Oh yeah… I mentioned this one a few days ago, as my husband’s co-workers brought it up…

People can be that reactionary when they don’t know shit.

Dude, he didn’t care and doesn’t care about the United States. He’s on track to become a triilionaire and that is all that matters to cretins like him.

Ohhh, boy, this is going to go over well with the Jewish and black servicemen and women, won’t it?

I really have no interest in AI. God knows, I can chat with a wall, a tree, a rock or even the air often enough on my own.

Sometimes I even surprise myself with the answers I get.

That’s definitely an E ticket!

I want people to remember he was in the Epstein files… so leave that aspect of his legacy intact.

Musk stated not too long ago, he felt empathy was a weakness of western society.

So… too bad for Tesla. Oh well.

When I was a kid in the Bay Area in California in the 70’s there were dairires that made ice milk and it was like vanilla and chocolate sherbet. I know the texture you are talking about, and yeah, it’s delightful and smooth.

…Were they sold into the idea that when the company is making lots more money it can do lots more good with it?

This. I remember the PR that came out at the time.

More to the point, in America, the USDA regulations allow for hard pack ice cream to have up to 40% of its volume expanded with air.

WAAaaaay back in the early 2000’s after Unilever bought them, I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Vanilla ice cream and got home and it sat on the counter and melted - much to my dismay - (It ended up under a towel and did not get put away.)

When I opened it, the level of ice cream in the container had dropped down by almost a quarter. What the hell? So I got another pint and at that time noticed that it was easier to scoop - a sign that there’s air being incorporated.

Yeah… nope. Done.

Haven’t bought Ben & Jerry’s in over 20 years. (besides, there’s a real homemade ice cream shop around the corner from my home - it’s what I get now and I support the woman that runs it.)

I do my backups manually.

As I have run unsuported Mac installs for the last 20 years, I started a long time ago, automatically partitioning my OS drives and making storage volumes to work off of.

The storage volume in the computer will have subfolders for the type of data - music, video, photos, etc.

When my storage volumes fill, I will pull my latest backup drive out of storage, hook it up then go into each storage subfolder, sort by date and add everything that’s newer than what’s in the backup drive. (which is actually how Apple’s Time Machine backups work - incrementally sorted by date - but I’ve had this method since the start, so I just stuck with it)

I just make sure to take note of how many files/folders I’m adding to the backup drive and note what it has at the start, then at the end, as a double-check of it all, before I clear the storage drive on the computer. (I did not do this and lost almost a years worth of music rips, waay back in 2003. Rebuilt the music I lost then iTunes threw a wobbler and lost the library for me. FML…)

The longest backup will ALWAYS be the initial one if you’re dealing with a first time backup. The rest, once you work out how to organize your files, is academic.

What I’ve found is that your tastes will change, you grab content you think you’ll want to hold onto forever… and then years later, you realize it’s low-bitrate, low-resolution, too pixellated… whatever… and you decide to delete it.

With the software doing the backups for you - it’s too easy to just let it rip and go have dinner while it works and you end up with files that you’d otherwise get rid of. Part of being a data hoarder is not keeping everything forever. There’s a ton of garbage online. Tastes change as you get older… You want to curate that shit so you can keep what’s most important - like family stuff.

And really good porn.

Yikes. Before you dip into any of the self-hosting, take and get a WD Gold drive - from Western Digital directly (wd.com) - do NOT go through Amazon or NewEgg or any third party merchant. Send in the warranty that goes with it and register the drive (this is for covering the off chance it’s a DOA unit) Then get a good quality enclosure to pop the drive into and take your time and back up EVERYTHING onto that new HD.

Don’t use an SSD.

You want a spinning platter drive, as this is backup only, so once it’s full with all of your content, it gets dated and labeled and popped into a drawer for safe keeping. If you have countless terabytes of data, get more drives and swap them into the enclosure, date and incrementally fill. A fine tip sharpie to note what’s on the drive is fine, or if you’re obsessively anal about it, make a spreadsheet with that info… If your drives are kept dry and stored with care they will last for DECADES…

The truth if being honest here - I’m a data hoarder and most of the stuff I’ve tucked away since I first came online (in 1999) is now on drives that I maybe spin up once a year. I used to have the notion that it was critical that all my shit was accessible all the time and I ended up dropping money on networked storage… and over time, realized that as long as I knew where the files were, DID have the most important stuff - family photos and scans - tucked away not only in long term storage, but on multiple drives in multiple machines, (home, work, laptop) it was okay not have it served up instantly.

Just reading your post made me go cold inside - I can only imagine what you were going through until it got sorted. From a bonafide old school data hoarder… Please, back your shit up locally. Use enterprise drives.

Then sort a self-hosting soultion.