💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 04 › 21 › storn.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:51:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-14)
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< login> would it have been better for the internet to save
all its history?
Recently it has been too expensive to save it all. /usr/bin on unix came about because a disk ran out of space, so more binaries had to be placed on the user (usr) drive, and the user space got moved to /home. Or something like that. And that was at AT&T, which had mountains of monopoly money to spend. The problem here is that storing information costs energy; once storn, there are additional costs to maintain that information over time. Even if there are no or few ongoing costs--maybe the government is being nice, and does not tax your land--the storage medium and interfaces will degrade. I once found some tape drives optimistically labeled "40 year backup". There was already no tape drive available to read them with. Who knows if those tapes were still good? Another anecdote:
Much of the internet is somewhat less significant than a moon mission; such an effort is unlikely for most things. And with progress, older interfaces forever fall from favor. Who knows if after the heartbeats that are 10,000 or 100,000 years someone would be able to access the information, let alone understand it. Assuming they care to do so. Assuming they exist, and the information still does. Maybe a hypothetical inexpensive yet durable permanent storage medium will make for great building material, and will get pilfered?
Rocks, after a nothingburger of 1500 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_ancient_Taxila
Even more recently the practice is to copy vast quantities of information about, and to hope that the long-term backups never need be touched. If they exist. Are the backups even tested? Maybe it's somewhere in git. And long-term could mean a few months on the USB? Maybe the backup bill was too high--perhaps there was a failure to meet quarterly expectations--and backups got ironed out of the budget. One war or Carrington Event or just the simple passage of time later... so much for that silicon mandala.
What is the energy cost to permanently store ever increasing quantities of information that is mostly insignificant? To say less of being able to read it back in again. Is that cost even necessary? Even the zombies (ever condemned to repeat what is known) compress their massive feeds to make it tractable--so much more must the humans. Where's the quality in mere quantity?
“I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times, I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know. I devoted three years of my life to reading and studying these one hundred and fifty volumes, till I knew them nearly by heart; so that since I have been in prison, a very slight effort of memory has enabled me to recall their contents as readily as though the pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name only the most important.”
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1184
Dumas might be putting on some swagger here.
What sort of computing (and therefore energy, and resource use) can be sustained in the near future--centuries, millennium? Who knows! How useful is vast piles of ever accumulating junk to humans? Who knows! Most of it probably should be forgotten.
P.S. "stored" stuck me as having too blunt an ending. Hence storn.
