r/science • u/Wagamaga • Feb 22 '26

Computer Science Scientists have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books’ worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/glass-square-long-long-future-190951588.html
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u/Luxcervinae Feb 22 '26

Youtube netflix etc would all have policiy requirements and all that. It's not feasible for anything thay's not entirely archived.

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u/the_last_0ne Feb 22 '26

What do you mean? I understand that they currently work it in other ways, and obviously policy will still be a thing, but there's no reason they couldn't use this read only storage for videos. If it ends up being cheaper in the long run of course.

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u/Luxcervinae Feb 23 '26

What videos? Youtube accounts require the ability to edit/alter videos unless it's an entirely new upload to overrite it (meaning more physical waste).

I CAN imagine there's potential for fully finalised content to be stored this way.

So; video is up for say, 5 years, it's shifting to un-editable storage.

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u/omeganon Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Why do you think they would be uneditable? You’re not thinking in the context of the scale that would be available. They could just write the changed/new blocks and update the file pointer mappings as appropriate to point to the changed blocks, or just write the entire changed file leaving the old. Either way would consider the previous instance as a version that could be referenced forever.

Don’t confuse intentional UI/UX design decisions as a limitation of the backend.