It's not so much that we know there was nothing before it, but that we can't figure out what was before it.
nothacking
joined 3 years ago
Why does the tea project not have users claim ownership of GitHub profiles. That way it could be retroactively applied with no effort on the user or maintainer.
Except it does for assignments.
Python is just as bad if not worse then JavaScript. The fact that if you misspell a variable name, instead of giving an error like any sane language, Python code will still run, but do something different then it looks like it does, creating a hard to spot bug is just awful. The amount of time I have spent debugging python code only to find a tiny typo that any sane language would have caught before the code even ran is several weeks now, I can't imagine how much collective time has been lost over this, and a few other, horrible languages.
Here is an example of a non crap webp:
Considering how overloaded lemmy.world is right now, a pi in someone's basement would be better, and besides, centralization is bad. Federation is what prevents lemmy from becoming the next Twitter.
In the moment, yes.
However, the longevity of digital data is problematic. Computers have existed for less then a 100 years, but you'd already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape.
Modern protocols and formats are much more complex, so I'd say that reading your data in 100 years will be harder then reading 100 year old data today. Have a look at a pdf in a text editor. Imagine trying to figure that out once the documentation is lost. (... or stored in the pdf)
Without continual efforts to convert data or preserve hardware and software, the data will be lost.
Compare that to written documents. We have writing that's thousands of years old, and it's still legible and understandable. We have paper documents about as old as we've been able to make the stuff.