Eric_the_Cerise's recent activity

  1. Comment on Should the plural of "milf" be "milfs" or "milves"? in ~humanities.languages

  2. Comment on Should the plural of "milf" be "milfs" or "milves"? in ~humanities.languages

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    I would argue that the location has no bearing. Can you not still refer to "a pride of lions" in, eg, Canada, despite having no prides of lions roaming the Canadian savanna?

    I would argue that the location has no bearing. Can you not still refer to "a pride of lions" in, eg, Canada, despite having no prides of lions roaming the Canadian savanna?

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Should the plural of "milf" be "milfs" or "milves"? in ~humanities.languages

  4. Comment on Slate Truck preorder starts at $24,950 in ~transport

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link
    Anyone have any informed opinions on when/whether these will become available in the EU? Right offhand, it looks like that's not even on their radar (and--I suppose--understandably so), but yeah,...

    Anyone have any informed opinions on when/whether these will become available in the EU? Right offhand, it looks like that's not even on their radar (and--I suppose--understandably so), but yeah, this is exactly the kind of EV I'd go for -- and I mean, not even for the price, but for the bare-bones, DIY approach.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Commodore Callback flip phone in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link
    Literally popped into Tildes just now, to post about this phone. Yeah, it's expensive, maybe too expensive. But it's also original. It's not a smartphone, it's not a dumbphone. It's neither iOS...

    Literally popped into Tildes just now, to post about this phone.

    Yeah, it's expensive, maybe too expensive. But it's also original. It's not a smartphone, it's not a dumbphone. It's neither iOS nor Android; it's a Linux phone, but not a weird techie niche thing. It has a removable battery (raise your hand if you're old enough to remember those).

    Color me intrigued.

    11 votes

  6. Comment on Shopping around for a new-and-improved backup solution in ~comp

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    I want "git-like" functionality. I don't just want to be able to restore the latest uncorrupted copy of my data, or to maintain "last 3 daily, last 3 weekly, last 3 monthly" snapshots, etc. I want...

    I want "git-like" functionality. I don't just want to be able to restore the latest uncorrupted copy of my data, or to maintain "last 3 daily, last 3 weekly, last 3 monthly" snapshots, etc.

    I want to be able to reliably roll back to any particular date/snapshot/version of a file, document or project. I want to be able to pull up a version from 2 years and 8 days ago, and diff it against my current copy. Things like that.

    I don't necessarily need this level of rollback specificity with my entire /home partition -- in fact, I definitely don't. But I do want this capability with a lot of my data, such as my Calibre libraries, almost everything in my Documents directory, etc.

    So I'm looking for a backup solution that can do that, for specific projects, directories, etc, and then I'll probably just continue using rsync--pretty much just the way I've been using it--for the left-overs.

    2 votes

  7. Shopping around for a new-and-improved backup solution

    ~comp Ask (advice)
    A few days ago, I posted this and quickly realized that the world of data backups is far richer than just sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=Videos /home /home_bkup. So now I'm window shopping the...

    A few days ago, I posted this and quickly realized that the world of data backups is far richer than just sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=Videos /home /home_bkup.

    So now I'm window shopping the top Linux-supported backup solutions: borg, duplicacy, kopia, restic and--oh look--a core borg dev just dropped his own new-and-improved solution, vykar.

    Restic was the first tool I started to research, and I thought I really liked it, got as far as installing, initializing a test repo, creating a couple of snapshots. But restic seems to be, hmm, fussy about the source and destination paths, absolute vs relative paths, etc.

    The fact that merely renaming a parent directory (or grandparent, or great-grandparent, etc) causes restic to treat every unchanged byte below that as brand new ... that's a recipe for giant, bloated repos, and it's unacceptable to me ... and hey, lookit that, borg does not do that. So now, restic is out and borg is in.

    But what other pros v cons are there, that I haven't even realized need to be considered? What advantages/disadvantages do other apps offer? Which ones can I easily automate with nightly/hourly cron jobs? Which ones have their own even-better automated solutions?

    Do I even want encryption? All of my drives/volumes are LUKS encrypted, and anything I would store remotely would also get encrypted before it ever left my LAN ... plus, I'm just a bit nervous about having the backups encrypted, requiring working, functional software to restore/recover data from them....

    That may not seem like such a big concern, perhaps, but I am currently working my way thru decrypting a bunch of 10-15 year old TrueCrypt-ed volumes, which requires using an old, outdated version of VeraCrypt and a somewhat "cross-my-fingers" effort to find KeePass repos old enough (also outdated, KeePass 1.0 repos) to still contain the various passwords I used to encrypt those ancient volumes ... but also still use new enough master passwords that I can still get the KeePass repos unlocked.

    With rsync, I can literally just go into any backup, find the specific version of the specific file(s) I want to recover, and manually copy it back to my workspace. Is anything like that option available in any of these deduplicated/encrypted solutions, even if they're not encrypted? If (eg) a borg repo is created w/o encryption, the data is still all just borg-specific blobs, right? Or can I navigate into the repo and just manually grab files?

    Oh yeah ... for reference, the past 10-ish years, my backup routine has been to create a new, dated, destination folder, starting with a full backup of my /home folder (excluding things like Videos, Music, VMs, other bulky stuff that gets backed up separately/differently), and then running nightly diff backups into the same folder, while also maintaining a "one-day-older" second backup of the whole thing on a 2nd HDD ... then, every 3-6 months, zipping up the current backup folder and starting a new one.

    At any rate, there you go; that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about now, as I overhaul my 20-year-old, 20TB (but could be 2TB) backup system.

    Any and all feedback, recommendations, tips are welcome. Danke.

    18 votes

  8. Comment on Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    I didn't even know this. My focus was simply, "using Google AI to translate German court ruling that concludes Google AI can't be trusted to be accurate".

    I didn't even know this.

    My focus was simply, "using Google AI to translate German court ruling that concludes Google AI can't be trusted to be accurate".

    5 votes

  9. Comment on Would it make sense to wrap my Calibre library in a Git project? in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    Particularly, thanks for this point. Since I do often manually edit the content of some of my epubs, I was explicitly expecting (among other things) that git would provide versioning history for...

    Also keep in mind that .epubs are .zip files, which are binary blobs, and git won't be able to meaningfully delta them.

    Particularly, thanks for this point. Since I do often manually edit the content of some of my epubs, I was explicitly expecting (among other things) that git would provide versioning history for these edits. Your comment suggests that is not the case.

  10. Comment on Would it make sense to wrap my Calibre library in a Git project? in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    Thanks -- so far from the various responses, it looks like restic--combined with one of the automater-tools, is the best tool for what I'm trying to do.

    Thanks -- so far from the various responses, it looks like restic--combined with one of the automater-tools, is the best tool for what I'm trying to do.

  11. Comment on Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link
    Ars Technica article (I'm intentionally not linking it) on the same court case used Google translate, without a trace of irony, to translate the German court's ruling.

    Ars Technica article (I'm intentionally not linking it) on the same court case used Google translate, without a trace of irony, to translate the German court's ruling.

    8 votes

  12. Would it make sense to wrap my Calibre library in a Git project?

    ~tech Ask (advice)
    Basically, the title question. I'm rethinking my entire data backup routine, considering using Git to start tracking much/most (all?) of my assorted projects' histories. In most cases, it makes...

    Basically, the title question.

    I'm rethinking my entire data backup routine, considering using Git to start tracking much/most (all?) of my assorted projects' histories. In most cases, it makes sense; but with my Calibre library, I'm not sure.

    Has anyone tried this?

    More particularly, if I do it ... what-all should be included in the .ignore file? Should I try to maintain a version history of the metadata.db file (an SQLite db file)? What about the ".calnotes" and ".caltrash" folders?

    Thanks.

    19 votes

  13. Comment on What are your personal crackpot conspiracy theories about the world right now? in ~talk

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link
    Almost everything bad happening in the world today, no matter how apparently-unrelated it is on the surface, can ultimately be traced back to Global Warming. Additionally, I'm pretty sure I'm...

    Almost everything bad happening in the world today, no matter how apparently-unrelated it is on the surface, can ultimately be traced back to Global Warming.

    Additionally, I'm pretty sure I'm right on this one.

    9 votes

  14. Comment on What are your personal crackpot conspiracy theories about the world right now? in ~talk

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    I was joking at the time, but my instant reaction to the news was "I bet it was China".

    I was joking at the time, but my instant reaction to the news was "I bet it was China".

  15. Comment on What are your personal crackpot conspiracy theories about the world right now? in ~talk

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    How do you know his name? Are you sure it's not Greg (the guy in the cubicle next to Harry)?

    How do you know his name? Are you sure it's not Greg (the guy in the cubicle next to Harry)?

  16. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    I'm not clear on the technical distinction, but Lumo does not "browse websites" like humans do ... but it does actively visit current websites and scrape/analyze current data on the sites ......

    I'm not clear on the technical distinction, but Lumo does not "browse websites" like humans do ... but it does actively visit current websites and scrape/analyze current data on the sites ... sometimes. Often, it also does something like what you're describing, while claiming/pretending to have actually checked the current site. Also, occasionally, it completely invents data that it claims it got from a website that may or may not even exist.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    The fact that Lumo exists is the only reason I've been willing to try AI at all. All the other AI platforms out there, aside from sucking at their primary purpose for existing, are also giant...

    The fact that Lumo exists is the only reason I've been willing to try AI at all. All the other AI platforms out there, aside from sucking at their primary purpose for existing, are also giant data-sucks, gathering personal information about the users that I'm not willing to share with those companies.

    There are some interesting-sounding open-source models out there, designed to run entirely locally ... of course, the processing power must be at least a couple of magnitudes lower, but I'm probably going to give one or two of them a try, eventually.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    This is almost entirely what I use AI for, as a kind of natural language meta search engine. It still doesn't work, though, as the AI often lies about whether or not it actually performed the...

    This is almost entirely what I use AI for, as a kind of natural language meta search engine.

    It still doesn't work, though, as the AI often lies about whether or not it actually performed the search, and it has a strong programmatic tendency to repeatedly fall back to its own internal knowledge base, generally w/o informing you.

    I find myself constantly falling into tangential arguments with it ... "did you really look that up? show me the actual URL you got that from... See, now, that URL is a dead link, did you even try it before giving it to me?" and etc.

    5 votes

  19. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    Lumo. Whatever its faults, I'm reasonably confident that it shares its hallucinations only with me.

    Lumo. Whatever its faults, I'm reasonably confident that it shares its hallucinations only with me.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    Eric_the_Cerise
    Link Parent
    Last month, I used an AI to research the top corrective surgery eye clinics in my area ... over the course of several days, multiple sessions, with extensive reminders to check its work, verify...

    Last month, I used an AI to research the top corrective surgery eye clinics in my area ... over the course of several days, multiple sessions, with extensive reminders to check its work, verify online, etc.

    2 out of 5 clinics, it invented out of whole cloth, including hallucinated websites, surgeons (by name), physical addresses, phone numbers, dozens of hallucinated online reviews, etc.

    10 votes