Molson Hart

Radical counter-idea: information abt the past is less secure than ever. Technologies, companies etc go outdated faster than ever. You can easily find paper photos of yourself from 30y ago, but difficult to find digital one 10y ago.

This whole every info is in the cloud forever idea is a huge huge huge mirage IMO. You can't even read a floppy disk or watch a VHS anymore. Can you even log into myspace? Will even Yahoo exist is 5ys?

That's a great point. I feel like this is true in part because, at the time, we expected those photos to exist forever. Now that we do not, we save them differently. Good predictions are rare, but I've been using the cloud as a photo repository for years and expect to continue.

Yes, attitudes have changed too. This whole concept relies on some continuity of technologies and companies. E.g. if we use a different pict compression in the future will any company bother to migrate your old photos? Cloud itself is only ~10y old.

The potential life expectancy of a stone statue is 10k years? A paper photo 1-200? A JPEG x.y file on a HDD of a remote server 10? Etc.

Is this our next great startup idea? Instagram, for stone sculptures? I agree completely. I think you need to make the saving redundant, i.e. make sure you have a computer with sufficient HD space and make the cloud autosynch to your hard drive.

Google drive is supposed to do that in theory. Redundancy is super important. Another one is encoding. For example data ppl lament why "ancient, inefficient" CSV survives (text files basically). It is because you can still read it 20ys later with virtually all software.

I didn't think about csv's in that way - cool. Re: redundancy, Taleb's takedown of competitive advantage in international trade gave me much to think about. We have two lungs, two kidneys. Should we not have some duplication in industry?