History Is Written by the Losers (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: History Is Written by the Losers (2016)

#41

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 6:04 PM UTC

jbandela1 wrote: post #3

Also don’t forget Anna Komnene. She was the oldest daughter of Alexios I (who unwittingly kicked off the Crusades). After unsuccessfully trying to overthrow her younger brother, she was exiled to a monastery where she ended up writing the Alexiad which provides much of our information about the early crusades including first hand descriptions of some of the key players as well as as weapons and tactics.

Covered in episode 313 of Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy (without any gaps) podcast:

https://historyofphilosophy.net/anna-komnene>

(Episode and further references at the link.)

Re: History Is Written by the Losers (2016)

#42

Post by growingkittens » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 8:58 PM UTC

lorax wrote: post #40

growingkittens wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 100 years with minimal, passive effort, a piece of paper will be fragile, but usable. In 100 years, a hard drive will degrade without multiple transfers to new media - an active process. The barrier to digital archival is much higher than paper archival for the average person, and the internet does forget. There's not really an equivalent authority who preserves records for digital works, is there? The Internet Ar…

In 100 years most paper will be gone, thrown out, without any attempt to archive it. In 100 years most digital will be gone for the same reason. The exceptions in both cases is where something is “fortuitously forgotten”, a box left in an attic after a move, or a web page that remains in a fossilized state. Preserving both paper and digital records requires the active effort of convincing people (some of whom haven't…

> Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.

Who is this "someone", though?

There's no long term, passive, digital storage solution available for the average person. Records that used to survive on a regular basis no longer do so in digital form.

Re: History Is Written by the Losers (2016)

#43

Post by smcin » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:16 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #30

Machiavelli and Dante are other examples of losers effectively writing (thinly veiled, and very subjective) history. Both were political losers, exiled from their lands in their latter years, grinding their axes by wielding their pens.

Does that detract from the quality of their observations, though?

(You're reminding me of Robert Greene's superb "The 48 Laws of Power")

Re: History Is Written by the Losers (2016)

#44

Post by CRConrad » Fri, Jan 26, 2024, 10:26 AM UTC

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #24

korse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one. The robotics tie in isn't far off though, as some of the earliest autonomous mobile robots spawned from cybernetics research.

> I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one. Just to clarify, do you mean that the Soviet context is the same as the modern context or that the modern context misuses the term in some way (or something else that I missed)?

I read that as "the more stringent academic definition" (~= "the Soviet context") vs "the fashionable pop-culture cyberpunk-influenced understanding" of the term.

Take your pick which of those you mean by "the modern context".