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The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

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Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#31

Post by quicklime »

helldritch wrote: post #25
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we preserve open hardware and software, then we could rebuild in the case of civilizational decline and the accompanying knowledge loss ...can we? I'm sometimes a little concerned about how complicated chip fabs are. They feel like something that could take generations to rebuild, even if we had all the knowledge on what to do.

Home photo-lithography and chemical etching setups aren't common, but have been done by several people. We wouldn't be able to jump straight to 14NM, but we would probably be able to get to the 500-300nm size relatively quickly (a year or two, maybe, if starting from scratch) and shrink down from there. Devices would be much bigger and less efficient, but we would be able to run code and pump out 8086 processors with…

That's just one layer of the stack though. Future archaeologists will also need to create mock npm registries and maven repositories, and set up docker and k8s so they can deploy a complex set of microservices to look up our birthdays.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#32

Post by Wowfunhappy »

quicklime wrote: post #31
helldritch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home photo-lithography and chemical etching setups aren't common, but have been done by several people. We wouldn't be able to jump straight to 14NM, but we would probably be able to get to the 500-300nm size relatively quickly (a year or two, maybe, if starting from scratch) and shrink down from there. Devices would be much bigger and less efficient, but we would be able to run code and pump out 8086 processors with…

That's just one layer of the stack though. Future archaeologists will also need to create mock npm registries and maven repositories, and set up docker and k8s so they can deploy a complex set of microservices to look up our birthdays.

...all the code to which should be right in the Github Vault, right?

Idk, the hardware part seems much more difficult to me.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#33

Post by ca_parody »

Honestly, for however much this project either (a) is a genuine archeological move for the preservation of information or (b) to get good press, all I genuinely thought when this happened is "aw shucks - wish i fixed those bugs before they zapped it onto film and flew it to santa clause".

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#34

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

rob-olmos wrote: post #29
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #16

It looks like the code is actually stored in plain text, and that this is basically microfilm?

I don't think so. Project Silica talks about storing the data in droplet-looking voxels rather than etching language symbols. Cool video of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzHsibqpIs

But, from the article, it doesn't look like they used Project Silica here, they used piqlFilm.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#35

Post by xaedes »

rwky wrote: post #28

This means that after the apocalypse people will be able to reclaim the Linux source code but not Windows. I find it poetic that open source may one day be the norm.

Since Microsoft aquired Github, I think they may also put some MS closed-source code in the vault. Seperate.

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#38

Post by decko »

atonse wrote: post #23

This is so awesome, but the most surprising to me is that all the public source code on GitHub only totals 21 TB. I forget that they do fundamentally host text, and not video etc. I somehow thought it would be petabytes. The private repos might be more than that but those are historically paid.

20 of those are probably node_modules folders

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#39

Post by no_wizard »

atonse wrote: post #23

This is so awesome, but the most surprising to me is that all the public source code on GitHub only totals 21 TB. I forget that they do fundamentally host text, and not video etc. I somehow thought it would be petabytes. The private repos might be more than that but those are historically paid.

On the topic of size, I wonder how small it would be if you were able to deduplicate all repositories against each other. I sometimes suspect there is a tremendous amount of copy/paste code out there masquerading as someone else’s.

Even a naive deduplication might yield some very interesting results

Reminds me of a time I caught someone using someone else’s code in an interview and passing it off as their own. (Using was fine, it was the claim that it was theirs that bugged me)

Re: The GitHub Arctic Code Vault

#40

Post by saagarjha »

awb wrote: post #22
cmrx64 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's probably less effort to just archive the whole damn thing and let the future figure it out than to decide important things to archive and leaving everything else to disappear someday

I wonder how much space you'd save if you excluded repos with only 1 star or only 1 commit.

They’ve excluded pretty much everything below a hundred stars, from what I see.
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