---
title: "Blog"
url: "https://eternalos.com/blog"
description: "Notes on keeping a record of a life: why platforms lose it, which formats survive, and why a simulation of a person is worse than an archive of them."
---

# Blog

Notes on keeping a record of a life: why platforms lose it, which formats survive, and why a simulation of a person is worse than an archive of them.

September 2, 2026·2 min read

## [Your life is in accounts that end when you do](https://eternalos.com/blog/your-life-is-in-accounts-that-end-when-you-do)

Almost everything a person leaves behind now sits inside services that were never designed to outlive them, under terms most people have never read.

-   digital estate
-   platforms
-   access

[Read article →](https://eternalos.com/blog/your-life-is-in-accounts-that-end-when-you-do)

August 19, 2026·2 min read

## [A terabyte of photos is not a memory](https://eternalos.com/blog/a-terabyte-of-photos-is-not-a-memory)

Capture got free and description did not. The result is enormous personal collections that nobody can meaningfully search, read or inherit.

-   metadata
-   description
-   selection

[Read article →](https://eternalos.com/blog/a-terabyte-of-photos-is-not-a-memory)

August 5, 2026·2 min read

## [The formats that will still open in 2125](https://eternalos.com/blog/the-formats-that-will-still-open-in-2125)

Format obsolescence is the failure mode nobody notices until it has already happened, and the defence is unglamorous, well understood and mostly ignored.

-   file formats
-   obsolescence
-   migration

[Read article →](https://eternalos.com/blog/the-formats-that-will-still-open-in-2125)

July 22, 2026·2 min read

## [We are not building a chatbot of your grandmother](https://eternalos.com/blog/we-are-not-building-a-chatbot-of-your-grandmother)

Systems that simulate the dead are being sold now. The objection is not that they are eerie — it is that they overwrite the record they were built from.

-   griefbots
-   simulation
-   record integrity

[Read article →](https://eternalos.com/blog/we-are-not-building-a-chatbot-of-your-grandmother)

July 8, 2026·2 min read

## [Designing a record that survives its own context](https://eternalos.com/blog/designing-a-record-that-survives-its-own-context)

The hardest preservation question is not storage. It is what a record must contain to be understood by someone who shares nothing with the people who made it.

-   self-describing archives
-   long now
-   interstellar

[Read article →](https://eternalos.com/blog/designing-a-record-that-survives-its-own-context)