Day: September 21, 2020

Yes, like in the Shaw citation below, progress might be made by “unreasonable one” but is it the right progress to be made?

I think that we should try to adapt to the world instead of trying to bend the world to our needs. Technologically, we might seem to be advancing a lot, but scientifically, we are more or less stagnating.

There has not been any major discovery in physics for the past century or so, and physic is the base of all sciences. We invent new theories but we are stagnating comparatively to the centuries before.

We need some new goals. We need to go back to be advancing knowledge for its own purpose, not to enslave nature. I am ready to bet that it is also a lot less work or wasted resources.

>>> ” “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw ”
” I don’t think that these people, all of a sudden, had an epiphany after they retired. They knew all about the rot in the system they were part of, while they were part of it, but they’ve had too much to lose. You could argue that they should have said something before they retired, but that requires a moral backbone we can’t expect most people to have.
When people retire, the threat of getting fired disappears. Old people can speak freely to a degree most other people can’t. “

blog.ploeh.dk/2020/09/14/we-need-young-programmers-we-need-old-programmers/

I could not agree more. It used to be decentralized and it should go back to be just that. We need to look at the Web3 protocol a little bit closer.

>>> “Decentralizing the web through new technologies like blockchain and decentralized protocols can ensure that the web remains community-focused and user-oriented, just like it was originally intended to be.”

modernconsensus.com/commentary/the-future-is-decentralized/

Backup is an art. Third parties are bad like banks and retirement plans, in the sense that you do not have the ultimate control of your data or money.

For doing backups, I think that ‘tar’ is the best, but try not to go too much fancy (like incremental backups). When you think about it,  backup is just data processing.

A word of advice, do not compress and encrypt at the same time. Some specialist on encryption will tell you that is a bad idea because it really weakening the encryption. Encrypting WILL compress your data anyway.

Also, do not use file-system or operating system encryption. They change too often and when ‘upgrading’ your operating system, you may find yourself with an unusable file-system. It is better to use some sort of ‘bucket’ encryption like Truecrypt (now Veracrypt), and store your sensitive information on it. That way, you are also not wasting resources on encrypting everything and you will have more atomic control over what you encrypt. The backups will also be simpler.

Like always, your main problem will be to remember or storing your passwords.

>>> “Like so many things I’m supposed to do but don’t — getting exercise, eating right, sleeping well, standing up for women and minorities in public spaces — backing up my data has always been something I’ve half-assed at best.”

magnusson.io/post/backups/