Final Fantasy IX. I was a religious FF player before IX, and loved VIII so much despite all its flaws, because it really went for it with new ideas and atmosphere and the draw junction system which was hackable and broken but really interesting. In many ways the most Final Fantasy of Final Fantasy, despite the widespread hate.

But the devs got so conservative for IX, might as well have been playing Dragon Quest. And the load times and frequency and lack of variety for random encounters was just insurmountably tedious.

The sources said the president was upset with a particular moment during the hearing when Republican Sen. John Kennedy questioned Noem about a taxpayer-funded $220 million ad campaign. Noem repeatedly suggested the president was aware of the campaign and signed off on it.

And there it is. Killing Americans, violating the Constitution, lying, stealing, being a literal Nazi, none of that matters. To Trump, the only thing you can do wrong is prioritize anything over him.

Noem should be in jail and Mullin is just a PR switch, but I find this detail most telling about where the lines remain for Trump.

Yep, this is the best thing that could’ve happened to Noem. In a healthy government, that alone would start an investigation and no doubt uncover criminal self-dealing.

I used to spend a lot of time on tech sites, but tech in general has all become such an evil enterprise. I remember back in the '00s looking forward to the next Android update or even back when a new Windows was going to bring improvements (even if just to fix the bugs). Now every update to every service or hardware is enshittification and SaaS.

That does make sense - also matches how I have currently sperated files so it’s a valuable idea. Thanks!

Sorry. Shortly after posting this and the initial QA I left for a trip.

I could definitely wait those time periods for a first backup and a restore, since I assume it’ll be a once in 10 year at worst situation. Data changes after the first upload should be show enough to keep up.

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.

So the guy got lost and ended up in a woman’s doorstep. He has a curtain rod he issues as a walking stick and is mostly blind. The woman apparently called the police and the police charged him treating the walking stick as a weapon for some reason.

In order to avoid an issue with ICE for some reason he plead guilty (why a defense lawyer would recommend this or why it would not make things worse with ICE is beyond me).

Then when released the sheriff called Border Patrol for some reason to “offer” him a ride. BP claims he asked to be taken to a Tim Hortons, but obviously nothing they say can be trusted at this point. BP did this in secret which is totally normal and not suspicious, and didn’t inform his family or law enforcement, who put out a missing person’s report and started an investigation.

The successive layers of cruelty and reckless disregard - the woman calling the police for an apparent lost handicapped person, the charges, local LE calling BP, the guilty plea, BP taking custody for a “courtesy ride” that no one was told about that left him to die - are just incredible.

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.

Fascinating. Definitely still prefer the Go for retro futurism, though.

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.