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GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

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Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#61

Post by philsnow »

arethuza wrote: post #10
bovermyer wrote: post #3

The books under Fiction, Culture, and History - meant to demonstrate our "current culture" - include a number of pretty bleak titles.

The inclusion of Anathem and A Canticle for Leibowitz in a library intended to survive through a societal collapse does seem appropriate.

I usually avoid Stephenson (only because it's so wordy and I don't have much free time) and hadn't even read the wikipedia tl;dr of Anathem, but you mentioning it together with A Canticle for Leibowitz caused me to read the first few paragraphs of the wiki page for it and now I'm going to make an exception and find time to read it.

Thanks!

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#62

Post by pc86 »

dgellow wrote: 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.

What non-English technical texts would you suggest be added that has had a similar impact as the ones listed?

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#63

Post by jovial_cavalier »

yorwba wrote: post #59
jstummbillig wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very interested to hear about important omissions due to that bias.

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 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.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#64

Post by pc86 »

p0llard wrote: post #37
fnord123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Haskell (leading FP language) Scala is the leading FP language (thanks to Spark, Kafka, Akka, and other massive projects). And TIOBE puts Scheme and Lisp ahead of Haskell. And Emacs Lisp probably has more installs than GHC.

Probably depends on the definition of leading; I'd guess that Haskell is probably used more than any other (Turing-complete, to exclude Gallina, etc.) functional language within programming language research, but you're right that in terms of usage in industry etc. Scala is probably on top.

Programming language research is a pretty small and arbitrary space with regard to overall usage, isn't it?

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#66

Post by pintxo »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #63
yorwba wrote: 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…

If readability in 1000s of years of time is the goal, wouldn't you want to add as many (common) languages as possible? And for each book add as many translations of them as possible? That way they will be able to read most/all even if just one language survived - irrespective which one.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#67

Post by micpalmia »

jcahill wrote: post #27

As an archivist with work in Svalbard, I'm broadly in support of the notion here. But the 100 Classics approach to media that seems to be showcased in this provisional reamde fundamentally dooms the collection to irrelevance.

Not knowing much about archiving, this also struck me as a fairly superficial way to build an "archive" - seems more like an opinionated "best of" than an actually useful archive for future humans. I would like to see an actual OPAC!

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#69

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

mumblemumble wrote: post #13
dgellow wrote: 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…

Posted on HN yesterday, Pioneers of Soviet Computing:

https://archive.org/details/PioneersOfSovietComputing

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#70

Post by spacephysics »

screye wrote: post #47
polote wrote: 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

It's kind of counter intuitive, but writing about women's role in computing directly sheds light on men's role in the same. It is one of those sentences, where what is not said is just as important. > We believe women's unique role in founding and shaping computing and technology deserves its own section. > And men's role doesn't deserve a section, because literally everything else you read about was done by them . I…

I think category 13 should be included in their history/culture category, not a category in and of itself.

This is because it goes contrary to the goal of the project, to “...describe how the world makes and uses software today, as well as an overview of how computers work and the foundational technologies required to make and use computers.” I don’t see how separating top level categories at first from functional differences makes sense to then, by category 13, distinguishing merit from biology. It seems patronizing, and a politicization of something they’re stated aim is to be unbiased and logical.

We should discuss women’s contributions, by all means. But quite frankly I don’t care who makes the contribution, I only care about the impact of the contribution.

Therefore, highlighting an aspect of technology, or a recent advancement based purely off of it being from a man/woman or any number of ethnic/cultural backgrounds, is antithetical to the goal of science being unbiased. Literally the point of the scientific method is undoubtedly to remove biases, and find causality. We’re now introducing a new, subjective factor for what’s deemed a reputable contribution not for the contribution itself, but for what political agenda is aimed to be promoted.

Sure, highlight women’s achievements in the cultural category, especially cases where they were lost in history until recently (Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper). But don’t pretend to be the pinnacle of objectivity.

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