This article hit like an atom bomb this morning. I ran across it while reading a series of posts that the author, Jon Evans, wrote on his Substack newsletter a few years ago (long read but pretty interesting if you’re interested at all in the weirdness of the LessWrong/effective altruism movement. Also amusing in that it mentions SBF before the fall of FTX).

What struck me most in the GitHub article? This snippet:

As another advisor, historian and science-fiction author, Ada Palmer, explained to us, while we have many letters written by the Renaissance’s wealthy aristocrats, what modern historians would really like–few of which have survived–are ordinary people’s shopping lists. Our hope is that by storing and indexing millions of repositories we have captured a valuable cross-section of the world of modern software.

(emphasis mine)

I struggle routinely with the “why” behind this stuff…blogging…taking/sharing photos…all of it. The above was like a fresnel lens on it all. It matters because it’s a snapshot of a regular life, in this time, warts and all.

It also tells me that my instinct to put this stuff on archive.org’s Wayback Machine regularly is a good idea. If anything is going to be “permanent” it’s the Internet Archive. At some point someone might look back on it when trying to figure out how we lived and what we were talking about.