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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Is your Unraid free and unlimited then? Funny argument, indeed.

I'm amazed at the number of people jumping out here to insist that people don't use or value cloud storage because of the existance of one or thirty or whatever kludgey manual solutions. I mean, I know you can store stuff manually. I still have all that junk too! It's fun. But I don't recommend it to friends or coworkers or family or anyone else because... well, duh, as it were.

This forum's cherished (and, apparently, deeply insecure) geek cred notwithstanding, THE MARKET walked straight into the arms of the cloud, and has derived immense value from it. Grandmothers have terabyte archives of their progeny's development and will take it to the grave, without needing to puzzle out (sigh) an unraid install.

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I'm grandfathered to get unlimited updates, though if they rugpull on that the drives are just formatted as XFS. It'd be a hassle to move to something like TrueNAS, but I could do it even if the OS stopped working. Even if Lime Technology completely disappear one day and make every Unraid USB stick self destruct, I'll still have physical access to the data.

Cloud services, like everything else in control of rent seeking companies, are getting worse. That was always the obvious, inevitable trap with all of this, with any system where you pay a subscription for remote access to a timeshare computer. Which isn't to say that it isn't useful, I even use it, but I don't rely on it.

You didn't frame your initial post around the market of grandmas, your rhetoric was targeted to those reading your post; "How much of your personal data", "do you still have your email".

> You didn't frame your initial post around the market of grandmas, your rhetoric was targeted to those reading your post; "How much of your personal data", "do you still have your email".

Uh... that's wildly and seemingly deliberately mischaracterizing what I wrote. Seriously? The very next sentence falsifies your interpretation, quite explicitly. Why would you cherry pick like that?

You were talking to an audience of tech nerds, as was the original blog post we're all discussing. All of your counter-arguments in you original post were appeals to that base and merely suggesting that Gmail users outside of the Hacker News sphere exist doesn't really change that.

Given that, bringing up the needs of grandma and her family photos is a non-sequitur. We clearly aren't talking about that, more considering the wider effects of a tech industry having centralized control of and gating access to customer data and processing and the ways that has caused a lot of exploitation and enshittification.

But clearly you're avoiding talking about any of that, which is why the only thing in my post you engaged with is a bunch of handwringing that I misrepresented something you said (I didn't).

> We clearly aren't talking about that

You aren't. I was. Go. Read. What. I. Wrote.

Strawmanning is bad form and bad faith. Please don't do it.

I don't think I was and I think that you're focusing so strongly on a perceived strawman rather than the actual topic is an admission that you're just projecting.

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