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This is a strange and awful take. Physical objects decay to the fundamental forces of nature, but that is a flaw, not something we should emulate. Software is

This is a strange and awful take. Physical objects decay to the fundamental forces of nature, but that is a flaw, not something we should emulate. Software is a tool. Software is infrastructure. Degradation is desirable in neither. Data has metadata - creation time, access time, etc. - that can power workflows to identify and deal with old data if that is desirable, but in most cases they are not desirable. I haven't looked at the directory full of my wedding pictures in a decade, but I don't want my photo editing software to decide they're irrelevant and delete or hide them. Having access to old documents and data is often important and beneficial. It's why people look at inscriptions in old books, why they keep photo albums, why finding a forgotten item when moving furniture can be delightful. It's why we're able to identify trends. Most crucially, it is incredibly difficult to predict in advance which data will be useful in the future. Proactively discarding things when storage is incredibly cheap is a net negative.

rpmisms 2y ago
You can view software as tools or art, it is arguably both.
TZubiri 2y ago
Disagree, I'm with Kay on this one, life is much more powerful than current machines. When was the last time your mind ran into an out of storage issue and crashed? You talk about metadata being important, yet more than half of the storage used today isn't used to store books, or medical records or whatever business case, but traffic logs and virtualized package dependencies and shit like that.
- fragmede 2y ago
  It's called a senior moment, and you'll have them too if you've never had one before. In a middle of a conversation, you'll just forget what you were saying because you got distracted.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    First of all that's memory, not storage. And second, it's a graceful decay, you are not completely shut down from storing imporant information for later use. If in that moment something memorable happens, you will remember that.
- castwide 2y ago
  The disagreement here seems to be about what kind of data should be considered ephemeral. Traffic logs from a decade ago? A ten-year-old package lock? I'm sure I don't care anymore. Documents I wrote in the 90s? Yeah, I might still want them. I might not need them everyday, but I can say from experience that I've needed to track down files that are more than a decade old, and I'm glad I was able to find them.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    We strictly talking documents? It's very unlikely they will suffer from any decay since they are so lightweight. And to the extent that it's important you probably accessed it or shared it sometime in that period. A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.
    - castwide 2y ago
      I'm talking documents in a very general sense. It might be a text file, audio, video, a software installer, source code, or anything at all. > A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video. My point is that the video shouldn't decay, either. It might not be playable in modern media software for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't automatically make it a candidate for deletion.
    - erik_seaberg 2y ago
      If I learned of a old video of my grandparents, but a robot destroyed it, I would be furious. (Photos are what actually remain from their era.)
      - TZubiri 2y ago
        Oh yeah, taking screenshots would be a nice intermediate decay, instead of the whole video. You have to think, in general, that we have finite resources, and the alternative is not remember everything in perfect detail, but forgetting things that you do not choose to forget. Better to choose what we forget.
the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
Author here. > Physical objects decay to the fundamental forces of nature, but that is a flaw, not something we should emulate. That is explicitly called out in the article and I do not agree with you. Useful information is replicated, less useful information tends to die out. That we threw away that concept entirely in the digital world without a good replacement has some pretty strong downsides from my experience. And if you read what I wrote in more detail you can see that I'm very open to the idea of soft deletes and intentional information hiding.
- CyberDildonics 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
    I don't see how the headline is "inflammatory". You might disagree with the headline and the content and that is fine, however both headline and content reflects what I believe a core capability of (at least a significant number) of software products should be.
    - CyberDildonics 2y ago
      You think a core capability of software should be that it loses your data? That's like saying a core capability of shoes should be tacks under the sole. Of course you don't really think that. What software do you use that loses your data. Don't say something that cycles data out of a cache or lets you delete data, because that wouldn't be losing it.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - seo-speedwagon 2y ago
    No one forced them to write a comment without reading the article. And it’s not a small point that the author corrected them on; multiple paragraphs addressed thoughts like archiving to make searching old things intentional, and soft deletes. Also I didn’t read a scolding tone in the author’s response. And calling it an “inflammatory headline” is quite a stretch: this is a post tagged “thoughts” in someone’s personal blog, not a headline in the New York Times.
Barrin92 2y ago
>It's why people look at inscriptions in old books, why they keep photo albums, why finding a forgotten item when moving furniture can be delightful. It's why we're able to identify trends. I think it's often the opposite. Drawing confusing or bad analogies to the past rests on the false assumption that the future resembles the past, and the reason people love old photo albums or forgotten items is usually a kind of nostalgia, not because they hold relevance towards the future. This is also why forgetting or deliberately wiping the slate clean is fundamentally a good thing, it forces people to rebuild things from first principles without being bogged down in false assumptions carried over from the past, it's why the people who build new things tend to be young rather than old. If past information was so valuable in determining the future most visionaries would be 60. Hanging on to old information is a form of digital hoarding.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

rpmisms 2y ago

You can view software as tools or art, it is arguably both.

TZubiri 2y ago

Disagree, I'm with Kay on this one, life is much more powerful than current machines. When was the last time your mind ran into an out of storage issue and crashed? You talk about metadata being important, yet more than half of the storage used today isn't used to store books, or medical records or whatever business case, but traffic logs and virtualized package dependencies and shit like that.

fragmede 2y ago
It's called a senior moment, and you'll have them too if you've never had one before. In a middle of a conversation, you'll just forget what you were saying because you got distracted.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  First of all that's memory, not storage. And second, it's a graceful decay, you are not completely shut down from storing imporant information for later use. If in that moment something memorable happens, you will remember that.
castwide 2y ago
The disagreement here seems to be about what kind of data should be considered ephemeral. Traffic logs from a decade ago? A ten-year-old package lock? I'm sure I don't care anymore. Documents I wrote in the 90s? Yeah, I might still want them. I might not need them everyday, but I can say from experience that I've needed to track down files that are more than a decade old, and I'm glad I was able to find them.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  We strictly talking documents? It's very unlikely they will suffer from any decay since they are so lightweight. And to the extent that it's important you probably accessed it or shared it sometime in that period. A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.
  - castwide 2y ago
    I'm talking documents in a very general sense. It might be a text file, audio, video, a software installer, source code, or anything at all. > A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video. My point is that the video shouldn't decay, either. It might not be playable in modern media software for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't automatically make it a candidate for deletion.
  - erik_seaberg 2y ago
    If I learned of a old video of my grandparents, but a robot destroyed it, I would be furious. (Photos are what actually remain from their era.)
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      Oh yeah, taking screenshots would be a nice intermediate decay, instead of the whole video. You have to think, in general, that we have finite resources, and the alternative is not remember everything in perfect detail, but forgetting things that you do not choose to forget. Better to choose what we forget.

the_mitsuhiko 2y ago

Author here. > Physical objects decay to the fundamental forces of nature, but that is a flaw, not something we should emulate. That is explicitly called out in the article and I do not agree with you. Useful information is replicated, less useful information tends to die out. That we threw away that concept entirely in the digital world without a good replacement has some pretty strong downsides from my experience. And if you read what I wrote in more detail you can see that I'm very open to the idea of soft deletes and intentional information hiding.

CyberDildonics 2y ago
[flagged]
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
  I don't see how the headline is "inflammatory". You might disagree with the headline and the content and that is fine, however both headline and content reflects what I believe a core capability of (at least a significant number) of software products should be.
  - CyberDildonics 2y ago
    You think a core capability of software should be that it loses your data? That's like saying a core capability of shoes should be tacks under the sole. Of course you don't really think that. What software do you use that loses your data. Don't say something that cycles data out of a cache or lets you delete data, because that wouldn't be losing it.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- seo-speedwagon 2y ago
  No one forced them to write a comment without reading the article. And it’s not a small point that the author corrected them on; multiple paragraphs addressed thoughts like archiving to make searching old things intentional, and soft deletes. Also I didn’t read a scolding tone in the author’s response. And calling it an “inflammatory headline” is quite a stretch: this is a post tagged “thoughts” in someone’s personal blog, not a headline in the New York Times.

Barrin92 2y ago

>It's why people look at inscriptions in old books, why they keep photo albums, why finding a forgotten item when moving furniture can be delightful. It's why we're able to identify trends. I think it's often the opposite. Drawing confusing or bad analogies to the past rests on the false assumption that the future resembles the past, and the reason people love old photo albums or forgotten items is usually a kind of nostalgia, not because they hold relevance towards the future. This is also why forgetting or deliberately wiping the slate clean is fundamentally a good thing, it forces people to rebuild things from first principles without being bogged down in false assumptions carried over from the past, it's why the people who build new things tend to be young rather than old. If past information was so valuable in determining the future most visionaries would be 60. Hanging on to old information is a form of digital hoarding.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]