Such a great point.

I’ve refused to use software that require things like Discord or Telegram for support.

Use a proper tool on your website.

I’ve seen shops that only take cash, with an ATM in the store.

I kind of get it for small shops. Even just reconciling the register every day is way easier with just cash.

In the early days of CC you were charged per transaction.

Then you weren’t.

Now they’re doing it again.

I’ve seen it vary by card and vendor many times.

Edit: by Early Days I mean when electronic clearing became ubiquitous in the early 90’s, as the clearing houses charged per cleared transaction. Before that you literally mailed the card that was imprinted via the credit card machine.

Wow, now it requires cosmetic surgery to use different lighting too?

It takes very little knowledge or effort for a home cooked meal to cost 1/4 of, and taste better than, 90% of restaurants.

And after a few years of cooking that number rises to 98%+ of restaurants.

You can’t pay me to eat at a chain of any kind any more. At this point I have to go to a specialty place (where the entrees are $50 to $100) to eat better than I do at home.

That’s not uniquely Russian.

Knew there was a reason I liked Finns…

Wow. Off to searching for articles in Nature! Hello rabbit hole…

Non-tonal simply means the denotation isn’t carried by tone, not that users of the language don’t use tone. It’s an interesting distinction.

John McWhorter has a few courses in The Great Courses catalog about language - its pretty fascinating stuff. He covers things like tonal languages, and how even for a linguist like himself, they’re tough to learn.

Fine.

So don’t even bother locking your doors then?

You absolutists are part of the problem.

Or you’ve hacked into their calls!

Define how you mean “best”.

I don’t have a best alternative, as my use-case is an Android phone running Lineage.

Right? Reading that was like watching an action movie!

Hahahahaha

I’ll be over here crying in the corner.

Next you’re gonna mention ICQ

But do we have some real stats around it?

Because like OP, I’ve heard it my entire life and have never heard of someone drowning in the tub without being drugged up or really ill.

Ventrillo.

Dammit, son, makin’ me feel old now

I don’t know, problems with nextcloud are a near-daily thing around here. Seems like it has some structural challenges.

There’s also risk.

Offloading this stuff to cloud means you trade $ for someone else taking the risks.

And of you’re a business, you (better) have cyber insurance, and those insurance vendors will ask tough questions that most self-hosters would be clueless to answer.

It can be done, but like anything else, there’s no free lunch.

And if you have a proper finance org, they’ll want to see how self-hosting makes financial sense.

It takes real expertise and diligence to run everything on-prem - most small businesses don’t have the luxury of that kind of diligence since the cost (staff engineering time) comes from one side of the budget, and cloud (vendor) costs reduce both your risk and come from the other side of the budget (which reduces tax liability).

I agree with everything except the offsite, offline, external drive.

In my experience, cold drives fail more often than live drives, and you get no warning when this happens.

Drives weren’t engineered to be offline but to be powered on continuously. Things like lubricants in the spindle, but especially the read heads pivot were designed around this. How anybody us have heard the click of death - that’s the read head having issues moving.

Plus external drives have heat dissipation problems. They’re good for short, intermittent reads, but when initially copying data to them they can get quite hot. I regularly recover and rebuild drives for family and friends and have registered these things at 120° F+, so I keep an old case fan on them during recovery.

My current backup approach uses Syncthing, but only to replicate all data to a single point, which is then backed up properly.

All mobile devices sync to home, that box is the authoritative data source for everything: mobile devices, user data, media files, etc.

It replicates to two other local data stores (this for quick recovery should a drive/device fail) and is backed up to a cloud service (should I have a catastrophic event).

Its not a perfect 3-2-1 setup, but addresses my risks well enough.