Forgetting

Per Minsky, big brains are a liability until an innovation comes along that allows them to be used properly. IMHO big disks, along with big RAM and big processing cores (now core arrays) are liabilities because we don't know how to use them. Because we don't know how to use them, we fill them with garbage and complexity, like big brains before whatever innovation enabled the human brain, and all that capacity becomes dead weight with a huge amount of inertia. A liability.

Few things depreciate in value faster than source code. Forgetting revisions is useless if the memory is just going to be filled with more code. The prospect of petabytes of bloated, broken, and rotting code in any sort of repository is frankly disgusting to me. We are drowning under the weight of programmers who think the product of their typing (not so much thinking) is so special that it needs to be preserved forever more. I pity the new yosefks, the debuggers of tomorrow, I really do.

I also implemented for my purposes backup scheme that deletes older backups in order to keep backup density inversely proportional to age of backups.

Does that mean Apple can sue me because they came up with the same scheme and patented it?

J.L. Borges', "Funes the Memorious"

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges.htm