Honestly, find an existing project in your language of choice with an active maintainer and start fixing tickets.

You start a new project, odds are you’re stuck maintaining it for years, and it becomes a job, or it dies. IME, it’s far better to find a project you yourself use and like, that you’re capable of contributing to, and doing that. Start popping stuff off the bug list, if you’re a hero, or implement that missing feature in the backlog that you want. Your commitment to the project is a patch. Or, maybe you like working with the project and you become a long term contributor.

That’s just my recommendation. I’m not saying don’t start something new; just, if you’re looking around for things to do, and aren’t passionately trying to scratch an itch you haven’t found a solution for, you’re most likely just going to create a throw-away project.

Just my opinion.

Yah, you’re right. Like I said, when you say “Metaverse” most people (on the street) are going to think of Meta’s. I doubt most people in even developed countries even remember Sony’s failed VR world.

Is there another networked VR world that is anywhere near as big as Meta’s today? With nearly as many users (even with as much of a ghost town as it purportedly is)?

I think you were talking about a hypothetical metaverse, whereas I was thinking about the only one that I know that has any traction - tenuous though it may be - at all, which is Meta’s.

In the books, yes. It didn’t exist IRL, and a poorly as it was done, FB’s metaverse was (is?) a real product.

Facebook/Meta has never had an original idea; I’m not trying to give them credit for anything. There were other VR “worlds” before FB’s (Sony’s, for example, which was also a failure).

I just found out that Steve Jackson Games actually owns the trademark to the name “Metaverse.” I’ll bet that drove Zuck nuts.

Well, yes. Of course you’re right that “metaverse” predates Facebook. They’ve successfully co-opted it by now, though; Meta is what the average person thinks of when you say “metaverse.” Stephenson’s was also fictional, unless you’re really generous and use “metaverse” as a synonym for “the internet.”

Only, NFTs and Crypto are relatively accessible; anyone can get in on the game. The Metaverse is a monopoly.

The bubbles are still going, BTW. Bitcoin prices are currently higher than they have ever been, thanks to America re-electing the Fascist Orangutan.

This is great additional information, much of which I didn’t know!

I’m doing the backing-up-twice thing; it’d probably be better if I backed up once and rsync’d - it’d be less computationally intensive and save disk space used by multiple restic caches. OTOH, it’d also have more moving parts and be harder to manage, and IME things that I touch rarely need to be as simple as possible because I forget how to use them in between uses.

Anyway, great response!

I have no opinion about rsync.net. I’d check which services restic supports; there are several, and it is it supports rsync.net and that’s what you want to use, you’re golden. Or, use another backup tool that has encryption-by-default and does support rsync.net - there are a couple of options.

I would just never store any data that wasn’t meant for public consumption unencrypted on someone else’s servers. I make an exception for my VPS, but that’s only because I’m more paranoid about exposing my LAN that putting my email on a VPS.

restic, and other backup tools, are generally not always on. You run them; they back up. If you run them only one a month, that’s how often they run. The remote mounting is just a nice feature when you want to grab a single file from one of the backups.

What you’re describing is a classic backup use-case. I’m recommending the easiest, cheapest, most reliable offsite solution I’ve used. restic has been around for years, and has a lot of users and a lot of eyeballs look at it, and it’s OSS. There are even GUIs for it, if you’re not comfortable with the CLI. B2 is generally well-regarded, is fairly easy to figure out, and has also been around for ages. Together, they make a solid combo. I also backup with restic to a local disk and use that for accessing history - B2 is just, as you say, in case of a fire, or theft, I suppose.

I wouldn’t.

Use a proper backup tool for this, like restic. BackBlaze has reasonable rates, especially of you’re mostly write-only, and restic has built-in support for B2 and encrypts everything by default. It also supports compression, but you won’t get much out of that on media files. restic is also cross-platform and a single executable, so you can throw binaries for OSX, Linux, and Windows on a USB stick and know you can get to your backups from anywhere. It also allows you to mount a remote repository like a filesystem (on Linux, at least), and browse a backup and get at individual files without having to restore everything. It’s super handy if you screw up a single file or directory.

The molten aluminum version was seriously cool, though.

I envy people who can have analytical discussions about the procures of sex with completely destroying the mood.

I see a portal to Faerie.

OP should definitely crawl through the hole.

If Smell-o-Vision was a thing, everyone would think Trump smelled like pine trees and ocean spray, because that’s what he’d pay them to broadcast, or else refuse to allow himself to be broadcast on their networks.

The guy slathers on so much fake tan, he looks like he’s wearing black-face. His only genuine characteristic is his inability to stop the senility from coming out of his mouth.

Good thing Joe isn’t running, huh?

That’s composing quite an edifice of unprovable postulation to reverse engineer faith. “A” for effort!

Curse you. You stole my outtake.

“In other news, Carlson fell asleep ten minutes in to Oppenheimer, and Barbie made him uncomfortable.”

Yup. The requirement of “faith” is a sure sign of charlatanism.

It’s a funny thing, when you think about it. If you were truly God, you wouldn’t need to prove it; you could just make it so everyone believes you.

☝️

Why you hatin’ on tertiary and quaternary characteristics?

Body hair growth is triggered by hormonal changes, so body hair could be considered a sexual maturity adjacent characteristic.

Do you also consider a woman’s preference for non-hairy guys to be an abnormal fetish?

What about butts? They’re not (biologically) sexual organs, any more than mouths are; do you consider the admiration of butts to be a fetish?

Why do you include breasts (I assume these are your secondary organs?) as in the “not a fetish” list? They have nothing to do with the passing of gametes; they’re only valuable long after the sex act.

Your taxonomy seems rather arbitrary.

Nicely put!

Reddit at least allowed blocking of trolls, whereas if we want that here, we will need to expend the effort to make that happen.

I don’t so much mind this, at least. It’s just curation, and I’d far rather have it in our hands than the hands of moderators or platform owners. Not that moderation isn’t useful, and hosting admins can still defederate - but giving users the ability to manage their own block lists, at the user, group, and instance levels, makes it less critical to have moderation, and makes moderation a little less prone to abuse.

Completely agree, except that I’d amend that no real conservative politicians exist. I think there are a lot of real conservatives - you named several - but that simply can’t get elected with our current election mechanisms. Primaries need to be eliminated. Progress like adoption of RCV needs to expand. The electoral college needs to be eliminated. If we can make progress in these areas, it’ll let moderate conservatives to regain control of their party. And it’d let people stop arguing and being frustrated with having to vote for the lesser of two evils.