It used to be you could find a box of photos or keepsakes that you inherited to look back on how things were or when you were a kid. Now, most of that is stored on phones, and most parents probably don’t think to share or save them in a way to be passed down in the future.
Very few really care about all of the data you’re producing over your lifetime. How many times have you taken serious efforts to go to the city archives, or read through inherited documents and photos, etc…?? Are you doing anything with them or just sitting on them?? Flicked through it once? Fun.
Now with all of the bulk data we produce what are future gens gonna do with it? Prolly dump it into an AI to summarize and puke out into some trite little video memoir… That’s it, your life reduced to a twenty second collage for social clout.
If you set out to fight entropy, you’re not gonna win.
Pretty much. I’m a data hoarder, to a degree. My homebuilt, Ship of Theseus NAS is about 15 years old, and it contains data going back over 20. I save everything I produce.
I figure that one day, this data of mine will be fed into a system for future use, in the vein of how they construct people in the Star Trek Holodeck. So, I feel it’s up to me to curate that data, and be sure it’s accurate and reflects who I am.
These days it’s obvious that it will eventually be turned into training data for an LLM, but then at least, my data will have some structure and personality to it. Maybe someday a joke will be cracked for someone that came from a pattern I established. Probably not, but one can dream.
Fair enough, I like your way of thinking. I keep a lot of data too, even though I don’t have the same hope as you do… Oh well, not like it can hurt anything.
For a long time, when I’d replace a computer the new one’s hard drive would be so much bigger than the old one I would just copy the old computer’s entire drive into a folder of the new one - I think I did this at least four times before I decided that I almost never looked back into those older folders and found anything valuable.
I looked back 15 years like that once and found: clip art, and banner printing software for a printer I threw out 14 years earlier.