What I mean is: You can type an entire novel on a computer, and oopsie a random cosmic bitflip and system crashes and now its all gone. Or you do a lot of filming and the digital file can get corrupted. Where as stuff like, a typewriter, it’s less likely to just be all gone due to some malfunctions. Same with film, a cosmic bitflip can’t delete all your footage.
Know what I’m sayin’?
I feel like you might be young and not have had to actually use analog stuff. Your whole family trip photos could be gone in an instant because you burnt the film accidentally, or you could lose the film before getting it revealed, and although rare (probably as rare as a bit flip destroying data nowadays) it happened that pictures were destroyed during the revealing process, and even if all of that worked the pictures could have been over/under exposed, out of focus, or any other variety of issues.
Typewriters? I wrote stuff in them when I was a kid, granted computers were around back then, but I liked the sound. They would jam the hammers, run out of ink, or just annoyingly one letter would not work. If you’ve made a typo or wanted to edit something the entire page had to be thrown out and rewritten, and if it didn’t fit now the next page would have to be rewritten as well. And now that you’ve finished writing and left the pages on the table a spill could destroy your day’s work, or your dog could eat your homework.
Film? I don’t think anyone here has actually dealt with film unless you work in the industry. For home users we used to use videocassette, which is a digital medium, and a very flimsy at that, dropped soda on it? Gone, it got stuck in your player? Gone, you put a magnet near it? Gone.
On the other hand digital pictures, text and movies you can have multiple backups effortlessly and completely avoid any possible single disaster scenario.
I grew up with all that old tech and it was still more robust. You could repair it. Best part: tech bros didnt control your life and embed ads into your fridge.
You cant repair shit now. And even if you can The code is locked down so hard it will take a shut in in Russia 13 years to hack it.
Analog tape is STILL the highest quality and longest lasting medium for audio. They are still making remastered off 70 year old tapes. Granted, those are fragile around magnets, but so are hdds. But also, even if a tape gets near a magnet, its not deleted. It merely may erase the high frequencies unless you use a bulk eraser magnet. After that, vinyl lasts literally forever, though it degrades as you play it. Cds do get bit rot if stored wrong.
Micro sd cards and ssds die at a milliseconds notice. Ive had tons of them just be dead after a year of sitting. Same with doa hdds, ive gotten more than 10 in the last couple years.
Now typewriters, all mechanical ones weren’t great, but an electric typewriter is the shit. Fast, loud, un corruptible offline writing. I myself would still just opt for a non internet connected linux laptop with auto backup for writing though.
Yea I’m gen z lol
I’m just kinda scared of this AI thing and clientside scanning becoming mandatory in the future.
I mean, you write anti-government stuff on your computer?
Oops, files has been deleted because it “threatens national security”
They could make this AI scanning thing hardware-based bypassing linux (see Intel ME and AMD PSP for example)
There are several ways to counter that sort of thing, but let’s start from the beginning. LLMs (what people call AI) is VERY computational heavy, you need a powerful GPU to run a model locally, and it occupies lots of power and memory. The idea that we’re even remotely close to something like that being embed into hardware without people realizing it is just absurd.
But let’s imagine someone is able to make it, and magically prevents hackers from breaking it and using it as extra free power. This will have to live in the CPU as anywhere else wouldn’t have authority to “delete files”, and even the CPU would have a hard time doing that. Now this LLM needs to distinguish stuff I’m writing with stuff I’m reading, otherwise it would also delete files when someone is observing me. It also needs to reply in sub millisecond otherwise the computer will lag absurdly. It also can’t update it’s local model because it doesn’t have network access, so just use tokens it hasn’t heard of.
In short if someone managed to add a piece of hardware capable of doing that it would have to be significantly more powerful than the piece of hardware it’s embed in, and it would only work until someone breaks it and gives everyone a free hardware upgrade.
You can relax, nothing like that is even remotely close of being theoretically possible.
That being said, Windows doing this or similar is a possibility, your best bet is to use an open source system.
True, until its illegal to use your own hardware and you are required to log into bezosnet from your Amazon issued mandatory dumb terminal (which must always be on and internet connected with camera, basically like alexa that idiots have in their homes).
OP has a right to be un trusting. Im damn glad im not any younger. If I were id be learning everything I can about using open source software and cyber security. Also its proven already that we are being recorded and monitored 24/7 from our smartphones, unless you have a graphene phone.