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Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

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Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#21

Post by jaylevitt »

jeffbarr wrote: post #13

All of our digital ephemera (photos, blog posts, emails, reviews, tweets, code, and accounts) and so forth can theoretically last forever. In reality, disk drives and servers can die, domain registrations will expire, data formats will become outdated, and more. Even if you have the bits and you can read them, you may be faced with a excavation job. Who has time to dig through someone else's email? Are we generating…

Maybe that's theoretically true - but so far, copyright wars aside, it's been moving in the other direction, as storage and bandwidth get ever cheaper. One person finds a Super-8 film when they renovate the attic, it gets transferred, they upload it to YouTube, and now it's permanently on the Internet.

You can now listen to the earliest recorded audio[1] (which was never heard or playable in its own time), read many of Isaac Newton's original manuscripts[2] (with plans to triple the archive this year), and google ["yeeees" guy] to watch a clip of Frank Nelson[3].

You don't have to excavate at all; you just have to make it searchable so that someday, someone will run across it. This is what we have with just text search. Now add in PhotoSynth (the original, Flickr-driven version[4] with every photo ever, not the watered-down panorama app), automatic audio transcription, content-aware image search, "hum that tune" (Shazam, SoundHound, etc.). Within a decade, we'll have "imagine that video and search for it".

"Movage" becomes less of a problem because while it's not worth it for you to individually convert various old files on your hard drive, Google has no problem re-encoding their entire library to add HTML5 codecs: Write the script once and wait a few years for it to finish. It's already in some master, readable format, so they don't have the "ten versions of Word .DOCs" problem (or if they do, they hide it very well).

If anything, we're entering an age where nothing goes out of print, and there are no lost films. Ever. Yes, we have to fight some copyright battles, but the outcome is inevitable; in 50 years, all laws will be written by people who grew up with BitTorrent, not the DuMont network.

Someone coined a great term for this new age of digital plenty, but I forgot it. In ten years, I'll be able to Google that thought and tell you what it was.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/372994/earliest-audio-recording-resurrect...

[2] http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA_r1Ynl4Ls

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0

Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#23

Post by StavrosK »

vog wrote: post #7
StavrosK wrote: post #2

That's exactly what http://www.deadmansswitch.net is for.

I like the idea, but ... As a web service?! I'd love to see that as a free software daemon, or cronjob, which I can run on one of my website's servers. However, storing very sensitive information at a central place - a place which aims to collect sensitive information from many other people? Well, that's an invitation to abuse! How could I ever trust my most sensitive data to such a system?

Encrypt it?

Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#24

Post by StavrosK »

extension wrote: post #4

I find it strangely unsettling that if I die, my Minecraft clan will never know what happened to me. I'll just vanish one day. They will spend some time trying to contact me but probably won't make a connection with anybody who can tell them what happened. And nobody who is sure to know about my death would know to contact them.

Sorry to double-post like that, but it sounds like this site I made can help: http://www.deadmansswitch.net/

Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#25

Post by eli_gottlieb »

vog wrote: post #7
StavrosK wrote: post #2

That's exactly what http://www.deadmansswitch.net is for.

I like the idea, but ... As a web service?! I'd love to see that as a free software daemon, or cronjob, which I can run on one of my website's servers. However, storing very sensitive information at a central place - a place which aims to collect sensitive information from many other people? Well, that's an invitation to abuse! How could I ever trust my most sensitive data to such a system?

Well it should be software you run on your own machines. But that wouldn't suit the Web 2.0 fad.

Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#26

Post by GuiA »

If you're a programmer it's certainly possible you might have some pre-canned scripts to run -- perhaps telling nephew Susie she should have a great birthday and life once she turns 18. Maybe you have something to detect jokes your Uncle tells and add in a "lol" in a comment. Aside from being weird, is that socially acceptable? Should relatives help you do this?

This is the paragraph of the article that I found the most interesting from a sociological point of view (the rest has been covered many times in the past, and as other commenters have pointed out there are several services who deal with it). I wrote a bit more about it a while ago, as I think that this will become something potentially very real in the next few decades:

http://gardaud.posterous.com/digital-ghosts

Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#27

Post by Figs »

GuiA wrote: post #26

If you're a programmer it's certainly possible you might have some pre-canned scripts to run -- perhaps telling nephew Susie she should have a great birthday and life once she turns 18. Maybe you have something to detect jokes your Uncle tells and add in a "lol" in a comment. Aside from being weird, is that socially acceptable? Should relatives help you do this? This is the paragraph of the article that I found the m…

I remember reading about something like this in a few science fiction novels by Jack McDevitt (the "Alex Benedict" series) -- basically people had left behind AI versions of themselves that some of the protagonists interviewed to try to piece together interstellar archaeological mysteries.

Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#29

Post by jchampagne »

GuiA wrote: post #26

If you're a programmer it's certainly possible you might have some pre-canned scripts to run -- perhaps telling nephew Susie she should have a great birthday and life once she turns 18. Maybe you have something to detect jokes your Uncle tells and add in a "lol" in a comment. Aside from being weird, is that socially acceptable? Should relatives help you do this? This is the paragraph of the article that I found the m…

I agree that this is the most interesting part of the article, sociologically. My father was a tech guy who passed away over ten years ago, I believe that if you had the power to do so it would be an invaluable gift to your loved ones to leave them little messages every so often… (as long as your relationship was healthy!) But unlike the attached article implies, psychologists shouldn’t be concerned as I don’t think most people will ever feel like we are truly “communicating” with our deceased loved ones as communication is always a two-way streak. A robot giving standard-human like answers (or a relative enabling that) isn’t really your loved one communicating unless that loved one somehow took the time to sit there and guess what you might answer in different scenarios. As much as I’d love periodic messages and jokes sent from my dead father to appear every once and a while (and would look forward to and treasure them) I could never feel compelled to reply back to him, or desire a robotic answer, and once you cross that line then I think it falls into “socially unacceptable”.

Re: Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

#30

Post by chimeracoder »

jchampagne wrote: post #29
GuiA wrote: post #26

If you're a programmer it's certainly possible you might have some pre-canned scripts to run -- perhaps telling nephew Susie she should have a great birthday and life once she turns 18. Maybe you have something to detect jokes your Uncle tells and add in a "lol" in a comment. Aside from being weird, is that socially acceptable? Should relatives help you do this? This is the paragraph of the article that I found the m…

I agree that this is the most interesting part of the article, sociologically. My father was a tech guy who passed away over ten years ago, I believe that if you had the power to do so it would be an invaluable gift to your loved ones to leave them little messages every so often… (as long as your relationship was healthy!) But unlike the attached article implies, psychologists shouldn’t be concerned as I don’t think…

What about when we get to the point where we have an AI capable of simulating, if imperfectly, an individual's response to a given question?

If you think that this is farfetched, it's not - it's basically like http://iwl.me , but in reverse. The catch is that you need a lot of easily classified textual data about the person. But in the Twitter age, we do have that kind of information - or soon will.

Gracious Eloise[1] is a really cool idea, though it's going to create a nightmarish situation for forensics experts. Imagine if you combined the two - you could simulate what a person might say, and you could simulate their actual handwriting for it.

[1] http://www.graciouseloise.com/

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