Honestly, I’d buy 6 external 20tb drives and make 2 copies of your data on it (3 drives each) and then leave them somewhere-safe-but-not-at-home. If you have friends or family able to store them, that’d do, but also a safety deposit box is good.

If you want to make frequent updates to your backups, you could patch them into a Raspberry Pi and put it on Tailscale, then just rsync changes every regularly. Of course means that wherever youre storing the backup needs room for such a setup.

I often wonder why there isn’t a sort of collective backup sharing thing going on amongst self hosters. A sort of “I’ll host your backups if you host mine” sort of thing. Better than paying a cloud provider at any rate.

From a read of that issue, it looks like it never was.

The thing is, none of the suggested alternatives can do what pickle does, and the article focuses on a narrow (albeit ubiquitous) use case: serialisation of untrusted data.

There are still legitimate use cases for pickle, especially when storing, caching, or comparing objects that can’t easily be serialised with say, JSON or TOML. It’s a question of using the right thing for the right job is all, and pretending like JSON is a comparable alternative to pickle doesn’t help anyone.

They’re on Mastodon too if you’re looking for a fedi-friendly link: https://mastodon.social/@warandpeas

I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.

Matrix would be great if it wasnt so user-hostile, but it is :-(

If you like her long-form stuff, she has two rather amazing videos on Nebula:

• The Macabre World of Bodycam Footage (not what you think)
• The Ballad of John and Yoko

Lindsay Ellis has a positively exceptional video on this very subject.

“People who refused to vote for genocide have blood on their hands” is a weird take, but OK.

…and Dyson Sphere Program.

Oh boy are you not going to like this, but someone’s gotta say it:

The Democrats are just as responsible for this shit show as the Republicans

The US has a two-party system, based on the assumption that the two sides will oppose each other and through that opposition come to a happy/sane medium. I’ve been watching US politics my entire life (I’m 46) and not once have I ever seen the Democrats do their damned job and oppose the rightward slide.

Biden had the House and the Senate and he knew what was coming. Anyone paying attention knew that Trump or some other fanatic would take the White House again and he did nothing.

Things the Democrats could have done with the power they had:

• Reduce the powers of the president
• Enshrine abortion as a human right
• Abolish ICE
• Medicare for all
• Elevate Puerto Rico and Washington DC to state status, thus guaranteeing Democrat dominance for the foreseeable future.
• Reducing the funding of the military
• Stop supporting Israel already

They did… none of that. In the case of genocide, they did the opposite and then threatened anti-genocide voters that they’d better fall in line or they’d get… the other genocider. Fuuuuuuck that.

Some of this is strategic. The Democrats will never make it impossible for the Republicans to threaten abortion rights, because it gives them a stick to beat the Republicans with every 2 years. Same goes for Medicare. Some of it is ideological: the Democrats are just as bad as Republicans when it comes to supporting genociders and opposing socialism for example.

“BuT tHe RePuBlIcAnS aRe ObStRuCtIoNiSts!” I hear you say. “They Democrats could never get any of that done with the Republicans blocking everything!” To this I remind you that they had the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and all the powers Trump is unilaterally leveraging to turn your country into a dictatorship.

The Democrats haven’t had a leader with conviction since Carter, and every successive generation is more cowardly and disconnected from the people than the next. It certainly doesn’t help when people decry the immorality of refusing to vote for a candidate that will do nothing but keep the seat warm for the next Republican.

If the Democrats are unwilling to do their damned job, they should step aside and let someone else do it for them.

What’s 1312a?

It’s actually so much worse than that.

With e-labels you can optimise your prices in real time, A/B testing the public across the country in minutes to optimise for the highest rate a population will tolerate indefinitely.

Then, you can offload the management of this service to a third party, which sounds daft at first, but this provides deniability when it comes to price fixing. When EvilCorp contracts with all grocers in a given province/state, they can slowly hike the price of bread by 1% every hour until they maximise profits, screwing you. They can even optimise for time of day/region/whatever, all with deniability.

Surge pricing is a distraction. The real profit is in squeezing the public slowly.