Stringing more non-sequitors into this probably won’t make it make more sense

And the user experience I should expect depends on their stupid hierarchy for reasons I should care about, I’m sure, but still I find myself not. Choosing to enshittify is a choice. Choosing a business model that depends on coercion into an ecosystem that will become enshittified after accumulating a critical mass is another, even more evil choice. Doing it while those cheering loudest are the ones being fucked hardest (I mean, there’s still a “certain line” between how badly “certain groups” are discriminated against, but let’s keep things broad here because we all know the in-group is going to shrink… you know the poem, those that don’t speak up and all that) is yet another choice and one that I’m not willing to join. Doing it while playing monopolistic games arguably even more strongly than Microsoft did when it got hit with a Nynex-level antitrust suit is a step even further down the fuck-me-brick road. The list goes on. Have you met Android??? Google’s motto used to be Don’t Be Evil. Yeah, I’m at least that old. Fight me.

Edit: please don’t fight me. I’m in some back pain right now from some light physical engagement the other day. I’m also, at a minimum, that old…

No superb owls to be seen on those at all, really

I just ordered the bits for my future storage appliance, so I can share what I decided to roll with. I stumbled across the Fractal Design Node 804 case, which has room for 8 x 3.5" drives, and then I got 4 x 8TB WD Red Plus drives to start with, RAIDZ1, and then I can add another 4-disk pool later on down the road. The Red Plus drives run at 5400rpm instead of 7200, that’s fine for what I need and saved a few bucks while still keeping me in CMR-drive-land. I also grabbed 2 x 1TB NVMe drives to run as a mirrored pair for the OS. 64GB of RAM so I have some headroom for services I want to run. And I’m going to put TrueNAS Scale on it, which makes it really convenient to run those aforementioned services that I am wanting to run directly on the NAS, like NextCloud and my Linux ISO downloading tool.

Also now that my family has pretty much moved entirely away from using the big clouds as much as possible, I’m now reading some of the other comments here and looking into Backblaze to store my encrypted backups offsite. Not everything, mind you, there is a large percentage of my data footprint that is either easily recoverable or just simply would be non-catastrophic to lose. But the important stuff, that’s getting encrypted and put in someone else’s internet locker for safe keeping.