Australis13

Ah, my mistake, I’m getting mixed up between minidiscs and the 8cm mini CDs.

You can get multi-layer M-disc BD-Rs, though, up to the triple layer 100GB BDXL (although you need one of the BDXL burners to write those; the 50GB BD-R DLs can be written by most burners). They cost a pretty penny, though!

The biggest problem now is the disappearance of Bluray burners/writers. Here in Aus there are no internal drives available on the market any more. I’ve had to stock up with a few second-hand spares before they get too pricey.

Yeah, I like to have important data (such as family photos and videos) backed up on two different formats and M-disc BDs provide an acceptable option. There are various blog posts testing them online versus regular discs and they handle a lot more wear and tear (not that mine get subjected to that!), so I’m pretty confident that mine will outlast me.

Entertainment content I’m willing to risk on regular recordable discs/HDD backups if it’s important enough to put in the effort (I usually buy the physical disc anyway, so I have the pressed CD, DVD or BD to start with).

Haven’t seen a minidisc in ages! I remember some of the cheap IT hardware used to come with those for drivers in the late 2000s.

M-Discs are a specialised form of DVD and Bluray (DVDs require a burner with M-disc capability) that have a longer life than the usual consumer grade discs. Odds are that they will last longer than the technology required to read them.

Eventual goal - solar with battery backup for the house with isolation ability from the grid. Here in Aus you can have (1) solar tied to grid, (2) solar with batteries tied to grid, and (3) solar with batteries with a grid isolation switch. Only (3) allows you to power your house when the grid goes down.

If my place gets flooded then, due to the terrain, it’s going to be a much bigger problem than data loss (even if it is all my family photos and videos). I think that will be the least of my concerns at that point. That said, I do have off-site backups and I’m also locally archiving to m-discs, so both the flood and EMP problem are not insurmountable in that respect.

Probably the one thing I do need to do is print out a lot of the more recent photos so I have hard copies of ones I want to keep.

A combination of a microprocessor and a graphics chip, developed with help from Taiwan’s MediaTek, it is designed to run AI agents locally rather than relying on cloud computing.

From a privacy perspective, at least, this has potential.

It will allow agents to navigate PCs autonomously, replacing humans’ traditional mouse and keyboard interactions.

Yeah, no. These things are still far too unreliable. Anyway, if you look at most sci-fi set in the future with voice control, keyboards (or at least their touchscreen counterparts) are still very much present.

Lot of assumptions as to what’s going on here. All we can say for certain is that Claude is involved in the process somewhere.

I think concern is warranted, but let’s wait for more information before we decide rsync is “cooked”.

I have no experience with UPSes, but I have used LFP batteries a fair bit.

The main compatibility issue will be the battery voltage and charging system. Most Li-based batteries have slightly higher nominal and charging voltages than lead acid types depending on the cell configuration.

Check the specs on your UPS model to be sure it is compatible and if it is, I’d go with LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries rather than other Lithium chemistries at this time. They don’t weigh as much as the equivalent lead-acid batteries, are roughly the same size for the same capacity and handle deep discharge better than lead-acids. Plus LFP batteries aren’t as volatile as some other Lithium batteries.

I agree that it doesn’t fit the definition in the sidebar, and I don’t use it because of those issues. If I’m self-hosting something, it’s precisely because I don’t want to be sharing data with a company (whether it be my photos or an inventory of my media library) or because I want more control than an external service provides.

That said, most stuff we self-host isn’t going to be completely independent, e.g. if you’re running anything with HTTPS, you’ll need Let’s Encrypt or another way of obtaining a valid cert (unless you want to get into the habit of allowing exceptions in your browser, which is not a good idea).

In the strictest sense, Plex does qualify as self-hosting (you’re running the application on hardware you manage along with your own media library) - but I’d argue that the compromises it requires are not ones every one is willing to agree to.

“When people use our A.I.-powered features in search, they use search more,” Mr. Pichai said in an interview Tuesday before Google’s annual developer conference.

So either it’s a worse product and you have to spend more time just trying to get the information you want, or people find it easier to use and hence use it more. Given that Internet advertising is usually built around generating friction to keep the user on the page for longer, my inner cynic says the former is far more likely than the latter.

Very funny but also a good example of just how vulnerable these bots are to prompt injection.

This financial feature will be initially available to users in the US who subscribe to ChatGPT’s $200-per-month Pro tier.

Apart from the fact that there’s no way in hell I’d want a hallucinating LLM with privacy and security issues to see my health and banking data, I can’t quite get my head around the concept that there are users who willingly pay this much for access to it…

Over my dead body.

Also, this is laughable:

We’re on the cusp of the next major transition, the merger of humans and AI.

These guys don’t even have true AI yet, just a text predictor on steroids that frequently hallucinates and gets things wrong.

Garbage in, garbage out.

This is a basic concept. You train the LLM on the entire Internet and you’re going to end up with some very disturbing behaviours that may or may not be outliers.

To be honest, sometimes photos of cats are a pleasant addition to quality of life.

I agree about the celebrity bickering, though.

That’s the most amusingly unhinged spam I’ve read in a while.

Herpes simplex 1 (HSV-1) is not EBV (herpesvirus 4 aka HHV-4). Right family, but different virus.

EBV causes mono aka glandular fever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein–Barr_virus

Yep, I had a look at Winboat. It’s effectively a Windows VM anyway (using RDP), so for the sake of the couple of applications I need Windows for (which mostly interact with each other), VirtualBox with a VM is easier for me to manage.

I abandoned Windows for Linux rather than update to Windows 11. I will be interested to see what Microsoft does, but at this point I seriously doubt they’re going to be able to give me a good enough reason to return to Windows as my primary OS. At this point I only need it for a few applications that don’t have a Linux equivalent and don’t run on Wine.

I can envision use cases like wanting to be able to search through all your documents or photos when you can’t clearly remember what you wrote (assuming it’s properly implemented and well-secured, e.g. path-constrained time-limited read-only access), or local chatbot for brainstorming, or if you want to play around with agentic “AI” (automating small things on the local system that aren’t easily scripted) then having one that is private and properly sandboxed would be helpful.

If they get it right (opt in by default, respects privacy, appropriately sandboxed for security, clearly defined use case, etc.) then I can see how this could be useful.

But it’s a big if.