Paper Trails | Hacker News Reader

Paper Trails

aeon.co

92 pointsapollinaire16 comments

I was quite moved to read the account of how the papers of the diseased Jewish Philosopher Husserl where saved for posterity.

This quote struck me hard: > This reveals one of the essential characteristics of an archive. To be an archive, the material must be public – there is no such thing as a private archive. It is located in space, a space outside the person whom it historicises. In this way, an archive is always threatened with destruction, and with it the person or time commemorated. Totalitarian governments of all stripes have recognised this – for all the defiance of the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov’s phrase ‘manuscripts don’t burn’ – they do, and with them are immolated lives, ways of being, and cultures.

We must continue to build out systems like #nostr and #bittorrent -like hosting to ensure that any culture will survive the next wave of Left or Right politics that will no doubt require its own wave of (digital) book burnings

As a non-crypto person, this is the sort of use I could imagine IPFS being put to. Slow, distributed storage of websites like archive.org.

It is perfect for things like that. Z-Lib was stored onto IPFS. Although of course the issue isn't actually creating the repository of information, it is fighting against those who wish to shut any repository down.

Arweave has a compelling design for long-term public archival along these lines, with an explicit concept of 'endowment' to predictably cover the costs of future storage.

The Arweave endowment is just one of these crazy schemes crypto folks think up to make their systems harder to understand so you don't realize how they scam you. I'm not saying Arweave is a scam, but that's exactly what this endowment structure is. They may as well just mint extra tokens to pay whoever the endowment pays, and delete tokens that would have gone into the endowment.

BTW, Arweave doesn't guarantee permanent archival - nodes are free to decide what to archive.

I haven't followed Arweave closely at all recently but the creator seemed genuine and capable enough to warrant attention. As to tech itself, assuming commodity storage costs continue to drop ~indefinitely and somewhat predictably it feels intuitive to me how such a scheme can be viable. It's ultimately a bet on ever-reducing storage costs.

> We must continue to build out systems like #nostr and #bittorrent -like hosting to ensure that any culture will survive the next wave of Left or Right politics that will no doubt require its own wave of (digital) book burnings

I can't agree any harder than I do right now. The idea that any form of data in any medium should be destroyed/hidden is horrifying, regardless of the reason(s) that led to such decisions.

diseased? (sick / infected)

did you mean deceased? (dead)

It strikes me reading this, that edited archives of author's works is an antiquated concept. I can understand that back in the 1800s (or even the 1930s) having a giant box of paper would have been daunting to sort out, prepare for publication and then release. But in 2024? It seems ridiculous. Dump it all in SQLite and put it onto the Internet. Let AI sort it out.

I really wish a lot of antique content was available this way. I like to watch YouTube channels like Esoterica [1] and often he will lament that scholarly editions of ancient works are either unavailable or only available with much effort at exorbitant prices. We are living in a time where I should be able to have access to the entire Nag Hammadi library as high quality images that I can feed into an LLM for casual analysis. Imagine the entire Vatican Library available in a format similar to The Pile.

What a treasure it would be to have an LLM that is trained on every single piece of philosophical, religious, political, economic, etc. writing from the earliest Sumerian clay tablets to the current copyright cut-off date.

1. https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel

> What a treasure it would be to have an LLM that is trained on every single piece of philosophical, religious, political, economic, etc. writing from the earliest Sumerian clay tablets to the current copyright cut-off date.

It strikes me that such an LLM would have weights tuned only predicting the languages that were put into it. It would be unable to connect those texts to modern ideas and modern language.

You can ask it a out Vatican texts, but only in Vatican language.

I suppose that is only if you assume I meant "only trained on ..." which is a limited reading of that idea.

But even if you were to make that assumption, I feel pretty confident that an LLM trained on 5000 years of recorded language, from the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, through Hellenic Greek, through Shakespeare and including all text in all languages up to 1928, would be a pretty broad base of training.

Challenge: Tell me you have never read a thoughtful and contextualizing scholarly archival study without saying so.

Solution: "Dump it in a database and let AI sort it out"

If the available options are:

1. Purchase an out-of-print copy of a scholarly archival study on ebay for $100+

2. Load the original raw contents into an LLM and perform the analysis myself

I think the freedom to choose would be a massive benefit. It doesn't prevent you from doing what you want to do.

Edmund Husserl truly is the father of phenomenology. He's been somewhat overshadowed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which is a shame.

For anyone interested in studying phenomenology, and specifically the philosophy of Husserl, I'd kindly recommend his works "Logical Investigations" and "Ideas".

For personal reasons, I've been thinking a lot about paper trail in the legal / evidentary context lately. So I clicked expecting something about the analysis of an organizations paper trail rather than an individual. Still there are some similarities. Namely, a set of documents such that matching them with or categorizing by relation to other publicly known ones is the main puzzle, and a source of these documents that is possibly intentionally trying to obscure those relations.

What can the creation of this archive teach us about identifying corruption? I'm legit unsure, but maybe there's a relevant lesson?

Interesting read. Granting the contention that there's no knowing the "real" Nietzche, I'd still like to have a better picture of where his writing does and doesn't support the figure built up by his sister.

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