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#long-now — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #long-now, aggregated by home.social.

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  1. @gregeganSF

    If I were the richest man in the world, I would build large housing projects around the world for those who need them, but secretly construct them to work as durable signs that remote sensing archaeology can detect thousands of years into the future. They would all point towards a same totally unremarkable flat spot somewhere in the planet ...

    #longnow

  2. @gregeganSF

    If I were the richest man in the world, I would build large housing projects around the world for those who need them, but secretly construct them to work as durable signs that remote sensing archaeology can detect thousands of years into the future. They would all point towards a same totally unremarkable flat spot somewhere in the planet ...

    #longnow

  3. It's great when authors truly lean into the "plain language" abstract now conventional for #AGU journals. TIme does not always avail, but the effort when available is salutary.

    "Most people have a general, intuitive understanding of the term “Anthropocene.” And while it has not formally been declared as a new geological epoch, it is scientifically clear that these new times have only begun to fully unfold. The Anthropocene stresses both the enormity of the human imprint on Earth, as well as its long-term nature. That latter aspect, however, is highly underappreciated among the public. We describe several qualitatively different Anthropocene pathways for the next millennium, some of them depending on our cumulative actions as humanity, some on how the Earth system responds to these human pressures. We highlight how much we are already stuck in a figurative “Anthropocene quicksand”, where only an active pull can free us from consequences like global heating—while even a very modest continuation of greenhouse gas emissions will keep us at high warming levels. Should Earth system resilience, the natural buffering capacity, significantly decline, the impacts of our actions would become even stronger. In a worst-case scenario, shifts in Earth system feedbacks could even surpass human forcing in relevance. But we are not there yet and can still pull ourselves out of the quicksand."

    #anthropocene
    #LongNow

    agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.co

  4. It's great when authors truly lean into the "plain language" abstract now conventional for #AGU journals. TIme does not always avail, but the effort when available is salutary.

    "Most people have a general, intuitive understanding of the term “Anthropocene.” And while it has not formally been declared as a new geological epoch, it is scientifically clear that these new times have only begun to fully unfold. The Anthropocene stresses both the enormity of the human imprint on Earth, as well as its long-term nature. That latter aspect, however, is highly underappreciated among the public. We describe several qualitatively different Anthropocene pathways for the next millennium, some of them depending on our cumulative actions as humanity, some on how the Earth system responds to these human pressures. We highlight how much we are already stuck in a figurative “Anthropocene quicksand”, where only an active pull can free us from consequences like global heating—while even a very modest continuation of greenhouse gas emissions will keep us at high warming levels. Should Earth system resilience, the natural buffering capacity, significantly decline, the impacts of our actions would become even stronger. In a worst-case scenario, shifts in Earth system feedbacks could even surpass human forcing in relevance. But we are not there yet and can still pull ourselves out of the quicksand."

    #anthropocene
    #LongNow

    agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.co

  5. Reading "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand broke my fixation on architectural permanence. The real value is in layers that change at different speeds, a truth that applies to institutions, software, and even relationships. #LongNow #SystemsThinking

  6. "…to be a fad, you must be liked. To be infrastructure, you must be required."
    Stu Brand’s pace layer model applied to investment strategy.
    longnow.org/p/70c7978a-6bbb-47

    #longnow @longnow

  7. The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting – HackerNoon

    New Story, 1,290 reads

    The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting

    by Bruce Li, January 12th, 2026

    A Comprehensive Engineering and Operational Analysis of the Internet Archive

    Introduction: The Hum of History in the Fog

    If you stand quietly in the nave of the former Christian Science church on Funston Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District, you can hear the sound of the internet breathing. It is not the chaotic screech of a dial-up modem or the ping of a notification, but a steady, industrial hum—a low-frequency thrum generated by hundreds of spinning hard drives and the high-velocity fans that cool them. This is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, a non-profit library that has taken on the Sisyphean task of recording the entire digital history of human civilization.

    Internet Archive’s office in San Francisco

    Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the “virtual” world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages.1 It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.3

    The scale of the operation is staggering, but the engineering challenge is even deeper. How do you build a machine that can ingest the sprawling, dynamic, and ever-changing World Wide Web in real-time? How do you store that data for centuries when the average hard drive lasts only a few years? And perhaps most critically, how do you pay for the electricity, the bandwidth, and the legal defense funds required to keep the lights on in an era where copyright law and digital preservation are locked in a high-stakes collision?

    This report delves into the mechanics of the Internet Archive with the precision of a teardown. We will strip back the chassis to examine the custom-built PetaBox servers that heat the building without air conditioning. We will trace the evolution of the web crawlers—from the early tape-based dumps of Alexa Internet to the sophisticated browser-based bots of 2025. We will analyze the financial ledger of this non-profit giant, exploring how it survives on a budget that is a rounding error for its Silicon Valley neighbors. And finally, we will look to the future, where the “Decentralized Web” (DWeb) promises to fragment the Archive into a million pieces to ensure it can never be destroyed.5

    To understand the Archive is to understand the physical reality of digital memory. It is a story of 20,000 hard drives, 45 miles of cabling, and a vision that began in 1996 with a simple, audacious goal: “Universal Access to All Knowledge”.7

    Part I: The Thermodynamics of Memory

    The PetaBox Architecture: Engineering for Density and Heat

    The heart of the Internet Archive is the PetaBox, a storage server custom-designed by the Archive’s staff to solve a specific problem: storing massive amounts of data with minimal power consumption and heat generation. In the early 2000s, off-the-shelf enterprise storage solutions from giants like EMC or NetApp were prohibitively expensive and power-hungry. They were designed for high-speed transactional data—like banking systems or stock exchanges—where milliseconds of latency matter. Archival storage, however, has different requirements. It needs to be dense, cheap, and low-power.

    Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive (with the PetaBox behind him)

    Brewster Kahle, the Archive’s founder and a computer engineer who had previously founded the supercomputer company Thinking Machines, approached the problem with a different philosophy. Instead of high-performance RAID arrays, the Archive built the PetaBox using consumer-grade parts. The design philosophy was radical for its time: use “Just a Bunch of Disks” (JBOD) rather than expensive RAID controllers, and handle data redundancy via software rather than hardware.

    Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting | HackerNoon

    Tags: Architecture, Brewster Kahle, California, Fight Against Forgetting, HackerNoon, Internet Archive, Long Now, Memory, PetaBox, San Francisco, Storage, World Wide Web, WWW
    #Architecture #BrewsterKahle #California #FightAgainstForgetting #HackerNoon #InternetArchive #LongNow #Memory #PetaBox #SanFrancisco #Storage #WorldWideWeb #WWW
  8. The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting – HackerNoon

    New Story, 1,290 reads

    The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting

    by Bruce Li, January 12th, 2026

    A Comprehensive Engineering and Operational Analysis of the Internet Archive

    Introduction: The Hum of History in the Fog

    If you stand quietly in the nave of the former Christian Science church on Funston Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District, you can hear the sound of the internet breathing. It is not the chaotic screech of a dial-up modem or the ping of a notification, but a steady, industrial hum—a low-frequency thrum generated by hundreds of spinning hard drives and the high-velocity fans that cool them. This is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, a non-profit library that has taken on the Sisyphean task of recording the entire digital history of human civilization.

    Internet Archive’s office in San Francisco

    Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the “virtual” world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages.1 It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.3

    The scale of the operation is staggering, but the engineering challenge is even deeper. How do you build a machine that can ingest the sprawling, dynamic, and ever-changing World Wide Web in real-time? How do you store that data for centuries when the average hard drive lasts only a few years? And perhaps most critically, how do you pay for the electricity, the bandwidth, and the legal defense funds required to keep the lights on in an era where copyright law and digital preservation are locked in a high-stakes collision?

    This report delves into the mechanics of the Internet Archive with the precision of a teardown. We will strip back the chassis to examine the custom-built PetaBox servers that heat the building without air conditioning. We will trace the evolution of the web crawlers—from the early tape-based dumps of Alexa Internet to the sophisticated browser-based bots of 2025. We will analyze the financial ledger of this non-profit giant, exploring how it survives on a budget that is a rounding error for its Silicon Valley neighbors. And finally, we will look to the future, where the “Decentralized Web” (DWeb) promises to fragment the Archive into a million pieces to ensure it can never be destroyed.5

    To understand the Archive is to understand the physical reality of digital memory. It is a story of 20,000 hard drives, 45 miles of cabling, and a vision that began in 1996 with a simple, audacious goal: “Universal Access to All Knowledge”.7

    Part I: The Thermodynamics of Memory

    The PetaBox Architecture: Engineering for Density and Heat

    The heart of the Internet Archive is the PetaBox, a storage server custom-designed by the Archive’s staff to solve a specific problem: storing massive amounts of data with minimal power consumption and heat generation. In the early 2000s, off-the-shelf enterprise storage solutions from giants like EMC or NetApp were prohibitively expensive and power-hungry. They were designed for high-speed transactional data—like banking systems or stock exchanges—where milliseconds of latency matter. Archival storage, however, has different requirements. It needs to be dense, cheap, and low-power.

    Brewster Kahle, founder of Internet Archive (with the PetaBox behind him)

    Brewster Kahle, the Archive’s founder and a computer engineer who had previously founded the supercomputer company Thinking Machines, approached the problem with a different philosophy. Instead of high-performance RAID arrays, the Archive built the PetaBox using consumer-grade parts. The design philosophy was radical for its time: use “Just a Bunch of Disks” (JBOD) rather than expensive RAID controllers, and handle data redundancy via software rather than hardware.

    Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

    Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting | HackerNoon

    #Architecture #BrewsterKahle #California #FightAgainstForgetting #HackerNoon #InternetArchive #LongNow #Memory #PetaBox #SanFrancisco #Storage #WorldWideWeb #WWW
  9. I got hyper fixated in a #LongNow talk about symbiogenesis and the chatbots and so I transcribed it because I couldn't find any transcription. reboil.com/mediawiki/What_is_I

  10. I got hyper fixated in a #LongNow talk about symbiogenesis and the chatbots and so I transcribed it because I couldn't find any transcription. reboil.com/mediawiki/What_is_I

  11. In which @Katecrawford takes the #LongNow stage talking "Mapping Empires" - YouTube LiveStream available, on 2pm AEDT so a good time-zone for Australians!

    #STS

    I think @attacus might like this

    longnow.org/talks/02025-crawfo

  12. In which @Katecrawford takes the #LongNow stage talking "Mapping Empires" - YouTube LiveStream available, on 2pm AEDT so a good time-zone for Australians!

    #STS

    I think @attacus might like this

    longnow.org/talks/02025-crawfo

  13. If you are inquisitive, I think you'll find this Seminar About Longterm Thinking (first link) at the Long Now Foundation very interesting. It's about emergent behaviour, replication and life, symbio-genesis, and their relation to computation. It's a great follow on to the previous talk (second link) about looking at life from the point of view of information theory.

    #SALT #LongNow #computation #life

    youtube.com/watch?v=KhSJuqDUJME

    youtube.com/watch?v=zhzxQraB2m0

  14. If you are inquisitive, I think you'll find this Seminar About Longterm Thinking (first link) at the Long Now Foundation very interesting. It's about emergent behaviour, replication and life, symbio-genesis, and their relation to computation. It's a great follow on to the previous talk (second link) about looking at life from the point of view of information theory.

    #SALT #LongNow #computation #life

    youtube.com/watch?v=KhSJuqDUJME

    youtube.com/watch?v=zhzxQraB2m0

  15. #ClimateResearch, #ClimateMitigation and #ClimateAdaption are experiencing hurricane conditions in some parts of the world today (hello USA) but... play the long game. Here's a review and perspective with a touch of #LongNow thinking:

    "All possible—but currently unknown—worlds in 2050, with a larger global population, unprecedented climate conditions with higher temperatures, more frequent extreme weather events, sea level rise, disrupted ecosystems, changes in habitability and increased climate-induced displacement and migration, and the emergence of new geopolitical tensions, will require limiting society’s vulnerability both through mitigation measures to minimize further warming and through the implementation of innovative adaptation initiatives. The development of a skillful climate information system, based on the most advanced Earth system science, will be required to inform decision-makers and the public around the world about the local and remote impacts of climate change, and guide them in optimizing their adaptation and mitigation agendas. This information will also help manage renewable resources in a warmer world and strengthen resilience to the expected interconnected impacts of climate change. "

    frontiersin.org/journals/clima

  16. #ClimateResearch, #ClimateMitigation and #ClimateAdaption are experiencing hurricane conditions in some parts of the world today (hello USA) but... play the long game. Here's a review and perspective with a touch of #LongNow thinking:

    "All possible—but currently unknown—worlds in 2050, with a larger global population, unprecedented climate conditions with higher temperatures, more frequent extreme weather events, sea level rise, disrupted ecosystems, changes in habitability and increased climate-induced displacement and migration, and the emergence of new geopolitical tensions, will require limiting society’s vulnerability both through mitigation measures to minimize further warming and through the implementation of innovative adaptation initiatives. The development of a skillful climate information system, based on the most advanced Earth system science, will be required to inform decision-makers and the public around the world about the local and remote impacts of climate change, and guide them in optimizing their adaptation and mitigation agendas. This information will also help manage renewable resources in a warmer world and strengthen resilience to the expected interconnected impacts of climate change. "

    frontiersin.org/journals/clima

  17. What does it mean to think on the scale of centuries? Great discussions with Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson.

    The Long Now Foundation offers a fascinating read on long-term logic, design, and the ethics of building for the future.

    longnow.org/ideas/a-logic-for-

    #LongNow #FutureThinking #SystemDesign #Podcast

  18. What does it mean to think on the scale of centuries? Great discussions with Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson.

    The Long Now Foundation offers a fascinating read on long-term logic, design, and the ethics of building for the future.

    longnow.org/ideas/a-logic-for-

    #LongNow #FutureThinking #SystemDesign #Podcast

  19. I love the Eames Power of Ten reference. #longnow

  20. I love the Eames Power of Ten reference. #longnow

  21. “Everything you do from when you wake up in the morning to when you go to sleep is training data for the future’s model of the past… It’s a big responsibility.”

    — Benjamin Bratton, “A Philosophy of Planetary Computation : From Antikythera to Synthetic Intelligence”

    #ai #genai #technology #longnow

  22. “Everything you do from when you wake up in the morning to when you go to sleep is training data for the future’s model of the past… It’s a big responsibility.”

    — Benjamin Bratton, “A Philosophy of Planetary Computation : From Antikythera to Synthetic Intelligence”

    #ai #genai #technology #longnow

  23. "The clock is the ultimate artifact of a culture that evolved to convince donors from the tech community to underwrite spectacular ideas with no obvious payoff."

    Alec Nevala-Lee for Asterisk: longreads.com/2025/01/27/chime

    #Longreads #Essay #Clock #LongNow #Time #Technology #Future

  24. "The clock is the ultimate artifact of a culture that evolved to convince donors from the tech community to underwrite spectacular ideas with no obvious payoff."

    Alec Nevala-Lee for Asterisk: longreads.com/2025/01/27/chime

    #Longreads #Essay #Clock #LongNow #Time #Technology #Future

  25. The generative documentary about Brian Eno is running today for 24 hours. Six versions will run and it’ll be different each time:

    #longnow #brianeno #documentary #generativeart

    bsky.app/profile/longnow.org/p

  26. The generative documentary about Brian Eno is running today for 24 hours. Six versions will run and it’ll be different each time:

    #longnow #brianeno #documentary #generativeart

    bsky.app/profile/longnow.org/p

  27. The @internetarchive offers data vault storage at a fixed one-time cost per gigabyte:
    webservices.archive.org/pages/

    (Kind of surprised they don't directly offer paid web hosting).

    Or consider simply supporting them mastodon.archive.org/@internet since the work they do is essential infrastructure, akin to @wikipedia

    #LongNow #DataArchive #backups #libraries

  28. The @internetarchive offers data vault storage at a fixed one-time cost per gigabyte:
    webservices.archive.org/pages/

    (Kind of surprised they don't directly offer paid web hosting).

    Or consider simply supporting them mastodon.archive.org/@internet since the work they do is essential infrastructure, akin to @wikipedia

    #LongNow #DataArchive #backups #libraries

  29. Watching a video of a Glacier Peak flyover, and even more impressive than the amazing views & nature, is Gary Paull's incredible detailed/intimate local & geological knowledge, his orientation and pattern recognition skills... I've always been in awe of people who're so aware of and linked to their environment(s) and their place within (even if it's here more about the physical rather than social aspects). To me this is what hiking is partially about: Not just an activity, but more so a method & process of deeply connecting with a place/environment, using each visit for learning & trying to understand it, to navigate it without map, to appreciate its history, how it came to be, why it is the way it is etc.

    youtube.com/watch?v=W4s1RMPH9p

    Each time this is a vivid reminder of Brian Eno's "Big Here / Long Now" concepts (even if his European framing and many other aspects of the Long Now foundation/funding are problematic):

    longnow.org/essays/big-here-lo

    "How could you live so blind to your surroundings? How could you not think of where I live as including at least some of the space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn't lock up behind you? I felt this was something particular to New York: I called it "The Small Here". I realised that, like most Europeans, I was used to living in a bigger Here.

    I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be passing through. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as "The Short Now", and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - "The Long Now".

    "Now" is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It's ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows."

    — Brian Eno

    #BigHere #LongNow #Hiking #GlacierPeak #NorthCascades

  30. Watching a video of a Glacier Peak flyover, and even more impressive than the amazing views & nature, is Gary Paull's incredible detailed/intimate local & geological knowledge, his orientation and pattern recognition skills... I've always been in awe of people who're so aware of and linked to their environment(s) and their place within (even if it's here more about the physical rather than social aspects). To me this is what hiking is partially about: Not just an activity, but more so a method & process of deeply connecting with a place/environment, using each visit for learning & trying to understand it, to navigate it without map, to appreciate its history, how it came to be, why it is the way it is etc.

    youtube.com/watch?v=W4s1RMPH9p

    Each time this is a vivid reminder of Brian Eno's "Big Here / Long Now" concepts (even if his European framing and many other aspects of the Long Now foundation/funding are problematic):

    longnow.org/essays/big-here-lo

    "How could you live so blind to your surroundings? How could you not think of where I live as including at least some of the space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn't lock up behind you? I felt this was something particular to New York: I called it "The Small Here". I realised that, like most Europeans, I was used to living in a bigger Here.

    I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be passing through. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as "The Short Now", and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - "The Long Now".

    "Now" is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It's ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows."

    — Brian Eno

    #BigHere #LongNow #Hiking #GlacierPeak #NorthCascades

  31. e494 — License to Brick

    e493 with Michael, Michael and Andy on #digital #storage for a century, #AI #datasets, videos & new #Oreo flavors, #hacking digital license plates and #robots, and a whole lot more!

    https://media.blubrry.com/gamesatwork/op3.dev/e,pg=6e00562f-0386-5985-9c2c-26822923720d/gamesatwork.biz/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/E494.mp3

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:11 — 47.6MB) | Embed

    Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Podcast Index | Youtube Music | RSS | More

    gamesatwork.biz/2024/12/23/e49

  32. Got my copy of “Pace Layers” today, the Long Now Foundation’s 02024 Annual Journal.

    A perspective that lasts more than a quarter is more important than ever.

    longnow.org/

    #longnow

  33. Got my copy of “Pace Layers” today, the Long Now Foundation’s 02024 Annual Journal.

    A perspective that lasts more than a quarter is more important than ever.

    longnow.org/

    #longnow

  34. Lovely to find a #longnow London meetup at #emfcamp2024. We had around 20 people attend. Hope this becomes a regular thing!

  35. Thanks everyone who joined our #LongNow meetup at #emfcamp #emf24 here at EMF 02024! To stay in touch check out longnowlondon.org/ & join the substack for newsletters. And let's have a 02026 EMF session/village/something :) Message me if you think we should do more...

    (Y'all might also be interested in the archived events of maintain.community which are all on youtube: youtube.com/@MaintainHive/play )

  36. #emfcamp #emf24 today come talk about the long term, maintenance and care! & maybe figure out how the UK instance of #LongNow can sustain a connection to EMF and Eastnor for years to come longnowlondon.org/ 10:30 in the Lounge