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Comment by 1propionyl | Hacker News Reader

Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap.

I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral transmission...

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> They either degrade

Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far (save for core rope memory, maybe).

> even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community [...] translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext

This pertains to the message and not the support; also, I'll take missing subtext over missing text any day of the week, thank you very much.

> Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far

https://arcticworldarchive.org/ would like a word

This is a high-tech vault located in the Arctic. Compare this with manuscripts that survived centuries by virtue of simply being on a library shelf in some random monastery.

Furthermore, the vault contents are stored on piqlFilm, which in turn uses Boxing barcodes [1]. So, they literally rely on an analog support.

I restm my case.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_barcode

If you’re going oral tradition, you might as well use repeatedly-compressed JPEG instead. Same quality but less space used by the storage devices.

I’d suggest stone tablets

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