pja

Scratch a libertarian, find a ...

I have currently settled on borg for backups personally, combined with some gruesome ssh hackery to let me do pull backups of external machines using ssh tunnelled sockets back to a backup server which is not reachable from the wider internet. These days I might just use tailscale to set up a VPN & pipe the backup straight over that without all the ssh shenanigans but the system I have works. You can also use borg to talk directly to rsync.net at special nerd rates: https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html Bring your own support!

NB. Last time I looked at this, borg’s cryptography was somewhat suspect. Not actually broken, but definitely not using best practices. Restic is better, but at the time I was looking restic didn’t compress backups so it was a non-starter for me. These days restic does compression as well so is probably the right default choice. Borg2 has a rewritten encryption layer which supposedly fixes all the problems pointed out by cryptographers with Borg1, but it hasn’t hit a release version yet & is still in beta.

The seed oil / sunburn thing is something I saw going around online just this week. Is there /anything/ behind it at all or is it just another chunk of LessWrong science by anecdata?

High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.

Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.

This Twitter post from the guy who was synthesising the stuff in the US seems convincing: https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1689476909208600576

Not a superconductor - the hints of superconductor-like properties were due to a combination of iron contamination in the Pb forming iron fragments which (surprise!) show ferromagnetism & Copper Sulphide which shows a very similarly anomalous temp/resistivity profile (but is not a superconductor).

The most likely outcome (i.e., not a superconductor, lab error due to honest scientists being fooled by their own experiments) seems to be probably the true one.

Here’s another classic non sequitur: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwayy8oc30ygb1.png

Why does it tend to collapse into pseudo-religious babble when it goes off the rails? I guess it tends to be very repetitive, so maybe the training set has turned religiosity into some kind of attractive basin in the output space? Once in, you can’t get out again.

It’s as if it’s a markov chain with a bigger token space to work from. Oh wait.

He got publicly embarrassed by a disabled person, I know that much. But he would have been like this anyway.