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Comment by ideamotor | Hacker News Reader

We lose this when everything is recorded forever.

Stated more eloquently: https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1681340407857422336...:

“I need to say this, even if it does not make sense until decades ahead:

Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember.

We will have to face eternal memories with AI technologies and this will be hard.”

I’d replace AI with just IT in general. Relatedly, I used to believe in digital rot but now I’m not sure. I can for example search all the photos on my phone instantly to return images with a given text string. So the technology is improving to comprehend any data format and effectively retain its data.

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> Human intelligence and a foundation of consciousness is just as much the ability to forget somethings as it is to remember.

What's the word for something that's phrased like wisdom but doesn't hold up at all to mild scrutiny?

"Just as much the ability to forget as to remember", feh. One of those things is a bit more important, isn't it?

The entire point of the quote is that the answer to your question is "No".

> We lose this when everything is recorded forever.

I'd argue the opposite, we've amplified this affect. Off-hand statements from the past recorded forever get re-examined through a new lens in the present. What previously might have been totally innocuous become a scandal later. Whenever someone rockets into being main character for the day on the internet, their entire history is pulled up and re-assessed.

So like many things, it's amplified by the internet, but largely for the negative.

Data, information, doesn't rot, but code does because it relies on the implicit promises of the underlying system(s) it runs on top of, the systems it interacts with, and the expectations of it's users.

Information on the other hand usually only gets more useful with time with very minimal relative-cost to maintaining code even though they're both digital.

And, like we're seeing, a lot of the "usefulness" of the information over time is new methods and tools for understanding that information.

That distinction is not rigorous. To be rigorous the distinction must not be made.

>Data, information, doesn't rot...

Can you tell me what hieroglyphics mean? What about a phrase of latin or another dead language? Information is only as "fresh" as our ability to interpret and understand it. Dead languagues are the same as a file who's format we no longer have the spec for. Yes, the ones and zeros may still be there, but without the ability to understand what they mean, there's little we can do with that information. We're still at risk of losing those capabilities for data.

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