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I don’t know why, but I always assumed that image was from Firefly. It’s the same color shirt and everything!

I’m not saying it’s great.

I just don’t see this ending without a bunch of people having their lives ruined, so whatever we can do to pull the bandaid off faster is the best we can hope for.

You know, this might not be for the worst.

People really need to get used to the idea that everything you see online, and especially on Facebook is fake. Maybe it’s for the best if they don’t moderate things well enough to let people pretend otherwise.

I don’t have any personal experience with self hosted webmail. I know there are a bunch out there and definitely both options that can sit in front of a maildir and options that can sit in front of a POP/IMAP server like Dovecot.

I did a little googling, and if I wanted to set this up, the first thing I’d check out is something like imapsync -> dovecot -> Roundcube.

Dovecot provides a really reliable maildir -> IMAP/POP conversion layer, and once you’ve got that, most things should work.

You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports) and updating your MX records on your domain.

Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

What I’m trying to say is that you should choose the programming language that will make your learning and early projects easiest.

Learning a new language later is not hard. Trying to use the wrong tool for the task when you’re just learning is hard, and will teach you the wrong lessons.

Learning more programming languages isn’t the hard part of becoming a decent programmer. You’re optimizing for the wrong thing here.

You should choose a language that works well for the specific projects you think you’re going to do in the near term. Depending on exactly what sort of projects you want to do, Python, Typescript, C++, and Rust are all languages I might recommend. I wouldn’t recommend raw Javascript for anything other than doing some tutorials before learning Typescript.

Without more information, I’d recommend Python.

The moment you start allowing limitations on who can or can’t be president you open the door to politicians shifting the requirements to fit their political needs. The legislature would immediate start the game of updating the requirements in a way that seems benign but is primarily calculated to hurt their opponents. Within 2-3 election cycles you’d have bills up specifically targeted to exclude their most popular opponents.

100% agreed, though I’m in the “neither is ideal” camp. My favorite language, by a long way at this point is Rust.

It’s not functional, but borrows a lot of functional idioms while avoiding the pain points functional language usually hit in exchange for losing the purity of functional languages.

Is France… ok?

I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.

So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!

They really want people scared, ehh?

Probably though, in 30 years, reactions towards the current automation of certain jobs will be seen similarly as frivolity.

Honestly, it already looks ridiculous.

To be clear, I think the automation of jobs is, at least in the immediate, a serious problem, with real consequences. The problem is real. The issue is that objecting to the technology itself is idiotic. That’s not a fight you’ll win. The technology exists. People are going to use it. And in the long run we’ll all be better off for it.

There’s serious conversations to be had about how we use AI, and how we deal with the consequences of its use, and especially how we manage the transition. But you can’t have those conversations with someone who insists that AI is the devil and that we need to stop it, and who gets mad at you when you suggest otherwise.

note that you probably need to trust the remote household with your data

Probably not actually. Borgbackup (and any sensible encrypted backup system really), does client side encryption. So the data should be encrypted before it’s even sent down the wire. The remote household shouldn’t be able to access the data without the encryption key/password.

I mean, they will have to trust the remote household not to destroy the data, but that’s pretty much an unavoidable limitation.

You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.

Actually, right now, the western AI companies desperately want regulation.

An unregulated environment is one where they’re forced to compete on price against the Chinese companies and startups running open-weight models. All signs point to them losing that battle.

OpenAI/Anthropic’s wish list right now is a bunch of regulation to prevent the use of foreign models, and to require expensive to implement “safety” requirements that make it hard for startups to compete.

You absolutely shouldn’t be angry!

The existence of powerful open-weight models is the single thing that’s going to prevent us from descending into the full corporate dystopia everyone’s afraid of.

It’s going to hit the stock market hard once everyone figures out what’s going on though.

[forget]
keep-daily = 10
keep-weekly = 4

Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don’t usually back up logs.

I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I’ve got the space.

The hilarious part is, yes, I don’t care how fast my launcher is.

But… also, Steam is by far the slowest, least responsive program on my computer.

“Faster than Steam” feels like a joke.

I don’t use a lot of non-open source applications (and not a lot of desktop applications generally). Have they gotten so bad that the slowness of Steam doesn’t feel bad to people anymore?

the models only need to be right some of the time and they still constitute a threat.

Right!?!

And with how cheap and fast they are to run, they don’t have to be right that often as long as a separate run can verify/validate claims. In a lot of ways what the LLMs do should probably be thought of as just a very sophisticated sort of brute force approach. You’re effectively just searching the space of combinations of known vulnerabilities. It doesn’t require particular cleverness, just an encyclopedic knowledge, a reasonable way to prune the search space, and the ability to put in the compute time.

I must be missing something, because you’re getting a bunch of upvotes. I don’t disagree with anything you said, but it feels like a total non-sequitur to what I was saying.

Yes - proper air-gapping is a good idea. But asking the big AI labs to air gap is kind of pointless. Liability already gives them legal incentives to avoid incidents. If that didn’t stop them, a letter signed by a bunch of academics sure won’t. More importantly, open-weight models capable of doing all the things that we’re concerned about are already in the hands of bad actors around the world.

This letter is asking us to lock the front door of the house when the back wall is missing.