Some plastics cause cancer, others seem to be completely ignored by biological processes. Plastics range from cellophane which is basically just cellulose fibers chained together to Teflon which is basically entirely man made. It all depends, but generally speaking, plastic in the microwave is bad.

The capital comes from the profits from other markets. Which comes from exploiting workers. The original investment didn’t just spontaneously expose itself, people chose to flow money into it. They’ll pay for the next bubble with the profits C-suit executives stole from their workers and the little guy. They will take what should have been yours and bet it away on some fever dream that was doomed to fail from the beginning. All in the hopes that they might make their wealth get more outrageously excessive before this bubble bursts and they try again on the next.

What was left after the cryptocurrency crash? A whole lot of GPUs that got repurposed for AI. They’ll just get repurposed for whatever extremely computationally intensive thing some computer engineer comes up with. Until that bubble bursts, rinse and repeat. What’s happening is project managers are selling the next big thing to make a lot of capital really quickly to a board of directors.

To piggy back off of Arcayne’s comment

I’d recommend setting your sights on the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of your data, 2 different mediums, 1 off-site. Hetzner Storage Box is a good cheap offsite option.

I don’t backup everything to a 3-2-1. I at least have everything on a 2-1 backup scheme. Two copies, one offline. My personal photos and videos are on a proper 3-2-1. I can redownload my movies and music. I can’t retake pictures from my childhood. It saves a lot of money doing it that way. My personal media is less than 1 TB, whereas my whole collection is many TB and would be prohibitively expensive to 3-2-1.

Look into:

Talescale for an easy but limited option.

Wireguard with a dynamic DNS service for something that provides more flexibility with a little set up.

Don’t open a publicly facing port unless it’s for an encrypted tunnel. If you don’t want to open your computer to a lot of threats. Always use an encrypted tunnel when opening something to the Internet.

I’ve had my posts swamped by downvotes at least once by saying “I not pro-Palestine, I’m pro-People” as if I have to favor factions rather than, you know, being against the victimization of people who did nothing to deserve it quite independently of whatever label they’re tagged with.

I think part of the reason being pro-people makes others angry is because everyone is so polarized politically. A lot more people than usual are approaching politics expecting that you’re either supporting my ideals or not supporting them. Which may as well be opposing them and opposing ‘our’ ideals is your moral failing. Nuance is gone, the political center is gone. At least until there are some serious changes.

Okay young one, we have a few things to get through.

First, you should feel whatever you do feel. It’s not as embarrassing to have your parents help you than you might think. You’re in your early 20s, which means most of your life experience comes from when you were a child and embarrassing parents were a social death sentence. You’re an adult now and to a lot of older adults stuff like that becomes insignificant compared to other things. That said if you feel embarrassed, you feel embarrassed, there is no should to feelings.

Two, I suggest you tell your Dad that you appreciate what he’s trying to do, and that you’ll go on the date (because I think you should). You need to tell him that doing this without keeping you in the loop made you feel uncomfortable. He’s trying to help and it comes from a good place but the execution was a little off.

If he doesn’t listen or it still feels wrong you have to tell him that too and ask him to stop. Still I suggest you try it out.

Third, go easy on yourself. Finding a partner is not easy, and at your age you’re going to make mistakes, big ones but that’s okay. That’s what living is. Just make sure you don’t an STI or you or someone else pregnant. Unless future you is trying to have a kid, in which case good luck!

Here’s an AI summary of your distain for AI:

I’ll begin saying this when people ask why I want “dumb” machines.

AI summaries lack quality, ads distract drivers, you want a washing machine without ads, you don’t want your TV to watch you, you want machines to be submissive.

How did I do?

Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of help available. American’s are going to have to clean up their own house.

A suppressed gunshot is still very loud. Like 90 dB(A) or more. While there are purpose built firearms for very quiet shooting they’re rare, expensive, and only situationally functional.

If I were you I wouldn’t be getting my hopes up. In four years, if elections still happen, MAGA is still going to vote for Trump and Vance because “A Democrat as president would be worse.” Don’t think that term limits are going to stop Trump.

Just because Wikipedia offers a list of references doesn’t mean that those references reflect what knowledge is actually out there. Wikipedia is trying to be academically rigorous without any of the real work. A big part of doing academic research is reading articles and studies that are wrong or which prove the null hypothesis. That’s why we need experts and not just an AI to regurgitate information. Wikipedia is useful if people understand it’s limitations, I think a lot of people don’t though.

What I’ve done is set up an UnRAID server with an XFS pool for my media pool and a ZFS pool for my photos, family videos and documents. The biggest advantage I see with UnRAID is that it’s designed from the ground up for buying parts over time. When my media pool gets full, buy a bigger disk, slam it in, let it rebuild. When my documents (ZFS) pool is full I move it to my media array, break the ZFS pool and rebuild it bigger.

As opposed to say a TrueNAS scale deployment with pure ZFS, where I would highly suggest that you spend the money upfront and buy the system your going to want tomorrow, not today.

Sure UnRAID’s ZFS is not as mature as almost every other NAS OS out there but it’s good enough. Plus I have my pictures and stuff in a proper 3-2-1 backup so I’m not too worried about bitrot.

This is the type of thing that I look at say this can’t possibly work, and the engineer beside me will look at me a little confused and say this can’t possibly fail. Sure enough they’re usually right. Usually. I still won’t be climbing on there.

A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.

Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.

ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.

If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.

The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.

Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.

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Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Is Hamas even still a thing? Like as far as I can tell from my armchair halfway around the world they’re basically all dead. It seems to me like Hamas has been thoroughly defeated. Gaza is a wasteland and at this point I would be surprised if Hamas could muster up any type of action.

It’s an older meme, sir. But it checks out.

In practice you’re right, and I’m not going to even try to argue the real life consequences AI has caused. However I disagree that AI doesn’t have any place in the education system. Used on the appropriate problems, AI is a tool that makes a few things which were challenging to compute much easier. One example is large AI models folding proteins for medical research. A problem that took a computer a day or more to solve can be solved in hours on the same equipment using AI software. That’s just one application that admittedly isn’t useful to school aged children but it’s still one useful example of AI. There are others. Students should be taught how to use AI properly, and part of that is teaching them what it’s good at and what it’ll never be able to do.

The part I get angry about is disgusting Tech Bro Billionaires trying to shove AI into every piece of software they can. Just like the block chain they’re over promising and there’s a bubble. Unlike block chain technology AI actually has a few useful applications and because of that it’ll take a lot longer that BitCoin to finally level out.