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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it certainly can go that way unfortunately. I’m in favour of digitisation generally, but at a minimum it relies on:

    1. Redundant storage (always), hosted and paid for by the government (in this case).
    2. Published and documented open file formats.

    I believe that, in general, things lost to time on the net violate one of those two rules. They either resided on a single privately held server which was discontinued, or the data was locked up in some proprietary file format which was inevitably replaced for the sake of selling the new software product.

    The benefits of pulling this off correctly are enormous:

    1. Data lasts a very long time.
    2. Documents can be authenticated and change-controlled.
    3. Documents can be shared with any number of users simultaneously.


  • Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying “this Wednesday” on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

    Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, “this whateverday” refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it’s past or future. “Next whateverday” refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

    “This Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

    “Next Wednesday”, on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

    (I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)