Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching ‘The Daily Show’ in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.

EDIT: People don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. Even the people who are responding in good faith seem confused. That’s on me. So I thought I’d try to clarify with an example.

Take the Mona Lisa. Perhaps one of the most preserved objects in history. It’s so well preserved that it’s impossible to see. Sure, you can look at it, but you won’t see it. Taking a picture of the painting is encouraged, but you can’t get a look at it in your camera roll either.

If you saw the actual painting hanging on a friend’s wall, your first thought would probably not be “what a masterpiece”, but “why didn’t they remove the default print that came with the frame”? If you go to Paris, you can wait in line to have the “Mona Lisa experience” but the painting you saw wasn’t hanging on the wall, what you’ll see is the Mona Lisa you brought with you.

(yes, I stole this example from ‘were in hell’ youtube channel)

The real punch line is that in a cafe run by programmers, esoteric rules are in full force, but tables 0 and 1 are no where near each other.

I hear you can get a pretty good offer from CrowdStrike these days.

Think of LLMs like a stupid office worker. You wouldn’t rely on them to make critical decisions, but they’re valuable for tedious stuff.

For example, my calendar changed the way to enter new events breaking my workflow. Now I just type out a skeletal schedule and have LLM convert that into a .csv that I import.

I’m thinking of Ripping my CD collection again. I’m researching a way to use a LLM to tidy up the metadata.

I had a folder full of random stuff I’ve saved for years. Had a LLM organize and categorize it for me. I had to tweak the prompt enough that this was a medium difficulty task, but still way easier than doing it manually.