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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

Why aren't we saving this stuff? We have a way to turn dumps of raw human creation into very useful models. Why isn't there a scramble to preserve things like this in the very least so that it can be used as training data?

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People save music by pirating, but copyright law and its enforcement sabotage the effort. The current copyright system leads to a loss of cultural heritage.

For a narrow definition of music yes. Music is more than the audio. It's the packaging, the media, the artwork, the liner notes etc. The changes to these over time are as important as the changes to the music IMHO. They speak to our culture as much as the music does.

There's plenty of pirates who care about preserving artwork and liner notes! It's not everything, sure, but it's a lot.

And arguably they do a better job than the big (and small) labels which just throw a bunch of MP3s at you, maybe with a cover.jpg if you are lucky.

What a sad, sad rationale for preserving the fruits of human creativity.

The enemy of my enemy...

... is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less. Maxim 29

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-12-31

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-03-08

https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_...

> is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less.

The enema of my enemy: Simultaneously more and less.

Fruits are made to be eaten.

I agree! But I also understand that there is an awful lot to preserve that possibly would never be experienced again. Sure, they're preserved but if nobody ever sits down and listens to the record, does it exist? Is it worth preserving?

I believe in preservation but I also have a hard time justifying the rationale. To what end?

If things keep going as they have been, there will be more people in the future available to stuff from the past than there currently are.

This is true even if the population flattens out.

The article mentions that they convert to digital from the massive physical archive they have. I think it's a matter of turning those hundreds of thousands for records that they have into digital is a massive effort.

I can see why they dont save the physical copies, but I think the problem is physical record input rate > digitize rate leading to tons of inventory space.

Publicity like this should really help. How many people would even be aware of it? Well, clearly a number of people in the music world, but not many outside it. Now a few more.

This is primarily an archive of physical media (less than 10% have been digitized, and the goal isn’t to replace it with a digital archive), not very amenable to be used as training data in that form. The focus being on physical archival and cataloguing the physical artifacts is probably also why it has trouble getting funds.

Funding. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities struggle to get funded, especially with disciplines like history being in the crosshairs of conservatives. Archives barely get by and often have to make hard decisions about what the preserve based on their budgets. And then going from physical media to digitization is a nontrivial expense.

I think that preservation of art and history is amazingly valuable and I think that efforts to make this stuff available digitally is amazingly valuable, but these aren't profitable enterprises so they depend on a trickle of grant funding.

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