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   aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:01:34 JST aeva

   I love the term "software archaeology" because it implies the existence of subfields such as "software experimental archaeology" (attempting to reconstruct and demonstrate how people once built software) and "software paleoethnobotany" (quantifying what botanicals were culturally significant to software and the broader historic implications to the societies that wrote it), but also the existence of the broader field "software anthropology" and its offshoot "software sociology", and

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     Leftbot (leftbot@mstdn.party)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:01:33 JST Leftbot

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     @aeva i always felt like you could see different geological layers in codebases or shared scripts. the libraries in vogue, the shared methods, etc.

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     Allan Chow (grumpasaurus@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:01:37 JST Allan Chow

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     @aeva aren't we all software coroners and pathologists

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:01:39 JST aeva

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     • mym

     @mym no no that's software paleontology, which is a different field and kind of a faux pas to bring up with software archaeologists

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     mym (mym@toot.cat)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:01:40 JST mym

     in reply to

     @aeva relatedly, Lego just announced some new sets https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/triceratops-research-76959

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     mym (mym@toot.cat)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:01:41 JST mym

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     @aeva does software paleoethnobotany involve digging through a lot of software poop?

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     Scott, Drowning in Information (vortex_egg@ioc.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:01:54 JST Scott, Drowning in Information

     in reply to

     @aeva As a person who has done a lot of software archeology in past jobs, I can definitively tell you that "software pseudoarcheology" is also alive and well in organizations.

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     Green Fox (greenfox@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:00 JST Green Fox

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     @aeva In my current project, I often use the term Git Archaeology. Which I think applies here.
     - "git experimental archaeology" What problem was this commit intended to solve?
     - "git anthropology" What was the culture and pressures that created these design decisions?
     - "git paleoethnobotany" WTF WERE THEY ON!?

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     federico (federico3@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:01 JST federico

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     @aeva Software archaeology could be a pretty real subset of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_archaeology

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     ackack (Andy) (ackack@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:11 JST ackack (Andy)

     in reply to

     @aeva My very first job was as a Software Archaeologist back in the mid 90s. Printed on my business card 'n everything!

     We dusted off millions of lines of COBOL, PL/I, and RPG to reveal the architecture...

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:13 JST aeva

     in reply to

     You might say to yourself "Aeva, there's no such thing as Software Paleoethnobotany that's absurd", but some day a thousand years from now someone is going to be tasked with analyzing the remains of a surprisingly well preserved set of backup disks for an ancient industrial automation system to reconstruct the lost recipe for brewing the legendary "miller high life"

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     MrCopilot (mrcopilot@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:14 JST MrCopilot

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     @aeva Talk about job security, That poor tech will never believe they got it right and ancient people purposefully consumed the vile liquid results.

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     Shambolic Matter (xorn@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:16 JST Shambolic Matter

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     @aeva Published November 3057: Relative efficacy of indoor hydroponic software focused on cultivation of Sativa strains.

     Abstract
     We study a number of intact hydroponic devices that date to an era immediately before the second North American dust bowl. Comparative analysis of the installed software strongly suggest that this is not an antecedent of the common Strawbery2 hydro system which provided homesteads with most of their calories during the early 2250s.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:16 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • 🇹 Ti
     @aeva @The_T So basically Merveilles Town is a software experimental archaeology community.
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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:17 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • 🇹 Ti

     @The_T I think of it as more of a retro computing thing, like making 3D games but limiting yourself to period accurate algorithms.

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     🇹 Ti (the_t@glaceon.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:22 JST 🇹 Ti

     in reply to

     @aeva isn't software experimental archaeology just making a decompilation

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     Dana Fried (tess@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:23 JST Dana Fried

     in reply to

     @aeva tbh not only is Software Sociology a field but I'm pretty sure I have mutuals who do it, like, as a research profession

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:24 JST clacke

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     • Dana Fried
     @tess @aeva Nadia Eghbal might be the most well-known one?
     
     www.fordfoundation.org/work/le…
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     Sivation (sivation@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:27 JST Sivation

     in reply to

     @aeva I do entirely too much config archeology at work when we try to work out why the hell a specific setting was made over a decade ago.
     Sometimes, we have a useful change ticket… but most of the time? It just says “change X to be Y” ?

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     Andromeda Yelton (thatandromeda@ohai.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:36 JST Andromeda Yelton

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     @aeva also someone’s totally doing aerial photography with lidar to see if they can find where the software is buried

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     Morten Linderud (foxboron@chaos.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 12:02:39 JST Morten Linderud

     in reply to

     @aeva
     The repository handling scripts in Arch Linux is around 20 years old now. Rewritten twice over three different VCS tools.

     It's also been developed in cvs, SVN and git, and the all the history is preserved!

     I have several times run the git log looking at the 20 year old code wondering how they did stuff way back when to make sense of current repo handling.

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     Stefan Scholl (stefan_s_from_h@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 00:30:19 JST Stefan Scholl

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     @aeva I love “A Fire upon the Deep”!

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     Bradán Lane (bradanlane@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 00:30:22 JST Bradán Lane

     in reply to

     @aeva this fits with a term I learned when I joined a startup. I asked about "documentation" to get up to speed, and I was told, it was "tribal knowledge". Understanding the code was passed on from Developer to Developer and flowers down from the "elders".

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     Josh Jersild (joshjers@peoplemaking.games)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 00:30:28 JST Josh Jersild

     in reply to

     "software cryptozoology": a pseudoscience and subculture that searches for and studies the benefits of blockchain technologies whose present existence is disputed or unsubstantiated

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 00:30:30 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Stefan Scholl
     @Stefan_S_from_H @aeva I love A Fire Upon the Deep too, one of my favorites ever, but the software archaeology where they discovered the Unix epoch was in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepne… , which is still on my reading list.
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     John Colagioia (jcolag@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 22:11:51 JST John Colagioia

     in reply to

     @aeva I've been thinking for about five years about teaching software as anthropology, in fact. It's all about people and behavior, whether users, peers, management, or predecessors.

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     Sora5084 (sora5084@tech.lgbt)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 22:12:46 JST Sora5084

     in reply to

     @aeva '"software experimental archaeology" (attempting to reconstruct and demonstrate how people once built software)'
     Yeah... did that last year... Had to fix the bootloader for one of our legacy cameras that hadn't been touched in 10 years.
     Toolchain: I found multiple pieces scattered on servers and backups of former colleagues' computers.
     Sourcecode: Multiple source-tree copies + Git-conversions of the SourceSafe copies... None of which produced the exact bootloader that we used in production...
     In the end I reverse engineered the toolchain and the sourcecode to the point that I got a binary identical binary (minus timestamps). :blobcatuwu:

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     kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️‍🌈 (kianryan@oldbytes.space)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 22:15:44 JST kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️‍🌈

     in reply to

     @aeva Software experimental archeology is the entire retro dev field. I like this title, and want it printed on all my cards.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 22:17:03 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Sora5084
     @sora5084 @aeva Erasure: "I like to read a murder mystery // I like to know the killer isn't me"
     
     Software archaeology is extra rewarding when it's not your own fault. ?
     
     When it *is* your fault:
     
     mastodon.social/@Laebrye/11001…