nickersonm

Vultr is pretty well known amongst the small technically innovative "cloud" hosting companies, and IMO has better offerings than DO. They also have a peering agreement with Backblaze and Cloudflare; no transfer costs between any of the three.

> This keeps getting repeated.. but when I was studying, I bought used IKEA furniture, moved it around several times to different apartments, and then sold it again when I moved from that city.

> I've also renovated my house recently which involved disassembling and reassembling some IKEA furniture. They're still fine.

Indeed, I still have all of my original IKEA furniture after 7+ moves - none have "fallen apart". They just require partial disassembly to move. My IKEA desk and Billy bookcases are >20 years old and in great condition.

I'm not quite sure how people manage to be so destructive when moving.

Sell all your furniture and all but irreplaceable and critical belongings, possibly including selling any cars you may have. Use a few thousand dollars of that money for airfare or gas money and move yourself and minimal belongings to a new location. Stay in a long-term-stay hotel (<$100/day) for a week or two until you can get the cheapest apartment you can find. Slowly repurchase essentials as needed. Done.

I'll third this recommendation as well. I find them slightly easier to use than DO, and they have free transit to Cloudflare and Backblaze B2.

The point is that all technology is a tool. Whether it be writing, calculators, or various narrow AI software. We can either bemoan the loss of a now-less-useful skill (memorization, long division, longform writing), or learn how to use these tools to better achieve our goals.

> In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.

- attributed to Socrates by Plato. c.399-347 BCE. “Phaedrus.”

Greater control of our physical environment.

The number hasn't really changed, it's just been measured with increasing precision. It is rather unlikely to be wrong given measurements via various methods are all in agreement. Summaries about these various experiments are available: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/featured_science/tenye...

Thanks for your civil engagement on what is often a contentious topic.

While not a perfect representation of purchases, I believe the EPA chart (Fig. ES-3) I referred to shows the average of all for-sale models for a given year, so this should capture the increasing preference for larger vehicles. Indeed, the horsepower and curb weight are shown as significant increases, even while fuel efficiency is improving (≥2005). It looks to me like the average fuel efficiency passed the 1985 peak (presumably driven by the 1970s oil crises) around 2007.

Clearly two decades of decreasing efficiency was not ideal, but I posit it may be the 1985-2005 period which you are mostly remembering. Going by the chart there was a fast shift to smaller and 'weaker' cars for highly increased efficiency 1970-1975, after which there was a slow continuous increase of power and weight - first occasioning a slow but relatively small decline in efficiency (compared to the 1970-1975 increase), but then changing to increasing efficiency as that became a more important factor for consumers.

Relatedly, while I am certainly not the target audience for the kind of advertisements that may encourage people to purchase more oil-based products, I cannot recall seeing any automotive advertising that wasn't clearly produced by a specific vehicle manufacturer. It sounds like you are suggesting 2nd and 3rd tier advertising by fuel companies for reversing the 1970-1975 reduction in consumption, but I'm not familiar with that space - I would appreciate it if you could direct me to any resources you have about that.

If oil companies have been campaigning specifically to deceive customers about the potential harms those customers may cause, then that should be what they are "held responsible" for. Trying to make them responsible for harms others caused using their products is rather orthogonal to that, and doesn't bolster arguments criticizing them.

Tangentially, while some vehicles presumably have worse mileage than a comparably-sized vehicle from the 1980s, fuel efficiency has significantly increased since 2005 (after a small decrease from 1985-2005) while supporting continuously increasing power and weight [0]:

In the two decades prior to 2004, technology innovation and market trends generally resulted in increased vehicle power and weight (due to increasing vehicle size and content) while average new vehicle fuel economy steadily decreased and CO2 emissions correspondingly increased. Since model year 2004, the combination of technology innovation and market trends have resulted in average new vehicle fuel economy increasing 32%, horsepower increasing 20%, and weight increasing 4%.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...

Yet these companies aren't the ones actually burning the oil, are they? They merely sell the product which others then burn. How can you hold only them responsible but excuse the parties further downstream?

It's even older; there's a decent blip in the 1830s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=institutional+...

I highly recommend this as well, although I just use it for managing snapshots on my NAS.

For backup I use hourly & daily kopia backups that are then rcloned to an external drive and Backblaze.

That is an age-old question: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

You're mixing up responsibility and restitution. "It's my fault" is exactly taking responsibility.

I've had a good experience with Kopia [0] for over a year. Linux and Windows boxes all writing to the same repository, which is synchronized to both B2 and a portable drive every night. The one thing it lacks that I'd like is error correction, so I store it on a RAID1 btrfs system. ECC is apparently being developed [1], but is currently experimental and I believe requires a new repository.

[0] https://github.com/kopia/kopia

[1] https://github.com/kopia/kopia/pull/2308

Why would you want to bring it back? There are literal gigatons of useful material 'up there', perfectly usable in-place (or anywhere that's not down a well) with low effort. Even with Starship, it's easier to use resources at the destination rather than boost them up.

I use maddy + dovecot. maddy's IMAP implementation is good for small stuff (and trivial to set up!), but still performs very slow for few-GB inboxes or larger.

Only if you make workspace-specific settings changes.

Yes, but the point of publishing is not to inform the public or media - the point is to communicate scientific results to others working in one's field.

Expecting it to be well explained to the general public is like asking all patches posted to LKML to include a lay-language explanation of exactly what the patch changes, without using specialized CS terms.

A reference would be the video referring to another paper (or video). That's difficult to extract from the video unless the publisher is going to fully annotate it - and if that's the case, why not just publish the annotations and images? Much faster to read!

I personally preferred The Better Angels of our Nature [0] as a deeper look focusing on the assorted statistics. Enlightenment Now recycles a lot of it and summarizes. There's some minor updates as well.

[0] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-natu...

Dark matter isn't adding hidden variables, it's identifying that there is a variable present which we don't know the origin of.

Exactly - often people forget the 'dark' in 'dark matter' just means 'we have no idea what it is'! All dark matter researchers would love for it to become '<x> matter'. It's not like dark matter is an ideal explanation, as another comment says it's more like a remainder term in an equation that we don't know the origin of.

Are you thinking of Timescape Cosmology [0]? I think it's a great explanation for dark energy that should be further explored. A summary is that due to the large difference in gravitational gradients between in-a-galaxy and between-galaxies, it appears that intergalactic space is expanding, but in reality it's just progressing at a faster rate of time due to general relativity, thus appearing to inflate from our perspective.

Typical cosmological models assume homogeneity, which IMO is a poor assumption with the lumpy universe we live in. I'm a fan of more exactly applying known models before inventing new terms!

[0] http://www2.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~dlw24/universe/