LostXOR

I wouldn't even say that. Flash drives are good as temporary storage for copying/sharing files, or for stuff you need on hand (like a Linux boot stick), but I'd never include them as part of a backup system.

Cloud backups are alright from a privacy standpoint as long as you properly encrypt your data. Which also stops your cloud provider from suddenly terminating your account because you uploaded something they don't like.

Depends a lot on the quality of the stick. I have some that have worked well for years, and had others that failed after just a few writes. You'll probably be fine, but probably isn't good enough for a critical backup.

As long as your data isn't super important that's okay. But if it is, keep in mind that the chance of your USB stick failing when you try to read all the data off it after your SSD fails is fairly high. USB sticks do not do well with long reads or writes and tend to overheat and kill themselves. I'd strongly recommend picking up a hard drive to use as a third backup; a new 2TB drive is maybe $60, and a refurbished one half that.

Let me get this straight... They deleted their only other copy of the files from their old drives immediately after uploading them to OneDrive? Microsoft has some fault here, but that is also an unbelievably stupid decision on the user's part. It also sounds like they were planning to copy the files to a single new drive and immediately delete them from OneDrive, which is equally stupid. Are they allergic to having their files in multiple places or something?

It's an awful situation to be in, but it could've been avoided by simply having a second copy of the data, which is pretty much the simplest backup system.

They raise the barrier of entry for creating spam accounts from "make a bunch of API calls" to "set up some kind of AI captcha solver/pay someone in India to do it for you." It doesn't stop spammers, but it makes it harder for them.

People who are actually smart, regardless of their IQ score, know that IQ is a terrible measure of intelligence and would never brag about it.

I've had a great experience here on fedia.io. It's a smaller instance, and it is running Mbin instead of Lemmy, but everything federates over so you get the same content. Might feel a bit weird switching from Lemmy, but if you feel like it I'd recommend giving it a try. :)

We're also defederated from Hexbear, lemmy.ml, and Lemmygrad if that's a factor.

Nothing at all. That's why we have captchas.

For the first problem, just use a throwaway email service (I like temp-mail.org) to make your account.

Yeah that is waaay too small for a Skittle.

You're right! Let's say we have two dice:

D₁ is fair and has a 1/6 probability of rolling each number from 1-6.
D₂ is weighted, with probabilities P₁, P₂, P₃, P₄, P₅, P₆ to roll each number.

We roll D₁, and get a number with the following probability distribution:
1: 1/6
2: 1/6
3: 1/6
4: 1/6
5: 1/6
6: 1/6

We roll D₂, and get a number with the following probability distribution:
1: P₁
2: P₂
3: P₃
4: P₄
5: P₅
6: P₆

We find the probabilities of every combination of rolls that yields a 7:
1+6: 1/6 P₁
2+5: 1/6 P₂
3+4: 1/6 P₃
4+3: 1/6 P₄
5+2: 1/6 P₅
6+1: 1/6 P₆

Adding these together to get the total probability of rolling a 7, we get 1/6 (P₁ + P₂ + P₃ + P₄ + P₅ + P₆). Since the probabilities of rolling each number must sum to 1, we get a probability of 1/6 to roll a 7, and your gut is right. :)

7 is the only number where this property holds. Other numbers will have a probability dependent on the weighting of the die, which could be calculated with a similar method.