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Shining a light on the digital dark age

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Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#41

Post by kepano »

grglburgp wrote: post #24

Attenuation of signal is how reality works. Generational churn means eventually no one who knows why the nested dolls were nested as they are will be gone. Humans will create a new set of nested dolls they can grok. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson; clearly the dead do not rule the living. Edit; forgot this point… Maybe he said that; it’s unverifiable for us. Maintenance of hallucination is all it ends up. Reality we se…

I like the idea of accepting transience, but if we lose important knowledge we return to superstition.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#42

Post by bottlepalm »

With AI we have a real chance of 'losing the past' as in we won't be able to tell fact from fiction. The bar to modify images, video, and text form the past will be so low that everyone will do it. And on top of that, coming autonomous agents will do be creating and modifying information at rates we just won't be able to keep up with.

I'd say we should sign everything we can now, anything created from 2023 onward is already suspect of being created by AI. The past will be 'erased' as well if there's no way to verify our historical information.

For example, I create an AI photo of Frank Sinatra in an LA diner eating a sandwich and post it online - tell me how on can verify today that picture is legit or not. Whose the arbiter of all Frank Sinatra photos? How much time, effort, and money would it take to do that verification? Now extrapolate this example to everything. The past becomes only myth and legend.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#44

Post by reidjs »

kepano wrote: post #29

I love to see more interest in the topic of digital continuity. My philosophy around this is "File over app" — if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your file…

I agree with “files over apps.” I used google docs for my personal notes until one day I had shoddy internet and realized how awful it is to lose access to something important that you wrote down.

I now use iA Writer which allows you to save your notes in markdown from iPhone, syncs via iCloud, and then I can continue from my laptop. Admittedly the native Notes app has some better functionality around sharing and searching. However, Notes saves into a SQLite db, which would be fine, but it’s not trivial to view the tables/schema in there.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#45

Post by aziaziazi »

rolobio wrote: post #28
izzydata wrote: post #18

I think there is something to be said about what is worth archiving. I don't know what it is that should be said though. It seems weird to me that as a society we might be saving things such as a 10 hour video of white noise for another 100 years rather than some personal blogs. What is and isn't worth saving?

It will probably end up being the most popular things, the most viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be archived. This reminds me of books. I’m sure the majority of books from over a hundred years ago are lost because they weren’t popular. We haven’t really noticed their absence…

When you publish a book or magazine in France you’re required to give 2 copies to the national library for archive purpose. Doesn't something like that exist in other countries?

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#46

Post by nemo »

justrealist wrote: post #35
nemo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better Historically that has not been the case for most of human history. As odd as it might seem, in general the rediscovery of the accomplishments ancient world has been a great driver towards progress. The periods when the accomplishments of the past were lost and fully forgotten were the sorts of times people call Dark Ages.

Actually the cities that are the most modern and progress-oriented today are the ones that felt comfortable bulldozing all relics of the past. (or the ones where the "old city" was destroyed in brutal urban warfare)

Responding to a statement about "for most of human history" with a reference to a very recent event isn't something you should begin with "actually" since it's not a reply to what I was saying, it's just your own tangent. Also, actually, even in the early modern period people were still looking to the past for inspiration even when they were reusing land - there's far more to the past than mere buildings.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#47

Post by causality0 »

What's preserved is also getting more and more sterile. Material that's now unfashionably rude or just plain unprofitable has a tendency to just be erased. I invite you to look through your Liked YouTube videos and witness how much of what you enjoyed has been taken from you forever.

Consider that everything you witness has an expiration date and if you don't save it maybe nobody else will.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#48

Post by grglburgp »

chrisco255 wrote: post #36
grglburgp wrote: post #24

Attenuation of signal is how reality works. Generational churn means eventually no one who knows why the nested dolls were nested as they are will be gone. Humans will create a new set of nested dolls they can grok. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson; clearly the dead do not rule the living. Edit; forgot this point… Maybe he said that; it’s unverifiable for us. Maintenance of hallucination is all it ends up. Reality we se…

The only reason you can paraphrase Thomas Jefferson is because his words were archived a long time ago, and the archives have survived all this time.

Sorry; I did not make my point clear. Were they his words or is the association made up?

Without direct observation it’s hearsay.

What’s the point of maintaining associations we can’t verify? The truth that Jefferson stated such is only hallucination for us.

The value is in the awareness of the realities mechanisms, not the association with Jefferson.

Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age

#49

Post by espe »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #39

I live in a small country with a weird language and with a lot of our local pop music... The new music is fine, everything is on youtube.... for now! ... but the older songs are disappearing. Years ago, we had a bunch of "mp3 sites" (websites where you could download pirated mp3s), that disappeared, a huge local torrent tracker, focusing also on local stuff, that lost most of the data in the OVH datacenter fire and s…

not sure it helps but - soulseek is pretty alive
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