Fantastic article! Anyone got a way around paywall?

To the window to the wall

'Til sweat condenses without needing tiny balls

I would like to emphasize that lets say that the mathematicians take from this that they shouldn’t have posted all of their exciting stuff online for the general interest of the public/curious minds and to only share promising new directions when they are sure all the easy low hanging fruit is explored by them for potential in publishing research/getting funding… what good is that?

We are all exploring the same cave and yes of course explorers should be rewarded for finding new promising passages into areas of the cave that have yet to be explored, but we have set the incentives to be opposite so that every caver who finds a promising direction is incentivized to hide it and try to clandestinely map out the full extent of the cave that is reachable through that portal… before bringing the discovery to the group where instantly selfish actors will try to use automated tools to grab all the newly accessible low hanging fruit before anybody can find the fruit through a more thoughtful and human means. This is suffocating to knowledge and science especially given the distorted structures we have imposed on science and how it must operate and quantify within society to be deemed materially valuable.

We need to focus on the fact that this kind of use of “AI” is essentially like contracting a sailing ship to take you across the Atlantic while knowing nothing about how to use a boat, paying people who know how to sail you safely across the ocean to do so while you lounge around and then when you get within 10 feet of the coast of Europe leaping off and swimming to shore before the boat can dock.

Yes you can argue you were the first of that crew to cross the Atlantic but… ok? Why the hell did you do that? …and now you are trying to use that fact to argue that human sailing crews have been surpassed by your genius design?

“already”?

“Blah blah blah China is worse though! blah blah blah!!” - people who spend their time here concern trolling about tankies

It helps to take a step back and think about Syncthing as a file sharing utility in general.

Syncthing allows you to share any number of folders with any number of other devices with any type of sharing structure you want (2 way file sync = filesharing, 1 way file sync = backing up). You can also set up file versioning on files within a Syncthing folder’s settings.

Note: Syncthing is not intended to be a true file backup utility, and some people will get quite upset if you portray it that way, which I get, but also it just works… and you just need to be reasonable about how you do things, just remember it is a general filesharing tool that you are USING to backup files.

You are the cloud with Syncthing, but unlike something like Nextcloud there is no special central file server nonsense, there are just Syncthing devices sharing folders to other Syncthing devices so you can do it however you want. You do need two devices of course, your phone you want to backup and the device you are backing up onto (which could be a computer with usb drive attached), but from there you can add new devices and share the same folder/folders to them and leapfrog important files without needing to sit there and think out some complicated system or architecture ahead of time.

Syncthing is very “organic” because it is so simple, but it is also very powerful, I have relied on it for years in a variety of contexts and have never really been let down.

One tip, if you want your own personal cloud, a raspberry pi type device, or an old phone plugged into the wall can serve as your server that is always listening for file edits/updates from devices in a folder share. Otherwise you have to make sure Syncthing devices are on the internet at the same time to sync files, though there is actually a quite nice GUI interface for resolving file conflicts if they do happen (I have used it quite a few times and resolved issues).

If your files are smallish, just setting the “file versioning” setting under a Syncthing folder’s settings to a number like 5-10 versions can provide even more confidence you won’t lose something but I digress…

I love Syncthing!

edit you can also do weird little hacks if you need to by doing things like setting up a Syncthing folder share on a Dropbox folder to sync files in ways you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, it isn’t a recommended practice but shrugs I have also done this many times too and haven’t had any serious issues.

You don’t need a full backup of your phone, you need a backup of all the relevant data! What do you need to backup other than contacts and media in your home folder? (documents, downloads, music, podcasts, DCIM etc…)

If there is relevant data “locked up” in your apps can you export it in some form to somewhere like your downloads folder and sync that folder?

Yeah but you can also set it to copy your DCIM photos folder or whatever (if you want to backup files, make it a one way folder sync in the folder options in Syncthing), if Syncthing is limited it is because of Android’s filesystem limitations not Syncthing.

Also consider an option that uses termux if Syncthing doesn’t work such as this one that uses rsync and termux.

https://howtos.davidsebek.com/android-rsync-termux.html

^the above tutorial may look intimidating at first, but each step is explained very clearly

You can also use termux to install Syncthing and then take advantage of termux’s ability to work around Android file system limitations.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/

Use syncthing and just sync all your important folders!

On F-Droid app store use Syncthing-forked

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingfork/

There are probably other more wholistic and specific ways to do this with apps specifically designed for it, but Syncthing you can use for pretty much anything and any other internet connected device you have you can use Syncthing to share/backup files too.

You don’t even need internet to use Syncthing, it will work entirely over your local network if both devices are on the same network.