Data recovery is a last-ditch effort that often as enough fails, and if it succeeds will only get you back kilobytes or megabytes of your most critical material. (Unless you’re lucky enough that it’s actually a controller failure.)
If you want to avoid disk failures, invest instead in backups.
When it comes to writing styles? Absolutely. There’s a ton of skills involved, and deciding exactly which thoughts you want to convey is only a small part of it.
If jogging isn’t convenient, then you can still walk faster.
Whatever your ‘natural’ pace is, you can easily up it if you consciously try. I guarantee it. Downside is, once you get used to it you’ll start to get annoyed at all the slowpokes who seem to think they’ll live forever.
The Clockwork Rocket
Garakowa: Restore the World
It’s a movie about a suspiciously humanlike pair of anti-virus AIs, and their attempt to protect a backup archive of human history from destruction at the hands of sapient viruses. It’s compressed a bit more than would be ideal, but otherwise well done.
Practically anything else I could say about it would be a spoiler, so I won’t. What happened to humanity? Why are they there? Where do the viruses come from? You’ll need to watch it to find out.
The story is also interesting due to the central Friendliness failure being novel, fairly plausible, and extremely disturbing.
But here’s the thing: most of the suggested ways to solve this problem (including the one I use) involve keeping the massive weak constraint relaxation, throwing away all irrelevant assumptions, and introducing new features to get the structured symbolic stuff. And that revision process generally leaves you with hybrid systems in which all the important stuff is NO LONGER particularly opaque. The weak constraint aspects can be done without forcing (too much) opaqueness into the system.
Where can I read about this?
We already have a media thread. An average of several dozen media links are posted every month[0], and if they were all top-level posts the site would quickly become useless. While the story is interesting, I don’t think it’s interesting enough to overcome that.
[0]: Have not actually counted.
It’s circular, and square.
That’s literally all there is. I can’t imagine it visually, the way I usually would. Wonder why. :P
I also asked for a square circle which got the immediate reply that it is logically impossible.
I am now imagining a square circle. That’s interesting.
Google for ‘crashplan data loss’, and you’ll find a few anecdotes. The plural of which isn’t “data”, but it’s enough to ensure that I wouldn’t use it for my own important data if I wasn’t running two backup servers of my own for it. Even then, I’m also replicating with Unison to a ZFS filesystem that has auto-snapshots enabled. In fact, my Crashplan backups are on the same ZFS setup (two machines, two different countries), so I should be covered against corruption there as well.
Suffice to say, I’ve been burnt in the past. That seems to be the only way that anyone ever starts spending this much (that is, ‘sufficient’) effort on backups.
All of that said?
I’m paranoid. I wouldn’t trust a single backup service, even if it had never had any problems; I’d be wondering what they were covering up, or if they were so small, they’d likely go away.
Crashplan is probably fine. Probably.
Use a backup system that automatically backs up your data, and then nags at you if the backup fails. Test to make sure that it works.
For people who don’t want / can’t run their own, I’ve found that Crashplan is a decent one. It’s free, if you only back up to other computers you own (or other peoples’ computers); in my case I’ve got one server in Norway and one in Ireland. There have, however, been some doubts about Crashplan’s correctness in the past.
There are also about half a dozen other good ones.
I would be very interested in trying one of those. In particular, I frequently change up my writing style (deliberately), and it might be able to tell me what I’m not changing.
And frightening.
I feel like spending time learning “domain specific knowledge” is much more effective than “general rationality techniques”.
However, reading Lesswrong is what prodded me towards getting better at spending my time effectively, really getting into a growth mindset. My only problem nowadays is that there are too many things I want to learn, and that’s a much better problem to have; I know I can, I just have to pick and choose. I’m getting better at that, too.
Maybe the same would have happened anyway, but I don’t think it would have happened quite as fast.
Ah, no. I do agree that uploading is probably the best path, but B doesn’t follow from A.
Just because I think it’s the best option, doesn’t mean I think it’ll be easy.
Maybe.
Determining which possibilities this is false for in our particular universe would take some time, and depends on the exact form of the laws of physics (which we don’t know), so let’s use a simplified example.
Take the Game of Life. While simple, it is in fact turing-complete; this was demonstrated by implementing a turing machine on it, which is the best way to demonstrate that sort of thing. (It’s fun to put one cell out of place and watch it disintegrate.)
Take an infinitely large game of life. Start it in a random state, and leave it to evolve for an infinite amount of time. As you’d expect, a lot of things happen; in a universe that large, you will indeed see, for example, all possible simulations of Earth. So in that sense, “all things happen”...
But there are some states of the world which you will never see, no matter how long you wait. These are called Garden of Eden states).
There’s a very good chance that there are also garden of eden states for this universe. They’re likely to be states such as “The universe is tiled with a mandelbrot pattern of black holes”; states which are simply so unstable that they cannot naturally arise. There may also be less exotic states of that sort, but I feel less secure about claiming that...
And the Garden of Eden theorem, if it is applicable to our universe, states that it has Garden of Eden states of and only if time is non-reversible. As physics does indeed appear to be time-reversible, that’s a bit of a problem. However, I don’t know how applicable it is to our non-cellular physics.
(E.g., the trimean will have a better breakdown point but be less efficient than the mean; a worse breakdown point but more efficient than the median.)
What does “efficient” mean, in this context? Time to calculate would be my first guess, but the median should be faster to calculate than the trimean.
Did my first serious bit of Minecraft modding, and learned how to use Blender in the process. It’s not as impressive as the things I do at work, but it’s fun.
Isn’t 2*T obviously better? Maybe I’m missing something here...