Maciej Ceglowski – The Internet With a Human Face – btconfDUS2014

Maciej talks about his youth and how, whenever he did something bad, he was threatened with: “this will end up on your permanent record.” Then he learned there was no such thing as a “permanent record”. But, switching gears to the internet we’re building, he now says:

How depressing to grow up and be part of the generation that implements the god damn permanent record for all of us?

In programmer folklore, we obsess over data loss. We got PTSD from losing data once that now we’re dead set on capturing and retaining everything forever. We haven’t arrived at a point in time where we fear but data gathering and retention over data loss. Rather than having a little foresight, it seems we're going to capture and retain everything and then learn from experience why that’s a bad idea.

It's almost as if we [we got burned] by the fact that computers only understood binary and couldn’t really understand floating point, that [instead of fixing it] we just decided “we’re going to use integers from now on as a society because the computers don’t let us do otherwise.”