4 ms·

30 years ago there was no digital world. Nearly all information was in physical artifacts. The things worth saving haven't really changed, but the amount of

30 years ago there was no digital world. Nearly all information was in physical artifacts. The things worth saving haven't really changed, but the amount of noise they are buried in has. Imagine if that letter was kept in a two ton pile of ad fliers. Sure, someone would find some of those fliers interesting, but you'd have been much less likely to even know about the letter.

qwertox 2y ago
What about robots reading each flier and checking if something is odd about that particular one? It could find the letter and report it to you. Even easier if it was all digital information.
bongodongobob 2y ago
If only we had search algorithms...
palmfacehn 2y ago
>...a two ton pile of ad fliers Alamy is selling scans of ad prints from the 1850s. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/1850s-advert.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/1850s-advert.html
- chgs 2y ago
  Because they are rare
  - chefandy 2y ago
    I don’t think that’s true? Tons of stuff from that era had been digitized, even before newer more relevant stuff and older rarer stuff, because the acid paper had a short shelf life and there were so many ads in printed stuff then. I might have a skewed perspective from working in the digitization world for quite some time. I think they’re selling what they sell with all their other content— discovery, curation, preparation, and easy delivery.
- chefandy 2y ago
  Ads range from a (necessary, in a capitalist society) nuisance to a scourge, and people justly put up increasingly thick boundaries to shield themselves from their influence. When waning cultural relevance or whatever dilutes that influence, you can more easily see the ads for what they are— often manipulative marketing tactics implemented through often genuinely beautiful art and design. Both aspects are fascinating to consider and the art can be quite enjoyable. Early modernist posters from Paris are beautiful. Watching collections of mid century television ads in the prelinger archives is fun, and tells us a lot about the ways we are influenced by modern ads speaking to current perspectives, fashions, and concerns.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    Capitalism would work 100% fine without ads because people naturally compare and contrast options when buying stuff. All that's necessary is making it possible for people seeking out your type of product to find you. And for revolutionary products, there's word of mouth. If anything I think capitalism would function better without ads, because I would argue that advertising overall results in less informed customers, especially the modern lifestyle/brand type of advertising that's clearly quite effective at manipulating people.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things? Ads suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  A selection 74 items over a 10 year period is a different proposal compared to e.g. keeping two tons of ad fliers from November 17th 1907 (and every other thing, every other day, all the time).
jonhohle 2y ago
An aside about ad spam from companies that I occasionally buy from: Often as spam comes from the same mailbox as order receipts and includes words like “order” while messages with receipts never include the word “receipt”. When inundated with daily or sometimes multiple times a day ad spam from the same company it becomes very difficult to filter for only not receipts, to clean a neglected inbox. After I’m gone, I fully expect my family just to delete it all because the signal to noise is so low.
- sdenton4 2y ago
  Sorting through twenty years of spammy email is one of those things that seem like an llm would actually be good for.
  - be_erik 2y ago
    Some might say, that years of spammy emails drove the creation of the llms we know today. It's easy to forget how fast some things have moved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  I don't have anyone to do anything after I'm gone, so I just delete the emails myself. I do keep the notable ones, like registration information and some payment receipts but otherwise everything goes to the trash. Bonus points: I don't need 30/50/100Gb mailbox (and the associated mailbox cost nowadays). Search is not only fast but if I didn't found something - then there is nothing of this something in the mailbox. I't mentally pleasurable to log in once in a while and throw a bunch of unneeded stuff into the trash bin, quite similar to a real life room cleaning.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Fortunately Gmail tabs go a lot of the way to letting you mass delete junk you don’t care about. Assuming you do even a modicum of labeling stuff you might like to refer to or act on, deleting at least older promotions and updates eliminates a lot of things.
eesmith 2y ago
A two-ton pile of ad fliers? Sounds like Ted Nelson's Junk Mail collection, https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail .
harrall 2y ago
It’s not like you currently go to a webpage and save all the images onto deep storage for archival… I’m not sure what relevance things being digital has on identifying noise. If the ancestor before you is hoarding anything that comes across their path, be it digital ads or every physical greeting card they’ve ever gotten, the problem is with the person’s collection habits, not the medium.
alex_young 2y ago
Well, I remember a lot of great stuff on Usenet circa 1994, but it looks like Google shut down access to it via Google Groups, which used to archive it in a searchable way. There was a ton of great stuff 30 years ago, and I think it's definitely worth saving. The Internet was a very different place, but it was quite real 30 years ago, and I think the idea that the further back you go the more valuable this kind of thing is is the right way of looking at it.
- patrickhogan1 2y ago
  This. Usenet. Then IRC. I think back to full on conversations I had with friends on IRC that I never kept. Then people stopped using IRC. All gone. Also slashdot. Go back 20 years and start clicking links. Most of them are broken.
- Thorrez 2y ago
  >but it looks like Google shut down access to it via Google Groups Huh? It still looks accessible to me. https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.radiology.interventional https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.radiology.interventional Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Groups.
  - alex_young 2y ago
    That’s cool, I’m glad they didn’t remove stuff. For the life of me I don’t see how one would discover that or other historic groups. It seems like at the minimum they removed the index of them or at least made it hard to discover.
    - Thorrez 2y ago
      It doesn't look like the index is gone to me. E.g.: https://groups.google.com/search?q=%22Has%20anyone%20ever%20did%20a%20CT%20scan%20and%20found%20calcification%20of%20the%20thyroid%22 https://groups.google.com/search?q=%22Has%20anyone%20ever%20... https://groups.google.com/search/groups?q=%22sci.med%22 https://groups.google.com/search/groups?q=%22sci.med%22 Were Usenet groups ever easier to discover in Google Groups than this?

qwertox 2y ago

What about robots reading each flier and checking if something is odd about that particular one? It could find the letter and report it to you. Even easier if it was all digital information.

bongodongobob 2y ago

If only we had search algorithms...

palmfacehn 2y ago

>...a two ton pile of ad fliers Alamy is selling scans of ad prints from the 1850s. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/1850s-advert.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/1850s-advert.html

chgs 2y ago
Because they are rare
- chefandy 2y ago
  I don’t think that’s true? Tons of stuff from that era had been digitized, even before newer more relevant stuff and older rarer stuff, because the acid paper had a short shelf life and there were so many ads in printed stuff then. I might have a skewed perspective from working in the digitization world for quite some time. I think they’re selling what they sell with all their other content— discovery, curation, preparation, and easy delivery.
chefandy 2y ago
Ads range from a (necessary, in a capitalist society) nuisance to a scourge, and people justly put up increasingly thick boundaries to shield themselves from their influence. When waning cultural relevance or whatever dilutes that influence, you can more easily see the ads for what they are— often manipulative marketing tactics implemented through often genuinely beautiful art and design. Both aspects are fascinating to consider and the art can be quite enjoyable. Early modernist posters from Paris are beautiful. Watching collections of mid century television ads in the prelinger archives is fun, and tells us a lot about the ways we are influenced by modern ads speaking to current perspectives, fashions, and concerns.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  Capitalism would work 100% fine without ads because people naturally compare and contrast options when buying stuff. All that's necessary is making it possible for people seeking out your type of product to find you. And for revolutionary products, there's word of mouth. If anything I think capitalism would function better without ads, because I would argue that advertising overall results in less informed customers, especially the modern lifestyle/brand type of advertising that's clearly quite effective at manipulating people.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things? Ads suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.
zamadatix 2y ago
A selection 74 items over a 10 year period is a different proposal compared to e.g. keeping two tons of ad fliers from November 17th 1907 (and every other thing, every other day, all the time).

jonhohle 2y ago

An aside about ad spam from companies that I occasionally buy from: Often as spam comes from the same mailbox as order receipts and includes words like “order” while messages with receipts never include the word “receipt”. When inundated with daily or sometimes multiple times a day ad spam from the same company it becomes very difficult to filter for only not receipts, to clean a neglected inbox. After I’m gone, I fully expect my family just to delete it all because the signal to noise is so low.

sdenton4 2y ago
Sorting through twenty years of spammy email is one of those things that seem like an llm would actually be good for.
- be_erik 2y ago
  Some might say, that years of spammy emails drove the creation of the llms we know today. It's easy to forget how fast some things have moved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering
justsomehnguy 2y ago
I don't have anyone to do anything after I'm gone, so I just delete the emails myself. I do keep the notable ones, like registration information and some payment receipts but otherwise everything goes to the trash. Bonus points: I don't need 30/50/100Gb mailbox (and the associated mailbox cost nowadays). Search is not only fast but if I didn't found something - then there is nothing of this something in the mailbox. I't mentally pleasurable to log in once in a while and throw a bunch of unneeded stuff into the trash bin, quite similar to a real life room cleaning.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Fortunately Gmail tabs go a lot of the way to letting you mass delete junk you don’t care about. Assuming you do even a modicum of labeling stuff you might like to refer to or act on, deleting at least older promotions and updates eliminates a lot of things.

eesmith 2y ago

A two-ton pile of ad fliers? Sounds like Ted Nelson's Junk Mail collection, https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail .

harrall 2y ago

It’s not like you currently go to a webpage and save all the images onto deep storage for archival… I’m not sure what relevance things being digital has on identifying noise. If the ancestor before you is hoarding anything that comes across their path, be it digital ads or every physical greeting card they’ve ever gotten, the problem is with the person’s collection habits, not the medium.

alex_young 2y ago

Well, I remember a lot of great stuff on Usenet circa 1994, but it looks like Google shut down access to it via Google Groups, which used to archive it in a searchable way. There was a ton of great stuff 30 years ago, and I think it's definitely worth saving. The Internet was a very different place, but it was quite real 30 years ago, and I think the idea that the further back you go the more valuable this kind of thing is is the right way of looking at it.

patrickhogan1 2y ago
This. Usenet. Then IRC. I think back to full on conversations I had with friends on IRC that I never kept. Then people stopped using IRC. All gone. Also slashdot. Go back 20 years and start clicking links. Most of them are broken.
Thorrez 2y ago
>but it looks like Google shut down access to it via Google Groups Huh? It still looks accessible to me. https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.radiology.interventional https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.radiology.interventional Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Groups.
- alex_young 2y ago
  That’s cool, I’m glad they didn’t remove stuff. For the life of me I don’t see how one would discover that or other historic groups. It seems like at the minimum they removed the index of them or at least made it hard to discover.
  - Thorrez 2y ago
    It doesn't look like the index is gone to me. E.g.: https://groups.google.com/search?q=%22Has%20anyone%20ever%20did%20a%20CT%20scan%20and%20found%20calcification%20of%20the%20thyroid%22 https://groups.google.com/search?q=%22Has%20anyone%20ever%20... https://groups.google.com/search/groups?q=%22sci.med%22 https://groups.google.com/search/groups?q=%22sci.med%22 Were Usenet groups ever easier to discover in Google Groups than this?