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Comment by stanrivers | Hacker News Reader

Writing allows you to extend your memory.

Without writing, you are going to get lost in your thoughts and eventually they will all crumbled down around you when you push too far.

Writing is such a great invention - because it lets you transfer knowledge across time and between people.

However, I find less people appreciate that, without writing, a lot of the complex ideas people have worked through would not be possible. Your brain just can’t hold it all in there.

The paper becomes an extension of you and your brain.

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which is exactly why when paper becomes digital, free software (FSF and GNU free, not open source) becomes quite important.

I fear that it will have to get really bad before everybody agrees on this, and it might even be the case that people like me who worry about free software are wrong about our fears and everything will be fine... ultimately time will tell.

So I am curious about what you mean here but am unfortunately missing the point as the first paragraph and second don’t match in my head.

What exactly are you worried about ?

They are worried that if data is stored in a medium that is not Free/Libre that whatever is used to read the data will be discontinued/made prohibitively expensive and the information will be effectively lost.

I'm of mixed feelings about the situation, but tend to agree.

The biggest sign of hope that I see is that many programs use either open or simple enough standards that non-authorized/non-supported software can open it. However, this is always subject to change.

This makes me think about how Yahoo Groups is shutting down in December 2020. Or Geocities in the past. All the content on both platforms is user generated.

The companies that offered those services have the right to shut it down. It's not really a public utility that's funded by the people using it or tax payers or anything like that.

It's up to each individual to archive what is important for them. But a lot of what we publish online is across different devices and on different platforms. It's not as easy to manage all that data as it could be.

DRM is a sweet poison. It is definitely good for the companies producing content and encourages investment, but it offers no long term provisions for the survival of the content itself. When amazon goes bankrupt all of my ebooks in their format, in their reader will be gone forever.

That's why I refused to buy Kindle books as long as I didn't have a good way of adding them DRM-free to my Calibre library.

I do buy Kindle books now.

What is funny is that there are Kindle books on Amazon that you cannot read on your eInk Kindle!

For example, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forcing-London-Mathematical-Society... has as its format "Print Replica", which I like for math books as they are basically just high-quality PDFs. But you cannot download it to a Kindle Oasis, for example! Funnily, after you remove the DRM, it just becomes a PDF, and you CAN download it to the Kindle Oasis.

That's just ridiculous.

This is an interesting point. Is there a legal notion of 'perpetuality' for creative works? Would it be better if Amazon was seen as the current custodian rather than absolute owner? More like an art gallery.

> The paper becomes an extension of you and your brain.

Because when the medium over which we write (the "paper") becomes a digital computer-based system it becomes possible for some actor other than myself to gain control over this extended portion of my self and my mind.

And while this has always been possible to lose control over one's writing (other actors may steal and/or modify them, etc..) with digital computer it becomes possible to remotely do this in better and more efficient ways (...etc)

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