Bob Odenkirk has never steered us wrong, thanks. I downloaded three copies of this from YouTube in case I forget.

That’s incredibly helpful and informative, a great read. Thanks so much!

That’s a great point.

The Backblaze option is something I’ve seriously considered.

Any reason this person didn’t go with the $99/year personal backup plan? It says “unlimited” and it is for my household only, but maybe I’m missing something about how difficult it is to setup on Unraid or other NAS software. B2’s $6/TB/mo rate would put me at $150/mo which is not great.

For me, I have a bad memory. I might remember a childhood movie (a nickname I give to special Linux ISOs) that I hadn’t even thought of for 10 years and track down a copy, sometimes excavating obscure sources, and that may be hours of one-time inspiration and work repeated many times over. Having a complete list is a good helper, but a full backup of course is best.

Yeah, this is certainly a viable “brute-force”-ish ooption. While I have 56, I’m only using 26 or so. But I’d actually be hesitant to do anything less than a full capacity mirror because I do expect to eventually use this (and more - adding drives to Unraid).

I’ve balked because of cost and upkeep (maintaining the same capacity, additional chances for drive failure, two separate sites I need physical access to with a high bandwidth connection), so I admit I was hoping I was missing an easier option.

Do you have logs or software that keeps track of what you need to redownload? A big stress for me with that method is remembering or keeping track of what is lost when I and software can’t even see the filesystem anymore.

I think rather than China just doing it, Xi will contact Trump and offer him some token concession that Trump can sell as victory on tariffs, in exchange for the US not helping Taiwan. I’ll give myself a bonus point if that “major” concession is something we already have or had prior to Trump’s tariffs.

I understand the sentiment and agree with the diagnosis. I just worry that the proposed cure won’t address the illness. Decentralization is a band-aid at best.

I think the traditional journalism business model is just a proxy for “truth” in the sense that fact-checking and reliability is really what’s at stake versus social media “news.” And the substituted point is still valid - truth as a business model is no longer financially viable - but the cure I feel should be to make truth financially viable. One way to do that is to depress demand for misinformation (laws prohibiting misinformation and enforcement, creating boycott campaigns against platforms that algorithmically incentivize misinformation like Facebook and X). The other is to reward truth (educate the populace to support it, sure, but also keep funding as a social good journalism like NPR, PBS).

It’s not great, but I don’t feel just pushing into decentralized media will do anything except create even more competing “truths” and hasten information exhaustion. That path leads to Russia, where the populace seems mostly nihilistic and too jaded to act.

In itself, the answer is really simple, at least for the remaining democracies, and a solution would be entirely possible: people would have to switch to decentralized media apps, such as those provided by the Fediverse, and stop attributing so much credibility to legacy media. This would significantly reduce the scope for concerted disinformation, which is the main reason for any autocratic form of government being possible, which is of course never in the interests of citizens.

Sorry, but I don’t think this will do it. We got into this situation because social media in general allows for fine-tuning manipulation and propaganda to specific audiences, not because they’re centralized. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were probably a but-for cause (and there are many) of Trump’s first win. But it wasn’t because Facebook was actively trying to help Trump, as much as it was because social media both democratized and bastardized journalism.

If everyone switched to Lemmy, Russia and others would now just focus (as I think they already have here in election years, but to a larger extent) their resources on Lemmy disinformation campaigns instead of X and Facebook. If the userbase splintered to 100 different apps instead of any centralized one, likewise targeted misinformation would follow. And viral misinformation would cross platforms, just like it already does.

Yes, education is the long-term answer.

A disproportionate number of them are likely true psychopaths, without functional empathy or conscience. That is certainly my theory about the dead eyes.

Yeah, my opinion is rule-breaking should be reported. I’ll correct myself: The phrase I should have used is “bad-faith conduct.” Sealioning, LLM-likely text, propaganda posts, troll comments. Things that may not break rules but still are outside the bounds of respectful or legitimate effort.

If people want to use it to express general disapproval, the result will be a reddit-like leveling of commentary and opinion, because the bell curve of opinion will keep narrowing to just the most statistically acceptable content.

But if you insist on using downvotes for just “disapproval,” I’d at least suggest doing it asymmetrically: upvote if you liked a thing at all; downvote only if you absolutely hate it.

He’s mentally impaired. A malignant and grandiose narcissist wants more money, attention, fame, and so on for themselves no matter what they have.

I believe that was the rationale for disabling downvotes. Honestly, it was pretty nice. Really, only rule-breaking content should be downvoted in my opinion. But everyone just uses it as a “don’t like” signal, which further marginalizes small/niche posters and communities that aren’t breaking any rules, by suppressing their posts with negative ratios.

Yeah, it’s such a simple psychological judo move to force them not to wear masks. I really think it would be extremely effective in preventing a lot of violence.

Per the local government’s ordinance summary, this is a criminal ordinance and it’s effective 30 days after passage, signature by mayor and publication in the City’s newspaper. So soonest will be late March.

I agree the question is whether the cops will enforce, but regardless, it should be done. And it gives a clear tool to local leaders to (hopefully, finally) flip the switch and start arresting ICE for criminal acts, since whatever Stephen Miller says, ICE does not have “absolute immunity” to break the law, much less violate the Constitution.

Yes, that’s the biggest hypocrisy that can’t really be explained without partisan intent. Talk radio is almost entirely right-wing and always has been. AM signals - too low quality for profitable music stations, but far-reaching and the natural home of low-cost talk networks - have always been heavily weighted to right-wing content.

That wide reach is the chief reason why, despite the GOP always favoring the rich in their actual politics, they started heavily gaining support in all rural areas around the country from the 90s onward. In many rural areas, the AM station with Rush Limbaugh was the only - or one of only a few - they could tune into.