What I mean is: You can type an entire novel on a computer, and oopsie a random cosmic bitflip and system crashes and now its all gone. Or you do a lot of filming and the digital file can get corrupted. Where as stuff like, a typewriter, it’s less likely to just be all gone due to some malfunctions. Same with film, a cosmic bitflip can’t delete all your footage.
Know what I’m sayin’?
I feel like you might be young and not have had to actually use analog stuff. Your whole family trip photos could be gone in an instant because you burnt the film accidentally, or you could lose the film before getting it revealed, and although rare (probably as rare as a bit flip destroying data nowadays) it happened that pictures were destroyed during the revealing process, and even if all of that worked the pictures could have been over/under exposed, out of focus, or any other variety of issues.
Typewriters? I wrote stuff in them when I was a kid, granted computers were around back then, but I liked the sound. They would jam the hammers, run out of ink, or just annoyingly one letter would not work. If you’ve made a typo or wanted to edit something the entire page had to be thrown out and rewritten, and if it didn’t fit now the next page would have to be rewritten as well. And now that you’ve finished writing and left the pages on the table a spill could destroy your day’s work, or your dog could eat your homework.
Film? I don’t think anyone here has actually dealt with film unless you work in the industry. For home users we used to use videocassette, which is a digital medium, and a very flimsy at that, dropped soda on it? Gone, it got stuck in your player? Gone, you put a magnet near it? Gone.
On the other hand digital pictures, text and movies you can have multiple backups effortlessly and completely avoid any possible single disaster scenario.
Yea I’m gen z lol
I’m just kinda scared of this AI thing and clientside scanning becoming mandatory in the future.
I mean, you write anti-government stuff on your computer?
Oops, files has been deleted because it “threatens national security”
They could make this AI scanning thing hardware-based bypassing linux (see Intel ME and AMD PSP for example)
There are several ways to counter that sort of thing, but let’s start from the beginning. LLMs (what people call AI) is VERY computational heavy, you need a powerful GPU to run a model locally, and it occupies lots of power and memory. The idea that we’re even remotely close to something like that being embed into hardware without people realizing it is just absurd.
But let’s imagine someone is able to make it, and magically prevents hackers from breaking it and using it as extra free power. This will have to live in the CPU as anywhere else wouldn’t have authority to “delete files”, and even the CPU would have a hard time doing that. Now this LLM needs to distinguish stuff I’m writing with stuff I’m reading, otherwise it would also delete files when someone is observing me. It also needs to reply in sub millisecond otherwise the computer will lag absurdly. It also can’t update it’s local model because it doesn’t have network access, so just use tokens it hasn’t heard of.
In short if someone managed to add a piece of hardware capable of doing that it would have to be significantly more powerful than the piece of hardware it’s embed in, and it would only work until someone breaks it and gives everyone a free hardware upgrade.
You can relax, nothing like that is even remotely close of being theoretically possible.
That being said, Windows doing this or similar is a possibility, your best bet is to use an open source system.
None of this is an issue when you have data integrity checks and proper backups.
So no, I don’t know what you’re saying.
Digital (as in data) has the ability to be easily copied, modified, searched, encrypted, transferred. Making a backup is trivial and virtually free, with less of an environmental impact.
Digital data always ends up being held on something physical which can be destroyed with the same processes as analog data can - except the digital storage medium can be more resilient to some external factors while being vulnerable to some extra ones which analog is not. In other words: a little bit of fire will not destroy a hard drive, but will burn paper easily. An EMP will destroy a hard drive but do nothing to paper. Both can be protected for either case to a certain degree.
Make backups of data you don’t want to lose (digital or analog). Don’t make the mistake of thinking one is more secure than the other.Can I introduce you to the concept of “fire” :D
A single bitflip wiping your novel is incredibly unlikely, to the point of being almost impossible. Modern OSs and filesystems are fairly resilient, and the data is likely all still there.
Fire? Never happened to the houses I lived in, seems kinda rare ngl (/joke)
But like you ever heard of Microsoft just yoink your files onto OneDrive then deletes your local copy? Then oopsie, ran out of storage, and you didn’t pay subscription, so your cloud is gone too…
I don’t think an evil arsonist can even do that much damage, deleting millions of files across the world.
Maybe not yours, but I’ve had a fire in my life that deleted lots of pictures and stuff, whereas all of the digital media we have is still with us because we copied it to several places so no single event could destroy it. If you only had one copy of an important digital file, you’re doing it wrong.
I have heard a lot of people complaining about deleting the Local copy… It seems to mainly be a bad faith argument where deleting the Local copy just refers to the process of freeing up local storage of unused files(?) repeated by people who doesn’t actually use OneDrive but want a unarguable point to why it’s shit.
(Mind you I think it’s bad enough that Microsoft tries to kind of coerce you into handing them your data)
To be fair, using OneDrive is like using paper that can spontaneously combust at any moment.
It’s on by default lmfao
Your brand new notebook comes pre-gasolined
My laptop came preloaded with Linux.
Haven’t used Windows for anything at home for years now. Even convinced my wife to switch her laptop to Mint when she got fed up. It’s been nice.
OneDrive is absurdly easy to not use. I feel confident saying that if you can’t figure out how to save an MS word file to a non-onedrive folder you should definitely leave it on. A single backup on a cloud service with a local cache is better than a single backup on one physical drive that will eventually fail.
If it’s important, you want at least three backups in two different formats with one physically removed from the others. A copy you save to a thumb stick, a copy you save to OneDrive, and one you print out. (Or, conversely, the physical copy you bought, one electronic copy local, and one copy of that electronic version saved to iCloud or what have you.)
Not really. Your examples work both ways to me. You can loose typewriter stuff as well, like say you spill something all over it. For film I have heard horror stories of it not recording or the film failed so same applies to that as well. If anything stuff like word files now default to save every 5 minutes and honestly if its that important it should be saved both local and some cloud location as well.
I think both sides have pros and cons just like everything and neither are any simpler, at least to me.
I felt like I agreed with the title, but the logic in the explanation doesn’t hold up for me. I don’t think analog or digital are more resistant to various things that may happen – both are susceptible to their own things.
Where I do agree: I can hold a vinyl record in my hand, and it’s MY copy. Mine has a scratch that makes that noise on track 2. The crackle is specific to mine. It is unique in a way that the Spotify equivalent isn’t.
But put that record in the wrong spot, it’ll warp. Everything dies, just in a different way.
PSA: I am not suggesting equivalence. I’ll take analog all day long and it shocks me that people are willing to pay over and over again to access the same content with digital streaming. But yeah, can’t get behind the logic in the post.
Right a big selling point for digital was the ability to make a ton of copies and not have to physically store it in a file cabinet or something
Back in the day there was a fire where they stored military records and a ton of “permenant” records went up in smoke
Really you need the ability to have both in case one fails
Ok…but thats not an arguement for or against analog or digital. You’re just making the case for redundancy. You can achieve the same thing by making a copy of analog files, and simply storing the copies in a different place.
NOW if the permanent records burn, there’s a backup. And that’s the point of redundancy.
Yes, analog is more tangible, if you define it in terms of user experience. For me personally, holding an actual paper book and smelling the paper is an entirely different experience than an ebook-reader (although I do love mine). The act of looking up a piece of music in your collection and playing the physical medium on a device feels more satisfying than simply looking up the digital stream.
However, ‘tangible’ is nice, but ‘intangible’ has its advantages too. I rip my CDs in order to be able to listen to them on my phone (and to have the music in my collection in case the CD breaks). Last time I bought a few CDs, I even got a download linnk for the digital files as well. Neat! Backups are way easier with digital, both on-site and off-site. Finally, the abundance of digital streams makes it easier for me to discover new artists. Digital media have their use cases too. :-)
Does your e-reader use e-ink and an indirect backlight? I’m assuming so, but If not, it’s definitely worth giving a try.
Yes it does.
I get what you’re saying except I am the opposite. I used to do everything analog, but carrying and reading books became too painful. The school or public library used to be my favorite place. I used to draw a lot in analog too, but that became too painful. Nowadays if I want to read, it has to be digital or it won’t be comfortable and too painful. I like being able to resize text and easily search for things. I am also getting more into audiobooks or TTS. I hate when I am asked to write with a pencil and paper, my handwriting has become shit too.
Digital with proper backups will last longer than most non-archival analog media. But there’s always weaknesses to every medium. Fire and flood will destroy analog media. Even just humidity, mold, sunlight, too cold, too hot, everyday conditions can damage analog media.
To me balance is key. For example, I use ipods where I put all my music collection that I have backed up in several HD. There still a feeling of ownership having those mp3 files available whenever I want. Now, I also own vynils which I love listening to having a coffee in my sofa. To me that’s actually a good balance between digital and analog that actually works. Going full streaming did never satisfy me.
I mean there’s 2 sides. Analog fails in more gradual forms. Digital obviously has the advantage of… replicating massively over large distances very quickly… IE your document could be backed up to a remote server as often as you save it. Versioning can exist so, you can have every change every update… differences between the file at 3:33 and 3:34 pm.
True on the gist that, a single corruption can’t hit a whole typed document usually, IE your 20th keystroke on a typewriter can’t randomly damage the first 19 characters.
I would say though digital excels in being able to be replicated, and versioned.
I love typewriters. When I write with them, I write differently than when I write with my computer. Just one example: if I write something i find shitty with my computer, I just delete it; if i do it with my typewriter, I have to physically strike the “bad” text. This has two consequences : I have to think more of what I’m writing, and if i finally change my mind the bad text is still there for me to work again or put somewhere else in my text. The “tangibleness” is important not only for conservation reasons.
But computers are better at sharing what in wrote, and polishing my texts. I like to scan and OCR-ize my pages and finishing the work on a computer. I don’t oppose analog and digital, but i find it sad that most people chose one (the digital generally) and reject the other. It’s like not using your left hand.
Analog > digital in every capacity.
Except for storage capacity.
And joysticks.
And computers.
You say that, but analogue computers are quite good at what they do. Issue tends to be that they’re specialised, so aren’t very good at general tasks.
Brains are a rare exception.
Digital just adds more layers of abstraction before it reaches you and your message goes out to wherever. And there’s more signal stuff around it.
I can see my notepad. I can move it around, I could put paint on my fingers and touch it to draw something.
On a computer, I hit keys and they send a signal through the machine with a bunch of stuff going on before it appears on the screen. The computer might have some issues and then, even if I hit the keys nothing happens or something unexpected. And when I break the screen it’s not on the screen anymore, but somehow still there and went god knows where on the way.
The notepad is a lot simpler.
Well yeah because it’s actually tangible so of course it is.
