1000 years of embarassment for publishing lame code on GitHub - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 22, 2020, 09:48:31 am
content: Better write good code, or else...https://phys.org/news/2020-07-github-archival-storage-years.html1000 years of shame for you!

author: olkipukki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 22, 2020, 12:26:37 pm
content: The Era of Emoji is coming.Nobody will read and write in 1000 years timeP.S.caveonipad painting is leading trend

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 22, 2020, 01:38:59 pm
content: Not even sure what's the real point of that, nobody will ever touch it.And if history is anything to go by, problems with decoding it would have nothing to do with understanding 2020 technology and everything to do with undestanding 2020 English

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 22, 2020, 01:43:44 pm
content: By then, computers will be so smart that they understand the code themselves and run it in demo mode, on a simulated device, just for geek entertainment!

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 22, 2020, 02:31:23 pm
content: but then its so bloated with intelligence that it runs alot slower than ancient one. take for example Win10 vs WinXPand everybody forget that the best computers have been around since Adam, we just dont call them computers. that can make another computers from nothing, or breed another super computers within 9 months. either its a 1000yrs shame of lame code or.. your best code will be forgotten if you havent uploaded one.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 12:07:31 am
content: What I think is interesting is this question: will such a cache actually bootstrap any potential future civilization?Consider if we discovered such a cache today. Would it be a curiosity? Would it be useful? Would it be inscrutable and useless?Consider what we are doing today. We're storing data, with plain language descriptions. Which, by the way--Quote from: magic on July 22, 2020, 01:38:59 pmThey're storing it in multiple languages; you could've spent a few seconds checking.Which we know from historic precedence, is very likely to be helpful. The Rosetta Stone is famous for a reason!If we discovered a cache that was similarly labeled, likely we would have some understanding of one or several of the languages given -- there are only a few historic languages known today, from any context, that are just about indecipherable. And it's not clear whether some of them are merelyelaborate hoaxes...Indeed, most languages that were common 1000 years ago, arestill common today,given some fairly aggressive drift in that time. We have plenty of surviving works, and excellent understanding of them by academics today.So that's language. What about content?Suppose we found the archive of a semi-ancient civilization. It contains a large cross-section of their technical knowledge. What the heck can we do with it?Well...1. Translate the documents, as needed.2. The documents describe how to access, reproduce and work with the data.3. We will need a computer of some sort to process the data. The Github archive is QR coded, LZMA compressed, byte based, and has two very fundamental data formats: plain text in UTF-8 (for the most part?), and raw binary. (The text of course is stored as binary, but the meaning of those bytes must be decoded and translated, a substantial effort.) Probably, our hypothetical historic archive has similar methods employed, but we must figure out what, and we must figure out what encoding they used -- maybe something like ASCII but based on the local language, maybe something awful like EBCDIC, maybe something entirely different like custom PDF font encodings, or like some vintage game consoles have used*.*Tile-based graphics, with hard memory limitations, force a simplified character set. Text might be encoded on a dedicated tilemap, or as part of the base tilemap at whatever offsets the characters happened to land on. Things get very interesting when Kanji and Latin scripts must be supported, as some (JP/US) game titles did.4. But what if we don't have a computer to process those data? If a more primitive civilization picks up our data, we might hope they can bootstrap off of it. If more advanced, they might at least enjoy the quaintness of our playthings, and recreate them on a hobby basis for example, much as hobbyists today recreate vintage architectures, instruction sets and so forth.If more primitive, the best we can hope for is, the data get published as widely as possible; the most basic, accessible and translatable data at least. A team of researchers could dedicate their effort to decompressing things by hand, and probably they could prioritize repos by what seems most promising.But what would be promising? Probably not the gigs of inscrutable minified JavaScript and other crap. Text files would be nice, just for basic understanding. (Historical similarity.) What would be really cool, are examples of simple, low-level machines, as hardware, emulator, instruction set, etc.I think what might end up happening is this:Say we discovered such a cache around 1900. Or 1950, or 1800 for that matter. With the technology present in each of those eras, we would be able to construct some sort of very basic, low level machine. In 1800, it would likely be a hybrid of mechanical and human function. (I'm sure figures like Babbage would be utterly fascinated by such findings!) In 1900, electromechanical to electronic; in 1950, vacuum tube to solid state.I can imagine it would be a hobby just to construct models of various instruction sets andvirtualmachines -- the archaeo-6502 might well be one of the first implemented. What's funny is, it might not prove very useful:a. 6502 is a simple instruction set by VLSI standards, but it still takes thousands of transistors. ENIAC used as many tubes and relays (well.. a few more), and was far more limited in general computing terms (though far more powerful, numerically, per instruction).b. What use is a computer? First priority, automate computors (human computers). Your basic four-banger calculators, and some more advanced sequential machines. Then automate sequences of operations: accounting (IBM's bread and butter of the day), creating tables, and military applications (many of the early computers were merely for firing tables and other what-today-seems-like-bullshit tasks). Everything from Babbage to early IBM to ENIAC. Nothing very general-purpose if at all, there's far too much hardware required to build such a thing, let alone any understanding of how to do that.c. But these are still very big machines. Thousands of working parts, whatever the technology: at best these would be the hobbies of prominent academics, with any luck, helped with patronage from anyone they could convince of the value of these things -- especially corporate, government and military.d. But also the competitive advantage is hard to tell. Likely many would argue that these historic records are humanity's shared achievement, and thus they would be translated and published widely.What I can't decide is whether some of these problems would solve themselves. It was averylong time before we got modern operating systems, languages and semantics -- early pioneers could see it back in the '50s, 1850s for that matter; but it wasn't until the 60s and 70s that these sorts of things were finally realized (e.g. the introduction of Algol, Lisp, C..), and decades further before they became widely accessible -- outside of academic and professional environments -- personal computing. Perhaps the accessibility of the ideas alone would lead to a cultural revolution, perhaps we would have languages structured after the historic examples, before any machines even exist to implement them? Perhaps we'd have assemblers and compilers right away, rather than waiting some years, decades, for their introduction (with great ease of use, mind)?It may very well be that, without the widespread availability of hardware to actually test out these ideas on, they might never catch on. Even if widely published.But I digress; such is the nature of the what-if.Tim

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 07:30:53 am
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on July 23, 2020, 12:07:31 amOP's article only mentions "multiple languages" in the sense of computer languages. And the project looks to silly to me to research it further. But I give you that, I need to update my stereotype of Americans from "they will write it in English only" to "they will translate it to every obscure Amazonian language for brownie points"Civilization and computer technology is so widespread and globalized at this point that it doesn't seem possible anymore for any "barbarians" to ever manage to destroy every trace of it. (And honestly, if they do, screw them.) The practical gap between the "digital haves" and the "digital have-nots" doesn't quite increase their chances either.There is a lot of hoarders who will preserve anything worth preserving. There are even hoarders like the Internet Archive who preserve data not worth preserving. The problem of future historians will no longer be finding artifacts to study, but finding anything of value among gigabytes of poo.Realistically, it's another exercise in vanity like the Pioneer Plaques.QuoteeditAnother day, I have seen a wiki-fucking-pedia article about "Anonymous" which matter-of-factly mentioned that there was over 9000 of them. Which shows that even today so-called "scientists" and "journalists" don't understand contemporary Internet culture.Quote from: magic on July 23, 2020, 07:30:53 am

author: mikerj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 09:33:08 am
content: Quote from: magic on July 23, 2020, 07:30:53 amFrom an individual perspective you can't determine the "worth" of specific data. It maybe worthless to to you, but not to others.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 09:57:17 am
content: My first reaction after reading that article was: "but wait, that code of mine was just a draft, I can write it better!"About how and why, and if it makes any sense to store GitHub for 1000 years, maybe somebody from GitHub recently read the "Earth Abides" novel, and took action from a software perspective.Since we are at it, from the perspective of forgetting how to read because of an event somewhere in the next 1000 years, we can learn from the past history, when humanity almost forget how to read and write:Well, we better not do that again.

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 12:00:31 pm
content: Quote from: mikerj on July 23, 2020, 09:33:08 amThey have a policy of saving pretty much everything they can, so to disagree with me you need to claim that for every data put on the Internet there is somebody who still considers it worth something. Off the top of my head, not sure if that's the case, but I'm not interested in arguing

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 12:09:17 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on July 22, 2020, 09:48:31 amDon't worry. If an archival medium claims to last for 1000 years, you might get 10 years out of it... assuming rats don't nibble on it first.

author: SparkyFX
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 03:46:49 pm
content: The interesting part is the storage technology, not so much the information (from todays perspective). In 1000 years only the durable media will have survived and content will matter more than media (as unsuitable storage media has not survived there is nothing to compare to).

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 04:28:35 pm
content: Quote from: SparkyFX on July 23, 2020, 03:46:49 pmThe fact that it will be stored in Svalbard, in controlled temperature conditions will help. There is yet another important storage there, a plant's seed preservation facility, a Seeds Vault.The Svalbard Vault is one of the key locations. It was designed to last.Svalbard as an inhabited place is also unique.I like snow, would love to live there.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 23, 2020, 04:29:18 pm
content: If humanity suffers such a catastrophe that we loose knowledge of computers then they have more important things to worry about then resurrecting petabytes worth of mostly shitty code (i wrote some of it so i would know).How long did it take us to go from living in caves to building pyramids? Then how long did it take us from there to finding what water is even made of? Then how long did it take us to go from that to having smartphones in our pocket? It has only taken us about 100 years to figure out all of our computing knowledge, while all the other stuff have taken many thousands of years.And even then most of the progress in computing is in the technological advancement of figuring out how to build a faster and more powerful computer for an affordable price.

author: KL27x
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 05, 2020, 12:30:33 am
content: Berni got it right.Knowing human history, the best way to bootstrap civilization out of a mass of culture-poor humans is to preserve the knowledge of our most effective weapons and tactics of every era.The tribe that finds this will exert control and dominance and unite a bunch of bickering primates whose only goals are to fight with each other over the best rocks and dirt.Advanced civilization is sprung from the efficient consolidation of power. Until then, it's just a big boiling pot of crabs, dragging each other down to get to the top.Advanced weaponry is the easiest and surest way to achieve this. This power crosses all language barriers and leaves no doubt who's in charge when your democratic referendum stalls or breaks down.We have computers at all because of WWII and the cold war.After weapons, the knowledge of currency and banks, debt and credit.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 05, 2020, 05:05:04 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on July 23, 2020, 04:29:18 pmSure, and the github initiative here in itself sounds a bit vain, and you may question the relevance of the data itself, but the general idea behind it is still interesting.All of the past history of the universe in general (not just of humankind), we have been able to figure it from cues and evidence that lasted for an extremely long time. Without that, we would know about nothing about the past beyond a few decades.Modern technology is NOT durable. We seem to behave as though everything we do now will last forever, yet we use increasingly short-lived media to store information. In general. If you think about it, even our own physical existence - whereas we are still able to find very old bones from very ancient species, we now increasingly burn dead people, so the probability of finding any physical evidence of our own existence in even just centuries from now is getting lower and lower.We just rely on our whole system lasting forever, but nothing lasts forever.You seem to think that if something severe enough happens that we'll lose the ability of accessing all current humankind's data, then it won't matter anyway. This itself may look reasonable at first, but I don't think it is at all. This is reasoning as though we were at the top of what we could ever be, and if anything bad happens that breaks our current civilization, then all odds will be off basically, and the future of humankind won't matter. This, at second thought, looks like pretty vain thinking IMHO. It's like seeing ourselves on a very short term only.Bad things have happened in the past, and bad things will happen in the future. Things that may even destroy our current civilization, but that won't mean that humankind will be over, or that another intelligent species won't take over, and in time, will be glad to find evidence of past history. If we do nothing to help that, there may be nothing left of us whatsoever even just a few centuries later if something drastic happens, something that has never been the case in the past, or with other species.Just a thought. It's kind of "interesting" to think about, at the same time, how badly we have influenced our environment, and how little there may be left of us in a relatively short time span if we ever disappeared.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 05, 2020, 06:16:56 pm
content: Quote from: magic on July 23, 2020, 07:30:53 amIf you give the modern scientists a Gigaton of poo 1000 years old they will be ecstatic. A lot of lifestyle information can extracted from poo. So yes, it is valuable !

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 05, 2020, 06:48:11 pm
content: True, as a historical record of the state of computing in the year 2020 it is a pretty good way to do it.For example we did go back to the dark ages after the Roman empire collapsed. We might have had smartphones 1500 years ago had that not happened. Some saying that one of the reasons for its demise was that it got simply too big. Perhaps if some Roman smart ass got bored with some different metals and some lemon juice and then realizing this mysterious energy could travel long distances along wires to carry information way way faster than a guy on a horse...Then again this would have just gotten us a shortcut to our eventual screwing up of the whole planet and killing ourselves.

author: olkipukki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 04, 2020, 08:56:02 pm
content: Quote from: RoGeorge on July 22, 2020, 09:48:31 amTooo late, been already badged

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 04, 2020, 10:29:32 pm
content: Oh, no! Same here. This will probably stay as the most embarrassing thing of my entire life.https://github.com/rogeorgeBest reason to start working on Project Immortality right away, so to be able to intercept and silently patch the code capsule in 3020.

author: ebclr
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2020, 03:54:19 pm
content: "The Era of Emoji is coming."In China that era started 2 milenions ago那个时代开始于2百万富翁的中国

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2020, 05:39:10 pm
content: Quote from: ebclr on September 05, 2020, 03:54:19 pmAre you sure 2 Chinese millionaires started it?

author: RenThraysk
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2020, 05:59:26 pm
content: Yeah, one of my projects got sucked in.Like how they phrase it "Arctic Code Vault Contributor". As if I did anything to contribute, or even asked. Bit impolite of them.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2020, 06:28:35 pm
content: An archivist mindset is hard to understand, because it’s a goal in itself. If your goals are different, there is no common ground to explain that kind of activity. One may try with finding some practical(?) applications that appeal to you, but this is just rationalization of an already made choices.If a millennium from now historians have a chance of laying their hands on that archive, they will be crying from joy. It doesn’t matter how bad the code is: it is an invaluable record of the reality in which we live. The real reality, not idealized myths or political narrative of the winners. This code will convey some part of our profession and hobby activities — something that 1000 years from now will not exist anymore or will be a totally different thing. It will shine some light on areas of life affected by that software. Could you tell what kinds of pornography were people using in the end of 19th century? In 3020 you will be able to use the youtube-dl repo to draw some solid conclusions about that content in the begining of 21th century. Do you know how many documents from different sources had to be collected and crosslinked to get even a vague image of what people knew in Middle Ages? Now look at physics modelling software or numerical solvers on GitHub and imagine that you can draw those conclusions instantly WRT our own times.And in 1000 years there will be no you. If you are not ashamed of publishing this code now, when it can affect you, what’s the problem with 3020? No one will know you even existed. Except some people who read your code. Perhaps you wish to be remembered for code than for skull found in a plague grave.Of course for GitHub it may be just a publicity stunt. I do not know their real intentions.

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 05, 2020, 07:33:48 pm
content: Quote from: golden_labels on September 05, 2020, 06:28:35 pmHmm, which of the causes would more likely result in them slapping lame-ass "badges" on people whose code they have taken?Quote from: golden_labelsTime to rewatch?