The Library That Lasts | Hugh Howey

[@t0dd000]

For our survival, there is nothing more important than seed vaults. For our "in memoriam", nothing is as important as preserving our stories.

[@osmmanipadmehum]

you should get involved in convincing data storage companies to produce alternative lower tech interfaces for devices. For harddrives, Sata is probably much more difficult to read off of than parallel ata, and more protocols are also added logically to make more layers top of the real data in the drive, such as encryption, file systems, partitions, compression and file formats. These all make it more difficult to access especially if the available tech is lower than what the device normally requires to run, and in case make shift tech is needed to improvise an interface to read the data. Ideally a drive that can take a digital address (on the harddrive) as input and a ascii character as output would be easiest to manually retreive the contents. This would ideally behoove someone to create a method of access and storage on the drive where everything is stored in ascii or some other simple binary format. This could perhaps even be done as demonstration, by using physical switches on a harddrive to put the address, and leds or even lightbulbs outputting one single letter at that address. That would bypass all needs for computers and much of other tech.

[@t0dd000]

"One book in ten years." I feel seen. Surviver bias: yes! That being said, my work will be forgotten about, about a day after I'm dead. And that's okay. But yes, great minds get lost. Is that bad? Maybe. Maybe not.

[@dackdel]

also datacenters or 'm-disc' can be burnt to the ground much like paper.

[@andersonmorgan1610]

thanks for your beautiful comment

[@andersonmorgan1610]

thank you so much for the comment

[@manyRafting]

What is really remarkable about this talk is the gorgeous lady with the blue dress that appears at 8:45.

[@kukulroukul4698]

No ! its the brunette at 51:15 :)

[@t0dd000]

Digital won't last. Paper, good paper, will. The landfill or "randomly buried" paper books will produce survivors. Do digital as well, but, at least today, digital is ephemeral and easily lost at grand scale. But, of something structure, it'll be in big chunks. That's it future man can decipher it. M-Disk is interesting. It kind of merges the advantages of paper and digital. Problem though: M-Disk only lasts 1000 years. Paper can last orders of magnitude longer.