#long-now — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #long-now, aggregated by home.social.
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A QR Code smaller than bacteria could be stable for millennia:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/03/260328043603.htm
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"…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.
https://longnow.org/p/70c7978a-6bbb-470c-8b99-6e6116648991/?member_status=free -
The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
https://longnow.org/ideas/the-26000-year-astronomical-monument-hidden-in-plain-sight/
#HackerNews #AstronomicalMonument #HiddenInPlainSight #LongNow #AncientHistory #SpaceExploration #26000Years
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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 -
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. https://reboil.com/mediawiki/What_is_Intelligence%3F_(Long_Now_Talk)
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In which @Katecrawford takes the #LongNow stage talking "Mapping Empires" - YouTube LiveStream available, on 2pm AEDT so a good time-zone for Australians!
I think @attacus might like this
https://longnow.org/talks/02025-crawford/?hss_channel=lcp-43424
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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
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@tychotithonus you should start putting '020' on the front...
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#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. "
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.3389/fclim.2025.1554685/full
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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.
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“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”
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"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: https://longreads.com/2025/01/27/chimes-at-midnight/
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The generative documentary about Brian Eno is running today for 24 hours. Six versions will run and it’ll be different each time:
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The @internetarchive offers data vault storage at a fixed one-time cost per gigabyte:
https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault/(Kind of surprised they don't directly offer paid web hosting).
Or consider simply supporting them https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/113743001452074514 since the work they do is essential infrastructure, akin to @wikipedia
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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4s1RMPH9p0
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):
https://longnow.org/essays/big-here-long-now/
"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
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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.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:11 — 47.6MB) | Embed
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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.
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#LongNow #boston annual party Sunday 2pm #cambridgeMA ticketed event rsvp https://www.longnowboston.org/events/long-now-boston-annual-garden-party
#BostonWeekend (15/x) -
When Online Content Disappears
https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/
"38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later" -- #ATHENA_CHAPEKIS #SAMUEL_BESTVATER #EMMA_REMY #GONZALO_RIVERO
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Lovely to find a #longnow London meetup at #emfcamp2024. We had around 20 people attend. Hope this becomes a regular thing!
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Thanks everyone who joined our #LongNow meetup at #emfcamp #emf24 here at EMF 02024! To stay in touch check out https://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 https://maintain.community which are all on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MaintainHive/playlists )
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#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 https://longnowlondon.org/ 10:30 in the Lounge
