Blog index–Rolling🥎blog–Permalink
Have local copies of stuff
Jake Thoughts — 09 Oct 2021 00:25:58 -0400The title may suggest saving your favorite websites or saving images or saving videos to your hard drive. This is just a subset of what I meant, albeit a useful endeavor. My real intentions go further than that: Print that website out! Print that image out! Burn that video to a DVD disk! Print/burn EVERYTHING!
Meme sort of related but doesn't go far enough. Hard drives and other forms of electronic memory can FAIL. [Someone pointed out that if you do go down the 'saving the entire internet' route you need to sort/tag everything you've saved because finding them afterward will be very difficult. If you are going to save everything, save everything more than once and on different devices so when one fails you still have backups (plural).]
But J-j-jake! I don't have enough ink for that! I don't have a DVD writer because modern gaming computer cases do not create space for them!
Pathetic. I suppose I can settle with you just saving everything on to a flash drive. I actually happen to possess a rather sizeable flash drive that I update infrequently - so I am at least understanding on that front. Also `ink` ðŸ¤. I will let you in on a secret regarding printers: a single cartridge (toner) for a lazer printer will typically last longer than an inkjet cartridge by sometimes thousands of pages with a cheaper cost per page. The hardest part by far will be getting the printer to work but that is a different story for another day.
Civilization - Institutions, Knowledge and the Future - Samo Burja (37 minutes, a good video.)
After watching the Civilization video, I was left with some kind of impression specifically about the past and how lessons of the past often BARELY made it to the present.
- "For 2000 known ancient Greek writers, we have 13% of it. ... And a smaller fragment of complete works."
- "0% of this culture is present with us today [because 2/3 of the Chinese population died which includes the entirety of this culture]."
This fear encourages the schizo within. What if the internet breaks? What if electricity gets turned off forever? You can't read your blog if it's intangible! Obviously that would never happen unless aliens invaded Earth. And I'm not saying that aliens will invade Earth and target these specific weak points... but they could. The chance is non-zero. How much data exactly is intangible and therefore at risk? I suspect a rather high degree and if something bad happens that semi-intangible data will remain forever intangible. Now, I also think in the event of a real alien invasion (real or imagined), they would probably bring back the 'internet' but only selectively and with lots of restrictions meaning your creative blog posts probably will not make the cut. Additionally, 'privacy' will most likely be heavily discouraged, so Tor, and other methods of getting 'anonymous connections' will not be allowed to function the way they have previously. My uninformed schizo-take on technology but whatever: maybe they will make it so that packets will require some kind of identification just to be transmitted[1]. I should stop giving them ideas.
A different perspective if my favorite boogy-man, the aliens (a place in for some powerful entity), doesn't sit well with you... Internet archives ... *can* be modified! One example that I know of is nearly every archive for original mewch, one of my favorite chans before it got [REDACTED]'d, does not exist even though, according to others, it used to. You cannot find internet archives on them even though they did exist at one point (I've made some personal copies of some threads but not enough, something I regret). Unless they are somehow made immutable through something like the blockchain, files can be removed or worse, altered. Of course, physical paper can also be modified and destroyed but the effort to do this would require it to be deliberate or a very bad case of carelessness. Paper documents will last much longer than electric documents would because they are already physical and not an abstraction somehow created from 1's and 0's that also somehow appears in a logical manner on a screen. Paper documents can also be converted back into electronic documents and printed again.
Regardless of the hypothetical risks, having a printed copy of something makes the intangible tangible (sure, you could argue semantics about 'what *is* written language? How does the brain interpret letters in such a way that we can understand abstract ideas from random chicken scratch?' but I think the planet's lingua franca will be somewhat resistant to being eradicated, take a look at Latin or ancient Greek for example). You DO have a piece of history. With luck it will find its way to the right person in the future. Maybe it will end up being a 'redpill' or maybe every one will greatly enjoy the story 1000 years later or maybe future readers will think 'wtf were they doing back then?!' or maybe the religion will gain a new follower or whatever. To me it doesn't really matter what the content is as long as it can reach the next generation(s) somehow.
I am doing my part! I've printed my entire blog! :^) Future historians will thank me for it.
I've also printed out some holy books, fiction, philosophy, and other things that I enjoy. You get bonus points for reading what you've printed more than once since you are making that paper pay for itself. Information is valuable and nearly priceless - worth more than the paper itself. Next step might be organizing it somehow and I cannot offer advice on that though I want to. Another benefit of printing is that you can annotate the paper without feeling guilty. It's not a $70 book!
Jake, I am totally unable to acquire a printing device and even if I do, what I print will be used against me regardless of the content printed.
Hmm... I hope your future will change for the better so that you can spend hundreds of dollars on paper, a lazer printer, and some toners. When I say print I mean print, if you are printing a book that you could buy, maybe buy the book? Perhaps printing will be a waste of paper if are going to end up buying the book as I have for some titles. Don't buy eBooks though, unless either: you figure out a way to print them, or it can be transferred to your file system.
Also, I heard that looking to the past is like looking to the future. Be someone's past so they can see their future! Or something.
[1] That idea alone kind of spooked me. I have thought of some things that might help in dealing with it. It would be a good idea for people, myself included, to learn about 'underground' ways of connecting to the internet (more than just Tor and I2P and Yggdrasil). Maybe look into what is needed to create some kind of private intranet that could connect to other private intranets. I believe this will reduce the power that 'turning off the internet' will have. Off the top of my head, large mesh-nets seem like a decent-ish option, though I will plainly admit I don't really know how they work besides connected devices are server-clients. I agree that it will be a pain to get people to even experiment with mesh-nets as with everything technology related especially when their internet already 'just works'. If one can create or join a mesh-net community, it would be a good idea to use TLS since who knows what the other nodes are doing. Ah, but if the mesh-net gets super big then the FCC might get force themselves to get involved and... hmm...
(This blog post was 'in progress' before Facebook went down for several hours while the media is pushing that they should have a seat at the UN. These incidents did encourage me to actually finish this... Lately I have been having difficulty saying 'yes, this is finished.' I have to almost impulsively publish blog posts (the Doppio cgi post was finished before the Gemini blog post, for instance) otherwise I will try to perfect them forever.)