You may still be using flint-knapped knives, but the world as a whole moved on to bronze, then iron, and, more recently, steel. Hammers evolved as well, with more ergonomic grips being invented to reduce repetitive strain injuries, as well as various heads which are better suited to different tasks (like the claw hammer or ball-peen hammer).
it's not sustainable in theory, because you can definitely think up valid failure modes like that. in practice though it's how a huge percentage of open source software out there is developed and maintained. at most the bdfl becomes less active in development but continues to shepherd the project as it attracts other contributors.
...what? Why? Do you feel the videos she likes should be allowed to just vanish into the mists of time? To me that sounds like saying 'my sister takes pictures at her daughters' birthdays and I'm trying to get her to stop'.
If you're grabbing lots of things because they meet some definition of rare, yeah.
If you're grabbing 720p of things you actually watched, then at 4 hours at day and 1.5Mbps an entire year of recordings would be less than a terabyte. So I'd estimate this as a $1-5 per month hobby and the time/effort shouldn't be too bad either. If they reach small NAS territory then that's a useful thing to learn. They just need to limit the 4K content.
However, it's satisfying to be able to smugly watch/listen to content that becomes unavailable due to it being old or unpopular or even complicated by rights issues.
Just yesterday, I was watching Digging The Greats on YouTube, discussing De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising. He can't even recreate the beat/mix on YouTube as it would get flagged for copyright. It was unavailable for streaming/download until 2023 due to licensing issues.
My go-to example of disappearing media is the third season of Monkey Dust that ran into problems with music licensing and so it was never available on DVD and will never be screened again. (Available through nautical methods)
> ...what? Why? Do you feel the videos she likes should be allowed to just vanish into the mists of time? To me that sounds like saying 'my sister takes pictures at her daughters' birthdays and I'm trying to get her to stop'.
Anything, even good things, can be done to excess.
In defence of data-hoarding, it's relatively benign apart from maybe costing time and money, but then so do a lot of hobbies. Hoarding seems to be celebrated when it's billionaires hoarding wealth, even though the billionaires typically use their wealth in the most harmful and damaging way possible.
To be sure, I am probably more like a casual data hoarder—only hoarding files I will revisit (I have a TV app I wrote that plays these videos on a schedule—a lot like these "HN TV" sites we've been seeing vibe-coded lately).
But it does take a non-zero amount of time to copy/paste a URL and then move the files to external storage when my laptop gets heavy with data.
And while it does feel a bit like a mental sickness (really, sickness?) I have other behaviors like spending too much time on YouTube in general that unfortunately would persist whether I was hoarding or not.
I do try to walk away from the browser more these days—limit it to a few hours in the morning and then when I am eating lunch or whatever during the day.
Hoarding is more getting hold of data/films/tv/music that you're not expecting to get around to watching, but feel like you want a copy or that it is of cultural relevance.
e.g. I grabbed a copy of Sátántangó due to it's fame/importance, but I'm unlikely to sit through 7 hours of it.
Or more recently, I grabbed a better quality copy of the original Green Hornet series that I'm not going to bother watching.
Reminds me of that one episode where Mr. Spock figures out there's a problem with the computer because it loses at chess. And he knows it shouldn't lose at chess because he programmed it himself.
It's like fan fiction: sneaking into theatre to watch a movie without paying for admission is illegal, but writing fan fiction about the movie and publishing it on AO3 is legal.
The following is completely off topic, but I was mildly bemused how the article ends:
> Reflecting on the evolving nature of street scams, one commenter noted, "People are becoming hesitant to help strangers on the street for a reason. It's a dangerous world, making people colder."
> Reflecting on the evolving street scams, "People are becoming hesitant to help strangers on the street for a reason. It's a dangerous world, making people colder," one commenter lamented.
Yeah, I never contributed to FOSS to get credit; I contributed because I wanted something improved which I thought was not very good and thought that sharing the improvements with the world would be good (sharing is caring, after all). From a Free Software perspective, I actually quite like that Generative AI allows people to create the software they want and adapt it to their wants and needs. Free Software is about freedom, after all (free as in free speech). Unfortunate GAI tends to be quite resource intensive, which is bad; but local models are getting better all the time, so hopefully eventually anyone can run a GAI model on their own computer and have it create any and all software they want.
It's a bit like Bob Ross' Joy of Painting: if everyone can paint then anyone can make any painting they want to see.
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