Huh? I've been seeing the "hopelessly doomed because of AI" trope practically since ChatGPT came out. It wasn't even remotely as bad as it is now, but it's been there all along.
I think you might be confusing Backblaze reading files and how Dropbox/OneDrive/Nextcloud/etc. work. NC doesn't enable this by default (I don't think), but Windows calls it virtual file support. There is no avoiding filling the upload buffer, because Backblaze has zero control over how Dropbox downloads files. When Backblaze requests that a file be opened and read, Windows will ask Dropbox or whatever to open the file for it, and to read it. How that is done is up to whatever handles the virtual files. To Backblaze, your Dropbox folder is a normal directory with all that that entails, so Backblaze thinks that it can just zip through the directory and it'll read data from disk, even though that isn't really what's happening. I had to exclude my Nextcloud directory from my Duplicati backups for precisely this reason -- my Nextcloud is hosted on my server, and Duplicati was sending it so many requests it would cause my server to start sending back error 500s.
And no, my server isn't behind cloudflare, primarily because I don't have $200 to throw at them to allow me to proxy arbitrary TCP/UDP ports through their network, and I don't know how to tell CF "Hey, only proxy this traffick but let me handle everything else" (assuming that's even possible given that the usual flow is to put your entire domain behind them).
Dropbox and onedrive can handle backblaze zipping through and opening many files. The risk is getting too many gigabytes at once, but that shouldn't happen because backblaze should only open enough for immediate upload. If it does happen it's very easily fixed.
If it overloads nextcloud by hitting too many files too fast, that's a legitimate issue but it's not what OP was worried about.
The issue you’re missing is that the abstraction Dropbox/OneDrive/etc provide is not that of an NFS. When an application triggers the download of a file, it hydrates the file to the local file system and keeps it there. So if Backblaze triggers the download of a TB of files, it will consume a TB of local file system space (which may not even exist).
It does keep them permanently. Dropbox is not a NAS and does not pretend to be one.
> When you open an online-only file from the Dropbox folder on your computer, it will automatically download and become available offline. This means you’ll need to have enough hard drive space for the file to download before you can open it. You can change it back to online-only by following the instructions below.
Same exact behavior for OneDrive, though it apparently does have a Windows integration to eventually migrate unused files back to online-only if enabled.
> When you open an online-only file, it downloads to your device and becomes a locally available file. You can open a locally available file anytime, even without Internet access. If you need more space, you can change the file back to online only. Just right-click the file and select "Free up space."
This "let's not back up .git folders" thing bit me too. I had reinstalled windows and thought "Eh, no big deal, I'll just restore my source code directory from Backblaze". But, of course, I'm that kind of SWE who tends to accumulate very large numbers of git repositories over time (think hundreds at least), some big, some small. Some are personal projects. Some are forks of others. But either way, I had no idea that Backblaze had decided, without my consent, to not back up .git directories. So, of course, imagine how shocked and dismayed I was when I discovered that I had a bunch of git repositories which had the files at the time they were backed up, but absolutely no actual git repo data, so I couldn't sync them. At all. After that, I permanently abandoned Backblaze and have migrated to IDrive E2 with Duplicati as the backup agent. Duplicati, at least, keeps everything except that which I tell it not to, and doesn't make arbitrary decisions on my behalf.
This is exactly why random corporations need to be gone from government. Or copyright needs to be abolished, one of the two. No corporation (no matter how beloved) should ever have this kind of power. IMO the more powerful an organization becomes, the deeper the scrutiny should be.
This distinction is good in academic circles and similar (like on here). But the public (and ordinary people who aren't people who regularly visit Hacker News -- or even know that Hacker News exists) don't care. To them, AI == inequality and inequality accelerants, because it is funded and run by the richest, most powerful people on Earth. And those very people are making everything worse for all but them, not better. Nobody is going to care about academic distinctions in such circumstances.
It's because the consequences of AI is so direct and obvious, and also faster, where the inequality and job losses from other tech advances are just less direct.
That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service that they were a boon to small fry (see Amazon's FBA commercials, for example). But you've got folks like Altman and Amodei gleefully saying how AI will be able to do all the work of a huge portion of (mostly high paying) jobs.
So it's not surprising that people are more up in arms about AI. And frankly, I don't think it really matters. Anger against "the tech elite" has been bubbling up for a long time now, and AI now just provides the most obvious target.
Does economics or political theory focus on centralization, practically speaking? Not as a normative claim. What the actual effects are like. It just feels like we're at a centralization of power of unprecedented scale, to the point where no previous theories or models could really apply (in order to make analytical progress - I mean sure feudalism is honestly becoming a scarier and scarier analogy but still, there are significant differences)
I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard
I would happily switch to it in a heartbeat if it was a lot more well-documented and if it supported even half of what CMake does.
As an example of what I mean, say I want to link to the FMOD library (or any library I legally can't redistribute as an SDK). Or I want to enable automatic detection on Windows where I know the library/SDK is an installer package. My solution, in CMake, is to just ask the registry. In XMake I still can't figure out how to pull this off. I know that's pretty niche, but still.
The documentation gap is the biggest hurtle. A lot of the functions/ways of doing things are poorly documented, if they are at all. Including a CMake library that isn't in any of the package managers for example. It also has some weird quirks: automatic/magic scoping (which is NOT a bonus) along with a hack "import" function instead of using native require.
All of this said, it does work well when it does work. Especially with modules.
I prefer Godot over Unity honestly. Not just because the engine feels better but because it's accessible, which is what matters to me. Unity isn't and probably never will be, so meh. Sure you can make accessible games in it but the editor itself isn't accessible so it kinda defeats the point of being able to make accessible games in it in the first place. And don't even get me started on Unity's licensing model. Godot's superior C# support is, IMO, just a cherry on top.
IMO (not the GP) but if Anthropic were my friends I would expect them to publish research that didn't just inflate the company itself and that was both reproduceable and verifiable. Not just puff pieces that describe how ethical they are. After all, if a company has to remind you in every PR piece that they are ethical and safety-focused, there is a decent probability that they are the exact opposite.
Please please please tell me this is sarcasm. Because if you are serious, I think a lot of people have a long list of bridges to cell you.
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