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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Agreeing with this, expanding a RAID array is not necessarily impossible, with something like RAID 5, and the right RAID setup, you could theoretically add an identical disk without wiping it all in the rebuild. RAID 1, you’ll 100% need to copy the data somewhere that isn’t the 2/4 disks in the meantime. In an environment where storage is expensive, RAID 1 is not suitable imo.

    ZFS makes it so easy though. Throw a mismatched disk in? No big deal, it’s in your pool now. Want double parity for extra peace of mind? You can do that. It self-heals so you don’t need fsck, its maximum limits are too big to realistically matter on human scales, and the documentation on it is pretty good.


  • Yeah this is it, the problem is that even once you solve the technology problem, it becomes the choice between two logistics problems, distributing liquid fuel for refilling, and moving large amounts of power on the grid on demand. The latter is a solvable problem, but the former is just so well understood.

    Certainly, most people are better served by EVs today, for their personal vehicle needs. But I think hydrogen will be a compelling option for people with specific needs beyond the short term. Especially with continued investment in that technology in Japan.


  • There are two hydrogen fill stations between my home and work, they definitely get used, and the price per kg of green hydrogen is still trending downwards. It’ll never be the next big thing, hydrogen is heavy and has several of the other problems of gasoline that EVs always solve. But for people who need personal transport, and need to frequently go larger distances than one battery charge will support, hydrogen fuel cells solve a problem EVs have, without going back to fossil fuels; fuelling up takes negligible time.

    I think hydrogen cars will have a niche for a long time to come, enough to keep the technology around and evolving.


  • Critically, the people who build these machines don’t typically update drivers to port them to a new OS. You buy a piece of heavy equipment, investing tens, or maybe even a hundred thousand dollars, and there’s an OS it works on, maybe two if you’re lucky. The equipment hopefully works for at least 20 years, and basically no OS is going to maintain that kind of compatibility for that long. Linux might get the closest, but I’ll bet you’re compiling/patching your own kernels before 20 years is up.

    This kind of dynamic is unavoidable when equipment vendors sell equipment which has a long usable life (which is good), and don’t invest in software support (which is them being cheap, to an extent), and OSes change enough that these time horizons likely involve compatibility-breaking releases.



  • It’s a structural challenge more than a fallacy, but I don’t entirely disagree. This sort of thing works best when one of two things is true, there’s some way for people to organize, or it’s relatively small and there are real options.

    The former clearly isn’t true here, but I think the latter is. There’s a lot of companies trying things with AI, and some are working better or worse. This particular use is relatively small, and I think the downside of doing it is also small in the short term. (This is a giant red flag, avoiding a red flag isn’t a large cost)





  • I suspect there’s a tendency of experts in something to think of people who do it narrowly as people doing at least as much as they are.

    The people who have a bunch of docker services, or complex multi-machine infrastructure are self-hosted software users, and probably in that 1-2% range. People who heard piholes are useful, so they bought a pi 3 and set it up are self-hosted software users. Somebody using an old desktop they got on Facebook marketplace for running Plex media are self-hosted software users… and so on. So are the people in their houses, some of their friends and family.

    Using that inclusive definition, being closer to 10% than 1% makes sense to me.



  • Speed cameras are a privacy issue that doesn’t solve the problem of speeding. People are most comfortable driving the speed the road is designed for, and if that speed is too high, the solution is to modify the road for a safer speed. The speeders in your example are right here, for the wrong reason; speed cameras should be rare if they’re allowed to exist at all. They have, at most, a short term benefit, and broad public surveillance is a very serious issue they contribute to.


  • I was one of the people who went to college to learn things, but the more I learn, the more I’m saddened by all the people I went to school with who studied things they didn’t enjoy, didn’t particularly care to get better at, all because they saw it as a way to make money. In optimizing for money, they miss out on learning and fulfillment.

    This wasn’t that long ago, but I can only imagine how much heavy GenAI use could intensify that effect






  • The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.

    Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.