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Comment by Trias11 | Hacker News Reader

If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations.

Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page.

So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.

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Reminds me of the Rosetta Disk that some folks in the futurist community came up with 15 years ago:

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

The Github arctic code vault appears to have created TAR archives and turned them into a sequence of QR codes on a kind of film. And then thrown them in a hole under 250 meters of permafrost in Svalbard.

I honestly thought you were being silly. Wow!

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

I noticed that Virgil got the arctic code vault badge, and thought it was funny, but I never checked what the conditions or criteria were. So I looked.

> The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size. (Repos with 250+ stars retained their binaries.) Each was packaged as a single TAR file.

Virgil bootstraps from compiler binaries checked into the repo--there is literally no other way to get a PL off the ground without a compiler or interpreter binary in some language another computer understands--so I guess the archive has a completely useless source-only copy. That is, unless future historians want to write a new interpreter in order to run the source that's checked in :D

What's potentially amusing is how GitHub might handle code revisions if they were possibly stored on a WORM medium. Several past companies[1] have attempted to engineer storage that might outlast us all and even Elon Musk snuck in one such repository[2] when he launched his Tesla Roadster into space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhase_Technologies

[2] https://medium.com/arch-mission-foundation/arch-mission-foun...

Black & white photographic film is the most stable practical storage medium that we have.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Fox_vault_fire

Permafrost: now known as all-too-temporary-frost.

Microsoft’s research’s Project Silica was doing interesting things on etching glass for long duration archival.

https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/ignite-project...

I would etch it as an photo onto glass.

"5D optical data storage (sometimes known as Superman memory crystal) is a nanostructured glass for permanently recording digital data using a femtosecond laser writing process. ... GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft, plans to use this technology to archive all public Git repositories. Microsoft refers to this technology as Project Silica with a claimed lifetime of over 10,000 years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

This practically grants that the titanium plate will be sold and melted being much more valuable as material than the information encoded.

QR code? I think many are really underestimating the amount of change in 500 years.

It's about the density of information, quality of preservation (eg. checksumming) and simplicity to decode.

Sure, QR codes are unlikely to be useful in 500 years, but if they have the above properties, they are just as good as anything else. If civilization endures, I am sure they'll be decodable in 5 centuries (whether they are preserved is altogether another matter).

There was a post here on hacker news of a service that would convert a static page and contain the entire page in a URL. That, in turn, could be converted to a QR code. I didn’t notice if it relied on something like bit.ly to store data, but it didn’t seem like it.

Unfortunately, I can’t find it again at the moment.

This one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317840

It encodes data in the # fragment of the url itself, but for decoding the data in the fragment it relies on the js loaded from the server also the domain must be resolved.

You mean a Data URI?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...

Pretty sure it was this: https://itty.bitty.app/

Yes, that’s the one I was thinking about.

Funny, I was just reading about this https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-paper-data-storage-option/ a few hours earlier.

Trying to find paper storage schemes for digital information.

ps: oh and the main linked site is dead (sic) so https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...

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