jon

"Preserving Work and Experiences: Challenges and Solutions"

Transcript: Pondering I've been having as I've been trying to present myself better on the internet and I think this is partly a question of the, partly the portfolio question that Kristin is running into. Just Dave at the Sightcraft thing and experience of writing my own last build with me page. But there's a noticeable difficulty in pointing to contributions in more detail, in a level of detail that a resume can't quite capture. And I don't think this is something we've regressed from. I think resumes are a hilariously inept medium for somebody to look at 12 years of my life and make an assessment of whether I'm going to be a good fit for the standardized worker-shaped role they have in their organization. So I don't think we've lost anything from moving away from resumes. But what can we have now? What can we use now? And just as a thought, on my own build page, several of the things link to groups of other people where we bought a domain and we paid for a year of hosting. Some parts of that service are now decommissioned and frankly it's like ironically and beautifully running other people's services and their information as well, hosting it. But the point is nobody's apex is efficiently loose and broad enough to keep paying for these things. It's usually coming out of somebody's wallet and for many of these things I'm still paying hosting fees and domain names years after the project because I want it to continue having a presence on the internet, a piece of it that can be found and discovered and connected to other places. And it hurts to watch that thing go away even if the social field and the event around it has closed down and moved on. If we have nothing to point to in the past about what this thing was, I think I would argue it makes it more difficult to make things in the future because the literal evidence of our past efforts and creativity and dedication are being wiped out. So a question as to what can be done to better express those past experiments and projects in a way that lets other people who want to do similar things in the future make sense of them and potentially even learn from them and connect them to their own current ideas and open up possibilities for the future. So immediately my thought goes to archive.org and I don't love it. It's a non-profit. I think they're better. I love their work. I donated money for a fair bit of time to them on the regular, but I don't want to outsource this to somebody else's non-profit mission. Maybe a better way of putting it is I kind of feel like that's the last resort and it should be prioritized for knowledge that upholds the commons. So news, culture, points about the reality we share. In other words, I'd much rather that resource for archiving, storing, and upholding it and hosting it be directed towards my local newspaper than my own blog. It just, from a slightly perhaps utilitarian view, feels easier. To to justify if not an argument can be made that if I do some math and donate X number of dollars a month, I can sort of piggyback off of their their place. But I don't I don't love that. I feel like that's. It's pretty. Uh, it's again, it's kind of like paying your taxi driver to be your drug deal. Like, yes, they transport things. No, they don't want the liability of transporting that good. Um, and I think there's a similar thing here. Uh, I think I want things that I'm reserving here to have a richer context. And, um, ability to exist, then, uh, just just an archive.org on top. And, you know, they have to have their own constraints to work with. They can test things in their own way, make shortcuts when they can completely justifiably because they're not, they're not limitless and they don't have the resources of Google to archive everything. So, um, what's, what's another alternative? I think one thing that's noodling around my brain is some way to do this. All the things that I work on and I'm touching. So if I help somebody build a website for a shared event, I also pull it into some sort of service that I'm running. It takes a deep archive of that thing and, and runs it, um, and hosts it, but that's also a fair bit of work and is kind of just a reshuffling of the responsibility from me paying, uh, digital ocean or, uh, whatever other site block to post this instead of me posted paying my own server costs more directly, but also my own work and, uh, effort to keep that content understandable, indexable, accessible. Um, another thought is to encode it into a perhaps lower fidelity medium, but I'm not sure that's the most accurate way to say it. Uh, so if I have my experience, my personal experience of interhacked dot space, uh, there's that site. There's some recordings on YouTube. There is an update feed that might be revivable. And then there's also my memories and journal snippets and notes and, uh, experience of it that I could conceivable collapse down into a blog post that now has a lot less of a surface area to need to be, um, reserved because it's literally images and texts and we have trouble preserving those than God help us. But there's no, no more off the shelf, customized web server security domains to worry about. We can just be slash slash interhacked space story and anybody else that wants to point to that saying now has a lower entropy risk way to point to it. Maybe that's, that's how I would say it. So I suspect that's the closest thing to the portfolio approach where you're not necessarily linking out all of these things. You're creating your own encapsulation and, uh, your own encapsulation and representation of them that is again hosted on your own space, but it's also hopefully like more longterm sustainable and whatever the sort of groups, uh, groups, attentional and resource field back into that place. That's, that's, that's one way. I think one other idea here, and maybe this is just an extension of my own, but, is some sort of, ah, let me think about this a little bit. It'd be a bit like a Figma board that's meant for collaborative storytelling and writing, but every link that's put into it gets archived and snapshotted in a consistent way. So it becomes quite literally a memory time capsule, because you don't, an ordinary user doesn't have to think about linking to an archive.IS version of whatever they're linking it, linking. They also don't have to make sure that that version looks nice. They can quite literally just drop the link in there. And of course there's the recursive problem of how deep does the snapshot go? How many levels in that domain do we go? Same kind of indexing problem. Especially for something like linking to a tweet thread. You want to capture all the tweets in that thread, but then you capture all the quote tweets as well. You capture all the replies to those quote tweets. That's clearly the answer to BS. But that gets prohibitively complex and expensive pretty quickly. Maybe what I'm railing against to some extent is link rot. It's a sad thing. It's a well documented thing. Part of the problem is our current server architecture, server client browser architecture. I suspect, maybe it's history, I'm not sure, but the current trend of cloud list, instant deploy, rebuild, everything gets a unique deployment stack. I suspect this is actually less resilient to link rot because the hardware of a server and its DNS records, well the DNS records pointing to it rather, and literal web config on it, Apache or NGINX or what have you. Those were harder to change. They were more sticky. Once configured and put into existence. It wasn't just push your code. Everything has been rebuilt and there's a new version of it that exists. It's kind of related here. What might help in the future? Probably decentralized hosting for these things. In a fictional world, the Mac mini net exists and most of the things I want to run can be run on it. Especially if it's statically generated, but even if it has services running, over time it can get a proportionally smaller cut of the resources allotted to it. Perhaps enough so that one can host hundreds of services on a network of dozens of machines, each device contributing just a small fraction of its CPU load to that thing. And the data is living on, let's say a portion of these minis are very focused on or optimized for CPU, RAM usage, live hosting on massive uplinks. But then a couple of them are the library nodes that have 10 terabytes. This is the partial SSD, partial hard drive. I suppose this could be kind of like a scoped IPFS, but sort of like RAID so that each file is known only once, but stored as many times as its significance requires. So node module installations, not very important. NPM lock, pretty important. Server code, very important. This is also related to just the question of archiving family photos, like how do you do it? Right now most of my photos are in iCloud, and I'm literally trusting this company that's so far not done a terrible amount to make you not trust them, but still, they're pretty benevolent. Not benevolent, they have ENL sheets to worry about. Can I trust them to keep my data around forever? Do I even want them to keep my data around forever? If I want my data off of their servers, there's no law that says they have to get rid of it unless I'm a EU citizen. So these are questions that come up around the question, the sort of topic of data permanence on the internet and representing one's past to people that want to know, that may have just stumbled upon my site long after I did the thing, made the thing. Yeah, that's my thought.