jzdziarski

Literally read this while loading an old Famicom disk game into a Nintendo disk drive. Thirty years and it not only still works, it was more capable by its design. Nothing wrong with magnetic media, but good luck on your modernization effort.

Fascinating study. It would carry more currency with me if the ngrams used were learned through ML and corpus training rather than heuristics. It is assumed these ngrams are particularly useful markers today. The significance in their absence doesn’t seem to be part of the research. When there is such dramatically “off the chart” data such as this, you need to start looking under the hood at other factors. Studying individual authors would be a good start. Other factors may also include the editorial process. Publishers tend to have common nuances they like to conform to. Could the editorial process explain why some of these nuances are widespread? It’s also worth considering that technical language (computing, for example) made great leaps around this same time period and bled into common parlance. Social media, which is cited here only as a loose correlation, also altered the brevity of writing, which changed how we use and communicate language - but it’s a far stretch to call these subtle changes distortions, at least beyond letting Jack Dorsey fuck up our use of language. The authors argue that the meaning of these ngrams hasn’t changed, but their application sure has. Overall it feels like a great area to study, and as good science does, presents more questions than it does answers. There is much more to explore here though before we can conclude the entire world is depressed. I am not an expert in linguistics, but I do feel as though there is a modern element missing from this research.

First, I’m so glad this turned out to be hypothetical, and you didn’t have to suffer through such a catastrophic loss. Second, if you had actually suffered such a loss, your digital life would hopefully be the last thing on your mind, and you’d just be glad to have your life and your family - the only real things that matter in this world.

That said, planning a strategy for offsite data storage or a secondary authenticator is of course wise. A safety deposit box or other offsite location that you can frequently refresh and keep up to date would be a good investment. If you’re worried about keeping a master key to your life in a single place, you could separate your data and your authenticator. The how likely depends on your threat model, several people on this site may find it insufficient. To whatever degree you obfuscate or complicate your recovery path, you also increase the risk of losing access to it yourself.

You might also consider it’s not necessarily the “thing you have” that might go MIA, but due to physical injury, age, or just forgetfulness, the “thing you know” could also be at risk. I realize this the older I get. Finding a secure way to store a master password in the event you cannot recall it, or perhaps in the event of your death, is something you may also consider. In this case, I would avoid a cipher or something else you’re likely to forget.