> If you were an investor or trader, managing millions of dollars, would you keep the only copy of critical information in a cloud?
I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people. I've done enough business continuity and disaster recovery work with small business to be confident in saying it doesn't occur to small business owners. I'm not sure why individuals would be any different.
It's very hard to put yourself in the mindset of a non-technical person.
> I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people
Most people do not store anything valuable in the cloud anyway. The only problem is that they won't be able to login into Windows if MS bans the account, and they won't be able to install apps if Google bans their account along with phone serial number.
Presumably, as the GP said, you're not a normal person and you live in a basement. >sigh< (I'm with a lot of what the GP said but they didn't need to be insulting.)
The solutions self-hosting storage for non-technical people are terrible. Presumably there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty. I would guess the margin isn't there and a recurring subscription for something you own is probably unpalatable to a lot of consumers. So this is what we get.
The main side-effect is the lack of trust and integration. For example, if you self-host your email (or more realistically push it on a VPS), then the moment you want to send an e-mail you are going to be marked as spam.
To register on some websites you may sometimes receive: “please use real email from gmail/outlook/etc”.
When you have a business meeting with a customer: “oh just install Jitsi on your mobile phone” is the best way to lose a sale.
Or no way to pay train tickets because you cannot install the app because your Apple / Play Store account is locked.
I get what you are saying, but the examples are not great:
I've rarely seen (if ever?) a website so stupid and user hostile, to claim that there are no other "real" e-mail service providers out there, other than gmail, outlook, or a maybe a few others. There are services, which reject things like tempmail, that much I have seen, definitely.
Jitsi Meet runs in the browser. Does it not on a mobile phone? Perhaps there is something to this one, if it is the case, that customers in some areas don't even own any working machines any longer and only have phones.
Train tickets, at least where I am from and living, one can always buy, by going to a service center, or online via browser. I never had to use an app to buy train tickets. Even when traveling in China, which is arguably much further in terms of digitization than Germany, I was able to buy train tickets via a website comfortably, upon which the ticket was registered to my passport.
But I get it, there can be such examples.
Though I don't think this really matches the "depend on the cloud" thing. It's more like depending on services, that make use of "the cloud", and not directly using cloud services oneself.
I agree with you, and I think your reasoning is totally understandable. Just that I see additional friction, and friction in a business world is risk :/
(side-note, with Jitsi, it feels like I have a fireplace log in the hands when I use it)
I think Samsung rejected non-"Big Emails", but pretty sure we can find exceptions both ways.
Fun stuff I found while searching:
> https://transportation.ucsc.edu/buses-shuttles/dvs/
>
> The Disability Van Service (DVS) is a shared-ride service that provides on-campus wheelchair ramp–equipped transportation for those unable to use the regular Campus Transit system due to disability
>
> If you are a visitor, please use a Gmail address to complete the form or email dvs@ucsc.edu if that is not possible
and then, the form is behind... a Google login wall
Concert and theatre venues in the US, mostly locked into exclusive agreements with Ticketmaster, practically require a smartphone running the Ticketmaster app. You can load the tickets into the Apple and Google "wallet" apps but you have to have the Ticketmaster app to do that. In the past year I've had to pretend to be a confused elderly person and beg box offices to get me printed tickets because I don't want to load the Ticketmaster app. Eventually I'll have to buy a burner device, assuming I still want to attend live events.
Ah, perfect! One question: is Ticketmaster rejecting non-"Big email providers" ? I suspect they do, due to bots (wouldn't it be the same with Tinder, etc ?)
I don't know. My Ticketmaster account was created in August, 2005, and is a one-off email address at my personal domain. I have no idea if I could create an account like that today (and I'd be afraid to try).
Sovereignty also means responsibility. Either you have to keep your network secure, or you pay someone else do it (not always very well), otherwise you get security problems. Same goes for redundants backups, hardware maintenance, etc.
> there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty
Theres no turnkey solution (of course not, it is prohibitively complex to architect one), but the bits and pieces are there, built on tried and tested software. For example, SMB and rsync and their clients, are practically enough to do backups.
I have an RTL-SDR rig with the stock tiny omni antenna in a second story of a building adjacent a public parking lot. I'm using rtl433 and I am able to reliably pick up TPMS from the lot. I've never done any testing to see what the metes and bounds of my reception are, but it's definitely not touching the tire. My rig is at least 30 feet away from the closest parking spot.
The typical "clean room" process would be to have one group reverse-engineer the original and document it, then have another group of "un-tainted" people implement the spec.
This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack".
You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
I was just about to post the same thing. It's a very enjoyable watch. Quite light and digestible (~80 min runtime) and featuring Mel Brooks and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Currently streaming for free on Kanopy, which is often available through local public libraries.
On a hike this weekend my daughter and I talked about the similarities of the branching and bifurcating patterns in the melting ice on a pond, the branches of trees, still photos of lightning, the circulatory system, and the filaments in fractals.
Find some images of the entire huge scale structure of the universe. It looks a bit like… a brain.
What does this mean? Probably not nothing, but probably not “the cosmos is the mind of god.” It probably means that we live in a universe that tends to produce repeating nested patterns at different scales.
But maybe that’s part of what makes it possible to evolve or engineer brains that can understand it. If it had no regularity there’d be no common structural motifs.
Similar feeling here re: "mind of God". I interpret these patterns as a very simple property of mathematics producing complex-looking patterns and evolution exploiting that complexity. Evolution is the ultimate procedural content generation machine.
I have a real soft spot for the genetic algorithm as a result of reading Levy's "Artificial Life" when I was a kid. The analogy to biological life is more approachable to my poor math education than neural networks. I can grok crossover and mutation pretty easily. Backpropagation is too much for my little brain to handle.
In grad school, I wrote an ant simulator. There was a 2D grid of squares. I put ant food all over it, in hard-coded locations. Then I had a neural network for an ant. The inputs were "is there any food to the left? to the diagonal left? straight ahead? to the diagonal right? to the right?" The outputs were "turn left, move forward, turn right."
Then I had a multi-layer network - I don't remember how many layers.
Then I was using a simple Genetic Algorithm to try to set the weights.
Essentially, it was like breeding up a winner for the snake game - but you always know where all of the food is, and the ant always started in the same square. I was trying to maximize the score for how many food items the ant would eventually find.
In retrospect, it was pretty stupid. Too much of it was hard-coded, and I didn't have near enough middle layers to do anything really interesting. And I was essentially coming up with a way to not have to do back-propagation.
At the time, I convinced myself I was selecting for instinctive knowledge...
And I was very excited by research that said that, rather than having one pool of 10,000 ants...
It was better to have 10 islands of 1,000 ants, and to occasionally let genetic information travel from one island to another island. The research claimed the overall system would converge faster.
I thought that was super cool, and made me excited that easy parallelism would be rewarded.
Backprop is learnable through karpathy videos but it takes a lot of patience. The key thing is the chain rule. Get that and the rest is mostly understanding what the bulk operations on tensors are doing (they are usually doing something simple enough but so easy to make mistakes)
Almost all talks by Geoffrey Hinton (left side on https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/) are in very approachable if you're passingly familiar with some ML.
My entire motivation for using GAs is to get away from back propagation. When you aren't constrained by linearity and chain rule of calculus, you can approach problems very differently.
For example, evolving program tapes is not something you can back propagate. Having a symbolic, procedural representation of something as effective as ChatGPT currently is would be a holy grail in many contexts.
You can definitely understand backpropagation, you just gotta find the right explainer.
On a basic level, it's kind of like if you had a calculation for aiming a cannon, and someone was giving you targets to shoot at 1 by 1, and each time you miss the target, they tell you how much you missed by and what direction. You could tweak your calculation each time, and it should get more accurate if you do it right.
Backpropagation is based on a mathematical solution for how exactly you make those tweaks, taking advantage of some calculus. If you're comfortable with calculus you can probs understand it. If not, you might have some background knowledge to pick up first.
For an individual, probably not. I've been an OpenOffice and LibreOffice use for my personal use and contracting business since 2004. I've had no need for "real" Microsoft Office in that time. I also don't deal in macro-encrusted documents or with more esoteric features.
For an org where individual users aren't technical I'd never try to get by w/o Microsoft Office. The assumption by all large orgs. that you're going to use Microsoft Office is pervasive. Even if the Free Office suites work fine tech support is always going to be mired down in compatibility issues, both real and perceived.
I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people. I've done enough business continuity and disaster recovery work with small business to be confident in saying it doesn't occur to small business owners. I'm not sure why individuals would be any different.
It's very hard to put yourself in the mindset of a non-technical person.
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