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Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe?

Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me

Depending on how well digital records are preserved I think future people might run into the opposite problem, so much information that there is absolutely no mystery about what people thought and believed.

Even with all the information at our fingertips, I still don't know what a person dreams of, hopes for, cries about, longs for, and ultimately, who the person really, truly, is, because us humans are all too good at sharing everything, but the truth of our humanity, the things that make us vulnerable, so we invent a shallow shell of a personality over the years to protect ourselves and thus we put out there only that we think is acceptable to put out there all while remaining in solitude with our actual self. I wish it would be different.

and on the inside of that shell, we're all pretty much the same...

Looking at Roman graffiti from 2000 years ago does pretty much confirm this.

Cocks. Lots of cocks.

(_))===D

The only thing that's changed is the medium they are written in/on.

We're basically still living in the cultural mileu formed in Rome, though. I would expect to have much more cultural connection to someone in Rome in 0AD than someone in the Amazon in the 14th century.

Look at the letters you just typed. They're an incredibly efficient information transmission technology. By making the minimal energy expenditure of moving your fingers across the keyboard you're able to convey so much of your current emotional state and ideas in your head. While people thousands of year back only had the stone and who knows what other tools to do the same, but at the much larger cost of carving stone, and only with a minimum of effectiveness in conveying their emotional state, which for us, will forever remain unknown.

Likely by then catastrophic wars or economic hardship will lead to one or two “resets” and a lot will be lost.

For some reason, I've always felt that comments here are ephemeral.

I think it's the lack of notification of replies -- this causes the 'conversation' to die out naturally over the course of a day or two.

future LLM will just be trained on all our dead texts and messages - becoming some kind of supra-human which will be the amalgam of all of us.

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