tal

Yeah, that's probably a fair answer for some folks and systems. Depends on what your system is doing, your risk tolerance, and what money you're willing to put into the thing.

If I didn't have a backup system in place, say, that'd be much higher on my list than trying to ensure power isn't cut off unexpectedly during power outages.

Some left-wing French legislator did. Had a post about on !news@lemmy.world or somewhere like that, saw it recently.

“Absolutely not. My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a press briefing Monday, likely referencing an American-French allyship during World War II that snuffed out Nazi Germany. “They should be grateful.”

Ehhh....maybe yes, maybe no. It's not clear to me that the Allies lose, even if it's just the UK and USSR as the major powers.

The US provided aid prior to, but didn't enter the war directly until after Pearl Harbor (and in Nazi Germany's case, the direct factor was the German declaration of war on the US a few days later). At that point:

• Nazi Germany's attempt to reach the preconditions for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of the UK, had already failed, as it had lost the Battle of Britain, the air war over the UK. Forcing the UK into a surrender would then require winning the Battle of the Atlantic, successfully blockading the UK.

• Nazi Germany's attempt to knock out the USSR at one go, Operation Barbarossa, had also failed immediately before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Time was not on Hitler's side, as his advantage was earlier preparation. The Soviet Union had been hurt, yes, but wasn't out of the fight. An additional problem for Nazi Germany was that Operation Barbarossa had caused the Soviet Union to stop permitting supplies to Germany through; prior to that, the Soviet Union had been a route to circumvent the Blockade of Germany.

Had the Allies won, it would have been a considerably-more-unpleasant-for-them fight than was the case in our own timeline, but it's possible that the Axis had already bit off more than it could chew by mid-1941.

I'd think that a larger issue might be whether the Soviet Union winds up taking control of Western Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Union_(alliance)

The Western Union (WU), also referred to as the Brussels Treaty Organisation (BTO),[1] was the European military alliance established between France, the United Kingdom (UK) and the three Benelux countries in September 1948 in order to implement the Treaty of Brussels signed in March the same year.[Note 1] Under this treaty the signatories, referred to as the five powers, agreed to collaborate in the defence field as well as in the political, economic and cultural fields.

When the division of Europe into two opposing camps became unavoidable, the threat of the Soviet Union became much more important than the threat of German rearmament.[8] Western Europe, therefore, sought a new mutual defence pact involving the United States, a powerful military force for such an alliance. The United States, concerned with containing the influence of the Soviet Union, was responsive.[9] Secret meetings began by the end of March 1949 between American, Canadian and British officials to initiate the negotiations that led to the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949 in Washington, D.C.[10]

The need to back up the commitments of the North Atlantic Treaty with appropriate political and military structures led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). On 20 December 1950 the Consultative Council of the Brussels Treaty Powers decided to merge the military organisation of the Western Union into NATO.

I agree that it's less-critical than it was at one point. Any modern filesystem, including ext4 and btrfs, isn't at risk of filesystem-level corruption, and a DBMS like PostgreSQL or MySQL should handle it at an application level. That being said, there is still other software out there that may take issue with being interrupted. Doing an apt upgrade is not guaranteed to handle power loss cleanly, for example. And I'm not too sanguine about hardware not being bricked if I lose power during an fwupd updating the firmware on attached hardware. Maybe a given piece of hardware has a safe, atomic upgrade procedure...and maybe it doesn't.

That does also mean, if there's no power backup at all, that one won't have the system available for the duration of the outage. That may be no big deal, or might be a real pain.

Yeah, I listed it as one possibility, maybe the best I can think of, but also why I've got some issues with that route, why it wouldn't be my preferred route. Maybe it is the best generally available right now.

The "just use a UPS plus a second system" route makes a lot of sense with diesel generator systems, because there the hardware physically cannot come up to speed in time. A generator cannot start in 10ms, so you need a flywheel or battery or some other kind of energy-storage system in place to bridge the gap...but that shouldn't be a fundamental constraint on those home large-battery backup systems. They don't have to be equipped with an inverter able to come online in 10ms...but they could. In the generator scenario, it's simply not an option.

I'd like to, if possible, have the computer have a "unified" view of all of the backing storage systems. In the generator case, the "time remaining" is a function of the fuel in the tank, and I'm pretty sure that it's not uncommon for someone to be able to have some kind of secondary storage that couldn't be measured; I remember reading about a New Orleans employee in Hurricane Katrina that stayed behind to keep the datacenter functioning mostly hauling drums of diesel up the stairs to the generator. But that's not really a fundamental issue with those battery backup systems, not unless someone is planning on hauling more batteries in.

If one gets a UPS and then backs it with a battery backup system, then there are two sets of batteries

one often lead-acid, with a shorter lifespan

and multiple inverters and battery charge controllers in multiple layers in the system. That's not the end of the world, a "throw some extra money at it" issue, but one is having to get redundant hardware.

One thing I’ve always found funny though is that if we have AI’s that can replace programmers then don’t we also, by definition, have AI’s that can create AI’s?

Well, first, I wouldn't say that existing generative AIs can replace a programmer (or even do that great a job at assisting one, increasing productivity). I do think that there's potentially an unexplored role for creating an LLM-based "grammar checker" for code, which may be a larger win in doing debugging work that would normally require a human.

But, okay, set that aside -- let's say that we imagine that we have an AI in 2025 that can serve as a drop-in replacement for a programmer, can translate plain English instructions into a computer program as well as a programmer could. That still doesn't get us to the technological singularity, because that probably involves also doing a lot of research work. Like, you can find plenty of programmers who can write software...but so far, none of them have made a self-improving AGI. :-)

I'll add one other point that might affect people running low-power servers, which I believe some people here are running for low-compute-load stuff like home automation: my past experience is that low-end, low power computers often have (inexpensive) power supplies that are especially intolerant of wall power issues. I have had multiple consumer broadband routers and switches that have gotten into a wonky, manual-reboot-requiring state after brownouts or power loss, even when other computers in the house continued to function without issue. I'd guess that those might be particularly-sensitive to a longer delay in changing over to a backup power source. I would guess that Raspberry Pi-class machines might have power supplies vulnerable to this. I suppose that for devices with standard barrel connectors and voltage levels, one could probably find a more-expensive power supply that can handle dirtier power.

If you run some form of backup power system that powers them, have you had issues with Raspberry Pis or consumer internet routers after power outages?

While laptop batteries may not have aged well, especially if they're left discharged, one other nice perk is that laptops effectively have an integrated UPS.

Don’t connect your Roku to the internet.

I thought that Roku was some kind of streaming service to a device. Doesn't that need to be Internet-connected to function?

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roku

Ah. Apparently that's what they originally did, but they've also subsequently come out with smart TVs, which I assume can operate without an Internet connection.

It concludes that “estimates about the magnitude of labor market impacts (by AI) may be well above what might actually materialize.”

I can believe that in the short term. Especially if someone is raising money for Product X, they have a strong incentive to say "oh, yeah, we can totally have a product that's a drop-in replacement for Job Y in 2-3 years".

So, they're highlighting something like this:

A 2024 study by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, on labor force perception of AI (“IIMA Study”) states that 68% of the surveyed white-collar employees expect AI to partially or fully automate their jobs in the next five years.

I think that it is fair to say that there is very probably a combination of people over-predicting generalized capabilities of existing systems based on what they see where existing systems can work well in very limited roles. Probably also underpredicting the fact that there are probably going to be hurdles that we crash into that we don't yet know about.

But I am much more skeptical about people underestimating impact in the long term. Those systems are probably going to be considerably more-sophisticated and may work rather differently than the current generative AI things. Think about how transformative industrialization was, when we moved to having machines fueled by fossil fuels doing a lot of what had to be manual labor done by humans in the past. The vast majority of things that people were doing pre-industrialization aren't done by people anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_United_States

In Colonial America, agriculture was the primary livelihood for 90% of the population

https://www.agriculturelore.com/what-percentage-of-americans-work-in-agriculture/

The number of Americans employed in agriculture has been declining for many years. In 1900, 41% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. In 2012, that number had fallen to just 1%.

Basically, the jobs that 90% of the population had were in some way replaced.

That being said, I also think that if you have AI that can do human-level tasks across-the-board, it's going to change society a great deal. I think that the things to think about are probably broader than just employment; like, I'd be thinking about things like major shifts in how society is structured, or dramatic changes in the military balance of power. Hell, even merely take the earlier example: if you were talking to someone in 1776 about how the US would change by the time it reached 2025, if they got tunnel vision and focused on the fact that about 90% of jobs would be replaced in that period, you'd probably say that that's a relatively-small facet of the changes that happened. The way people live, what they do, how society is structured, all that, is quite different from the way it had been for the preceeding ~12k years, the structures that human society had developed since agriculture was introduced.

since 2015

Honestly, I'd say that a lot of Trumpism's stuff is more-or-less in line with the stuff that the John Birch Society has promoted, and that goes waaaaay back. I mean, Trump talking about annexing Canada/Panama/whatever, no

in fact, that's one of the few cases that I think that they'd take a dead-opposite position on, since they've a horror of the North American Union. But there's a lot of overlap outside that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

The John Birch Society from its start opposed collectivism as a "cancer" and by extension communism and big government.[29][30] JBS publications referred to the fight against Communism as a spiritual war against the devil.[25]: iv, 156–157  Allegations that so-called "Insiders" have conspired to control the United States through communism and world government are a recurring theme of JBS publications.[31] The organization and its founder, Robert W. Welch Jr., promoted Americanism as "the philosophical antithesis of Communism."[32] It contended that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and argued that states' rights should supersede those of the federal government.[33] Welch infused constitutionalist and classical liberal principles, in addition to his conspiracy theories, into the JBS's ideology and rhetoric.[34] In 1983, Congressman Larry McDonald, then the society's newly appointed chairman, characterized the JBS as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.[35] The society opposes "one world government", the United Nations (UN),[36] the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements. It argues the U.S. Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization. It has cited the existence of the former Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of a push towards a North American Union.[37][38] The JBS has sought immigration reduction.

The JBS opposed the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.[16][39][40] It has campaigned for state nullification.[41][42] It opposes efforts to call an Article V convention to amend the U.S. Constitution,[43][44] and it has been influential at promoting opposition to it among Republican legislators.[45] The JBS also supports auditing and eventually dismantling the Federal Reserve System.[46][non-primary source needed] The JBS holds that the United States Constitution gives only Congress the ability to coin money, and does not permit it to delegate this power, or to transform the dollar into a fiat currency not backed by gold or silver.[non-primary source needed]

Everything you say to your Echo...

I don't have an Echo.