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’?

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    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)

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        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.