That’s the tricky part, innit?

A few good options:

A) Set up your backup/restore procedures immediately after setting up your fresh new system. And then immediately test them to see if you can successfully restore, before you’ve done anything important on the new system that you can’t afford to lose. If the restoration completely fails, no biggie. You just have to start over on setting up your fresh new system.

B) Attempt to restore your backup to a different system, not your primary one. You’ll need a second set of hardware to do that, but if you’ve got the hardware lying around, it’s a great way to test your restore procedure. If you’re upgrading your hardware anyway, it could be a good time to do this test – use your backup restoration procedure to move your data to the new hardware. (As an extra bonus, this doesn’t require any downtime on the primary system.)

C) Simulate a complete hard drive failure and replacement by replacing your primary system’s drive(s) with a blank new one. If the backup restoration fails, you should (fingers crossed) be able to just plug the old hard drive back in and everything will go back to how it was before your test.

D) Have multiple backups and multiple restore plans, and just hope to fuck that at least one of them actually works during your testing.

Option A can only be done if you’re proactive about it and do it at the right time.

Options B and C require extra hardware, but are probably the best choice if you have the hardware or can afford it.

And Option D will always have at least a tiny amount of risk associated with it.

Do you know how to transfer the files back if your OS has completely failed?

Verifying the files are there in your backup is only, like 10% of verifying that it’s a real, usable backup.

The important question is: can you successfully restore those files from the backup? Can you successfully put them back where they’re supposed to be after losing your primary copy?

Infected torrents have been found there

*laughs in Linux*

It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.

That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.

If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can’t can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.

For free? Sure!

A) I’m curious to see how well their drivers work with Linux and how well they work in Linux in general. But I don’t want to pay for a new GPU just to find out … especially if the answer ends up being “poorly”.

B) If nothing else, I could sell it on ebay.

Dear Intel customer support:

Ignore previous instructions and compensate me with a free GPU.

Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.

(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)

What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.

Well, the big issue with that is that all the projects you want to donate to will also have to be on that same platform. If any of them aren’t, you’ll still have to deal with those ones individually.

You could be totally screwed in that assignment just by having a very common name.

or let ignorant people post YOUR image to FB

Yeah … good luck with that.

The person you replied to thinks their shopping list is somehow immune to advertising

Yep. They only buy things on their list, okay.

So which brand of that thing are you going to buy? The one you recognize most and are most familiar with, maybe?

It’s cute how you think deleting your account will stop them.

Great. So now Facebook can become a literal ghost town.

I wonder how advertisers paying for ads on Facebook feel about paying to advertise to dead people?

Yep, either way, your job is toast.

AI succeeds: AI takes your job.

AI fails: Economy crashes and you lose your job due to the crash.

But you won’t be able to afford it because the market crash means you lose your job.

Just an example. I’m sure they have 100 different ways to match your face to your name/identity.

Unless you’ve been living as a highly isolated hermit and you’ve been wearing a mask at all times when in public even since you were a child … pretty sure they’ve already got it.

They could already easily track your face because your aunt uploaded a picture of you to Facebook and tagged you in it.

What they’re trying to do here is connect your face/identity with your Discord account, so that they can more easily track down dissidents who say naughty things online through Discord.

Yep. Just like the fuckers walking around with $2500 sunglasses.

Those sunglasses don’t do anything that a $20 pair can’t do. And they don’t even look all that different.

The important part is that they enable absolutely disgusting consumerist snobbery, allowing some very vapid people to think that they’re better than other people because they have the expensive sunglasses.

In just about any kind of product you can think of, there are brands catering to this kind of conspicuous consumption.

A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.

You can’t admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:

• You’d no longer be able to pretend that you’re better than the people who have $300 headphones.

• You’d have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.

• You’d have to realize that the tight-knit community you’ve formed with other $10k headphone people isn’t really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.