domain:imgur.com
MotteInTheEye
6hr ago
If that's the purpose then I would say that it is essentially a lie. When your data is stored with a major cloud provider, it is not just on some computer similar to yours somewhere, it is replicated in enterprise grade data centers across multiple geos and there is a rotation of highly paid engineers on call if anything goes wrong with it.
ares
6hr ago
How's everyone feel about OneDrive integration in Windows, or Google and Apple cloud in their phones?
Two is one, one is none, and three's a spare. I run multiple backup solutions on my data because I do not want to lose a bit if any one of them breaks.
For phones, I think you're pretty much stuck with Google or Apple owning your data. That's a large vulnerable surface of your Google or Apple account, so ensuring you set up 2FA (and not via phone number since those can be easily spoofed). I use a hardware key. I'll have to reassess if I ever decide I'd like to start committing felonies, because both of those companies share your data pretty freely when there's a legitimate request from law enforcement. That'll include GPS and location data, and "person who always brings their phone with them decided to leave it at home on the night in question" is very easy to tell from the records. Also important not to google incriminating things. The military uses cell phones a lot when targeting bad guys. Most of them had good OPSEC but their wives never did. My military career was mostly in intelligence, and being resistant to the techniques we used is just not practical for anyone who doesn't believe their life or freedom is in serious jeopardy from the US government (ala Snowden).
At home I'm using a ZFS array to protect against hard drive failure and bit rot. I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire. I keep my important stuff on Google Drive mirrored to my ZFS array. I have a VeraCrypt file that holds anything I want to backup but not let Google read. Examples of things that someone might not want Google to read include TOR accounts and bookmarks, "hacking" tools and scripts that have been used in violation of the CFAA, and cryptocurrency keys. Not that I have any of those.
Having seen how Google handles data privacy and security from the inside, I'm not at all worried about their cloud integration from a security perspective. I trust Apple and Microsoft similarly. The company is not going to blackmail you with your nudes or leak your social security number, and employees can't access those things on your account without getting caught. The company will cooperate with any and every government if they feel the request is legitimate, as I mentioned. I keep that in mind, but don't actually want to join up with the Proud Boys or kidnap the governor of Michigan, so I'm comfortable keeping my files with them. I am quite comfortable keeping my SSN and bank account information on my Google because I have the hardware 2FA key (and no other 2FA allowed) to protect against account takeover. The government and law enforcement can already get my SSN and bank account info if they want them. And if Google deletes my account, no biggie because I have a local copy of everything.
I moved my email off gmail and don't have a plan for email backups yet. Another TODO.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
Also meta: if we allow really long posts, it might be nice to somehow allow folding the long post but not it's replies. You can fold the whole thread, but sometimes I just want to see the new replies.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
What potential economic return?
Every economic use case for space relies on either 1) being near earth 2) expeditions to go get stuff and bring it back to earth(asteroid mining and the like) or 3) someone else being willing to fund the giant money pit of creating demand up there. Colonies are very firmly in the third category; somebody has to be willing to lose a lot of money to get them up and running, and in the real world there’s probably not a McGuffin to justify it.
Fundamentally there’s just not any reason to expect a return from it. There’s people that would quite like to go, sure. But a major government has to spend a significant fraction of their budget over a long time horizon setting it up. That’s the kind of resources we’re talking about here.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
6hr ago
The law has been on the books for plenty of time. I think this is a good reminder that the basic unit of the United States of America is the State, not the political party. I think the Democrats really thought the state would simply roll over and accommodate them, and that expectation is frankly cause enough to remind them of the proper place of the party.
I'd love to know the rationale for repeatedly ignoring these sorts of laws. "Because we can", sure, that works until you can't. At the very least, start lobbying the states for uniform 2-month rules or something.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6hr ago
Maybe the neocon or Whig wings, but the minarchist and libertarian wings are quite willing to end subsidies.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I feel like solar/batteries, specifically, are exempt from a ‘f you, greenies’ push by republicans because government solar programs are so often about giving middle class people free money.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
It seems like some of the precursor missing technologies are obvious, but comparatively few are working on them. I'm thinking small-scale closed-loop habitats: Biosphere 2 was cute, but it mostly failed as an experiment and wasn't even a reasonable size for space colonies. I think we're quite short of the required technology, but it seems a fairly easy experiment to run iteratively on Earth to get there.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I like roundups so long as they’re organized on more or less the same topic. Eg ‘abortion on the ballot in the fall’ with examples from several states, or the country politics roundups that sometimes get posted. What are simply random topics strung together can be difficult to deal with.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7hr ago
I think it's just the horses vs. elephants thing discussed over at ACOUP. Yeah, horses may freak out when they encounter an elephant in combat. But if you train the horses around elephants, they'll get used to the elephants, and then they can deal with elephants in combat just fine.
sweet
7hr ago
Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
It's this, combined with the fact that women are a distraction when discipline and focus are paramount. If you've ever trained in martial arts you know the air is charged differently when a woman is in the gym and the minds of men will wander.
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
Officially "Big Falcon Rocket" but this is commonly known to be a euphemism for the actual meaning, "Big Fucking Rocket". Circa 2019 IIRC it got renamed to "Starship" so the term is deprecated at any rate.
TitaniumButterfly
7hr ago
The value of the roundups is hard to casually overstate. Can't tell you how many times I thought I'd read every discussion on this site only to find half a dozen or more gems in the roundup that I'd somehow missed entirely.
cjet79
7hr ago
Perfect weather would be going through a yearly seasonal cycle in 4 months instead of 12. There would be a perfect day of winter, snowing 20F, not windy. A perfect day of spring, 70F and humid after just raining with green shooting up everywhere. A perfect day of summer 90F, with a slightly cooling breeze, occasionally big fluffy clouds to give some relief from the sun, and a pool to jump in to cool off. A perfect day of fall, 60F with leaves falling, a cooling breezing that makes sweaters comfortable, and dry weather for some good fire pits in the evening.
I genuinely like weather variations, but I tend to get sick of weather extremes after a month. So just a faster set of seasons would be good.
If I had to pick a single type of weather I'd pick room temperature 70F with no sun or wind. Basically no weather, since I'd get sick of any extremes after enough time.
The fact that the Democrat president singlehandedly increased the number to the current level seems to imply that their goal isn't to decrease it.
Remember when the Democrats agreed to tough-on-crime policies in the 90s, despite formerly being the party that wanted to lessen crime penalties?
Depending on how you look at it, it was either a trap or a compromise that gave a lot to the Democrats while giving a little bit to the Republicans.s
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
I really like the roundups. It makes discussions easier to find later, which is one of the reasons I find these threads so valuable.
Twitter is noticeably worse for me. About 40% of the time the app is in a state in which no images or videos will load. It's full of bots, which I never noticed before. I get follow requests from bots several times a week, even though I have a private account and have never posted anything.
There are more ads and oftentimes I am shown the same ad three or four times in a row. The recommendation algorithm sometimes does weird things. Recently, about a third of the recommended Tweets were in Turkish. I don't speak a word of Turkish.
I do like that there is less censorship, but I don't believe for a second that firing so many people hasn't caused serious problems.
Other companies that have done mass layoffs are having similar problems, though not as severe. Most software I use has gotten worse lately. Facebook Messenger is especially bad.
lagrangian
7hr ago
Meta: please consider making multiple top level comments instead of one (excellent!) multi-topic comment. The responses get disorganized as-is.
sliders1234
7hr ago
Software makes it harder and easier to make money. Profits scale a lot more. But it’s a lot harder to get to initial profitability because the competition to be the one who scales is more fierce.
In the physical world every real estate developer can make a building with positive unlevered free cash flow (harder to create a yield above capital costs but fundamentally the project will have profits).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
7hr ago
Also read Jasper Fforde's Red Side Story last night, and regret the wasted time. Dreadful sequel 15 years too late to use the original ideas of the first book.
I'm enjoying it, personally. But I wouldn't call myself a literary connoisseur.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7hr ago
"But battles are ugly when women fight."
What does he mean here? This could either mean that women fight dirty and thus make the battle ugly, or it could mean that women having to fight means women getting wounded and killed and being forced to wound and kill others which is itself ugly. Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
sliders1234
7hr ago
He didn’t make them popular. He got them to the point of being economically competitive and profitable to sell which is a huge step forward.
We did nuclear fusion decades ago. We still can’t do it economically.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
8hr ago
Ever been to 4chan?
(And yes, I know a few people in that demographic that do this constantly for that reason.)
dr_analog
razorboy
8hr ago
I don't have an opinion on AI yet, but then again I don't understand why people are acting like OpenAI == Elon Musk
I think his early investment in OpenAI shows vision even if he did leave them for dead for not bending their knee to him.
Also, because FSD is amazing? It's pretty reliable! I mean it needs to be, like, 4-5 orders of magnitude more reliable and it's unclear if they can achieve that with their current tech stack but it's still one of the most remarkable AI achievements ever to have a car that can drive itself for an entire day, using only cameras, in any arbitrary environment and maybe only kill one pedestrian. I would absolutely say they're well positioned to capture a portion of an AI market.
Let me know if you want to compare notes when you finish it. Won't say anything that might spoil you now.
Maybe I was just in a bad mood for it.
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