Man, paying Google/Apple $5/mo is surely a much better solution for her. And are you really doing 3-2-1 on that?

Save the dicking around for your own stuff.

And at $180/yr for the 2TB of storage we'd need to pay for, vs. maybe $200 in hardware, it pays itself off pretty quickly... if you exclude the time spent setting it up and administering it. But I don't mind, it's a bit like digital gardening for me.

If it was just for backuping my photos I would just buy an external hard drive or 2 tough

We back it up daily using restic to an old 2TB NAS that's at my parents place + the occasional manual backup

Backup to cloud glacier storage is ~$1.20 per TiB-month

Cost is absolutely a factor. self-hosting can't even be touched. And, the that's just the start of the value proposition.

For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.

Just some days back someone on reddit posted how their 14yo son (via a family/linked Google account) used Gemini Live to, err, enjoy himself with the camera on.

All his accounts are now permanently locked for CSAM.

So, yes, not being beholden to a megacorp absolutely has its uses.

Google even came out and said that’s not how account suspensions work: They don’t sequentially ban other accounts that have been associated with a device that was associated with an account, as many pointed out.

I’m surprised how many people fell for that obvious piece of Reddit creative fiction. I think we’ll be hearing about it as an urban legend for years.

Reddit has become a place for posting fiction on advice subs. It started on the relationship advice subs but has spread to all of the advice subs now, like the legal advice post you saw. You have to read Reddit with a lot of skepticism.

Unfortunately I have seen other horror stories (dad takes a picture to send to the doctor, it uploads to iCloud/Google photos, account gets banned) to be wary of trusting any such large corp.

Partly tangential, but just yesterday there was a post of someone with a checzk password who got locked out of their iPhone. Now of course an iCloud backup might have actually helped them here, but the reliance on "It's Apple, it'll work" is a very common thing (understandably!), but unfortunately not true.

(You can go to the legal advice UK subreddit if you want to see the post.)

It was removed quickly because it was obviously untrue. The details of the story weren’t even consistent across the posters comments.

According to which criteria?

There are values beyond "basic convenience" that are important as well. Being independent from a subscription service is one of them. Having full control over your own media being another.

Moreover, subscriptions in general have disadvantages. For example:

1. If a subscription service decides to increase their prices tenfold, there is nothing a customer can do to stop them.

2. If they decide to stop operating completely, a customer also has no say into the matter.

3. If the subscription service decides to just unilaterally stop offering the service to a particular user, they can do so at their own discretion, at any time.

This all means that whatever value is being "obtained" by using a subscription service, it is only going to last for as long as the provider wants it to last.

Of all the dicking around one can do in a homelab, and I'm guilty of plenty of it, setting up some network storage for photo backup is easily one of the highest value things you can do.

My spouse is more tired to Google, but for myself if I got cut off i'd just have to change some recovery email addresses.

Brothers, maybe they don't want you to see all their private chats with AI?

and yes, most people willing to endeavor into the area are hobbyist, with all that entails

however, reading even one story of someone losing access to their cloud photos for xyz reason, is enough to decide that you ought to have some mechanism in place to ensure ownership of your data

Cost wise on the right hardware it is very cheap to run, add the privacy/personal control aspect it's no wonder so many people do it.

Using a VPS entirely removes the hardware aspect, but it also mostly defeats the point of self hosting.

https://ente.com is open source, and self hosted, and end to end encrypted.

My personal backup has been flawless (so far).

Would have spent a couple thousand $ by now, if stayed on it.

Especially transient dialogs, e.g. wifi/file picker. I would create rules in sway/i3 for those to keep them floating.

I've written at length about this topic on HN in the last month, so I'd hate for it to seem like my lil hobby horse, but something I've come to appreciate about the conventional "stacking" window solution of Windows/macOS is that it has a good answer for apps you briefly use.

Cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs.

Consider how imagery of a farmer inseminating a cow with his arm disappearing up some tract or fitting a spike to the baby so it can't drink its mom's milk -- or farm conditions in general -- are basically shock footage that people are insulated from until they maybe chance upon a movie like Dominion.

These are not sapient beings that are capable of looking out for their own well-being. We've bred that out of them over hundreds of human generations.

The gestation period of a cow is approximately 9 months, similar to humans, by coincidence. Only a cow that has given birth to a calf will produce milk. The normal lactation period is 305 days before the cow is "dried up" before giving birth again. 10,000 pounds of milk is considered a good lactation total. Typically, cows are bred to calve once per year. Typically going through 10 lactations before that one way trip to MacDonald's.

Dairy bulls are notoriously nasty creatures, so artificial insemination is almost universal in the dairy industry. The "tract" that you speak of is the cow's colon. The technician is careful to guide the pipette so as not to injure the animal, and the colon provides convenient access to feel what is going on inside.

If you are squeamish about such things as cow's colons, then vet school is not for you.

e.g. "[They might assume] cows simply produce milk like chickens lay eggs."

It's normal to never really think about it -- our society is set up so that you never have to. The secretion comes in a jug, the meat comes in cellophane, and that's it.

You may have a point that many have no idea how chickens work. Egg laying being like giving birth isn't an unreasonable explanation if you had to come up with one on the spot while completely in the dark. But most understand how milk is produced because even if they've never seen a cattlebeast, they deal with milk-producing humans daily.

I'd liken it to claiming an anti-measles-vax person is aware of the risks of measles. They might not believe in the risk at all.

But I've yet to see someone show video of a prominent democrat doing the same salute as Musk. Which is probably why it's left as an exercise for the reader to find.

That said, we don't need to speculate about his salute when you can look directly at the slop he posts on Twitter.

Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50% share with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the project forever after the donation.

You've twisted the timing. My comment is about

"Give me money." "Okay, tell me why I should give you money."

not

"I gave you money. Tell me what you did with it." It's a big difference. It's easy for me to just not give them money if I don't know what I'm donating to.

Though I'm making a general reflection rather than trying to antagonize any individual here. I was already thinking about this when clicking into TFA to see that yes, it's another donation beg.

The answer to the person I replied to is basically: yes.

There's a nit in human psychology between mutual transactions (even lopsided against our favor) and voluntary unilateral ones (like donations) where the latter results in disproportionate scrutiny and entitlement compared to the former.

I once started accepting donations on my forum. I noticed people acted like they were about to make the grandest gesture in the world, would I be so lucky to deserve it after answering their questions despite having built a forum they spend four hours a day on. (They gave me $5)

And once they donated, they saw themselves as a boardmember-like persona with veto power and a disproportionate say on what I do, often pointing out that they're a donor. (They gave me $5)

I'm exaggerating a bit to paint a picture of what I mean. I think it's all unintentional, and they might be embarrassed if I'd told them this.

But I ended up refunding everyone after a while.

Yet when I charged $5 to let users expand their PM inbox size or max avatar resolution, nobody ever brought it up. They understood the transaction ended there. What is the $5 used for? -- What do you mean? It doubled my PM inbox size.

It's a funny quirk of our brain. I think a license purchase aligns expectations much more than groveling for donations, and it creates a natural freemium model for open source (or source-available rather?) projects.

He had a calm, cool, consistent, professional demeanor. Always worlds different than the people people claim him to be.

You'd have to believe these public figures were playing 4D chess where they invented a persona and spent a couple years impeccably roleplaying it with no mistakes only to abandon it.

Aside from it being incredibly difficult, unlikely, and premeditated to do that, you can read the posts of Szabo et al and see they literally don't have it in them.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of that Show HN 10 years ago that deanonymized all of our HN alt accounts with a basic trigram comparison or whatever it was, even alt accounts with three short posts.

Among people who try to guess Satoshi's identity, there is also a surprising bias toward fame or at least well-known people. There is literally zero reason to think that Bitcoin came from a person anyone had heard of or has heard of since. It's a big world. Many (most?) interesting and novel open-source contributions, hash algorithms, cipher algorithms, key-exchange protocols, and so on come from previously unknown figures. Pick any random open-source project and try to guess who created it as if you didn't know; most people wouldn't do a good job, and thinking "oh, it has something in common with Twitter so it must have been Jack Dorsey" would have a terrible success rate. And, as it happens, well-known people tend to like fame and don't try to stay anonymous.

I could name hundreds of smart, experienced, and relatively unknown tech-company employees, professors, and open-source contributors who would have all the necessary broad skills to have written Bitcoin. It's not that rare. The contribution itself is rare but that's like lightning; the insight of invention strikes unpredictably. Assembling high-level systems that use cryptography isn't something that requires that you post to mailing lists or message boards of cryptography enthusiasts. And even if that weren't true, there are hundreds of useful, moderately used cryptosystems that most people haven't heard of and that would never make the radar of a NYT author who (evidently) thinks it's a coincidence that two different cryptosystems might use asymmetric ciphers.

The NYT article boils down to "I had a hunch from this person's body language and, out of a community of a few hundred identified figures, I found a methodology to confirm that it was him." It's a hair better than that and honest with regard to some of its own limitations, but in the end it's no more convincing than that. The upshot is that there's some circumstantial evidence in favor of a particular person, although there's significant circumstantial evidence in the other direction too. It's astonishing to me that the NYT published this piece.

It's very common for this to happen when media are trying to unmask an anonymous figure. There are parallels with the furore around Burial's nomination for the Mercury Prize, journalists picking any number of seemingly random and unlikely well-known names to attribute as being him, when the truth was that he really just wasn't interested in publicity and preferred to live in peace and quiet. Now, in the days of social media etc. it seems even more unimaginable to them that someone would want to remain in the background and not claim the limelight for their work.

Not only that, but the exceedingly niche C++ language and the MIT license!

Very true. Every time I see people seriously propose Elon Musk or Paul Le Roux or some other flashy/cool celebrity figure, I'm reminded that people are just attracted to spectacular stories and theories. Similar to how every missing persons case eventually has "trafficked by millionaires for sick satanic rituals" proposed as a theory.

I think Satoshi was probably a regular, older IT professional who developed an interest in digital cash, did some research, and familiarised himself (somewhat) with earlier proposals and discussions. People suggest he was a seasoned cypherpunk, but when he first began posting about Bitcoin to mailing lists, I seem to recall someone having to correct his formatting (I don't remember the specifics, and I wish I could find it, but it stood out to me at the time as suggesting unfamiliarity with mailing lists generally).

Also, my n=1 is that I told Claude to create a `make backup` task and it used .backup.

I don't understand the double standard though. Why do we pretend us humans are immaculate in these AI convos? If you had the prescience to be the guy who looked up how to properly back up an sqlite db, you'd have the prescience to get Claude to read docs. It's the same corner cut.

There's this weird contradiction where we both expect and don't expect AI to do anything well. We expect it to yolo the correct solution without docs since that's what we tried to make it do. And if it makes the error a human would make without docs, of course it did, it's just AI. Or, it shouldn't have to read docs, it's AI.

So it's not that they're too stupid. There are various motivations for this: clinging on to familiarity, resistance to what feels like yet another tool, anti-AI koolaid, earnestly underwhelmed but don't understand how much better it can be, reacting to what they perceive to be incessant cheerleading, etc.

It's kind of like anti-Javascript posts on HN 10+ years ago. These people weren't too stupid to understand how you could steelman Node.js, they just weren't curious enough to ask, and maybe it turned out they hadn't even used Javascript since "DHTML" was a term except to do $(".box").toggle().

I wish there were more curiosity on HN.

Hypothetically, you have a simple slice out of bounds error because a function is getting an empty string so it does something like: `""[5]`.

Opus will add a bunch of length & nil checks to "fix" this, but the actual issue is the string should never be empty. The nil checks are just papering over a deeper issue, like you probably need a schema level check for minimum string length.

At that point do you just tell it like "no delete all that, the string should never be empty" and let it figure that out, or do I basically need to pseudo code "add a check for empty strings to this file on line 145", or do I just YOLO and know the issue is gone now so it is no longer my problem?

My bigger point is how does an LLM know that this seemingly small problem is indicative of some larger failure, like lets say this string is a `user.username` which means users can set their name to empty which means an entire migration is probably necessary. All the AI is going to do is smoosh the error messages and kick the can.

2. I architecturally describe every change I want made. I don't leave it up to the LLM to guess. My prompts might be overkill, but they result in 70-80ish% correctness in one shot. (I haven't measured this, and I'm actually curious.) I'll paste in file paths, method names, struct definitions and ask Claude for concrete changes. I'll expand "plumb foo field through the query and API layers" into as much detail as necessary. My prompts can be several paragraphs in length.

3. I don't attempt an entire change set or PR with a single prompt. I work iteratively as I would naturally work, just at a higher level and with greater and broader scope. You get a sense of what granularity and scope Claude can be effective at after a while.

You can't one shot stuff. You have to work iteratively. A single PR might be multiple round trips of incremental change. It's like being a "film director" or "pair programmer" writing code. I have exacting specifications and directions.

The power is in how fast these changes can be made and how closely they map to your expectations. And also in how little it drains your energy and focus.

This also gives me a chance to code review at every change, which means by the time I review the final PR, I've read the change set multiple times.

`the error is on line #145 fix it with XYZ and add a check that no string should ever be blank`

It's the randomness that is frustrating, and that the fix would be quicker to manually input that drives me crazy. I fear that all the "rules" I add to claude.md is wasting my available tokens it won't have enough room to process my request.

I think Claude makes me faster, but the struggle is always centered around retaining own context and reviewing code fully. Reviewing code fully to make sure it’s correct and the way I want it, retaining my own context to speed up reviews and not get lost.

I firmly believe people who are seeing massive gains are simply ignoring x% lines of code. There’s an argument to be made for that being acceptable, but it’s a risk analysis problem currently. Not one I subscribe to.

Then work on making sure the LLM has all the info it needs. In this example it sounds like perhaps your hypothetical data model would need to be better typed and/or documented.

But yeah as of today it won't pick up on smells as you do, at least not without extra skills/prompting. You'll find that comforting or annoying depending on where you stand...

You get a better solution but also a plan file that you can review. And, also important, have another agent review. I've found that Codex is really good at reviewing plans.

I have an AGENTS.md prompt that explains that plan file review involves ranking the top findings by severity, explaining the impact, and recommending a fix to each one. And finally recommend a simpler directional pivot if one exists for the plan.

So, start the plan in Claude Code, type "Review this plan: <path>" in Codex (or another Claude Code agent), and cycle the findings back into Claude Code to refine the plan. When the plan is updated, write "Plan updated" to the reviewer agent.

You should get much better results with this capable of much better arch-level changes rather than narrow topical solutions.

If that's still not working sufficiently for you, maybe you could use more support, like a type-system and more goals in AGENTS.md?

For new features, I spend a bit of time thinking, and I can usually break it down in smaller tasks that are easy to code and verify. No need to wrangle with Plan mode and a big markdown file.

I can usually get things one-shotted by that point if I bother with the agent.

This was the costliest one we had access to, chosen as an experiment - took $20 over almost a half hour to run.

Plan mode gives you a plan file, then you refine that, and impl derives from it.

Also, do you know it cost $20 because you're using the Claude API? I'd definitely use a subscription for interactive/development use.

I didn't catch what it was, some web dashboard that showed the cost per prompt. We could see it going up as it ran. We were just using the plan our company provided.