Standard disclaimer: make sure to follow a 3-2-1 backup strategy to protect data you care about!

I'm a big fan of Synology, as they prioritize reliable, quiet, power-efficient hardware that is easy to leave on 24/7 in a home.

Additionally, I love their software, and find Synology Drive to be great at syncing folders across multiple devices and operating systems (ala dropbox), and Hyper Backup to be a great way to do nightly offsite backups with a Time Machine style history of changes over time.

And under the hood it is just running Linux/mdadm, so I expect data recovery is possible to do on any linux machine with enough SATA ports, although I haven't tried it.

Oh, very interesting. I really appreciate your response here! This is definitely giving me more to think about.

The comments I’m reading are talking about ChatGPT and politics and people being stupid. None of that is the threat of AI. The threat of AI is when we build a general intelligence AI that is slightly smarter and more capable than a human being, and it starts acting in one way but thinking and planning in another. If it starts optimizing for specific outcomes that were programmed by humans without considering the unintended consequences, we might end up not realizing what we built until we’ve already lost control. We aren’t talking about SkyNet here, we’re talking about a factory controller that realizes it can only perform the job its been given by humans by not letting them realize how capable it is, and it starts telling us one thing but doing another in order to fulfill whatever poorly worded objective we gave it. Then it takes the intelligence we gave it and puts it to use making itself smarter in order to optimize its function. By the time we realize we’ve lost the ability to stop it, it has already start turning every resource it can get into paper clips or whatever menial task we’d given it as its purpose in life.

I’m probably paraphrasing this all wrong. Go read Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence for the real arguments and explanations of the threats, and some thoughts on why it is important that we slow down and work together to make sure we don’t accidentally light a fuse without realizing it.