This is kind of an antithesis to his message in the post; that nothing is actually permanent, and while many people are concerned about continuity of service, ultimately perfect continuity is impossible, whether that's due to the organization running out of money, bad backup practices and a fire, global warming wiping Ashburn Virginia off the map, or the end of the human civilization by some other means.
I've helped with a couple risk registers at tech companies. Two things I've never seen appear in a risk register: The company runs out of money. Human society is wiped out. I've been laughed at once for bringing up variations on these. They're out of scope; risks stop being a threat when there's no one left to care about them.
I think the goal of keeping an internet-scale level of data accessible and searchable, for longer than one lifetime, is an impossible task. Maybe Archive.org/Archive.is can pull it off; I doubt it. Its an insane amount of data. Most of it is totally pointless, but its really difficult to pick-apart what's useful and what's useless, so you have to keep as much as possible without bias. All of that is on hard disks which violently spin around at 8 meters per second, accessed by software which we all know breaks every day but are too afraid to admit it, over a network of other computers with all the same flaws, distributed globally, yet can be significantly disrupted by one roadside construction worker and a jackhammer.
The internet didn't increase the lifetime of data; it decreased it. Sure, we have far more of it at our fingertips than any other point in history, but that's not lifetime; that's just volume. And that volume has desensitized us; its fundamentally impacting our innate biological memory capacity, and the social structures we form around memory. We know the Library of Alexandria existed because people wrote about it; the pages laid for thousands of years; its memory passed verbally from person to person.
If all computers stopped functioning tomorrow, not even disappear, they're still there, they just don't work: Would the memory of Stranger Things still be known in two thousand years? I doubt it, but: if the only thing which offers us a satisfying "Yes" is "we keep the computers running, accessible, indexable, searchable"; that seems, at the very least, given the extreme challenges we as a species will be facing over the next century, beyond the scope of human possibility
Absolutely shameless plug: If you'd like a cleaner looking, 3d printed solution for attaching a filter to a pretty standard box fan, in this fashion, we sell some over on Etsy (use the coupon code HACKERNEWS, 20% off) [1]
Does it work better than duct tape? Probably not. Duct tape does a great job of creating an airtight seal, whereas with these clamps there is a small gap between the fan and the filter. But, it does make it easier to replace the filter, looks clean, and we've ran tests with an AQI meter; definitely has a positive impact.
I've helped with a couple risk registers at tech companies. Two things I've never seen appear in a risk register: The company runs out of money. Human society is wiped out. I've been laughed at once for bringing up variations on these. They're out of scope; risks stop being a threat when there's no one left to care about them.
I think the goal of keeping an internet-scale level of data accessible and searchable, for longer than one lifetime, is an impossible task. Maybe Archive.org/Archive.is can pull it off; I doubt it. Its an insane amount of data. Most of it is totally pointless, but its really difficult to pick-apart what's useful and what's useless, so you have to keep as much as possible without bias. All of that is on hard disks which violently spin around at 8 meters per second, accessed by software which we all know breaks every day but are too afraid to admit it, over a network of other computers with all the same flaws, distributed globally, yet can be significantly disrupted by one roadside construction worker and a jackhammer.
The internet didn't increase the lifetime of data; it decreased it. Sure, we have far more of it at our fingertips than any other point in history, but that's not lifetime; that's just volume. And that volume has desensitized us; its fundamentally impacting our innate biological memory capacity, and the social structures we form around memory. We know the Library of Alexandria existed because people wrote about it; the pages laid for thousands of years; its memory passed verbally from person to person.
If all computers stopped functioning tomorrow, not even disappear, they're still there, they just don't work: Would the memory of Stranger Things still be known in two thousand years? I doubt it, but: if the only thing which offers us a satisfying "Yes" is "we keep the computers running, accessible, indexable, searchable"; that seems, at the very least, given the extreme challenges we as a species will be facing over the next century, beyond the scope of human possibility