I gave up on timecapsule because performance has gotten worse and worse year over year. I replaced it with a periodic rsync backup to a NAS that is in turn backed up in other ways

The upside is that it's dead simple when it comes to how the backup is stored. In 10 years time, having files in a filesystem will still work, but I imagine restoring an old time machine backup will require quite a bit of work

If you wanted to you could probably figure out how to do apfs snapshots before rsyncing

If you exclude pointless stuff like browser caches it's also pretty performant compared to timecapsule, and the transfer is properly encrypted

Turning it into a copy of facebook

FWIW, on android with firefox + ublock origin it's clean from ads.

On iOS with firefox it's filled with ads; with firefox focus it's mostly clean but you get a dismissable "please disable adblocker" style prompt I didn't get on android. I don't know if there's a browser with a good adblocker allowed in iOS walled garden, but I'd be happy for suggestions

You can have humour and children at the same time...

If you can assume "a sufficiently smart piece of technology" that doesn't exist now, a lot of problems become trivial

yes.

but then, respect the trendline, especially if it's exponential.

Is it exponential or logistic?

It's interesting how differently people can think.

I couldn't imagine thinking "I'm gonna do this 0.1x as fast as I could, wasting my life away with pointless extra work, to spite my employer"

There would be no money floating around the music business, spare or otherwise, if no one paid for music

I guess you could fund it with taxes?

Sure, why not? Current US music revenue is $6/mo per US taxpayer. For less than half the cost of Spotify you could 5x the income going to musicians if you skipped the middleman and magically just paid them directly. That doesn't seem like a bad deal.

Why do we insist on building cars to be safe in a collision when it would be so much nicer to not have accidents? Why do we build cancer treatment when not getting cancer is a much better option?

The article for example mentions MRI macines, aerospace engineering, fiber optics and semiconductors, so I guess it depends on if you want those things to still be available in a crisis

That does sound kinda minor? A worst-case scenario of a month or two without MRI machines or "aerospace engineering", whatever that means doesn't sound particularly scary. And that is making some pretty unrealistic assumptions like there is literally no helium, hospitals don't have private reserves that can last a few months and there are no replacement gasses or alternative options of any sort. And people can make do with limited fibre-optic or semiconductor manufacturing. We have crisises in various computer components every few years (I can think of HDD, RAM & GPU supply shocks over the last few years). Doesn't seem to be a major problem. A couple of months of disruption isn't a strategically interesting event.

It all depends on what you care about. People dying waiting for an MRI doesn't end society as we know it, but someone will probably be sad about it

If you're worried you can keep your own helium reserve? Then if there is an emergency and it turns out that you don't need an MRI you can sell the helium to whoever does and feel really good about your foresight.

I'm not seeing any need for a strategic reserve here. There aren't any strategic issues. It is a bit far-fetched that a helium shock will even lead to the end of MRIs.

Everyone also could keep their own supply of gas and their own batteries for electricity but it turns out that is not expensive and foolish compared to centralizing such backups.

A month or two without an MRI is a lot of dead people.

A lot of people die every month. We're talking about a probability near-0 event where I imagine it'd be difficult to pick that deaths out from general background mortality - admittedly just based on the fact I don't recall anyone I know who needed a life-saving MRI but I know a few who died. That isn't much of a justification for a strategic helium reserve. Some level of risk just has to be tolerated, we can't afford to have a contingency for every possible hypothetical.

Theoretically, by taking the opportunity to inject an exfiltration mechanism if you ask it to write code for you

Lots of people I know run models in "yolo" mode or the equivalent as well, which means it could just invoke curl or telnet to exfiltrate data.