Memories of October: a collage of blogs

On October 30th, Armin Roacher writes:

In the physical world, much of what we create has a natural tendency to decay and that is really useful information. A sticky note on a monitor gathers dust and fades. A notebook fills with notes and random scribbles, becomes worn, and eventually ends up in a cabinet to finally end its life discarded in a bin. [...] Yet software rarely behaves this way. [...] While outright deletion may not be the solution, irrelevant notes and documents showing up in searches add to the clutter and make finding useful information harder. Make It Ephemeral: Software Should Decay and Lose Data

In a world where everything is temporary, even geography, and nothing stays the same forever, not even memories, perhaps digital information is the odd one out, trying to pretend that it can somehow outlast the coming entropy?

On October 23th, Joel writes:

I can’t help but feel that maybe I’ll reach a point where I’ll end up writing about exactly the same topic with different words and I won’t even realize. [...] Maybe every iteration will be just a little better than the previous one—or devolve into madness... Lossy Memory

Is time itself an echo, that echoes through time? Or is just our memory of it so.. so.. fuzzy?

On October 20th, Henrique Dias writes:

I have been recently dabbling with the idea of a second brain, or just note taking in general. I feel like I’ve been through this many times in the past years. [...] I have some more factual notes that I may be importing soon to this website. However, be warned: everything is subject to errors. Dabbling With the Idea of a Second Brain

A second brain sounds nice. Perhaps taking notes will help with the years going forward... backward in time. Uhh...

On October 2nd, Leon/TDP writes:

The concept of a discrete file, an abstraction applied to a wide array of artefacts [..] was necessary for this model to work, enabling easy copying, transfer, deletion and compression. [...] Without discrete files we no longer own content. We merely rent songs from Spotify or TV programmes from Netflix and Amazon Prime. Notes on files and folders

Even concepts are a flicker of the light. What once we took for granted, that data can be organized in folders, and chaos reined in, is now exposed to be a lie. The universe does not cooperate with our demands for order, and now metadata infests the platforms.

On October 8th, Wouter writes

While browsing through archives of very old files, I rediscovered backups of websites I once made. [...] Why not let the websites speak for themselves and follow the history together with me, from 1998 to 2020?
[... 2000 version:] I do love the warning that appears after a script checks our browser version (my translation from the original Dutch text):

Warning! Also for Netscape users a warning: Netscape 4.x and Opera 5.x do not properly support the CSS styles that have been used a lot here! Click here to download Internet Explorer 5.5 for free. The Brain Baking Museum

Ha, what a thought, writing about history in October! Of all months! LOL

On October 28th, Susam writes:

The first line of code I ever wrote was: FD 100
[...] Until then I had seen CRTs in televisions where I had very little control on what I see on the screen. But now, I had control! The turtle became my toy and I could make it draw anything [...] I like to believe that my passion for software engineering as well as my love for writing code, sharing code, and open source development are a result of coming across these beautiful code examples early in my life. FD 100

Logo was my first programming language too, and it told me much about programming, debbugging, putting myself in the shoes of the computer (here, visualized as a turtle), and sharing one's creations with friends.

On October 5th, Rachel writes:

Obviously they tried and tried to make [a clone of Snapchat] work, but it didn't work [..] so they finally decided to shut it down.
Meanwhile, back on the main site, people's cooking videos have been disappearing.
[...] Amazingly, nobody figured this out for months, or long after any chance of recovering the original data had passed. All of that stuff is gone forever and it's never coming back. Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

So.. big platforms can get in trouble for keeping too much data, in revolt against the universal law of entropy. Yet, when they losing data away to the chaos, they are still considered in the wrong?