Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.
> One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them
My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
What you fail to understand is the vast majority of people are not hoarders and don't enjoy hoards.
It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine.
If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.
Just wow.
I also don't think your implication that only a small subset of people ("hoarders") will enjoy such collections is correct. Most people can become sentimental even if that's not their day to day modus operandi.
Ultimately it gave me the chance to be for my inner child what my parents never were, but man there was a lot of pain in that process.
Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling is far from universal.
Sure, we are all different people. I was super happy to find my childhood class photo and marksheets that my dad had saved - it just underlined what I already knew, that he cared. I shared it with my children and we bonded over the exams where I didn't fare well.
> But that feeling is far from universal.
I know that the level of sentimentality isn't a universal thing.
I'm not going to hold them to cherishing this stuff and ask them to explain themselves if they just delete it. I just want them to have a chance at looking at small parts of their childhood. It is done without expecting gratitude or reciprocal emotions in return, which I guess, is part of being a parent.
So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x.
And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll take time to look through things.
I live and hoard long enough to know I rarely look back to stuff I've saved, things that I hope it will spark my creativity someday, never arrives (except for some really rare case, which is like 'hey, I remember this...,cool', you relish the nostalgia for a bit and then you move on eventually)
I agree with you that even digital stuff took toll on your mind. I remember the sadness but then big relief when my old HDD gone, along with stuffs. The thought that I don't have to worry about it anymore is a plus in itself.
In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise.
I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set.
The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood.
I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids.
Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it.
There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.
I have a single page document with the information I think somebody would need from my electronic files if I died. It's printed and stored in my fire safe. My next of kin has a copy of the key.
I don't really expect they'll do, nor care to do, anything with my digital files.
It could be that the longer it goes on the less relevant it becomes, but it will still hang over my head.
It's hard for me to imagine a problem that could only be solved in that way, or in fact that could be solved that way at all.
I agree that it's a lot of work but disagree that it's a burden - I see it as an opportunity to reflect on your and your parents' lives. And it is only a lot of work if you actually care about preserving the important parts, throwing stuff out wholesale is much easier.
Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?
My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again.
If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.
For what it is worth, I still find it frustrating when I cannot find a certain piece of information that I am looking for but I know exists because I came across it before but didn’t record it at the time. However, I also appreciate being able to forget distressing events that would find ways to remind me about their existence.
I guess all of this may depend on the exact definitions of knowledge, data, and memory, and how an individual reckons with acquiring, organizing, and forgetting information.
I still have a folder full of notes from several of my university courses, grouped by course. Some of it is source code (either the lecturer's or my own); some is assignment text (in a mixture of plain text, PDF, legacy .doc, etc.). There aren't any repositories because this was many years before Git existed and professors back then apparently didn't think we needed to be taught about the systems that did exist.
But why not keep it? The whole collection is smaller than, say, the OpenBLAS shared library that comes with a NumPy installation. It's maybe 1% of the size of the ISO for a modern desktop Linux distribution.
It's part of a folder with even older stuff - all the way back to toy Turing programs I wrote as a child. There are countless random files that are probably poorly organized internally, that I'll likely never revisit with any good reason. But the whole thing is less data than I'd likely end up downloading if I spent an hour on YouTube or Twitch. The ability to store it permanently costs me literally pennies, amortized over the cost of the drive.
... And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess.
Data size != memory size, and even memory size != binary size. It's totally fair to rail against the program text, and associated application data, that have to be loaded onto your machine in order for you to do something as simple as send a message on Slack -- RAM, unlike cold storage space, has not grown quite so exponentially, and wasting that space is expensive. And of course, the larger the binary, the slower the program, and the worse your programs will interface with other ones on the system.
It’s more about increasing the signal to noise ratio along the axis of perceived value.
The solution to this problem is the same it has been for literally centuries: archiving.
The whole point of an archive is that it's out of the way and takes no effort, even more so a digital one. But if you have/need/want the time/space, you or someone else can check it, and find a gem.
I don't think that's a problem. What turns logs into a problem is misplaced expectations on what is their purpose and how you should use them.
Logs are collected with the express purpose of being ignored, and as a safeguard in case in the future you need to check an audit trail of what you were doing. After a while, once the odds of those logs providing any value drops enough, you can safely delete them.
Your tool is only as good as you make it out to be.
I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are plenty of cases where people underestimated their own worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas.
Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on things. Old war veterans might not think twice about their love-letters between them and their partner, but taken together with a large collection of letters, historians can build new perspectives that we weren't able to see before.
> They have no idea what is valuable there.
Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It would require a person to have an idea of what could be valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that, together with more things.
For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query the db and so on.