I had not thought about having the sunscreen leech into the water. Thank you for educating!

https://engineering.fb.com/2015/05/04/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook-s-cold-storage-system/

This is an article from 2015 where Facebook/Meta was exploring Blu-ray for their DCs. You’re definitely right though. Tape is key as the longest term storage.

This is such a great example of the potential consequences of making a decision without understanding the landscape/context. It’s obvious this would happen in hindsight.

Super cool, blew my mind! I would love to see it in operation. The logistics from the machine side + the storage heuristics for when to store to a disc that’s write-only sounds like a really cool problem.

There are also techniques where data centers do offline storage by writing out to a high volume storage medium (I heard blueray as an example, especially because it’s cheap) and storing it in racks. All automated of course. This let’s them store huge quantities of infrequently accessed data (most of it) in a more efficient way. Not everything has to be online and ready to go, as long as it’s capable of being made available on demand.

The number of articles out about the latest and greatest game updates from a few hours ago which are rehashing patches released a week or more ago drive me nuts. How many times do I have to wade through multiple screens of preamble to find out that content is being recycled from week old news.

But yes, the ratio of low signal to high signal content is crazy in general. I get that people have to make a living and want to do it via communicating on YouTube/articles/… but I feel we’ve really lost access to high quality content. ChatGPT and other LLMs are going to make this wayyyyyyy worse.

Content recommendation algorithms push for length and frequency, which inevitably means meeting the quantity bar is more important than quality. Meanwhile we have really thought out high quality content buried in a mountain of clickbait and those creators both don’t get as good monetization or exposure. It’s a sad system :(. I want to see more ErrantSignal quality bar and less clickbait please.