Am I too old? I only trust hard saving to offline storage. Be that an external hdd or a flash drive.
people just never learn that companies cannot be trusted…time and time again, they work to steal and claim ownership of your intelligence.
people don’t need to learn that. these things need to be regulated. also Google needs to be broken up to like 12 pieces or nationalized. what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
what needs to happen is companies not have this much power ever.
There is zero chance that we can get the oligarchy to surrender power peacefully, so that’s not going to happen unless…
For legal purposes this comment is a joke
Famously Americans did the splitting thing once before with Standard Oil and it was immensely beneficial to the economy in general. Just checked the wiki and it was more than 100 years ago. Unlikely the same laws are still on the books.
There are several companies currently active that deserve the same treatment.
Hey we did the same thing with AT&T! Split them into a bunch of smaller companies which then merged back together after a few years…shit…
The same laws are still on the books, actually! We just never use them anymore.
The big one is the Sherman Anti-trust Act.
We also nationalized several enormous companies with arguably excellent results (ConEd, Amtrak, the post-WWI FRA).
Yeah, for me cloud storage is one of many backups, but it’s just that, a backup. It should never be the original or only. It’s there in case your PC shits the bed, not as your prime storage.
I’m in university (as an old) and just about everyone from faculty to staff has been pushing me to put everything in OneDrive. I know better, but young people tend to trust that an educational institution is looking out for them.
My freshman year I met teenagers who didn’t know what a flash drive is. Most of them have iPads with no storage, one of my classmates was just uploading all her lectures directly to YouTube so she could review them later.
There’s nothing wrong with putting everything in OneDrive… as long as you also have it somewhere else.
At work we’re told to put everything into OneDrive and we’re blocked from using USB drives, or using any other online storage. Fortunately all of the data I use and create on my work computer belongs to my employer, so if they only trust MS with their data then who am I to argue?
Yeah, I understand why employers use it. Oddly, I used to work for Microsoft and can’t remember using OneDrive for our projects lol
But as a student I really prefer saving stuff locally and to a separate storage device. The university system has been hacked at least once since I’ve been a student, we all lost our credentials and were required to physically go to the campus to reset them. The university also revokes access three years after graduation.
Oddly, I used to work for Microsoft and can’t remember using OneDrive for our projects lol
They knew better than to get high off their own supply
i use ms word to save certain things, offline, an older version of office not the new ms office that forces AI. i do that to save certain things, like resumes,etc.
Lemmy taught me that if you try to cancel, they’ll offer you ms sans-ai. Save 3 whole bucks too.
we dont have that new bs with Microsoft, we have a cracked version or one that works just fine. our work started to use the newest ms version, it was pretty crappy UI.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust cloud companies.
It’s worth noting that Google is 100x worse than the baseline level of sucking when it comes to randomly deleting your account with no recourse.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust companies.
The extra words are not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t trust.
And there are people who think you’re joking, reductio ad absurdum.
You can’t trust your own computer, because the hard drive might go bad at any moment, so you backup up a USB drive. But you can’t trust that backup, because your house could burn down, or get flooded, or get caught in a tornado; so you back up to cloud, too. But you can’t trust that because, well, cloud.
At some point, you just have to accept that there will always be risk, no matter what you do. You take steps to minimize it until your comfort level exceeds the cost or PITA-ness of your backup solutions, but those who know, know you can never guarantee you’ve covered all the bases.
Don’t trust, indeed.
The extra word is not needed. The most accurate version is just:
Don’t.
Really this is the most correct. Saves so much time. Just don’t.
This is extra bad because they want you to use cloud files in gdrive (I can’t remember what the feature is actually called), which doesn’t save the content locally on your computer, but puts an icon that will download the content from Google servers when you click on it. This means you have no local backup of your data in your computer backups.
Is local storage even safe from big corp just remotely nuking your files? I’m sure there’s a secret button somewhere to mass delete photos from people’s phones incase they start rolling in the tanks to crush a protest.
If you’re running a corpo os on your hardware this could very much happen
The thing is, we really don’t know what’s in the hardware, how do we know there isn’t a “Intel ME” on your phone that is just hibernating, waiting for the right kill signal?
Sadly, could be explosives.
I don’t think they can nuke files from my linux computer.
Is your CPU open source? I bet you have a Intel ME or AMD PSP on your computer.
12,000 words? So, like, two chapters?
Maybe he was writing in german? Some words can be sentence long.
that’s like one eighth of a whole-ass book, my friend. and after a year of writer’s block that shit would hurt to lose.
Alright cool, probably takes a long time to do while also having a job and a family, but I’m just saying there were times in college where I wrote out 5k words in a day, formatted and typeset within a week.
alright, cool. so what?
So its a pretty small number of words.
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.
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.
The only time in my life I’ve seriously considered suicide was when I lost the usb drive that had all my novel notes on it. If a major company ripped everything from me because “reasons”, I’d be considering homicide instead.
By the way, git is good for more than just software. I keep my novel notes in a git repository these days.
I do my writing in markdown. Keeps me from being distracted over formatting. Easily converted to HTML/EPUB for review and editing. git + plaintext + pandoc is a dream.
Yes, same here - I do all my show scripts in Markdown. My editor of choice is IntelliJ. For any non-technical writers here, IntelliJ is like what Scrivener wants to be when it grows up.
I have tried lots of text editors, tons. None of them quite do what I want. I installed CudaText. It’s now my favorite. I love it so much. The settings… Oh, the delicious settings…
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.
This reframing can be super useful in getting corporate types to understand that storing stuff in the cloud isn’t a magic solution, and that it comes with its own problems (especially in terms of data governance stuff).
Even on weather articles?
Especially on the weather articles. Heavy someone else’s computers with the good chance of rain.
I have TWO USB backups.
My brother fucked one up for his Windows XP obsession. Which would be funny, if it were not dangerous.
Justified obsession tbh.
Don’t use Google trash. Google is evil.
I’ve not missed cloud functionality since I worked out Proton Drive and Syncthing.
That’s why I make my writing with a typewriter. With tesseract I have a LibreOffice version in a few minutes.
reads like an ad for that service they plugged
Maybe, but it’s a well known writer’s tool. I don’t think they need to push this angle.
This should be painfully obvious to anyone who spends a second thinking about it. It frustrates me to no end that people just trust these “services” blindly, when they can at any time, for any reason, take away your access with no recourse. Why do people accept these terms? Why do they trust companies that are not on their side? I struggle to understand it. Cloud should only be used as a backup - and not the only one at that. Is this an issue with computer literacy? Is it that people don’t understand how data is saved?
Is this an issue with computer literacy? Is it that people don’t understand how data is saved?
I think it’s a combination of computer illiteracy and familiarity.
Most people only know what they’re familiar with. For the average person cloud services are everywhere and it seems like everyone is using them so it doesn’t seem unusual to use them. These same people don’t have enough knowledge about computers to understand the risks of these services or, more importantly, that there are alternatives.
In addition, even if they have the knowledge, most people would rather pay Google $20/mo than to buy a $500 Network Attached Storage machine for their home network.
I don’t want to be the old guy, but back in my day… if you wanted to watch a movie or listen to a song you had to figure out how to get it, how to play it, how to connect your TV/speakers, etc. The fruits of technology were available for anybody who cared to spend a little bit of time to learn.
Now, there’s zero incentive to try to figure anything out because it’s much easier to install Spotify with a single button than it is to install Airsonic or Jellyfin. Streaming services never have to worry about competing with self-hosting because they’re ensuring that nobody needs to learn anything about computers.
So much of our lives are touched by computers that it seems irresponsible not to understand how they work.
