[HN Gopher] Luster Lost: Pondering the way that physical objects...
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Luster Lost: Pondering the way that physical objects degrade over
time
Author : benbreen
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-03-12 20:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Digital data, if considered in some Platonic sense, doesn't
| degrade. However, the physical substrate required to store said
| data _does_ absolutely degrade over time: hence the need to copy
| data to new media periodically. 'Tain't no way to get around the
| Second Law of Thermodynamics.
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| I'd construct a sad caveat to this, but Randall Munroe did it
| better than I can already: https://xkcd.com/1683/
| sliken wrote:
| Not only the physical substrate, but the platform it runs on.
| Even 30 years (not much for a library/archivist) old software
| can bring substantial challenges. Much more so if it was a
| closed system like a game console, or DRM protected binary that
| may or may not work in an emulator (if said emulator exists).
|
| I do wish that published software had a maximum license life,
| much like patents that would allow archiving.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| There's an argument in this article that digital media can't get
| any "better" because the 1s and 0s can only be replicated, there
| is no opportunity to remaster it with improved digital tools. And
| then a nod to the fact that N64 emulators can significantly
| upscale the media (which reminds me of a _similar_ discussion
| about how the pixel art of old games looks _significantly_ better
| on real CRTs because of the way the artists made the sprites to
| interact with CRT tech).
|
| It isn't really the case that digital reproduction can't be
| improved while analog representation can (with improved tech),
| however. It points at a more interesting discussion (to me at
| least) about how any preservation effort is a kind of curation.
| It is a political act, albeit a subtle one.
|
| Even the brand new media that I consume today is generally
| curated. My "smart" TV does a wide range of modifications to the
| digital image it displays before it reaches my eyes. Getting it
| to give me an "honest" version of any video is remarkably
| difficult, and that's before it even hits the physical layer of
| anti-glare coating or intermediary layers like ambient-light
| dimming.
|
| And who's to say what the canonical version ought to be anyway?
| Was digital input assuming a particular interpretation for its
| output? Perhaps it was targeting some assumptions about the
| average display? Did you really do it right if you try to
| reproduce a book, and you reproduce it as if it was freshly
| printed, even though it was first printed 140 years ago? Or did
| you "do it right" if you emulate the effect of the book freshly
| printed 140 years ago and then very very carefully stored for 140
| years?
|
| Back when I was a professional musician, I would always listen to
| the recorded "digital canonical" version on med-range monitors,
| high-end headphones, and super cheap car-stereo speakers, to get
| a sense of how it would sound in each medium. But I can never
| know exactly how it hits the record that really matters, which is
| the particular influence on the brains of the listeners.
|
| Ultimately, you do what seems right, which in turn has more to do
| with evolution than correctness, even if your goal is transparent
| correctness.
| hawski wrote:
| It is now interesting that there are CRT shaders available for
| emulators. I just found a discussion about C64 CRT shader and
| people do share their preferences:
| https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79062
| codelobe wrote:
| Remember when .PNG included a gamma correction to try and make
| a more accurate image -- Appearing as the creator viewed the
| image...
|
| And then WE ALL REJECTED THIS INSANITY because it made .PNG
| images a pain in the butt to work with since the gamma
| corrected image wouldn't match the RGB values of the
| surrounding document (see: CSS color codes). Then Ye ol' .GIF
| enjoyed being the pixel perfectionist's choice of image format
| for the web for quite a while longer. I once was forced to
| write a script that chopped up a 24bit images into a bunch of
| 16px by 16px .GIFs (one palette entry per pixel, 256 total).
|
| Digital doesn't usually need to be restored as long as it is
| replicated often enough (before bit-rot sets in). However, I've
| got a large number of tools for restoring spinning disks
| (migration to new hardware isn't easy for the average end-
| user).
|
| Let's say a modern game came out that had a capability to
| demand of a GPU more polygons/paritcles than capable today...
| but in the future those capabilities might exist. Digital media
| could be improved by adding more/better compute resources (if
| originally designed to scale, that is). Then there will be
| curmudgeons (like me) that think things were better before the
| edge users' hardware became a giant supercompute cluster /
| distributed storage...
| imp0cat wrote:
| Their article about the Fisker review by MKHBD
| (https://tedium.co/2024/03/04/mkbhd-fisker-negative-review-fi...)
| is also great. It expands on the idea that: the
| malleable nature of software in the modern era means that it's
| now possible to release products before they're actually ready.
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