61–70 of 96 posts
Where can we find the list of the 6000 repos ? On my profile it just shows 3 "and more", would like to get the full list. TYIA ;)
Where can we find the list of the 6000 repos ? On my profile it just shows 3 "and more", would like to get the full list. TYIA ;)
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
As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is qui…
Much of that is "if we forget technology which we realize somewhere down the road we actually might want to use again." History provides plenty of examples of this, and it's particularly important with a technology which mostly lives on ephemeral media that only lasts a few decades.
Even if you do expand your speculation to post-disaster scenarios, though, while it's true the archive wouldn't be an instant reset button, it would help greatly accelerate the recovery of technology. It's worth noting that it will come with a slew of (human-readable, not encoded) technical works regarding subjects ranging from modern software engineering to microprocessor design to photolithography to power systems, which we call the Tech Tree, along with a guide and index to all the stored repos. Wherever its inheritors / discoverers may be in terms of technological advancement, and especially if they have modern-ish hardware (which can last much, much longer than most storage media), recovering the archive's contents will be a lot faster than rediscovering them from scratch.
(Also worth noting we'll be storing "greatest hits" copies of the ~15,000 most-starred / most-relied-on repos, along with a sampling of several thousand repos with few/no stars, in a selection of places like Oxford's Bodleian Library; our hypothetical future tech seekers won't have to go all the way to Svalbard for those.)
I don't want to stress the doomsday scenarios too much, though, despite our ongoing pandemic. I think the most likely outcome by far is that progress will continue; the archive may be useful to recover a couple of otherwise forgotten technologies that suddenly become important / interesting; and it will ultimately be chiefly of interest to historians. That historical value is a key reason why it casts such a broad net. I too have a couple of fairly unsophisticated pet projects in there that the future won't be interested in individually - but collectively is another matter. One of the most interesting things our advisory committee told us is that history is replete with lists composed by wealthy people of the books they thought most important, carefully preserved for posterity, whereas what modern historians _really_ want is ordinary people's shopping lists, of which almost none survived. That's one reason there are millions of repos in the Arctic now, instead of eg just the most-starred 100K: some of those may be the modern technological equivalent of Renaissance shopping lists, for the historians who may take a particular interest in this (possibly) especially wacky and volatile era.
I know it's an inherently cinematic and dramatic project and so it's tempting to call it a PR stunt ... but I assure you, it's not, and, speaking personally, I would never have gotten involved with it if I thought it was.
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.
Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange
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.
They've just archived the HEAD of the 6000 most popular repos > We’ve archived 6,000 of the world’s most popular repositories as a proof of concept for future archives. > The snapshot will consist of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size.
It looks like the code is actually stored in plain text, and that this is basically microfilm?
As David Rosenthal (formerly of Sun, NVIDIA, and Stanford) explains, the actual Arctic Code Vault is a PR stunt, and has almost no chance of helping anyone in any kind of realistic disaster scenario: https://blog.dshr.org/2019/11/seeds-or-code.html That said, the rest of the project, which focuses on preserving several independent copies of repositories hosted on GitHub with a handful of partner organizations, is qui…
Archive Program director here - it's really not a PR stunt, we genuinely believe it will be of significant historical value and quite a good chance it will be of practical value. Much of that is "if we forget technology which we realize somewhere down the road we actually might want to use again." History provides plenty of examples of this, and it's particularly important with a technology which mostly lives on ephe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I can't believe they are spending so much money and effort to preserve code I don't give a damn now and once I pushed to GitHub. And like me, 99% of the devs I know personally.
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