4 ms·
There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that
by shagie 3y ago
There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
- kbutler 3y agoLove that reference to the Unix epoch, and the all-too-human misassociation with a seemingly more appropriate event.
- ethbr1 3y agoArchaeology focuses on the things that were important to past humans. It seems impossible that, given current economic trajectories, there won't be software archaeology in the future.
- ajb 3y agoSeems quite possible that the the present will seem to future archeologists like an illiterate dark ages, between civilisations from which paper records, that last long enough for them to find, are preserved.
- viraptor 3y agoWe already have software archaeology today. People who are into software preservation track down old media, original creators, and dig through clues to restore pixel-perfect copies of abandonware. It's only going to get bigger / more important with time if we don't concentrate on open standards and open source everywhere.
- soulofmischief 3y agoAnd it's sad that many archivists have to break the law in order to secure the longevity of important cultural works. Our abusive relationship with modern commercialism has disintegrated the value of art, folklore and tools, both in the eyes of consumers and producers, and we no longer as a society seek to preserve the greatest works of today's most cutting-edge mediums. It's quite a sad state of affairs, which will only be mourned with increasing intensity as time marches on and curious researchers try to piece together the early days of the internet and personal computing.
- johnnymorgan 3y agoThank goodness for that too. Star Control 2 was too good of a game to lose and is one of the best examples of this.
- ethbr1 3y agoI'd say game emulation is currently the most prevalent heavyweight archaeology. In the more common case, it's simply archiving -- we still have hardware it can run on (e.g. x86). The GPGPU and ML stuff is likely going to age poorer, although at least we had the sense to funnel most high level code through standardized APIs and libraries.
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoWhat a silly thing to write. It's not a very self-improving computer system if it doesn't simplify itself, is it?
- viraptor 3y agoIt depends if there's anything left to simplify. Maybe this is the optimum we'll reach between concise expression and accuracy of representation.
- kbenson 3y agoIf you need an arbitrary point of reference to count time from, what's simpler, making a new one or using the existing predominant one that everything else does? Making a competing standard and then having to deal with interop between standards is not simpler or better unless there's an actual benefit to be had.
- corysama 3y agoHow very human-centric of you ;) It’s not hard to imagine a program of ever increasing complexity, highly redundant, error-prone, yet also stochastically, statically, increasingly effective. The primary pushback from this would be our pathetically tiny short term memory. Blow that limitation up and complexity that seems incomprehensible to us becomes perfectly reasonable.
- saiya-jin 3y agoThat would help for sure, but you would soon reach the limit of how much at the same time our brains can process consistently and how large mental model we can still effectively use. Situation that have 500 viewpoints and 10,000 variously interacting facts to consider won't be any more comprehensible for a mere human, short term memory limiting us or not.
- jbgt 3y agoEven smart people have an appendix!
- Linosaurus 3y ago
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoThis is why, if you expand your cognitive light cone to distant future generations, you will conclude that using Rust is the only moral choice. (I still don't, but I mean still.)