I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.
Cybercab Liam Denning reports on Tesla's quarterly results flop in Someone Call Tesla a Robotaxi, or SpaceX, Quick . He notes that: The curated list of investor questions that gets teed up ahead of these affairs had indicated some brewing discomfort about the big issue: Tesla’s lack of progress on its long-promised mass rollout of robotaxis. Musk duly tried to finesse this by pointing out that the…
2021 Media Shipments Exabytes Revenue $/GB Flash 598 $68.6B $0.115 Hard Disk 1418 $28.0B $0.020 LTO Tape 59.2 $0.51B $0.003 I summed up my big picture view of archival media eight years ago in Archival Media: Not a Good Business . Whatever your choice of technology, the economics are brutal. This is a version of the table in that post, updated to 2021 and again based upon IBM data . Note that…
Whisky Still The original function of a Web server was to respond to queries by revealing the appropriate part of their internal data. This necessarily meant that repeated queries, for example from a search engine's or an internet archive's web crawler, could extract the server's entire internal data. Since the extracted data had been published on the Web, it was not trade secret. It was protected…
Elon Musk is the world champion of totally implausible projections, and Kim Khan reported on a personal best in SpaceX sees total addressable market rivaling size of the U.S. economy : The $28.5T forecast compares to U.S. Q1 2026 nominal GDP of nearly $32T, with the estimate for the market of AI enterprise applications of $22.7T about 70% of total U.S. economic output. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei…
I have been a small part of the chorus of voices critiquing the AI bubble that I described in Portents Of Doom . But what if we're wrong? What if the overwhelming demand for AI sin't the result of the AI platforms massively subsidizing their products, but because the world needs more and more non-consensual sex images , slop web pages , agentic ransomware attacks , students cheating on exams ,…
Boeing's PDP-7/340 Most of my career has been involved in various ways with computer graphics. Below the fold I recount the story of how I got started in the field just as it was getting started. To give you some idea of just how early my introduction was the Mother of all Demos had been the year before. The displays I got to work with drew lines in monochrome, not rasters in color. You created…
Divine, Pink Flamingos Wikipedia defines Coprophagia as "the consumption of feces". Since " brevity is the soul of wit" , my favorite science fiction includes the 254 words of Fredric Brown's Answer from 1954. It describes a galactic civilization holding a ceremony to mark the final connection of all their computers. What happened was: Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of…
A year ago in The Back Of The AI Envelope I pointed out that the AI platforms were running the drug-dealer's algorithm, "the first one's free". By massively subsidizing the use of their products, they were generating overwhelming demand for them. They used this demand to justify massive investments, in the hope that, by the time they had to show a return on these invetment, the users would be so…
Source Back in February I posted The Kessler Syndrome , which also included a brief section mentioning the impacts of the proposed megaconstellations on the environment, specifically global warming from CO2 and black carbon, and depletion of the ozone layer. Three months earlier Anton Petrov had examined the last of these in Risk of Ozone Layer Destruction from Internet Satellite Swarms and Rocket…
Once again I attended most of the library of Congress' Designing Storage Architectures workshop remotely. I apologize for the delay in posting this; domestic duties have kept me very busy recently. Below the fold notes on the talks that caught my attention, based on my now somewhat memory and the slide decks for the talks from the Library of Congress website . Data Storage Trends As usual, IBM's…
J.P. Morgan hits photographer with cane This is just a brief post to explain to my old boss, Eric Schmidt , why he and his ilk are getting booed at college commencements , and why laws against data centers are getting passed. The explanation is below the fold. Let us start from an under-appreciated fact. Paul Campos reports that : The college wage premium, that is, the increased earnings…
XKCD #538 A year ago I wrote The Risks Of HODL-ing sparked by Mitch Moxley's They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month . Moxley recounts the kidnapping of Veer Chetal's parents to persuade him to hand over his share of the loot: the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping…
Via John Markoff, I was invited to a conversation with Jonathan Dotan and the students of his EE292J course entitled Designing for Authenticity . Below the fold are my brief introductory remarks, and some notes for the discussion. Thank you for inviting a relic from earlier days in the Valley. As with all my talks, the text of this brief introduction will go up at blog.dshr.org later this…
Source This is the promised follow-on to Flooded Zones Part 1 , which discussed the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack being mounted by AI against the scholarly publication system. By reducing the cost of generating and submitting a paper or a review, AI has caused a massive increase in the quantity and a significant decrease in the quality of submissions to a system that was already…
Tom Cowap CC-BY-SA 4.0 Three years ago in Flooding The Zone With Shit , my first post on the AI bubble, I wrote: My immediate reaction to the news of ChatGPT was to tell friends "at last, we have solved the Fermi Paradox ". It wasn't that I feared being told "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it", but rather that I assumed that civilizations across the galaxy evolved…
Potential Attack Target Suppose some genre of content is under attack by powerful adversaries. Lets take political satire as a thought experiment in which powerful politicians are attacking sites and Web archives hosting it by sending bogus DMCA takedowns, suing for defamation, buying up their hosting platforms, getting their flying monkeys to flood them with spam, and so on. Below the fold I…
PsiQuantum's computer Four and a half years ago I wrote The $65B Prize about the potential reward for developing a "sufficiently powerful quantum computer" capable of cracking Bitcoin's encryption. It was based on work by Aggarwal et al , who were then projecting it would happen between 2029 and 2044 . The $65B was the notional value of the wallet containing the million Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto…
I have wanted to write this post for a long time, but I was waiting until I could visit the invaluable Royal National Theatre Archive to check my memory of their early productions. It doesn't look like I'll be in London any time soon, and I have the time now to write a long post about a long play, so here goes. Growing up in London meant that theatre has always been an important part of my life. I…
Source Around twelve years ago, Google figured out the fundamental problem facing Tesla's Fake Self Driving. Almost nine years ago in Robot Cars Can’t Count on Us in an Emergency , John Markoff wrote: Three years ago, Google’s self-driving car project abruptly shifted from designing a vehicle that would drive autonomously most of the time while occasionally requiring human oversight, to a…
A fundamental problem for decentralized systems like permissionless blockchains is that their security depends upon the cost of an attack being greater than the potential reward from it. Various techniques are used to impose these costs, generally either Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS). These costs have implications for the economics (or tokenomics) of such systems, for example that…
Source I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords Kent Brockman in " Deep Space Homer ", The Simpsons In recent months Cyberdyne Systems Corporation and its many subsidiaries have made very encouraging progress towards removing some of the major road-blocks standing in the way of the initial deployment of Skynet. Below the fold I report on the most significant ones. Cyberdyne Systems Corporation…
Source I have now seen the fabled CyberCab three times in real life. It has two seats, one of them fully equipped with human driver interface equipment. In each case a human was using them to drive the car, which is necessary in California because Fake Self-Driving is a Level 2 driver assistance system that requires a human behind the wheel at all times. A Robotaxi that requires a human driver and…
LEO in 2019 (NASA) In 1978 Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais published Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt . Wikipedia notes that : It describes a situation in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes so high due to space pollution that collisions between these objects cascade, exponentially increasing the amount of space…
Source A bit over three months ago I wrote Depreciation and started with this graph from my 2022 post Generally Accepted Accounting Principles about the way Bitcoin miners were inflating their profits through misleading depreciation of their rigs. The key message of the graph is the contrast between the 5-year straight-line depreciation and the curves showing the value of the remaining Bitcoin…
$BLEEBZORX chart Most of the world's software infrastructure is, or is based upon, open source. The developers and supporters of some of it, for example the Linux kernel, and the major compilers, are paid by technology companies because they are critical to their business. Other, less visible but similarly critical parts are supported by lone volunteers. Apart from the unfairness, this can lead to…