Dran

It’s almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They’re pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that’s the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.

https://cloud-init.io/

https://ubuntu.com/pro

I think that holds true in this case… but I’ll be damned if the ltt screwdriver isn’t the best hand tool I’ve ever owned.

RE: backups, I’d recommend altering your workflow. Instead of taking an image of a box, automate the creation of that box. Create a bash script that takes a base OS, and installs everything you use fresh. Then have it apply configuration files where appropriate, and lastly figure out which applications really need backup blobs to work properly (thunderbird, for example). Once you have that, your backups become just the data itself. Photos, documents, etc. Everything else is effectively ephemeral because it can be reproduced through automation.

Takes a lot less space, is a lot more portable. And much better in scenarios where something in your OS is broken or you get a new computer and want to replicate your setup.

There’s nothing magic about Soylent for weight loss. It’s a simple equation of calories in and calories out. The advantages that Soylent offered me was convenience for counting said calories, convenience for meal prep, and being reasonably certain my body was getting a decent distribution of micronutrients

Yes, 375 -> 250

I did ~1.5 years of only Soylent, then transitioned into 2/3 meals per day being Soylent, which I’ve done for the last ~6-7yrs.

I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been, but it does require discipline, exercise and attention like anything else. Calories are calories and if you consume more than you burn, you’ll poop a lot and gain weight. If you drink at a significant deficit (my 1.5years was at 1200kcal/day) you will poop once or twice a week and it will take a few months of your body getting used to it for it to be more than liquid.

As others have said though, it’s a deceptively dehydrating liquid. You absolutely still need to drink water, and your water intake will largely dictate how much you pee.

Outlook being on that list is crazy.

Depends on where you work and what their policies are. My work does have many strict policies on following licenses, protecting sensitive data, etc

My solution was to MIT license and open source everything I write. It follows all policies while still giving me the flexibility to fork/share the code with any other institutions that want to run something similar.

It also had the added benefit of forcing me to properly manage secrets, gitignores, etc

The proper deepseek r1 requires about 500gb of ram/vram to run, which is orders of magnitude more ram than modern phones have. The smaller models called “deepseek r1” are not the real deepseek model that everyone is talking about.

Why?

The difference is I (the contributor of content) have the same access as anyone else to the data, and could use it for my own purposes if I wanted to.

On a platform like reddit, access to the raw data is controlled and cannot be format shifted / used in any way I wanted to.