Digital Detritus | Hacker News Reader

Digital Detritus

lcamtuf.substack.com

30 pointswalterbell9 comments

The word “detritus” is a favorite of my wife and I. We use it it many contexts as a little in-joke.

Public digital detritus doesn’t really matter. The huge FANG style corporations have excess disk space. The real gold in cloud infrastructure is to have as much data in-memory for fast access, and those servers have disk space that can be blended into robust distributed super size virtual file stores.

Personally, I like that at least some of my eBooks might be useful to a few people after I die but I don’t feel like I need to do anything to preserve them since I find PDF copies all over the web (which is OK with me).

Personal digital detritus in our devices is a hassle which is why I like to periodically wipe my laptops and setup again and why I like VPSs that I usually discard after a few weeks or few months when I don’t need them.

Personal cloud digital detritus is no problem. On family plans, everyone gets 1 terrabyte on Microsoft OneDrive and on Apple+, and I also buy extra Google storage for myself. I don’t every spend even 1 minute cleaning up old stuff in the personal cloud.

Another commenter’s wife manually puts together short family videos. I stopped doing that when Apple and Google started automatically producing vacation memories of photos and videos - Apple does an especially good job, and half the auto generated memories get stared to keep access.

> everyone gets 1 terrabyte on Microsoft OneDrive and on Apple+

It is true that there is the problem of max capacity, and some self-described “digitally diseased” just can't have enough of it [0]

For many others however, it is a problem of control. The more digital stuff they have, the more maniacal and desperate they become in trying to perfectly organize it all (again and gain) [1].

Anyway, this article is not about the amount of data or their organization. IMO It is about its deeper long term "personal" value. it can still detritus even if it is well-ordered and does not take much space.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/

My wife has been making videos of bits spliced together from out trips recently and the whole family watches them over and over.

I don't think I've seen this described anywhere in an "official" anthropological sense, but given that we all seem to be aware of this in passing, it's nice to discuss terms for it.

I have been using "digital silt" to describe it, because it's self-explanatory, like silt in a river, ultimately settling at the bottom of the abyss.

It has always made me think of Philip K. Dick's "kipple" which seems to have an actually decent definition at urbandictionary: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kipple

Literature is always a good rooting for language. :)

I wonder if future generations will be disappointed that our memories are recorded as photos and there’s so little video of when their grandparents were kids. Video is many levels more immersive, but I still find myself and others are more “camera shy” on video than when having a photo taken.

No one really wants to have an immersive experience watching Grandpa hold up a fish. Also, most people can take a decent still picture, while impromptu videos require much more dexterity.

Finally, there is nothing worse than showing someone a cherished video and watching their eyes glaze over because it isn't paced like a Tiktok video. In this case, a picture does a much better job.

good idea. I don't really like videos, although I might try for a change. I usually go with photographs and recently I've started printing out trips pictures, and gifting copies to friends that where present. Seems a better way than to leave everything in the hands of the god of digital forgetfulness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com