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Disagree, I'm with Kay on this one, life is much more powerful than current machines.

When was the last time your mind ran into an out of storage issue and crashed?

You talk about metadata being important, yet more than half of the storage used today isn't used to store books, or medical records or whatever business case, but traffic logs and virtualized package dependencies and shit like that.

It's called a senior moment, and you'll have them too if you've never had one before. In a middle of a conversation, you'll just forget what you were saying because you got distracted.

First of all that's memory, not storage.

And second, it's a graceful decay, you are not completely shut down from storing imporant information for later use. If in that moment something memorable happens, you will remember that.

The disagreement here seems to be about what kind of data should be considered ephemeral. Traffic logs from a decade ago? A ten-year-old package lock? I'm sure I don't care anymore. Documents I wrote in the 90s? Yeah, I might still want them. I might not need them everyday, but I can say from experience that I've needed to track down files that are more than a decade old, and I'm glad I was able to find them.

We strictly talking documents? It's very unlikely they will suffer from any decay since they are so lightweight. And to the extent that it's important you probably accessed it or shared it sometime in that period.

A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.

I'm talking documents in a very general sense. It might be a text file, audio, video, a software installer, source code, or anything at all.

> A video from the 90s that you never read or accessed in that period? Yes, a candidate for deletion, or at least a decay. For example, if it was a video, the transcript might be saved, but the video might be lost. We may also get some written interpretation on the visual elements of the video.

My point is that the video shouldn't decay, either. It might not be playable in modern media software for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't automatically make it a candidate for deletion.

If I learned of a old video of my grandparents, but a robot destroyed it, I would be furious. (Photos are what actually remain from their era.)

Oh yeah, taking screenshots would be a nice intermediate decay, instead of the whole video.

You have to think, in general, that we have finite resources, and the alternative is not remember everything in perfect detail, but forgetting things that you do not choose to forget.

Better to choose what we forget.

After forty-ish years, the limit on personal storage is ever higher. The sum of every filesystem I ever owned will probably fit on two of today's very affordable hard drives. (I should get on that for pre-cloud stuff.)

And decayed versions wouldn't get the author much mercy from bereaved families.

1- moore's law will break eventually. Depending on storage growing is unsustainable. We will need to develop solutions that work when storage growth becomes linear.

2- even if you can save the bits and bytes, there's fidelity loss in soft and hard standards, namely video codecs and connector standards. Not sure how planned decay would fit here, but relevant considering that document from the 90s needs is probably on a weird codec in a pre pata drive. Or even worse an analog medium.

Even if you don't admit that it will happen in this generation, it will happen in the next. We have companies that offer free storage like google, the economics can't sustain that forever, youtube videos are already being purged, google drive limited.

The cost of storing forever is unsustainable over the decades.

If you're trying to upgrade or rebuild ten year old software, it's very important to know exactly what its dependencies were and where to find them, because there are too many other versions to choose from and most of them won't work. New software only needs a lockfile because it will eventually get old (if useful).

Fair point. But that just means the breadth of files that might need to be preserved is even broader than I suggested.

Author here.

> Physical objects decay to the fundamental forces of nature, but that is a flaw, not something we should emulate.

That is explicitly called out in the article and I do not agree with you. Useful information is replicated, less useful information tends to die out. That we threw away that concept entirely in the digital world without a good replacement has some pretty strong downsides from my experience.

And if you read what I wrote in more detail you can see that I'm very open to the idea of soft deletes and intentional information hiding.

Information that is known to be useful is sometimes replicated. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone#Rediscovery was abused and damaged; only four incomplete copies were gradually found by luck after two millennia. There are entire academic fields trying to learn things about our history by digging up stuff that was thrown away or abandoned.

You can view software as tools or art, it is arguably both.

>It's why people look at inscriptions in old books, why they keep photo albums, why finding a forgotten item when moving furniture can be delightful. It's why we're able to identify trends.

I think it's often the opposite. Drawing confusing or bad analogies to the past rests on the false assumption that the future resembles the past, and the reason people love old photo albums or forgotten items is usually a kind of nostalgia, not because they hold relevance towards the future.

This is also why forgetting or deliberately wiping the slate clean is fundamentally a good thing, it forces people to rebuild things from first principles without being bogged down in false assumptions carried over from the past, it's why the people who build new things tend to be young rather than old. If past information was so valuable in determining the future most visionaries would be 60. Hanging on to old information is a form of digital hoarding.