Daily backups of our (self-hosted) GitLab, rsync-ed to a remote machine, and from there, BTRFS snapshots onto a removable HDD, which is rotated off-site every week.
The problem was mostly that storage was expensive.
It’s difficult to understand in an era of cheap terabyte SSDs, but in the 1960s and 1970s, DASD (what IBM mainframes called hard drives) was relatively tiny and very expensive.
And so programmers did the best they could (in COBOL) to minimize the amount of data stored. Especially for things that there were lots of, like say, bank transactions. Two bytes here and two bytes there and soon enough you’re saving millions of dollars in hardware costs.
Twenty years later, and that general ledger system that underlies your entire bank’s operations just chugging along solidly 24/7/365 needs a complete audit and rewrite because those saved bytes are going to break everything in ten years.
But it was probably still cheaper than paying for the extra DASD in the first place.
The social media ban is broadly popular. The clear majority of voters support it. It’s a political win for the government to push this through, over the objections from Google, Meta, etc.
The fact that social media makes a stack of money in Australia but manages to pay almost no tax absolutely impacts their fate: both with the government and the voters.
Some of the popularity of this legislation might even come from it being seen as sticking it to “techbros”.
Banning eg coal mining, online gambling, etc, is vastly less popular. And they contribute to employment, revenue (via taxes), and they lobby/donate effectively.
Social media could easily have avoided this, as other industries have, but they decided not to. They might yet be able to leverage US tariffs though?
Hardly. Their survey showed about 55% of parents support for blocking 15s and under from Facebook and a bit less than 60% for Instagram, and less than 25% support for blocking YouTube, yet the Government talks as if support was almost universal.
But, and that's a very important but, this was based on questions that assume that adults would not have to do any kind of age or identity verification.
I expect the Government will be very surprised with the response when this is actually implemented.
Except in this case the content is basically totally unmoderated and mediated through an algorithm designed to keep the childrens attention permanently, so I would say the circumstances are at least a little different than back then.
It’s like every generation gets fixated on something new which can be perceived as moral decay and societal harm, and then rails against it. Making it even more popular with the younger generation, of course.
I’ve seen the same thing play out with rock music, television, computer games, and now social media. There’s likely examples back throughout history.
I think you can mount an argument against all of these things. In retrospect though, it doesn’t hold up. I wonder if social media is the same?
For every big tech dystopic platform going all wack there is some "the old greeks complained about kids these days" going my way.
Social media need to go. It is bad for us. I don't support a ban but at least the ban indicates there is some sort of room for counterculture. I think only a cultural mindset change works and it cam't be top down.
I think that the operational incentives for advertising-funded, for-profit social media make them unavoidably bad.
Conceptually, a digital means of communicating life’s events between friends needn’t be terrible, but … the impulse to self-promote is human, and ultimately destructive.
I don't think you can reasonably complain that the 9fans moderators rejected your argument when they stated that the problem was that they perceived your posting as having been AI-generated.
Many forums are struggling with AI-generated slop. It's inevitable that some human-generated content will be incorrectly flagged.
Perhaps a path forward is to subscribe, lurk for a while, answer a few queries succinctly and accurately, and thus build up a profile as a real user before attempting to initiate such a conversation again?
Or, perhaps a paper at IWP9 next year?
Also, you might consider posting about 9front on the 9front list, rather than 9fans, if your criticisms are specific to its development?
As an example, I started working on Y2K issues in 1991, and it was a project that had been running for several years already. It was an enormous amount of work, at least 25% of the bank’s development budget for over a decade.
30 year mortgages were the first thing that was fixed, well before my time. But we still had heaps of deadlines through the 90’s as future dates passed 2000.
The inter-bank stuff was the worst: lots of coordination needed to get everyone ready and tested before the critical dates.
It’s difficult to convey how much work it all was, especially given the primitive tools we had at the time.
I don't think any of those accurately characterize a dominant ideology on HN. If anything, in my observation, HN is somewhat libertarian-leaning, rather than fascist.
Even that is an incredibly vague and ahistorical definition. It’s strange how much ink is spilled over redefining ‘fascism’ in as vague a way as possible (thinking of Eco here, who remains perennially popular among those who tilt at hooked windmills).
Mussolini did a great job as delineating exactly what fascism was, and the NSDAP fit it, but in general it really doesn’t fit states outside of that particular time and place, including most regimes described as ‘fascist’ today.
The arguments for why Trump is somehow a fascist are among the most facile I’ve ever heard, and I say that having never voted for nor supported Trump, and having even more negative an opinion of him now than I did previously.
Political discourse will never be anything beyond laughable until we can get past screeching at each other over which side is the secret fascist.
I think that accepting the definition given by fascists to fascism, instead of evaluating their actions - as did Eco - might be the wrong way to go about this.
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