data access paradigm. A file cannot be yanked from under your feet, like a link can. It remains where it is indefinitely until deleted, it does not change (so cannot be tampered with or damaged by the author), it normally is not subject to artificial access restrictions a la logins or DRM. It's an artifact that can actually be archived for the rest of your natural life. I don't see any reason why the folders in question should necessarily be shared, though. I get the impression that as defined by Bush originally, the memex is first and foremost a memory expander for your private memory, and any sharing would take place infrequently, or on a narrow subset of data contained within.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
What do you have available to you when the internet is down? (It was for me last week, for pretty much a whole day.) That's the point (or at least one of them) of personal control. What do you have available to you after a hard drive failure? That's the point (or at least one of them) of having stuff in the cloud. How do you balance the two? Local, personal storage backed up in the cloud?
- frizlab 3y ago
  As much as I can locally, with Time Machine for backups. I have access to everything and do not fear hard drive failures.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    What's your plan for a natural disaster like a fire that takes out your house?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - frizlab 3y ago
      I did not mention, but I also have off-site backups.
- bombcar 3y ago
  When the Internet is down, I have the TexLIVE™ documentation files, and not much else to read - I need to fix this somehow.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    I’d suggest you look into Kiwix¹ and also Zeal². I wrote more about offline documentation here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838105> 1. https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/ 2. https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  > What do you have available to you when the internet is down? Everything, because I pretty much started shunning everything I can't reduce to a bunch of files I can use anywhere, and am using the same folder structure on all machines. If an application has a portable version (and doesn't have configuration that may vary between machines, e.g. hardware sensors displayed in the tray), I always use the portable version, install it on one machine, and then sync that to the rest. I love it so much. I can open a Sublime Text project file anywhere and it just magically works, because the paths are the same. The only reason I sync some things manually instead of using Syncthing for everything is that I don't want to needlessly cause more SSD wear. E.g. Firefox/Thunderbird constantly write and delete stuff in the profile, so if I want to use a profile on another machine, I close it, sync, and open it on the other machine. My source of truth is completely in those files, including my web stuff. Which, admittedly, is rather simple: just PHP and JavaScript and MariaDB really, or sqlite where that's enough. I thought I liked golang, but after spending an hour yesterday trying to compile something I haven't touched in 5 years, I decided to just rewrite it in PHP - because something that is slow but doesn't require constant hand holding beats anything else for me. I want to be able to pick up where I left, regardless of whether 10 years passed. PHP and JavaScript are unsurpassed in my personal experience when it comes to that. Even the shittiest JS still works fine 20 years later, and when you use PHP with warnings turned on, upgrading to new versions tends to throw very few errors, and they're actually helpful, so making the changes is trivial. I miss out on a lot of fancy things that way, but I don't miss any of them. I love thinking of my stuff as where it is in my "home cloud" folder structure, and that though they're not actually thin clients, the particular machines really don't matter. Of course I also have backups, but the plan is to never need them because I always have more than one "live" working environment, which reads from and writes to that shared set of files.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- selfhoster11 3y ago
  > What do you have available to you when the internet is down? Certainly not everything at this stage, but in a properly run Memex system, IMO, that really should be everything. Assuming enough local storage, there is no reason not to save every page you view while browsing the web in full. > What do you have available to you after a hard drive failure? That's the point (or at least one of them) of having stuff in the cloud. The standard answer to that, is to have good backups. Bite the bullet and spend some time and money on buying the proper equipment (a commercial NAS, a Raspberry Pi NAS with some USB-connected drives, a small form-factor PC with a couple of SSDs, anything you want), and integrating it into your other machines as a backup destination. Cloud makes it much easier, but also less private, with an ongoing monthly cost, and adds an additional point of failure that's outside of your control. As for how I balance it personally? Local storage all the way. Even if I picked an end-to-end encrypted backup service, several terabytes of data is just too expensive to store in the cloud.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

What do you have available to you when the internet is down? (It was for me last week, for pretty much a whole day.) That's the point (or at least one of them) of personal control. What do you have available to you after a hard drive failure? That's the point (or at least one of them) of having stuff in the cloud. How do you balance the two? Local, personal storage backed up in the cloud?

frizlab 3y ago
As much as I can locally, with Time Machine for backups. I have access to everything and do not fear hard drive failures.
- fragmede 3y ago
  What's your plan for a natural disaster like a fire that takes out your house?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - frizlab 3y ago
    I did not mention, but I also have off-site backups.
bombcar 3y ago
When the Internet is down, I have the TexLIVE™ documentation files, and not much else to read - I need to fix this somehow.
- teddyh 3y ago
  I’d suggest you look into Kiwix¹ and also Zeal². I wrote more about offline documentation here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838105> 1. https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/ 2. https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/
johnnyworker 3y ago
> What do you have available to you when the internet is down? Everything, because I pretty much started shunning everything I can't reduce to a bunch of files I can use anywhere, and am using the same folder structure on all machines. If an application has a portable version (and doesn't have configuration that may vary between machines, e.g. hardware sensors displayed in the tray), I always use the portable version, install it on one machine, and then sync that to the rest. I love it so much. I can open a Sublime Text project file anywhere and it just magically works, because the paths are the same. The only reason I sync some things manually instead of using Syncthing for everything is that I don't want to needlessly cause more SSD wear. E.g. Firefox/Thunderbird constantly write and delete stuff in the profile, so if I want to use a profile on another machine, I close it, sync, and open it on the other machine. My source of truth is completely in those files, including my web stuff. Which, admittedly, is rather simple: just PHP and JavaScript and MariaDB really, or sqlite where that's enough. I thought I liked golang, but after spending an hour yesterday trying to compile something I haven't touched in 5 years, I decided to just rewrite it in PHP - because something that is slow but doesn't require constant hand holding beats anything else for me. I want to be able to pick up where I left, regardless of whether 10 years passed. PHP and JavaScript are unsurpassed in my personal experience when it comes to that. Even the shittiest JS still works fine 20 years later, and when you use PHP with warnings turned on, upgrading to new versions tends to throw very few errors, and they're actually helpful, so making the changes is trivial. I miss out on a lot of fancy things that way, but I don't miss any of them. I love thinking of my stuff as where it is in my "home cloud" folder structure, and that though they're not actually thin clients, the particular machines really don't matter. Of course I also have backups, but the plan is to never need them because I always have more than one "live" working environment, which reads from and writes to that shared set of files.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
selfhoster11 3y ago
> What do you have available to you when the internet is down? Certainly not everything at this stage, but in a properly run Memex system, IMO, that really should be everything. Assuming enough local storage, there is no reason not to save every page you view while browsing the web in full. > What do you have available to you after a hard drive failure? That's the point (or at least one of them) of having stuff in the cloud. The standard answer to that, is to have good backups. Bite the bullet and spend some time and money on buying the proper equipment (a commercial NAS, a Raspberry Pi NAS with some USB-connected drives, a small form-factor PC with a couple of SSDs, anything you want), and integrating it into your other machines as a backup destination. Cloud makes it much easier, but also less private, with an ongoing monthly cost, and adds an additional point of failure that's outside of your control. As for how I balance it personally? Local storage all the way. Even if I picked an end-to-end encrypted backup service, several terabytes of data is just too expensive to store in the cloud.