Posts tagged tutorial

I just ran the command rm -rf ~, deleting all my personal files in the process. This was not the first time, and it was no big deal, because I back up my files with automatic rolling backups. My backup system is secure, redundant, and has low resources requirements. The backup repository is encrypted, deduplicated, compressed, and mirrored across multiple machines. You can choose to use any or none of these features while following this guide.

In this guide, I describe how to set up a secure and robust backup service yourself, which runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows via WSL 2. I provide my own scripts, config files, and workflows for maintaining, validating, and restoring the backups. This is all setup using free software, supports multiple configurations with varying degrees of security and redundancy, and scales well to more backup clients.

If you’d prefer to not set this up yourself and you run macOS or Windows, I recommend Backblaze:

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#af9v9g

They automatically handle everything, including most of the features I want in a backup service and some I could never implement myself, for $6/m per machine (USD).

Recently, I asked my research assistant, Paulette, to create a Redex model. She had never used Redex, so I pointed her to the usual tutorials:

• https://redex.racket-lang.org/
• https://docs.racket-lang.org/redex/tutorial.html
• https://docs.racket-lang.org/redex/redex2015.html

While she was able to create the model from the tutorials, she was left the question “what next?”. I realized that the existing tutorials and documentation for Redex do a good job of explaining how to implement a Redex model, but fail to communicate why and what one does with a Redex model.

I decided to write a tutorial that introduces Redex from the perspective I approach Redex while doing work on language models—a tool to experiment with language models. The tutorial was originally going to be a blog post, but it ended up quite a bit longer that is reasonable to see in a single page, so I’ve published it as a document here: