[HN Gopher] Paper Trails
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Paper Trails
Author : apollinaire
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-06-28 17:48 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| mykowebhn wrote:
| Edmund Husserl truly is the father of phenomenology. He's been
| somewhat overshadowed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which is a
| shame.
|
| For anyone interested in studying phenomenology, and specifically
| the philosophy of Husserl, I'd kindly recommend his works
| "Logical Investigations" and "Ideas".
| janandonly wrote:
| I was quite moved to read the account of how the papers of the
| diseased Jewish Philosopher Husserl where saved for posterity.
|
| This quote struck me hard: > _This reveals one of the essential
| characteristics of an archive. To be an archive, the material
| must be public - there is no such thing as a private archive. It
| is located in space, a space outside the person whom it
| historicises. In this way, an archive is always threatened with
| destruction, and with it the person or time commemorated.
| Totalitarian governments of all stripes have recognised this -
| for all the defiance of the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov's
| phrase 'manuscripts don't burn' - they do, and with them are
| immolated lives, ways of being, and cultures._
|
| We must continue to build out systems like #nostr and #bittorrent
| -like hosting to ensure that any culture will survive the next
| wave of Left or Right politics that will no doubt require its own
| wave of (digital) book burnings
| robertlagrant wrote:
| As a non-crypto person, this is the sort of use I could imagine
| IPFS being put to. Slow, distributed storage of websites like
| archive.org.
| ktallett wrote:
| It is perfect for things like that. Z-Lib was stored onto
| IPFS. Although of course the issue isn't actually creating
| the repository of information, it is fighting against those
| who wish to shut any repository down.
| refset wrote:
| Arweave has a compelling design for long-term public archival
| along these lines, with an explicit concept of 'endowment' to
| predictably cover the costs of future storage.
| immibis wrote:
| The Arweave endowment is just one of these crazy schemes
| crypto folks think up to make their systems harder to
| understand so you don't realize how they scam you. I'm not
| saying Arweave is a scam, but that's exactly what this
| endowment structure is. They may as well just mint extra
| tokens to pay whoever the endowment pays, and delete tokens
| that would have gone into the endowment.
|
| BTW, Arweave doesn't guarantee permanent archival - nodes
| are free to decide what to archive.
| refset wrote:
| I haven't followed Arweave closely at all recently but
| the creator seemed genuine and capable enough to warrant
| attention. As to tech itself, assuming commodity storage
| costs continue to drop ~indefinitely and somewhat
| predictably it feels intuitive to me how such a scheme
| can be viable. It's ultimately a bet on ever-reducing
| storage costs.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| diseased? (sick / infected)
|
| did you mean deceased? (dead)
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| For personal reasons, I've been thinking a lot about paper trail
| in the legal / evidentary context lately. So I clicked expecting
| something about the analysis of an organizations paper trail
| rather than an individual. Still there are some similarities.
| Namely, a set of documents such that matching them with or
| categorizing by relation to other publicly known ones is the main
| puzzle, and a source of these documents that is possibly
| intentionally trying to obscure those relations.
|
| What can the creation of this archive teach us about identifying
| corruption? I'm legit unsure, but maybe there's a relevant
| lesson?
| sevensor wrote:
| Interesting read. Granting the contention that there's no knowing
| the "real" Nietzche, I'd still like to have a better picture of
| where his writing does and doesn't support the figure built up by
| his sister.
| zoogeny wrote:
| It strikes me reading this, that edited archives of author's
| works is an antiquated concept. I can understand that back in the
| 1800s (or even the 1930s) having a giant box of paper would have
| been daunting to sort out, prepare for publication and then
| release. But in 2024? It seems ridiculous. Dump it all in SQLite
| and put it onto the Internet. Let AI sort it out.
|
| I really wish a lot of antique content was available this way. I
| like to watch YouTube channels like Esoterica [1] and often he
| will lament that scholarly editions of ancient works are either
| unavailable or only available with much effort at exorbitant
| prices. We are living in a time where I should be able to have
| access to the entire Nag Hammadi library as high quality images
| that I can feed into an LLM for casual analysis. Imagine the
| entire Vatican Library available in a format similar to The Pile.
|
| What a treasure it would be to have an LLM that is trained on
| every single piece of philosophical, religious, political,
| economic, etc. writing from the earliest Sumerian clay tablets to
| the current copyright cut-off date.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel
| czarit wrote:
| Challenge: Tell me you have never read a thoughtful and
| contextualizing scholarly archival study without saying so.
|
| Solution: "Dump it in a database and let AI sort it out"
| zoogeny wrote:
| If the available options are:
|
| 1. Purchase an out-of-print copy of a scholarly archival
| study on ebay for $100+
|
| 2. Load the original raw contents into an LLM and perform the
| analysis myself
|
| I think the freedom to choose would be a massive benefit. It
| doesn't prevent you from doing what you want to do.
| delusional wrote:
| > What a treasure it would be to have an LLM that is trained on
| every single piece of philosophical, religious, political,
| economic, etc. writing from the earliest Sumerian clay tablets
| to the current copyright cut-off date.
|
| It strikes me that such an LLM would have weights tuned only
| predicting the languages that were put into it. It would be
| unable to connect those texts to modern ideas and modern
| language.
|
| You can ask it a out Vatican texts, but only in Vatican
| language.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I suppose that is only if you assume I meant "only trained on
| ..." which is a limited reading of that idea.
|
| But even if you were to make that assumption, I feel pretty
| confident that an LLM trained on 5000 years of recorded
| language, from the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, through Hellenic
| Greek, through Shakespeare and including all text in all
| languages up to 1928, would be a pretty broad base of
| training.
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