It turned out to be nine pendants, three rings and 10 gold pearls in what was described as the country’s gold find of the century.

Huh. I knew gold is one of the few metals that you can find in pure elemental form in the Earth’s crust, but I had no idea it was already forged into pendants and jewelry and stuff! Geology really is fascinating.

Nissan also said it collected information on “sexual activity.” It didn’t explain how.

Nissan doesn’t provide a detailed explanation of how the data is collected, but they say that the source they collect the data is “Direct contact with users and Nissan employees,” Whatever that means.

Based on this information, I can only infer that the Nissan sales handbook has a section on using seduction for particularly difficult and/or hot potential customers.

…I used to work at a pizza shop. Oh, so that’s why we got so many orders from the local Nissan dealership!

TAPR or CERN OHL, probably— Kit cars do already exist, though are apparently aimed at hobbyists, and usually just partial cosmetic customizations. “Metal box on wheels with motor” ain’t exactly rocket science, although quality could be challenging and that’s especially important when it comes to safety.

That said, surely the production costs of modern vehicles needed to do their basic job— Efficient-ish and safe-ish transportation from point A to point B­— Can’t possibly be worth their increasingly inflated costs? There’s probably something to be said about the marketability of a sub-$10,000 basic OHL car that you can choose to scratch build or kit-build or buy fully built.

but the issue with uranium is that it’s basically in dictatorships

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_City

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Canada

They are branded, so effort would have to be put into making them appear to be authentic.

Not really. Branded QR codes are just regular, unbranded QR codes but messed up— You basically just stick the the branding right on top, and then let the built-in error correction take care of the rest. Should take all of 5 minutes to set up, or maybe 20-30 if you wanna be a stickler for detail.

And I think it’s improbable that staff wouldn’t notice.

If I were working at the restaurant— I think I’d notice after a couple weeks— They’d have impunity up to then— But even then, I’d just assume the management switched it out or patched it up because they wanted to change the link for metrics or messed up something backend or something like that.

The staff is paid to wait tables, not to audit cybersec from the perspective of the customers.

And again, the roi for the bad actor seems incredibly poor.

Probably highly variable.

If the restaurant has a lot of patrons that are wealthy and technologically illiterate, with banking apps on unupdated phones with known exploits, then you’d think “ROI” is basically everything in the bank accounts of the patrons.

Same if the online menu includes online payment options for whatever reason.

Regardless of age, I think you could probably argue that the small, glowing rectangle in your palm is an inferior reading and dining experience compared to an actual menu.

That’s not even to mention the unholy abomination of a tech stack that a system like this would be— Camera, QR decoder, web browser, WiFi/cellular, their web server— That signal might travel hundreds of miles to your ISP, their host, and then back— Probably a couple layers of outsourcing/contracting/helper apps they used to set it up— Though it’s apparently normal to take all that for granted these days, it’s still sorta ridiculous.

The fastest predator in the world right now is a dinosaur that can fly at over 200 mph— with razor-sharp claws, and so durable it can survive crashing into moving objects at that speed.

Their friends are scary smart. They’re fiercely loyal, and yet ruthless and cruel.

And we’ve spent the last while spraying their eggs with poison, releasing bio-engineered killer drones into their midst, and planting invisible obstacles right in the middle of their highways.

Eh. This is on us. URL shorteners and Twitter in particular have always been scarily brittle and opaque,. With nobody actively maintaining the data, why would you think that it would be around forever?

“Science” ≠ Technology!

If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they’ll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.

Inversely, you don’t even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they’ll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).

Monarchs cares about power. Give the ruler some more metallurgy or siege engines first, so you have their favour. Then split the Royal Court’s physicians into two groups, one that washes their hands, and one that doesn’t. Do the same for leeches, bloodletting, hydration, etc. It’ll be hard to argue with the resulting death rates. And in the long run, you’ll have a much bigger impact by introducing empricism/A-B testing/evidence-based medicine than any one thing specific thing you could have done.

Snarky anthropomorphization primarily serving clickbait and liability-limiting, I think, pretty clearly.

Really, the headline could just be “Microsoft To Allow Removing Preinstalled Apps”, or “Bloatware Apps will be Removable After Windows 11 Update”, or something like that. But the way they worded it lets them both sound more sarcastic to people who are pissed off by the scummy practice, and at the same time also sound plausibly less direct in calling Microsoft out.

Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?

Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you’re reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.

The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you’re missing the point of this comment thread.

PCM, ASCII, and straight RGBA bitmap encodings aren’t going anywhere. By extension, derived formats like WAV, UTF-8, and word processor files and webpage HTML are mostly fine too. The formats are structurally simple enough that even if the associated file extensions were somehow to be forgotten, all you’d need to do to invent them again is hand the file to a bored nerd over the weekend.

I think you kinda got the BBC and NASA problems backwards. The BBC’s had a couple of prominent incidents where digital “preservation” that was supposed to be eternal couldn’t even be opened anymore after a couple of years, like their Domesday Book/Project application thingy. They’ve also lost a bunch of old shows, like early Dr. Who episodes, I think. NASA didn’t just forget how to read the Apollo tapes; they overwrote them to reuse the tapes, as was their standard practice at the time. The original signal and tapes were very HD (or analog), but most of the videos we have today are from the TV camera that they pointed at their own TV screen last-minute when they realized they didn’t have an adapter for broadcast— The equivalent of a grainy cell phone photo of a screenshot, basically.

The BBC and NASA incidents happened in an era before computers were a ubiquitous commodity product. So, everyone and their cat was basically inventing their own obscure single-implemention proprietary file formats at that time. Nowadays we have established technical standards, as well as formats that have already sorta stood the test of time based on their utility and simplicity— and millions of people who already know how to read them— so that particular vector for bitrot isn’t really as much of an issue anymore.

…That said, I think I sorta missed your point. What you’re really saying is that stewardship of digital records is much trickier and riskier than stewardship of physical records— and that results in stuff being lost. And that is absolutely true.

I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.

LOCKSS and KISS, though. Flash chips don’t last forever but are pretty durable, and so are optical media as long as they’re the right material. SSDs decay and HDDs fail, but for magnetic platter media even if the head or motor crashes there’s always the old magnetic microscope in a pinch. USB’s not going anywhere, and if you have four or five copies that you don’t completely neglect and don’t store in the same physical place, presumably you’ll have the chance to notice and take corrective measures if any of them start failing or are at risk.

I don’t actually know that an individual book or picture will still be around in 50 years; Fire, flooding, insects, acidic paper, low-quality ink maybe— Digital stuff’s fragile, but so is physical stuff. Stick it in the attic, and the heat’ll speed up any chemical reactions and probably make it cozier for insects; Stick it in the basement, and the condensation will get you mildew and rot. By contrast, having a flash drive accidentally survive a trip through a washer and dryer is a pretty common occurrence, and I’ve yet to lose a drive even with that level of negligence. Material compatibility’s one of the very most basic parts of a set of very precise manufacturing techniques, tin whiskers seem pretty rare these days, the really scarily insidious stuff like hydrogen embrittlement is super improbable, and most biological forms of decay haven’t adapted to eating cured epoxy and monocrystalline silicon yet.

At least I sorta know how a flash cell or hard drive platter is meant to be structured; Who knows what weird organic reactions and unstable or slowly diffusing molecules are happening in the pile of chemical pigments on a sheet of likely-acidic bleached cellulose and cheap ink or toner, and whether it will still be legible to human eyes in however many years? Plus, a printed photo or document starts fading the very instant it’s created, and it gets a little worse every time you touch it with sweaty human hands or look at it while exhaling moist human breath and corrosive enzymatic saliva droplets under a white LED lamp or G-type star shooting out ionizing UV rays. Digital failures tend to be catastrophic, but at least up until the moment it fails, you can make sure that it is the exact same picture or text— And you can make many, many copies very cheaply, all of them very physically durable compared to paper, and know that they are all the exact same picture and text.

That said, I absolutely agree with your overall assessment that most of the information in the early 21st century, including most of the public Internet/WWW, most likely either will be or already is… Maybe not technically lost, per se, given how much caching and saving happens on private clients, but certainly rendered inaccessible.

Ideally I’d really love to see a return of microfiche, actually, using modern polymers and metallization. I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while now. At a reasonable scale for optical viewing, you could fit… much, much more content than you might expect, and do it several times over, in an entirely reasonable number of pages. Your comment actually spurred me to finally think of a practical way of printing that— for years before, I’d been trying to idly figure out a process based on photomasks and nanoparticles suspended in resin, which had always felt like a very messy and tricky idea, but I just thought of another idea– So thanks for providing some inspiration there.