1980s-2000s : the information age
2000s-present : the data age.
Information implies it's correct, data implies it can be anything , true or false.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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aughts were not bad but it was falling and once we got in the teens ugh. oh and old man thing the pre www was advertisement free which was awesome.
sure. the cut off can be somewhere around there, start can be earlier too.
You'll pry my kitten pictures from my cold dead hands!
Checks out, at least in my case.
I self-host my email and pretty much every other cloud service I'd otherwise be using. My Gmail account is literally a spam catcher address, so everything there and elsewhere I haven't already deleted is 100% crap.
Solutions?
I don't see one unless our society because less dependent on bullshit and honors privacy. I don't know about anyone else but I constantly bullshit specifics about myself on line to dirty up any data collected on me.
Solutions?
Carbon tax.
In this micro example, imagine if you could access all of your data for free when there as abundant sunshine (carbon free), or had to pay for carbon based energy at night. You'd start to sort your data for what you really wanted so that you'd only be paying a small amount for a small amount of data.
sudo rm -rf /data
I’m imagining Data from Star Trek being deleted…
Captain, this is most illogical.
We fully transition to clean energy like nuclear and build more power plants to allow us to store our online stuff.
The author of this article is not a serious person. He's in the same bucket as Greta Thunberg. They just like to scream and blame people instead of providing practical solutions. It's frankly tiring to hear them despite their honorable intentions.
Thunberg's solution has always been "listen to the experts who have been screaming at you for 50 years." You don't have to be an expert to care about things or to want to listen to people who are experts.
"listen to the experts who have been screaming at you for 50 years."
That would be fine provided that it's done correctly and civilized. Which is my point. Raising awarness is fine.Throwing insults loudly left and right to raise awareness is not. It only makes you seem delusional and sheds a bad light on your cause. This allows climate change deniers to take advantage of that to further their agenda.
People have tried to politely call attention to the climate crisis for decades. They were ignored. Sometimes, you have to be chaotic to get noticed. See also: Stonewall, the Black Panthers.
He’s in the same bucket as Greta Thunberg. They just like to scream and blame people instead of providing practical solutions.
Greta Thunberg is 22 years old right now, and was "screaming" and "blaming people" when she was 11 years old.
She saw the world she was going to inherit and forced conversation to work toward solutions. Expecting an 11 year old to provide answers that none of the established world has is silly.
Greta Thunberg is 22 years old right now, and was "screaming" and "blaming people" when she was 11 years old.
Expecting an 11 year old to provide answers that none of the established world has is silly.
Fully agreed.
She saw the world she was going to inherit and forced conversation to work toward solutions
I disagree. I saw her speak and the reactions to some of her speeches. Her inflamatory and derogatory speeches did nothing more than help opponents of the energy transition. To give you an example, when asked about it during an interview Putin jumped at the opportunity to discredit the energy transition. While the public saw Greta behaving like a petulant child during the speech, they then saw Putin speaking calmy, asking real questions like "How are poor nations going to transition when they need cheap fossils to sustain themselves?". They then take this bit and plaster it on every social media site. People see it and are inclined to take Putin's side since he appears more knowledgeable and in control of himself. And just like that he gets a boost in his reputation.
This is why I don't like activists like her and the author of this article. They do more harm than good by expressing themselves in such a violent manner.
charge more to customers for long term data storage. allow short-term for free.
How do you differentiate old from new? I can just create a fresh copy of whatever I'm storing and it'll look new.
It doesn't matter, strict enforcement is not the point. we're talking about reducing "crap data" which is data people don't care about long-term. If you care enough about the data to copy it manually more power to you. If you don't care that much, you'll let it get purged, whch is the goal.
If the files are exact copies, then MD5 checks will catch them; tweaking so many files just to bypass this could prove to be too tedious of a process for people to bother exploiting it.
However, people could create scripts for others to mass-download, -edit, and -upload their files accordingly to reduce this tedium.
Massive deduplication across all accounts on all servers of image, audio, and video data would theoretically be possible, but ain't gonna happen. Or we could just discourage people from posting cat videos and bad memes (even less likely to happen).
Deduplication is trivial when applied at the block level, as long as the data is not encrypted, or is encrypted at rest by the storage system.
If the storage all belongs to one machine, yes. If it's spread across multiple machines with similar setups that share a LAN, then you need to put in a little thought to make sure that there's only one copy for all machines, but it's still doable.
In this case, we're talking millions of machines with different owners, OSs, network security setups, etc. that are only connected across the Internet. The logistics are enough to make a hardened sysadmin blanch.
I would argue that duplication of content is a feature, not a bug. It adds resilience, and is explicitly built into systems like CDNs, git, and blockchain (yes I know, blockchains suck at being useful, but nevertheless the point is that duplication of data is intentional and serves a purpose).
If the data has value, then yes, duplication is a good thing up to a point. The thesis is that only 10% of the data has value, though, and therefore duplicating the other 90% is a waste of resources.
The real problem is figuring out which 10% of the data has value, which may be more obvious in some cases than others.
Technically git is a blockchain
Sturgeon's Law in action again.