rsync is a fine tool, but it’s not really for backups. It’s for unidirectionally syncing data, which is part of a backup.

There are tools that use librsync to do a backup system, like rdiff-backup or duplicity.

I have used rdiff-backup in the past, but restic supports deduping data keyed off content rather than filename, which is functionality that I rather like having. I drive a restic job from backupninja, which handles doing things like notifying you if a backup has failed.

I’m not personally familiar with Synology’s products, but if what’s going on is that you’re using some built-in feature of a Synology NAS to copy files from a USB drive to the NAS and seeing an error, I’d probably try copying that particular file to somewhere else on a PC, cutting the NAS out of the loop, to make sure that you don’t have, say, a corrupt filesystem where attempts to read the file contents are failing.

Sure, I’d like that, but I’m not going to keep personally fighting to make life better for that manufacturer’s customers. Not when there are other car manufacturers that aren’t pulling that stuff that people can be directed to.

Is the message you want to send “if you buy product from a vendor who actively goes out of their way to dick over open-source developers, it probably won’t matter for me as a customer because those developers will keep expending time and accepting legal risk to try to improve the situation for those customers”? Or do you want it to be “you probably want to look for open-source friendly manufacturers”?

I don’t really see the point. I mean, why bother to try to do something that just makes the company’s printers more desirable? Even if you “win”, the company is going to be a pain in the ass. Do you really want to waste time and financial resources on improving the company’s product?

Just don’t buy Bambu Lab printers. Don’t recommend them. And don’t support them with software.

If this was a world in which there was one 3D printer manufacturer, it’d be different, but it’s not. They have competition.

Alberto Mazzola, executive director of CER, a lobbying group representing European rail operators, said the EU should focus on simplifying ⁠the ​delivery of infrastructure rather than simplifying ​ticket sales. “If you don’t have the infrastructure,” Mazzola said, “selling tickets has very limited ​benefit.”

That…doesn’t really seem like an either-or decision. I can believe that CER wants the EU to facilitate rail infrastructure, but I don’t see how having a one-stop way for consumers to obtain tickets spanning rail systems is in any way incompatible with rail infrastructure issues.

With ageing populations, many European economies are creaking under the strain of funding pensions, care services and health. Yet the two areas where European governments remain most politically timid are social care and health reform. All suffer from a lack of doctors, nurses and other care professionals.

goes to dig up figures

I’m not going to say that Europe is doing the right thing on health care in a broader sense, because that’s a big topic, but specifically on the point of supply of doctors, according to this:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/doctors-per-capita-by-country

…most of Europe has a significantly higher per-capita rate of doctors than Japan does, which the author is holding up as the example that Europe should be following. Europe does have significantly lower rates of per-capita nurses (as well as lower rates than here in the US), but the article is talking about long-term planning rather than current needs:

Japan and Taiwan, as I discovered, started preparing for the demographic challenge decades ago.

By 2050, the number of centenarians in Japan could reach almost half a million. The proportion of pensioners is expected to rise to nearly 40%.

What the disparate destinations I studied had in common were resilience, imagination and political courage – qualities that mainstream politicians in Europe have long struggled to demonstrate. And they seem allergic to the other precondition for securing lasting change: serious long-term planning.

…and my guess is that it’s probably possible to ramp up the supply of nurses more-quickly than the supply of doctors, as the amount of training and education required for a nurse is lower than that for a doctor.

but it literally is just Thacker Pass.

This isn’t Thacker Pass.

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

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is a lithium clay mining development project in Humboldt County, Nevada

The location being discussed:

McDermitt Caldera in Oregon

It looks like there was some discussion that there might be lithium there a bit back, like in 2023, but this is not decade-old news.

So, visa length restrictions might be a reasonable approach for some types of illegally-operated businesses. I could buy this:

Authorities have also launched operations against foreigners accused of illegally operating bars, restaurants and tourism businesses in popular resort areas.

But…

Security concerns escalated further this month after Thai police arrested a Chinese national in Pattaya who was allegedly found in possession of a large cache of military-grade weapons, including assault rifles, explosives, grenades, Russian landmines and anti-personnel mines.

The suspect, arrested on 9 May, was charged with illegal possession of unauthorised weapons and could face up to 10 years in prison.

Like, that seems like it’s a customs problem. I mean, if you’re seeing said weapons illicitly entering the country in the first place, that seems like it’s already running afoul of most issues that you might have. I don’t think that it’s going to matter much whether it’'s a Thai native gunrunning or a Chinese national.

Alcohol and/or drugs, I imagine.

I’ve got some pessimistic views as to long-term AI concerns — I’m not sure that aligning advanced AI goals with human goals in the long run is a viable problem to solve. We may not be able to achieve Friendly AI. I could believe that.

But I certainly don’t think that AI development is “moving too fast”. Not really anything to gain in slowing down development. I remember Elon Musk proposing a six-month moratorium on development — that doesn’t make any sense, only would be something that you’d want to do if you had an immediate milestone that you believed that there was major risk attached to. In general, either AI is something that you should ban globally because it’s too much of an existential risk for humanity, and halt all development and enforce that halt, or you’d like to achieve it as soon as possible. We are not at a point where there is a consensus that that level of unacceptable risk exists and there is a global commitment to enforcing such a global prohibition.

I can believe that there might be an excess of infrastructure development in particular, that we might not have the research side moving as quickly as need be to support that. Like, we might be doing misallocation in buying a lot of specific chips without establishing that those chips are going to provide a worthwhile return. But in terms of the technology advancing…no, can’t agree there.

Among them, he said, is Europe’s deep aversion to industrial policy,

Has he forgotten France?

I’m assuming that “Europe” here amounts to the EU as an institution rather than individual European states at the national level.

Does Kickstarter have liability in general for Kickstarted projects? I’d kind of assume that that’s on the specific project. I can’t imagine that Kickstarter is in any kind of position to really do a domain-specific evaluation of whether a given project is in line with local regulations.

The average gross monthly salary in Venezuela is approximately $13.70 USD as of 2026.

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

Population: 31,800,000

the incumbent leftist bloc United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), its major allies Fatherland for All (PPT) and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV)

First, Peltier elements are pretty inefficient. Second, I’m dubious about the design — a Peltier element moves heat from Point A to Point B, and the whole device appears to still sit beneath the shirt. I suppose that the hot side is the outer side, but what you’d ideally want is to have hot air blowing as far away from you as possible.

I’m skeptical that it’s better to carry a battery-powered Peltier element than to carry something like an evaporative cooler. That’s more-energy-efficient, and you don’t have the problem of part of the device getting hot.

EDIT: Or, if you can’t leverage phase-change from liquid water to water vapor because of high humidity, cooling vests that leverage solid to liquid phase-change.

How a Cooling Vest Invented by a Furry Made Its Way Into the U.S. Military

Emily Darlington, a Labour MP who sits on the Science, Innovation and Technology select committee, said: “There’s clearly a market for hate content in the UK. When social media, intended to connect us, instead feeds us an endless stream of divisive and anger-fuelling content it distorts not only how we feel about our neighbours, but how we think the nation feels about our neighbours.

“The fact that this tactic is successful enough with a UK audience that individuals in other countries can profit off it shows how vulnerable we are. There’s nothing stopping foreign states from doing the same.”

Maybe the best way to counter xenophobia isn’t to rely on anti-immigrant views not being expressed — a fragile convention that can easily fall apart — but to actively explain why immigration is advantageous.

If people do not understand the purpose of a policy, they will try to make sense of it, either on their own or via adopting the takes that seem most-plausible to them.

If one’s way of dealing with politicially-unpopular policy is to hope that it doesn’t come up and thus falls out of public discussion rather than to sell the public on it…shrugs

Democracy is intended to have the public act as final, ultimate overseers of policy. At the end of the day, one has to sell the public on major policy decisions or be at risk of the public acting in opposition to that policy.

China’s special for controlling a very high proportion of the processing infrastructure that converts the lithium ore to batteries, rather than the extraction. There are a bunch of places that have substantial known lithium reserves.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-reserves-by-country

Australia does the most extraction:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lithium-production-by-country

Given that the Metaverse stuff hasn’t been commercially successful thus far, burning a lot of money.

The Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club indicates they support cleaner energy but believe drilling must not come at the expense of fragile habitats.

Foreign lithium isn’t magic, zero-footprint lithium. We are a major consumer of lithium, and will probably increase if we’re going to move to BEVs. If we’re going to consume it, it only seems fair to the rest of the world to have some of the footprint in our own territory.

I’d kind of expect more than that.

Meta’s said that they’re going to to be shifting focus from VR to AI.

It looks like Meta’s VR wing employs 15,000 people:

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

Number of employees: 15,000 (2026)

Though…hmm. It says that there are some AI things under that as well, so maybe that’s not all VR:

Reality Labs, formerly Oculus VR, is a business and research unit of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as the Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon Worlds. In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs.

“The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.

Senator Cédric Perrin, who chairs the foreign affairs committee and sits on the intelligence delegation, has been pushing this fight for over a year. During debate on a narcotrafic bill, he secured an amendment that would have forced messaging platforms to “implement the necessary technical measures in order to allow intelligence services to access the intelligible content of communications and data passing through them.”

I mean, I can send a GPG-encrypted message over a messaging platform and you can recover it if you want even if that platform’s native encryption is backdoored, but you’re still just looking at an end-to-end encrypted message.

$ gpg -q --quick-gen-key tal@lemmy.today
About to create a key for:
    "tal@lemmy.today"

Continue? (Y/n) y

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

$ gpg -q --quick-gen-key doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria
About to create a key for:
    "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"

Continue? (Y/n) y

$ gpg -a --export doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria >doctor-doom.public-key.asc

Back at tal’s computer:

$ gpg --import <doctor-doom.public-key.asc
$ echo "Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!" >message.txt
$ gpg -a -r doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria -u tal@lemmy.today -e message.txt
$ cat message.txt.asc
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

hF4DjahcIPqAf9cSAQdA/itkkQNubd3l6V1Rs1c00Z4zDquk9PrK1Z65VzNogzsw
8ypbEn0B145fyyfyeAc8r72J51qJbcTXVGQkb9JWXoLMh/irZZkYrUbuaBXephsm
0oQBqv6JgWc8kpeFKSihu69EXG/kEcHpOyCBb2nGOerHM1VzERdTdcfkgEQQYfYF
sPXVfRxGgJbGtkoyRGDGZCEnOpGDsQSCX8I8KkUfPALAqhBSmYbAa5lg0jWNiAQL
J4rrXGQiVCPC5Dr45KIEswddFI1oGhqZo16SgEGILcTiY4gN6yI=
=4RyB
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

tal sends the message to Doctor Doom over the backdoored messaging system. French intelligence watches closely. They break the platform-native encryption, but all they can see is the above text.

On Dr. Doom’s computer:

$ gpg -d message.txt.asc 
gpg: encrypted with cv25519 key, ID 8DA85C20FA807FD7, created 2026-05-10
      "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"
Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!
$