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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by labster on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @02:27AM (#43181519)
Honestly plaintext has a pretty bad record as a format, with all of the UTF-16, Latin-2, Shift JIS, and so on. I’d suggest paper, or for true archival storage, parchment and stone.
Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by 1propionyl on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @03:12AM (#43181775)
Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap.

I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral transmission...

Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by drexlspivey on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @04:04AM (#43182067)
I’d suggest stone tablets
Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by labster on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @03:42AM (#43181943)
If you’re going oral tradition, you might as well use repeatedly-compressed JPEG instead. Same quality but less space used by the storage devices.
Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by lou1306 on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @09:53AM (#43184139)
> They either degrade

Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far (save for core rope memory, maybe).

> even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community [...] translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext

This pertains to the message and not the support; also, I'll take missing subtext over missing text any day of the week, thank you very much.

Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by internetter on Thursday March 06, 2025 @06:28AM (#43278915)
> Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far

https://arcticworldarchive.org/ would like a word

Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by lou1306 on Friday March 07, 2025 @08:02AM (#43289824)
This is a high-tech vault located in the Arctic. Compare this with manuscripts that survived centuries by virtue of simply being on a library shelf in some random monastery.

Furthermore, the vault contents are stored on piqlFilm, which in turn uses Boxing barcodes [1]. So, they literally rely on an analog support.

I restm my case.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_barcode

Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by account42 on Thursday February 27, 2025 @07:00AM (#43193548)
That's like saying paper is a bad record as a format, with all of punch cards, barcodese, and so on.