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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM. Screen names are still part of the identity of some of my friends. For some folks that have already passed, our last conversations are on AIM. Don't know what else to say, but it definitely feels like a link to another era of my life is fading away. Nothing is permanent.

RIP running man!

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You just reminded my that my main screen name I use for everything was the one I originally came up with for AIM in like 16+ years ago.

You summed up my feelings perfectly. So many notable moments in my life played out over AIM conversations, especially discussions with my girlfriend (now wife) when we were geographically separated during our college years.

Nothing is permanent, exactly so.

Our ability to slog around drives full of data lets us gloss over this fact, but when we're dead, are our kids gonna keep slogging around our drives? Nah.

Better way to get permanence in your life is to do things that people will remember you for, if permanence is what you're after. Crowd-sourced in other people's memories.

That's why you need to keep it on some kind of cloud storage drive arranging an annuity or trust to keep paying the bills. Then, you have a script on a cloud server that posts on Craigslist once a year or month, hiring someone to duplicate your setup on a new cloud provider, opening a port for one of your existing nodes to connect to and verify, and also ask that person to modify the reproduction script of the clone, so that it will post on a Craigslist equivalent but not Craigslist. You'd also need some logic so that the rate you add clones is limited to the rate at which your fund to pay for the clones increases.

Someone needs to write an Ethereum contract for data archiving! Pay for storage based on market rates, regularly verify integrity with hashes, etc.

Haha, a never-ending hell for the kids you leave behind when you die. Love it. It should email them monthly messages, too. "Your dead parents data is STILL SAFE."

I'd include in that email an estimate of how much money has been spent on the preservation campaign so far.

"If your ancestor hadn't decided to dedicate X dollars (inflation adjusted Y dollars for current year) to this project you would have inherited calculateInheritant(tauntEmailRecipient, currentYear, familyTree, preferredCurrencyDenomination). PS - please reply to this email with contact information for any new descendants. If email is going out of style as a communication protocol, please reply with a program that, when executed, will take from standard in a filename that contains a message, and as a second parameter a contact address. Attached to this email you'll find a project spec describing this program more rigorously.

I am also feeling really nostalgic about AIM shutting down. My HN screen name is the one I created for AIM many moons ago.

> Truly sad. So much of my young social life was experienced through AIM.

This could be read in more than one way. I agree it is sad.

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