For safety, backups are much better than encryption.

The only thing encryption does is prevent others from reading your data if the machine gets physically lost or stolen. And ironically, that might prevent a stolen machine from ever making it back into your hands.

For desktops, encryption of a machine that doesn’t have critically private/sensitive content is even dumber. I mean, if you have terabytes of CP or are a terrorist, then sure, lock that down to make the police earn their wages. Or do it even if you don’t, but you just want to give authorities the middle finger.

But not much on the average computer needs encryption so long as you keep good physical and network security. And the problem with that is much of it is behavioural - they will need to learn how to not do dangerous things online and off.

In order to protect data is a good backup system - something that just works, is dummy proof, can be administered remotely, and which can restore content easily and reliably.

On a Mac, nothing beats iCloud. It’s encrypted before it even gets uploaded, and Apple has repeatedly shown it cannot retrieve the content… it needs to be forcibly cracked.

On the PC (both Windows and Linux) I prefer Duplicati backing up to BackBlaze B2.

I actually like the Microsoft Authenticator, as it dramatically improves security for Microsoft Accounts. Not only does it plump up 2FA TOTP from 6 digits to 8, but it can also implement challenge-response codes as a second layer of protection.

What I do not agree with is putting your computing eggs all in one basket. I have never used a Microsoft Account to secure Windows, and I never will. Complete data loss via loss of control of the Microsoft Account is just too high of a persistent threat. And that risk rises by an order of magnitude the less technically inclined a user is. For someone who has almost no computing experience, it is an unconscionably risky system to use.

• The average user has no need to use Bitlocker
• The average user should be using a local account instead of a Microsoft Account.
• Using a Microsoft Account causes Bitlocker to auto-enable.
• Loss of access to your Microsoft Account when Bitlocker is enabled can cause loss of all your data.
• Microsoft can and will roundly ignore you if you lose access to your Microsoft Account.

Microsoft has painted users into a very dangerous corner. Security is vitally important, but not when it’s almost maliciously implemented.

Even as a security professional I understand that most people will be ill served by having their computer locked down like Fort Knox. There are ways of ensuring security without having all personal content go permanently poof with the slightest wrong move.

Somewhere between 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 jobs aren’t real.

Those are rookie numbers, suppressed by the lack of ghost jobs in blue-collar industries.

In tech, ghost jobs make up an average of about 60% across all tranches.

That’s just shy of ⅔ of all job postings. And this is a conservative estimate.

My wife named her first SUV - a dinky Equinox - “pebbles”, purely because it was a light stone grey.

Her next SUV - a more beefy 4Runner that can actually hold the Gunner dog crate comfortably - is “snowflake”, purely because it was a pristine snow white.

I think I’m seeing a pattern here with my wife.

Honestly, if we’re talking about mostly or completely surface blasts, and not atmospheric detonations, that might be what saves the planet.

Nuclear winter is very much a thing by how the thrown-up dust reflects most incoming light, and with most detonations being in cities, the kicked-up dust would contain plenty of iron… which is the major limiting factor of phytoplankton, the largest single converter of CO2 to O2. All it has to do is fall out of the atmosphere and into the oceans during the spring to summer. So we need a late winter or early spring nuclear war.

I don’t understand how going to bed early is a problem.

My high school started at 0800hrs. I had to be up by 0630hrs to catch the bus at 0715hrs, and it was a 15-minute walk to get to it. I went to bed some time between 2130hrs and 2230hrs almost every night like clockwork.

Did I get 10hrs of sleep? No. But the ≈8hrs I did get was enough to ensure I was awake and coherent in the morning.

If kids are tired in the morning, what’s stopping them from going to bed earlier? I was never forced to do so. I just did, because I was getting tired shortly after 2100hrs. I listened to my body.

It has the handy acronym of ARGH.

Okay, that is hilarious.

I would say 10 of relative comfort, another 5-10 of increasing disasters (political, social, environmental, etc.) that tear apart civilization, and a final 5-10 of complete collapse where only small isolated communities still exist, and every day is a real struggle for survival against exceptionally hostile conditions.

Honestly, most scientific projections of resource exhaustion and environmental degradation point to 2050 as the point beyond which “civilization” really ceases to exist.

And honestly, I would be shocked if humanity still existed as any kind of a high-tech going concern much past that.

We don’t exactly know where the tipping point towards a Venus Scenario is. We just know it’s somewhere past +12℃, and before +16℃.

And the problem isn’t so much that we will reach that temp - we will go extinct long before that point - but rather the warming process - with all of the feedback loops that it kicks off - will push the planet into a Venus Scenario.

So no. The planet is not fine. The “friction” of prior warming events that would slow its “inertia” - the slowly-migrating, slowly-adapting biospheres that continue to draw down CO2e - won’t have that capability this time around. It’s just all happening far too fast for them to migrate or adapt.

We have literally “cut the brakes” with the speed and inertia of the current warming we have created. And one very real consequence may be a dead planet with a superheated atmosphere.

Here, feel free to simultaneously urinate and defecate into your pants:

• https://richardcrim.substack.com/archive?sort=new

All of this is evidence-based. All of this relies on facts.

Yeah, we’re f**king hosed as a species. Our legacy at this point should be in preventing a Venus Scenario, so at least life can continue to go on in some fashion

“Accidentally”.

Uh-huh. And I bet they’ve had a massive bump in sales from this “accident”, as underage people swarm vendors to see if they could score one of these “accidental” cans.

Conservatism: where suffering and pain is the purpose.

It’s become a cult of evil.

The scary thing is, this graph is probably far too conservative.

Evidence is now emerging that indicates that warming has accelerated dramatically in the last 2-3 years. As in, we may see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50, with +3℃ happening just after 2035, and +4℃ happening by some time around 2040 to 2050.

You know what happens around +4℃? The extinction of all megafauna - animals larger than 45kg. Like humans. The entire ⅓ of the planet between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will experience lethally high wet bulb temperatures across all regions for at least several weeks out of every year, rendering it permanently uninhabitable for the 4+ Billion people that currently live there. India is currently flirting with that reality.

And with that heating inertia, 2100 may see +8℃ temps, which essentially means ice-free poles year round (once things calm down), with palm trees and alligators at the North Pole. Of course, by that time chaotic weather and resource exhaustion will have killed off all remaining humans.

And the lovely thing about “moving parts” is that they all have this little thing called inertia… the faster they move, the further they go. And +8℃ is very close to the +12-15℃ that a Venus Scenario would be triggered by.

Past warming events have been “similar” in that they have gotten just as warm, but they took hundreds of thousands of years to get to the same place, allowing entire continent-wide ecosystems to quite literally migrate across thousands of kilometers to adapt. Our changes are happening in less than 0.01% of that time scale, giving ecosystems no time at all in which to react. So our biosphere will get slaughtered along with us, and will be unable to compensate in time.

And with the biosphere becoming overwhelmed by rapid changes, there goes the “friction” that could do something about that “inertia”.

And the worst part is, we still haven’t moved off of the worst-case-possible “business as usual” path. We are swan-diving into the worst possible future. Thanks to billionaires addicted to fat profit margins and who control all of the processes, we are utterly failing to generate the change needed to save ourselves, with CO2e production - purely human sources, excluding the feedback loops in nature!! - CONTINUING TO ACCELERATE.

Fun times. I just might live long enough to see humanity go extinct.

Conservatism needs its masses of ignorant and near-illiterate electorate who cannot think for themselves and cannot use critical thinking to realize how badly they are being hoodwinked. This hollowing out of the educational system has been done on purpose to bulk up the Republican electorate.

And with the dismantling of the US Department of education, things are going to get a lot, lot worse.

He was being defensive, borderline hostile.

He was correct. He was direct. There really isn’t any other way to handle an asshole when they’re celebrating their own assholery.

Science wouldn’t function by this metric. We aren’t in a universe where opinion shifts reality, we can make very solid axioms that are broadly true and testable.

It’s why science relies on the test of disproof. If a premise survives the test of disproof, it graduates to a hypothesis because it is seen as a reasonably accurate description of reality, in that nothing else comes as close.

In terms of public speech, specifically:

• Anything that can be or has been demonstrably proven cannot be subject to denialism. For example: the holocaust.
• News orgs cannot knowingly air falsehoods, and need to correct any falsehoods during subsequent broadcasts. Knowingly airing falsehoods should come with draconian financial punishments with no ability to appeal.

IME it is more devs and managers going wild on the “golly gee wiz” features that are meant to dazzle site visitors, rather than on actual content (or to obscure a lack of actual material content).

Sure, what you mentioned is a problem, and a serious one at that. But your issue arises more from marketers and bean counters and C-Suite execs than devs and managers.