What platforms are you working with? Borg might serve you better than Duplicati, but last I checked there’s no official Windows version.
There’s also Kopia. I haven’t used it much personally but I’ve heard good things. It supports a range of upload protocols: https://kopia.io/docs/features/#save-snapshots-to-cloud-network-or-local-storage
This is specifically about KDE’s own Linux distro, which is still in alpha.
Oh, looks like you’re right. Thanks for the correction.
Go piecemeal. Proton is a good deal if you actually use all their services, otherwise it’s overpriced.
For mail, mailbox.org, posteo.de, and fastmail.net seem to have good reputations. They’ll all allow you to bring your own domain (edit: not Posteo, my mistake), which I highly recommend so that it’ll be easy to switch providers again when whichever one you choose turns to shit (yes, I say when, not if, because I am just that jaded at this point).
For passwords, there are a lot of choices, but the most future-proof is probably to keep a local Keepass DB and sync it across devices any damn way you want. Bitwarden used to be good but I don’t know anymore. They’ve backed away from open source a bit recently, and I can’t even tell at a glance what their free plan offers anymore. Maybe look at https://vaultwarden.com/ instead.
For VPN and storage…I dunno. There are a lot, and most of them seem kind of shady tbh. I’d be interested in hearing others’ advice on this since I’m not sure what’s good these days.
Edit: I’d REALLY like to hear recommendations for Docs and especially Sheets. Everything else I’ve used is a UX nightmare, particularly on mobile.
No. Absolutely not.
The year-to-year advancements of the Pixel series are minimal. I upgraded from a 7 to a 10 and it was really more of a sidegrade thanks to the P10’s shitty GPU.
I’ll consider upgrading when the base model gets 16GB of RAM or if they ever make a SOC that’s a significant upgrade.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
Terrible idea. Let’s blind you and everyone around you! Great for bed and movie theaters!
I can’t say if it’s difficult to revert because I’ve never wanted to
Same.
If you never do anything advanced, it’s as easy as any stock UI.
If you do want to do advanced things, it’s probably your only option because most stock firmware is ass on consumer-grade devices.
Most things should work just fine. There’s not all that much that requires x86.
So the real question is, what does your mom need/want? NextCloud? Jellyfin media server? Ente photos?
Maybe just a media center? Basically an Apple TV on crack?
Hypothetically speaking, of course. Like O. J. Simpson’s book “If I Did It”.
Same reason people still use Twitter.
Same reason people still use Facebook.
Same reason people still use Discord.
Same reason people still use TikTok.
Etc.
It is extraordinarily difficult to move an entire community. The inertia is so strong. That’s why all these companies can ceaselessly enshittify without facing any real consequences.
Look at startrek.website. That was a concerted effort by a major subreddit’s mods to migrate over to Lemmy. And it worked! Sort of. The subreddit still has many times more users.
The choice for most isn’t “use <corporate hellhole> or <something else>”. The choice is “participate in your communities or don’t”. It’s not really surprising that most people want to stay in their communities.
And it’s not just online communities, either. I am consequentially disconnected from my real-world local community because I absolutely will not use Facebook.
That’s a good question and it’s hard to say for sure. There’ve been some advancements this year in offloading, using both VRAM and system RAM together. With MoE models and predictive loading you can get pretty good results that way…sometimes. I’ve never tried it myself, though I really should because my 24GB GPU is a serious bottleneck.
You could also think about getting a 512GB Mac Studio (coming soon). Not as fast as a GPU, but maybe faster than a GPU/DDR5 mix? And definitely cheaper per GB.
I realize now that the truly biggest models need way more than $40k of hardware. The biggest Qwen3.8 is 2.4 TRILLION parameters. Yikes.
I don’t think you should go bigger because bigger = slower. It might already be too slow to use. Give a smaller model a try first and see how it runs.
It’ll be slow but it’ll run.
Though even 128GB isn’t enough for the biggest models. 512 would open up more options and the very biggest need like 2-4TB, totally out of scope for personal use.
You could try a medium-big MoE model (Mixture of Experts) with less than 100b total parameters. Maybe start with something modest like Qwen3.6-35B-A3B at 8bit quants. That’ll leave you with plenty of memory left over for context size.
If you’re counting models that can be run locally but are too big to run on consumer hardware, then it’s pretty small. Like, they’re only lagging by a few months. But you you’d need like $40k of hardware to run them effectively.
If you mean just the models that you can run on consumer hardware, like, say qwen3.8-27b, then it’s more like 1-2 years behind. You can compensate for the lack of raw capability with a good harness, agentic loops, and human effort. As much as AI has a reputation for being low-effort, it actually requires a lot of skill to use very effectively.
I stated the new Final Fantasy Resonance. So far, it’s solid. No regrets choosing Switch 2 over PC. Performance is smooth. Recommended for any FF fans.
I’ve also been playing Echo Weaver, which is a metroidvania sidescroller with time-loop mechanics, where the main thing you gain between loops is just knowledge. Honestly, this isn’t my genre of choice — I can’t remember the last metroidvania game I played for any length of time — but I was intrigued by the time loop aspect. So far so good, but I’m only just as the first boss so time will tell if I stick it out. Performance in Switch 2 is not totally smooth unfortunately. FPS drops fairly frequently. It’s definitely playable but I’m disappointed that what seems like a modest 2D game has any performance issues whatsoever.
Since I’m not really into the genre I’m not sure how it compares to others but I’m having a good time.
There have been many studies showing that money changes people, specifically affecting empathy and pro-social behavior. I’m having trouble finding non-paywalled papers atm but this article seems like a decent overview: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_money_changes_the_way_you_think_and_feel
Jeff Bezos did at one time run a small business (Amazon started as an online bookshop operated from home). I’ve never heard of him doing evil shit like that back then.
I don’t believe anyone is born evil. Jeff Bezos became evil. And that probably could have been prevented if we just, like, had better tax laws.
Evil is largely circumstantial. If you somehow became a billionaire, you’d probably be evil too.
That said, yes, there are plenty of small business owners who are raging shitbags, too.
Classic Google.
Almost every Pixel phone generation has had some kind of common hardware defect.
Mods don’t have access to the backend database, and I don’t think Lemmy exposes that information directly by default. It’s not a “feature” so much as a natural consequence of the architecture.
I meant on your own system, running the backup software, since it sounds like Duplicati isn’t the best choice. Borg is a great backup program but it’s made for Linux. Kopia is cross-platform.
Sorry, I don’t have a go-to recommendation for the receiving end. In theory anything that can host WebDAV, SSH/SFTP, or an S3 endpoint would do the job.