Post Apocalyptic Computing

Pure anecdote here but: I own three different external HDD hard drives, all bought at different times (one of them bought used and formatted, so I don't even know how old it really is) that have all been mine since more than 10 years ago. I still use them all and they all still work fine. Obviously I also have everything on them backed up to a cloud regularly, but so far, they've been perfectly reasonable in their speed, quiet and not too warm (the opposites of these three being red flags for near failure in my experience)

I also own a secondary work/careless travel laptop that's from 2005 and that I've owned since buying it used in 2012. It too works fine, though I did have to change its hard drive once.

I have computers from the 60s to this year and my experience is quite different; newer hardware breaks faster & is harder to repair. Everything I have from the 70s and 80s is all simply working without fail (if something is broken, it's usually just soldering a capacitor or 2); most from the mid 00s to now is broken and often not repairable. I'm talking 1000s of machines. A good exception are thinkpads from around 2010 (with the nice keyboards); they seem unbreakable.

Or just get lucky and end up with a Dr. Stone [1] :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone

I wonder if there has been any study of what happens to LLMs subject to bit rot, given the level of compression of facts on one hand and the “superposition of stored facts” on the other one ( I’m obviously a layman here, I don’t even have the correct vocabulary)