The ideal system probably is something like btrfs snapshot, then restic or similar of that snapshot to a remote disk.

Btrfs doesn’t dedup identical data at different locations. Restic (or anything similar non-filesystem-level) cannot take an atomic snapshot. If you have something like a PostgreSQL database, where the DBMS ensures that what’s on disk is valid at any point in time, but only to an atomic view of the thing, you probably want an atomic snapshot of it.

I dunno if anyone has a single utility that does both steps together.

They call it disk destroyer for a reason.

There’s nothing specially destructive about dd. It’s just a program that opens a file, and if you tell it to open a device file and it’s got permission to write to it, it’ll write to it.

You can just as easily overwrite a disk’s contents with anything else that will open a file and write to it.

# cp /dev/urandom /dev/sda

will wipe your drive with random data in the same way that

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda

will.

I think that there’s a reasonable argument for a separate home partition on a multiuser system. Means that users can’t fill up root.

But a lot of systems aren’t multiuser these days.

EDIT: Honestly, my biggest partitioning irritation these days is that the Debian installer makes it a pain in the rear to have a larger /boot if you’re also doing an LVM-based install; the default is unreasonably small these days.

It sounds like that’s some network providers that block catbox, rather than vice versa.

https://catbox.moe/faq.php

Why can’t I access Catbox/access files on Catbox (files.catbox.moe)?

Good question! It turns out certain governments in the world hate freedom of information, don’t have net neutrality, don’t see online service providers as legally exempt entities, or a combination of the three! You will have issues accessing Catbox/files on Catbox if you are connecting from the following countries or providers:

Probably the most significant ones on there from a standpoint of users here are “Australia”, “Rogers”, “Comcast”, and “Verizon”. It sounds like all of those blocks are pretty easy to bypass (like, they’re either DNS-level or can be disabled by users on their router, where there’s a blacklist toggle that’s on by default).

You’re not wrong, but honestly, I suspect that some Goo-Gone or similar would knock out leftover adhesive.

I have seen people recommend that shiny aluminum-backed tape as being very opaque. Dunno what the adhesive is like on that.

Yeah, I know.

TitS 2.

M-Discs are also useful as very long term archival storage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

In 2022, the NIST Interagency Report NIST IR 8387[25] listed the M-Disc as an acceptable archival format rated for 100+ years, citing the aforementioned 2009 and 2012 tests by the US Department of Defense and French National Laboratory of Metrology and Testing as sources.

That will reduce prices by immediately keeping a lot of potential buyers out and by capping how much they can spend, but there will still be a bunch of places in the state where housing isn’t being built because of height restrictions and similar. That’s what the author is flagging as being the big issue, and I’d agree with him:

The first is these growth restrictions that first showed up in the 1970s and have gotten worse over time. I should note that some of these are finally being addressed in the California Legislature and in some cities.

Like, ordinarily, what happens if you don’t have artificial restrictions on construction, if prices rise enough to the point that it’s profitable to build housing, you get more housing.

What we’ve done is placed a lot of artificial restrictions preventing that construction from happening.

So when that happens, a housing shortage shows up. People bid for what limited supply there is. The poorest get priced out.

Larger loans let people spend more. So as long as there are some people who will take out ever more debt, larger loans will let prices rise even further.

We could block that, limit loans.

But that happens by excluding even more people from the market, just people who are a little richer than the poorer ones who were already being bid out. Like, if I cannot buy a house with cash, but can afford to do so with a ten-year mortgage, then I’m priced out under a “5-year max” proposal like the one you listed. That’s not great, because it excludes a lot of people from being able to have housing when we could let them have housing.

It’d be preferable to build more and end the housing shortage. That’d let prices come down to a level that’d be more generally affordable—like, we’d prefer prices to be limited by supply always being able to catch up with demand, rather than by trying to artificially exclude people from being able to get housing.

Sure. Everyone would prefer to have a monopoly that they control, given the option (though to avoid monopolies everywhere other than that). One generally doesn’t get the option to exclude other parties from competing with themselves, though.

If Delta or any other airline had the option, they’d rather be the only airline. But…here we are.

I’m not sold that unified memory is going to be the future of PCs.

Unified memory systems are convenient right now, because you have been able to run out and get relatively-affordable affordable systems, like a Framework Desktop, that have unified memory and can take a lot of memory.

Discrete GPUs, which are mostly where we’ve done parallel compute, haven’t had that much memory, because there’s little point in gaming. Sure, theoretically a video game designer could make games that make useful use of a ton of VRAM. But it’d also make gaming systems cost more, and you need mass to make a platform attractive for game developers to target. If there were enough people willing and able to buy dGPUs with 512GB of memory to play games, then we’d have them out there. But…that market doesn’t exist in 2026.

And in any event, in the short term, dGPU vendors are going to want to price-discriminate between (more price sensitive) gaming customers and (less price sensitive) AI compute. I don’t think that that’s long-term sustainable, but right now, Nvidia is the leader in compute for AI stuff. As other companies move into the market, make it more competitive, I think that that’ll change.

So…we don’t have a lot of high-RAM dGPUs today. But I’m not sold that that situation will last in the long term.

Unified memory systems are useful if you have a major need to frequently share a lot of data between the parallel compute hardware and the CPU. But…currently, AI compute stuff doesn’t really do that. You load a model, and that moves a lot of data, but then the CPU doean’t need to do much with it. Maybe that could change, and someone will come up with new systems that take advantage of tight coordination between CPU and the parallel compute hardware. But as of now, it doesn’t.

The properties of the memory that are most-useful aren’t the same. Parallel comoute is really bandwidth-intensive, whereas that may not be as critical for a CPU. The CPU cares a lot about latency, whereas that may not matter much for the parallel compute hardware—for LLMs, you often know well in advance what memory you’re going to need next, moreso than the CPU. I remember reading a paper recently talking about how current HBM memory isn’t optimized for LLM compute—for LLMs, you want more read capacity and don’t care as much about write.

Plus, having different memory pools simply means that the CPU and parallel compute hardware aren’t competing for bandwidth.

That’d all tend to suggest to me that it might be a good idea to have separate memories for the two in the long run. I think that that might be where we ultimately wind up, rather than with unified-memory systems as the norm.

Maybe not 640kiB, but realistically, my guess is that it’s probably possible to do human-level AI with less memory than existing computers have. We just don’t make efficient-enough use of hardware as things stand.

That being said, if you can achieve a given level of performance with a given amount of memory, the next obvious question is “well, how much better might it do if I use even more memory?”

The problem here is that it’s also going to make your pricing uncompetitive.

You can convert consumer surplus to supplier surplus by using price discrimination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus

• Consumer surplus, or consumers’ surplus, is the monetary gain obtained by consumers because they are able to purchase a product for a price that is less than the highest price that they would be willing to pay.

• Producer surplus, or producers’ surplus, is the amount that producers benefit by selling at a market price that is higher than the least that they would be willing to sell for; this is roughly equal to profit (since producers are not normally willing to sell at a loss and are normally indifferent to selling at a break-even price).[1][2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

Price discrimination, known also by several other names, is a microeconomic pricing strategy whereby identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers, based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[1][2][3] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[3] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay[2][3][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[5]

But in a competitive market, normally, that won’t work, because you require monopoly power to make it work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, ‘single, alone’ and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, ‘to sell’) is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service.[1] A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller’s marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.[2]

• Price discrimination: A monopolist can change the price or quantity of the product. They sell higher quantities at a lower price in a very elastic market, and sell lower quantities at a higher price in a less elastic market.

And the airline industry—at least in the US, and not saying that that is the case everywhere in the world—is a competitive one.

Warren Buffet has been a pretty prominent voice critical of airlines in the US as an industry; they aren’t very profitable.

searches

https://jimmysjournal.substack.com/p/why-buffett-hates-airlines-a-case

For decades, Warren Buffett’s distaste for airline stocks has puzzled many investors.

How could a business so essential to global commerce, tourism, and modern life be so unattractive to one of the world’s most celebrated capital allocators?

The airline industry is, unfortunately, a textbook example of a structurally unattractive sector:

• Rivalry Among Existing Competitors: Intense. Price wars are common. Differentiation is minimal. Customers view seats as commodities, and loyalty programs offer diminishing returns.

• Threat of New Entrants: Moderate to high. While aircraft procurement and regulatory hurdles present barriers, the proliferation of low-cost carriers has shown that entry is possible - often with disruptive effects.

• Bargaining Power of Suppliers: High. Aircraft and engine manufacturers (Airbus, Boeing, GE, Rolls-Royce) operate as oligopolies. Airports and labor unions also exert significant leverage.

• Bargaining Power of Buyers: High. With near-zero switching costs, passengers chase the lowest fare. Online aggregators have further commoditized the booking process.

• Threat of Substitutes: Medium. Alternatives like high-speed rail (Europe, China) or videoconferencing (post-COVID) are becoming more viable.

Each of these forces squeezes margins. Together, they form a gauntlet that makes sustainable value creation exceedingly rare.

The airline industry has a long and notorious history of earning ROICs at or below WACC.

In other words, despite growing revenues and essential services, the industry has historically destroyed shareholder value. From 1963 to 2023, U.S. airlines rarely posted positive ROIC-WACC spreads. This isn’t just a cyclical issue - it’s structural.

Buffett never bet against airplanes - he bet against the economics of the airline business.

And over the long run, he was right.

Delta might say “okay, Person X has the ability and willingness to pay more for a product that I offer, so I’ll charge more”.

The problem is that that makes it very easy for the airline down the street to take their business by simply not charging that much.

And while there is some overhead associated with comparing prices, and customers will place some value on the time they spend comparing prices, there are a number of well-established existing services to do price comparisons between airlines, like Travelocity and Orbitz, which make this pretty quick and easy.

Like, I don’t think that the limiting factor on an airline doing personalized pricing is likely a lack of having a model that can sufficiently-accurately predict the price an individual is willing to pay, which is what AI or other computer modeling would provide. Rather, it’s the presence of a competitive market.

The destruction of the book is done to mitigate some copyright concerns. There will be a fairly small number of large-scale projects like this, and each only needs one copy of a given book, so outside of maybe very rare books, the impact is going to be pretty negligible on availability — like someone buying one copy of that book.

I finally started putting white labels over a bunch of these the other day. It had just gotten out of hand. A Minisforum mini-PC with a blindingly bright power light was the breaking point — that took three layers of label to bring the brightness down to a reasonable level.

I’ve also started actively trying to get devices that don’t have power or status lights, where possible. I don’t really need a USB hub with status lights. Used to be just PC components with unnecessary RGB bits that I avoided.

There was a point in the past when society was concerned about people wasting their time on television instead of on social media or short-form video or whatever’s du jour now.

Hmm. This image shows up in the Lemmy Web UI in Firefox, but it looks like Eternity on Android can’t handle AVIF. Also posting a WebP here to see if that works better:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/76034828-6cef-4412-a832-7b06a739d1db.webp

EDIT: Apparently it can do WebP.

If that’s actually their problem, they could easily just play a small amount of silence before a video’s content. They don’t need to be constantly tying up an audio stream.

Funnily enough, Microsoft built WSL so developers could use Linux without leaving Windows. Instead, it turned a growing number of Windows PCs into functional Linux development machines, with Windows serving as little more than the launcher.

I mean, I get using Windows if you’re actually doing Windows development work, but if not, I’d just put Linux proper on the thing.

The appeal for developers is that even if their employer issues a Windows laptop, and even when their development stack expects Linux, WSL removes the need to dual-boot.

With WSL, they don’t have to fight their employer’s hardware policy to get it.

Any employer that is employing someone to do Linux development work and takes issue with them having a Linux box to do dev work isn’t a place that I’d want to bother to work.

only thing

Cygwin?