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GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

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71–80 of 105 posts

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#71
post #24

> We believe women's unique role in founding and shaping computing and technology deserves its own section. Hummm, ok, what about men's role ? One of the biggest complain women make, is the world keeps reminding them that they are a women. Well this is one of them

That is some classic feminist irony right there. If I were a woman, I would hate that shit but it seems like most people who comes up with and support ideas like this are either too stupid or too ignorant to care.

> If I were a woman, I would hate that shit but it seems like most people who comes up with and support ideas like this are either too stupid or too ignorant to care.

So if they don't do what you would prefer, they're too stupid or too ignorant to care? What about if they're perfectly smart and perfectly aware, and just aren't concerned with doing what you personally want? Maybe you feel differently from most people, which is great and nice and perfectly fine, but you speculating about what you would want if you were a woman isn't exactly a clear indication of what is actually best right now, and what women want.

EDIT: And to be fair, you don't know how you'd feel about this as a woman, because you don't identify as one (presumably).

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#72
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Fiction, culture, and history" section includes a bunch of works written in various languages, but apparently they're using the English translation. Surely the original is more representative of human cultures as a whole than its translation into English (which is more representative of anglophone cultures).

The core of the project is written in English, which is the current lingua franca of the world. If the purpose of the archive is for future scholars to have a corpus of knowledge from our time, then limiting it to one language maximizes the probability that the entirety of the information stored there will be recoverable. Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1…

Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.

If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.

See the problem ?

Keeping as much linguistic data as possible is beneficial. Intentionally curtailing is criminal.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#73

It s missing solid pieces, like how to bootstrap a C compiler from nothing: https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 or how to use that C compiler to bootstrap the rest of the software: https://guix.gnu.org/

I'd be interested to see them bootstrap a CPU from scratch.

Ingredients:

- Soil

- Seeds

- Salt water

- Rare-earth mines

- ???

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#74
post #41
post #5

The text uses the words "culture", "human history", and "the world/our world". But reading the list of sources included, it seems to mean "the English culture" of US + UK. That's a bit of a shame IMHO.

When saw that my repo got pulled, I couldn't help wonder what value the future archeologists will put on a Twitch chatbot that distribute cookies. However my IRC client may still be useful by then Relevant xkcd : https://xkcd.com/1782/

The whole premise of slack seems to be “let’s throw away everything we know about effective communication and try again”. That’s how we end up with threads nobody can follow, annoying bots and extensions you can’t mute, and a “knowledge store” that only works if you know who, when, and where something was said.

Every week I have to unsubscribe from the seventy channels and direct message groups I got involuntarily joined to.

If IRC could handle unreliable connections better I think it would absolutely trump Slack.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#77
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core of the project is written in English, which is the current lingua franca of the world. If the purpose of the archive is for future scholars to have a corpus of knowledge from our time, then limiting it to one language maximizes the probability that the entirety of the information stored there will be recoverable. Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1…

Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul. If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept. See the problem ? Keeping as much linguistic data as possible is beneficial. Intentionally curtailing…

>> Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1000 years from now. Even if those languages are alive in 1000 years, the likelihood that interpreting period Finnish and Hungarian from 2020 will be possible is far smaller than the likelihood that interpreting period English from 2020 will be possible.

> Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.

> If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.

Yeah, exactly. The GP has it bass ackwards. If you have concerns like the GP about intelligibility, then include both the original and the translation. That way even if Finnish and Hungarian go extinct and the archive is recovered, those parallel texts can be used to recover the Finnish and Hungarian languages themselves.

And I'm sure someone who is reading this is questioning the value of even preserving the Finnish and Hungarian languages when you've already captured the "knowledge" in English. All I have to say to that is future linguists will probably be very frustrated with losing two non-Indo-European languages to study, just like we're frustrated that we can't read Etruscan writings anymore.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#78
post #5

The text uses the words "culture", "human history", and "the world/our world". But reading the list of sources included, it seems to mean "the English culture" of US + UK. That's a bit of a shame IMHO.

I am assuming, based on the fact that it's a project by an American company, that this is largely being done by functionally monolingual English speakers. I wouldn't want them to attempt to speak for other cultures. And I wouldn't want to shame them for not attempting to speak for others. It's a bit unfortunate that they use the word "human" so expansively when the scope is so limited, it's true. But it's a new proje…

I haven't read the document but what's wrong with the term "human"? Is there some other intelligent life-form on this planet contributing to technology and software today that I'm unaware of?

Picking on the word human just seems nit-picky, like someone's not woke enough to use a more inclusive term.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#79
I am not sure how civilisations thousands of years in the future, with potentially a lower level of technology could be able to decipher the data from the archive, seeing the encoding complexity and the number of steps required. Considering how much money GitHub received from microsoft, I think they could have recorded all uncompressed, engraved in stone...

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am assuming, based on the fact that it's a project by an American company, that this is largely being done by functionally monolingual English speakers. I wouldn't want them to attempt to speak for other cultures. And I wouldn't want to shame them for not attempting to speak for others. It's a bit unfortunate that they use the word "human" so expansively when the scope is so limited, it's true. But it's a new proje…

I haven't read the document but what's wrong with the term "human"? Is there some other intelligent life-form on this planet contributing to technology and software today that I'm unaware of? Picking on the word human just seems nit-picky, like someone's not woke enough to use a more inclusive term.

My reading was that the complaint was that it implied false inclusiveness, which can come across as solipsistic to those who weren't included.

A little bit like how the final stage of Major League Baseball's playoffs are called the World Series, even though 29 of the teams are based in the USA and the 30th plays in a stadium ~25km outside the USA. I imagine that is at least a little bit irritating to professional baseball players from elsewhere in the world.

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