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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • This is a great conversation because I’m one of those people who’s terrible at arithmetic, but quite good at math. As in: I can look at a function, visualize it in 3D space, see what different max, mins and surfaces are dominated by what terms etc, but don’t ask me to tally a meal check. I’d be useless at applying any math without a calculator.

    Similarly, there’s a lot of engineers out there that use CAD extensively that would probably not be engineers if they had to do drafting by hand.

    The oatmeal did a comic that distilled this for me where they talked about why they didn’t like AI “art”. They made the point that in making a drawing, there are a million little choices made reconciling what’s in your head with what you can do on the page. Either from the medium, what you’re good at drawing, whatever, it’s those choices that give the work “soul”. Same thing for writing. Those choices are where learning, development, and style happen, and what generative AI takes away.

    That helped crystalize for me the difference between a tool and autocomplete on steroids.

    Edit: to add: you’re statement “I claim to understand but don’t” hits it on the head and is similar to why you have to be careful if plagiarism in citing academic review papers. If you write YOUR paper in a way that agrees with the review but discuss the paper the review was referencing, and, even accidentally, skip over that the conclusion you’re putting forward is from the review, not the paper you’re both citing, that’s plagiarism. Notion being you misrepresented their thoughts as your own. That is basically ALL generative AI.














  • So I had questions on practicing restore! I wanted to start by just making sure I had something, but how does one validate, short of having a duplicate hardware setup to restore to?

    Some of this is a bit extreme but a lot of it is capabilities I’ll be slowly building up. Read only backups is a fantastic point. I am indeed working at offsite backups. I have a separate drive for all the “untimely exit” stuff, and, most importantly, a physical printed folder in a fireproof safe. I have had/have some health issues that make it relevant. I strongly encourage practicality of air-tight security there. A plain text with accounts and passwords is a bad idea, but plain text naming where accounts are is reasonable. Yes, there’s always social engineering, but the people at those firms should be looking for proper legal documentation from the executor of the estate, and 98% of people are more likely to have a loved one who is cleaning things up than have someone stealing their identity. There is so much to handle when someone passes, any impediment makes it more likely someone just brute forces things.

    Re: Scrubbing “impolite” data. I lost someone last fall who was a data nut (tons of personal and professional videos and photos). We joked about finding their porn stash, but mostly we got drunk clicked around, and laughed at them flubbing a take at a work video, I cried a bit at a motorcycle maintenance list they never got to, that kind of thing. End of life is messy and gross. If it doesn’t carry jail time I can promise you no one will care whats on the computer after cleaning the endless bodily fluids out of the bed and carpet.

    I may pattern the backups of some drives, but there’s no way I’m going to have enough space to do that for 20+ TB of media. I like my media archive, I’ve spent a long time building it, but having the main drive, the local backup in a RAID, and an offsite is probably where that will end. The offsite will probably be a monthly one so that should help.

    On the other hand, I am working on cool genealogy project through gramps, which is intended to be a “forever archive” kind of thing. That I may pattern as the data would be incredibly difficult to replace and there’s an increased chance of non-malicious issues given I’ll be opening it up to extended family of varying technical expertise. THAT I may pattern more extensively the way you suggest.


  • This is really helpful thank you! I think it’s samba share? Whatever Unraid has just baked in and calls “shares”.

    Googling rsync that looks like it’ll work, and faster is better!

    While I do want true backups of a few drives (as in: if a drive fails, restore the backup to a new drive, physically swap it out, and you’re good to go), the majority of the data I’m just looking to have it “backed up” (as in: all of the files are present in more than one location). The majority of the data is ~18TB of media for my plex server. My unraid is: 1x 2TB, 1x 10TB, 1x20TB and 1x20TB(parity). It sounds like Rsync-ing the 20TB drive with my plex media and the 20TB unraid disk would get me what I need?

    Thanks for the pointers, getting a few things to google is incredibly helpful.



  • Not really “pink”, and lacks romance, but very pleasant: Dave the Diver. Cozy-ish game with nifty characters. Only thing would be I don’t know if you meant “no/minimal combat” because you don’t want the mechanics or the vibes. Dave has not particularly challenging combat mechanics, and paw patrol levels of violence levels (although you are catching and eating fish).

    If you like park builders, Zoo Tycoon is cozy as hell. Beware the DLC trap though. You can get the base game with a lot of meat pretty cheap, but the DLCs are like $10+ each and not really a good value IMO. But the game has a great vibe with some really neat mechanics that try and imitate real conservation efforts.

    What would check the boxes through a “Hot Topic” lens is Promise Mascot Agency. Surprisingly wholesome, completely off the wall, combat is all card/deck builder based… I… it’s a hard one to describe.

    Doughnut county checks all the boxes but is rather short. Katamari if you haven’t done it.

    I hear good things about, but have not played: Naiad, Tempopo.