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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

If the contents of your computer is anything like the contents of most old people's attics, there is a good chance your descendants really don't want to go through all of it. They'll just chuck it in the trash without even opening it.

Turns out the next generation has their own life to worry about, and doesn't care much for their ancestors' stuff (unless it's money... they love money...).

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Pretty much. Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares? Nothing is worse than trying to go through bunch of old faded photos where no one - even the owner - can identify who is actually in the picture.

I guess in our day and age we could write extensive meta data about where and when a picture was taken and who is in the picture, but I don't care to look through my own pictures, why would anyone else?

  > Anecdotes about lives of elderly people are nice when you are sitting an evening with a glass of wine and plate of cheese. Otherwise who cares?

I could imagine a future where DRM and copyright and just the cold fear of ligation could change the recreational screentime for families from being primarily studio-produced content to being primarily ancestor-produced content.

I remember some book I read where the child was constantly hearing about his family's history. Dune, maybe? Maybe a Philip Dick book? Asimov? I'm getting old.

I know my carefully curated collections of stuff will be worth pretty much zero to anyone a I leave them to. They may be interested in the pictures. But that would be about it. My massive cd/dvd/bluray/games/books/coins collection that I have amassed and carefully cataloged. At best it will end up at goodwill/ebay or at worst in the trash.

> Otherwise who cares?

People who can profit. And the idea of profit might be different in future.

That attic might contain a priceless vintage synthesizer, that encrypted drive might contain a priceless set of vintage unpublished club penguin screenshots that would make its AI approximation 0.03% more accurate. Etc.

My experience is completely different. I've painstakingly scanned my family's old pictures, transcribed the letters they wrote when on holiday, and still have some school crafts made by my grandparents.

After the death of one of my great uncles who died childless I picked up his photo and music collection. And I discovered the grandfather of a friend of mine in one of his holiday pictures, turns out they used to be friends and we had no idea.

But after enough time passes, lots of people do get interested in their ancestors. That's why DNA ancestry services are a big business - people get curious about where their unknown farther relatives came from. I guess there's just less mystery about people you actually knew.

Wow, perhaps I’m an exception to the norm, but this isn’t my experience at all. My family regularly sends interesting historical records of the lives of our ancestors. My great aunt composed a historical record of my great grandfather, who over his life built dozens of houses by his own hand. Even at university, I read a number of interesting historical letters and documents of the people who lived in the same dormitories in generations past.

I guess I may be ignoring all those documents that weren’t interesting enough to be remembered, but I imagine it’s hard to predict what will be interesting in the future. The fact that 99% of our lives are stored in computers vs paper would still vastly reduce the number of _interesting_ documents.

The key difference may be in the volume. Old pictures are more important to a family because there are so few of them. I only have one picture of my grandfather because it was taken when cameras were rarer than hen's teeth and 35mm film hadn't been invented yet. Now we have hundreds of thousands of pictures between the family members. Every vacation, every meal, every unimportant moment in time. I don't have time to look at my own pictures and I don't expect anyone else ever will.

Digital assets are a lot more perishable that physical ones. Cloud accounts will expire and be purged before anyone has the chance to retrieve them. Nobody will do "storage wars" with your pictures. Your local storage will fail or become incompatible with future tech before anyone has a chance to care about it.

We generate information at an ever increasing rate so whatever digital collections we have now will probably never be "dug up" by our descendants for a deeper look.

I'm trying to leave a "curated" collection with a few memories in such a way that it's immediately available to my family after I'm no longer around. Some moments in time that were important to my life, and had an influence on theirs.

Leave everything and let LLMs curate it on demand. "Show me pictures of my grandpa during the 2020 pandemic." "Show me pictures of my grandma's hobbies." "Find the most interesting pictures in this folder, not interesting historically but interesting action or visuals." "Make a montage of my cousins growing up." "Change my wallpaper every day to the most interesting family photo from that day of the year."

Great aunt, great grandfather — that's more than one generation back. I think it does get interesting when the distance in time increases.

Lets hope our kids and theirs keep our digital archives long enough for the great grandkid's to enjoy.

Fpr what it's worth my grandfather recorded his memoirs recently and I am very grateful. He's led a very interesting life (much more so than my own!) which is the key component, really.

Memoirs are one thing, but archives of mundane daily business? No thanks.

I agree with you. Right now I'm going through my grandfather's squadron records. Hoping to find the day that he crashed his motorcycle in Normandy to see what the CO thought about that. Apparently the other pilots were unhappy with him because they were banned from riding motorcycles after that.

Oh man I’d love to have all the data of my parents, grandparents etc… even just having analogue records is interesting I’d love to know what kinds of hobbies they had like collecting digital music, art, books etc.

I think you and the previous commenter have very different opinions on what "all" means. Connecting to parents and grandparents by knowing what art they like is one thing, but, for example, I have hundreds of photos of random bills and documents that I need to remember for later. None of my descendents would ever want to read through that unless they were investigating my life like in a movie.

My most frequent type of data in my personal archive is screen shots of tumblr posts that my oldest child like to take when they were 12 and we all shared photo saving account.

I do snap bills and white boards to remember but not with the eager enthusiasm of the long since grown up child.

Because I have been interested in my dead relatives, and because I suspect somewhere down the line someone will be interested in my living ones, I have been trying to capture their lives in books I have created (real books — printed at Lulu.com).

That seems nice! Thank you for the idea.

I don't think this is universally true. Some people actually make an effort to sort the stuff of their grandparents in the attic and figure out what still has some (emotional) value. But it's probably a minority of people.

It's the volume problem - I'm happy to read handwritten pages of my mom's diary from the 1960s, but the reams of laser printer out put from her master's degree in 2000s? Not so much.

The next generation will just run an LLM to mine the interesting parts out of the data.

Or tell an even more interesting story, 'cause that's what they want to hear.

What about that long forgotten BTC wallet?

Without a private key that is readily accessible? Worthless,

Wallet by definition has private key within it. Without key is just an address.

I think ‘readily accessible’ was the important bit.

I don't follow. The wallet is the private key, along with some other info.

The wallet could be encrypted with a strong password and thus inaccessible.

Yes, but any unknown password is enough to put most people off, particular if the contents of the wallet is unknown.

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