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Computers as I used to love them

tonsky.me

171–180 of 265 posts

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rclone is very good. Choose any cloud storage provider, and then run it through a nightly cronjob or whatever. https://rclone.org/

Oh sorry, should've been clearer, I'm not looking for backup (I'm currently using backblaze for that), just general storage.

Wasabi is good because it has no egress charges and is only $6/month per TB: https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you summarize what they maybe introduced/fixed to quell your old review? > over the last week, syncthing has corrupted my git repository twice. I reported this as an issue, but the issue was immediately closed with an explanation I disagree with. > I no longer trust syncthing until this gets resolved, unfortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23660438 — I would absolutely be syncing directories containi…

I had the exact same thing, granted, it was ten years ago already, with dropbox. Something something file versioning, ending up with neighboring files of conflicting revisions, the disease spreading over to all instances. My takeaway was „never keep git repos in a system that does its own distributed versioning”. I just do git push around so my remotes are up to date. Git is sort of dropbox with a manual gearbox, aft…

So, if you really want to use dropbox for syncing git repos, this plugin solves the problem well:

https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox

For me, it solved all of the corruption problems with using Dropbox for git storage. In the end, I decided it was too heavy weight, and wanted to be able to clone my repo on machines that might not have anything other than "git" installed, but until I reached that point, I was a happy user of it.

I'm not aware of a similar tool for syncthing.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#173
That's how Mullvad VPN works (more or less). Click "Generate account" and you get a unique 16-digit account number; download the app and put in the account number and you're good to go. No email, no username, no password, etc. Only payment info when you need to pay.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#175
post #98

Syncthing has reminded me how great computers can be if they are not made by corporations. It’s simple, predictable, sane, acts no-nonsense Most open source software is like that. In this very article you see exactly what capitalism and the profit motive does to software. Ancaps will constantly say the refrain “this is due to government, and corporatism, which is very different from capitalism” but I insist — do get…

> cryptocurrency, which can enable a form of socialism

When you twist "socialism" into some libertarian ideal of flat & free markets, you lose a lot of meaning.

Public blockchains behave similar to free markets, and have the same oft-ignored flaws. Namely, you need to trust that the market/blockchain is not de facto ruled by a shadowy cartel. This is often a poor assumption, because power consolidates over time. You also need to trust that the underlying currencies and protocols are secure. This is easier to do than the former, but still a significant vulnerability.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#176
post #51

I tried many sync solutions (Syncthing, SparkleShare, Resilio, Mega, Seafile, NextCloud) and I almost always experienced some kind of data corruption. Syncthing was no exception. I could not reproduce the problem, so I never made a bug report. The corruption was something like this: - I recursively renamed all files from a folder from uppercase to lower case. Suddenly I duplicated files, uppercase and lower case. - I…

It’s not recommended to sync a git repo

I have heard that before, but no good reason why.

If a synchronization software can't handle a git repository, what else is it not able to handle? After all, a git repository is just a bunch of files and in my case not particular big once.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#177

Just want to come in here to say that Syncthing solved my note-taking app "problem" that I've been bothered with for years. I want my notes as plain text files (or Markdown files to be specific), and I'd like to sync them with my phone. I'd also like to use the text editor of my choice to edit said text files. Cool, I just install Dropbox on my desktop, sync the files, and edit the files with Sublime Text. Oh but huh…

how do you handle images? This is why I use obsidian since it essentially manages images and keeps track of them for you.

Drop the image in a known folder and use Markdown to include them in the notes

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#179

I love syncthing as much as the next guy on here, but this article feels very much like "why doesn't this square peg fit my round hole?!" Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce. I couldn't go to a less tech savvy friend and say, "Oh, you use Dropbox for backups? Here, use syncthing instead!" For one, most people don't have multiple computers they want to keep in sy…

>Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce Device to device sync was literally the value prop for Dropbox when it launched > 10 years ago. That's why I started using it. Dropbox does now allow a more cloud-native file system / cloud backup usage pattern, but its roots are absolutely "keep my files in sync across several computers."

10 years ago, Dropbox was still storing your files on their servers so that your devices did not need to be online and accessible at all times in order to sync. It still operated in a fundamentally different manner than Syncthing. All that has really changed about the app is the marketing around it.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#180

I love syncthing as much as the next guy on here, but this article feels very much like "why doesn't this square peg fit my round hole?!" Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce. I couldn't go to a less tech savvy friend and say, "Oh, you use Dropbox for backups? Here, use syncthing instead!" For one, most people don't have multiple computers they want to keep in sy…

"Cloud" is fundamentally just another device.

Syncing is not a square peg, monetisation is.

There is no reason why syncthing cannot work on both a server in the "cloud" and an end-user device. Syncing files is a well researched and solved problem, at this point dropbox et al are not selling syncing, they are reselling IaaS + integration and gaffataping on anything else tangentially related they can conceive of to squeeze money out of users.

The fundamental value is already there to have for free and at a much higher UX quality, while paying for the IaaS directly... if only non-technical users were aware of it, and could access it as easily.

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