Short definition

The gesture by which a human designates, in the middle of an exchange with an assistant, a fragment that must survive beyond that exchange — and pushes it out to a place that no longer depends on the tool.

Full definition

In computing, persistence refers to a piece of data's property of existing after the program stops. There the word is passive: data either is persistent or it isn't.

In the articles on this blog, it becomes a verb and a decision. To persist is not a property of the data, it is an act: saying "persist that" about the paragraph that has just appeared in a ChatGPT conversation, and carrying on working.

Two traits follow. The gesture is selective — it is not about keeping everything, but about deciding in the middle of a stream that is mostly disposable. And it is external — what is persisted leaves the tool, so as to be recoverable regardless of what that tool will remember.

Usage in the field

Used to refer to what moves a conversation fragment from the stream to the durable, and to distinguish that gesture from an automatic memory.

Synonyms and variants

"to persist", "to push out of the stream". "To capitalize" when the emphasis is on what it produces in the long run rather than on the gesture.

Not to be confused with

• an assistant's memory — what a tool retains of its own accord, partially and with no guarantee of word-for-word recall. Persistence asks nothing of it: it leaves the perimeter.
• backup — an automatic and exhaustive copy. Persistence is a choice, and that choice is its value.
• Outbox — the place where what has been persisted lands. The gesture and its landing point are not the same thing.
• Ingestion — the operation by which an already persisted source is read, qualified, and made to move the existing notes. Persisting keeps without concluding anything; ingesting decides what the material is worth. The two follow one another and do not replace each other.

Examples

In the middle of a conversation spanning several days, saying "persist our latest definition": the paragraph leaves the stream and becomes recoverable five days later, whatever the assistant still has in mind.

Ambiguities / debates

The computing sense remains dominant and misleads: it suggests a technical property where a human decision is at stake. That is this entry's reason for being.