611–620 of 825 posts
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Maybe a better question is, what would HTML have looked like in the time of Shakespeare? Forsooth!
TIL: There's a "Shakespeare" esoteric programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Langua...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639119
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4910622
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Electronics aren't that sturdy. Hard drives demagnetize, solid-state storage decays, and there's always the chance that a stray cosmic ray will fry something. Even if we could construct something that sturdy: After a millennium, how would anyone know how to operate it? Would we include an instruction manual? Printed on what sort of paper? Microengravings on metal plates [1] will be more durable than electronics could…
Program once memory is quite resistant, and of course, plain old ROM is a rock, literally. Transistors do not deteriorate unless you use them, just like resistors and a lot of the available capacitors. On how to operate it, it's an e-reader, you turn it on there's the manual there. There is the really difficult part of telling people "put 12V DC here, ground on the outside", but it's trivial compared to the problem o…
A diode bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_bridge) can easily take care of polarity inversions. Voltage is a harder problem.
Since we're going through flights of fancy in these threads, another option would be to add a built-in solar panel to your hypothetical e-reader. Expose it to enough light (and you can probably assume the lighting won't be much brighter than a tropical midday sun) and it turns on.
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I have a book from the 1700s on my bedside table I can read just fine... My lived experience is I can read texts from hundreds of years ago just fine. Old mate is struggling with 50s tv. The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is. I think whoever is interested in a 500 year old website is going to be ok.
This comment will be fine in hundreds of years. I completely expect (at least Australians) to continue to use “old mate” for a long time to come :).
One is a 'phase' the other is cross generational.
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There are different kinds of stability. One is whether the same language is spoken informally. Another is whether people are able understand earlier texts. I'm pretty sure texts from the 20th and 19th century are commonly read in High School, TV shows from 1960s onward are watched, etc. Having the past ever-present makes it something current informal language relates to. Many, many people speaking English also create…
I have a book from the 1700s on my bedside table I can read just fine... My lived experience is I can read texts from hundreds of years ago just fine. Old mate is struggling with 50s tv. The only tip is to use stable language. IE don't use the term dab or vibe or whatever the latest fad niche speak is. I think whoever is interested in a 500 year old website is going to be ok.
Stuff like that can easily be looked up though, there are a number of "youth/hipster speak" dictionaires, pages like KnowYourMeme...
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I recall some scifi where some Diety/SuperAI left 'commandments' for humanity carved into giant monuments made of diamond. I presume that was considered the only thing that would survive deep time.
There was an interesting article online a few years back, can't find it now. It claimed that humans can't make anything that will last more that 16 million years. This includes any kind of nuclear pollution. Sure we might get lucky like Jurassic fossils, but not intentionally.
maybe host an html file on an ethereum smart contract with a very, very large trustfund that people can donate to?
i'd guess the ethereum blockchain will survive 500 years. Or a subsequent fork of it will.