Microblog Memes

Cloud drives are a handy form of secondary backup, IF you secure the contents with a tool like Cryptomator. I backup my content to a local NAS which one-way syncs nightly to an external drive attached to Raspberry Pi at my office and a cryptomator Dropbox, that in turn one way syncs to cryptomator Google Drive. I also manually encrypt and upload important documents to Proton Drive and Mega as cold storage.

I just realized the other day that one of the updates on my Chromebook automatically installed something called "NotebookLM" on my app bar. Never asked for it. Never even looked at apps on my Chromebook before. But it's there now, and it super secret bloodswap pinky swares it won't steal my ideas or writing. What an odd thing to say on first open.

That's why I make my writing with a typewriter. With tesseract I have a LibreOffice version in a few minutes.

So he just moves the files from one online storage to another? How stupid can one be?

I know it's a big jump from Adobe Cloud (which probably used user behavior tracking and their work to train AI) but it is possible to make great stuff with open source apps now.

The newly released GIMP 3.0 is quite amazing considering that it is free. Is it as good as Photoshop? Maybe it lacks all the features, but it's pretty damn good. If you install GMIC, an amazing suite of tools, it gets that much closer. Inkscape is also professional level for vector work now. Honorable mentions to Krita and kdenlive (for video editing). edit: I shouldn't leave out blender, jeesus.

I left Adobe Cloud 9 years ago. Yeah I had to endure a lot of ridicule and weird looks when I told people that I only worked in GIMP, but more recently, the response is less "You're weird" and more "I need Cloud for my job/it's all I know," which is a positive change.

If nobody ever makes the leap, things will stay the same indefinitely. Don't expect market forces to change things.

Cloud backup has its place, just as offline physical backup does. They solve for two different problems and you need both.

Cloud backup - mindless. Set it and it regularly backs up things you do, even when you're remote. Offline backup - fairly dependable, but not updated as often. Requires over action on the part of the user. Can't use remotely if you also want to secure the created offline backup.

So best use case would be cloud backup all the time, and a physical offline backup you control at regular intervals, that you'll actually do.

https://takeout.google.com/

You can download stuff off your Google account here. Select what you want, not all or it might fail. Choose format, and wait for the email.

There was a cool browser extension back in the days that changed the word "cloud" to "someone else's computer" in the articles on the internet. It changes perspective and eliminates a lot of headache this way.

[AI slop reporting intensifies]