NaibofTabr

Ah yes, the beforetimes, how could I forget.

Humans spent thousands of years without rulers.

orly? which thousands?

It just means no rulers, but that’s not how it works

…anywhere in reality.

First and most important:

In the context of long-term data storage
ALL DRIVES ARE CONSUMABLES

I can’t emphasize this enough. If you only skim the rest of my post, re-read the above line and accept it as fundamental truth. “Long-term” means 1+ years, by the way.

It does not matter what type of drive you buy, how much you spend on it, who manufactured it, etc. The drive will fail at some point, probably when you’re least prepared for it. You need to plan around that. You need to plan for the drive being completely useless and the data on it unrecoverable post-failure. Wasting time and money to acquire the fanciest most bulletproof drives on the market is a pointless resource pit, and has more to do with dick-measuring contests between data-hoarders.

Knife geeks buy $500+ patterned steel chef’s knives with ebony handles and finely ground edges and bla bla bla. Professional kitchens buy the basic Victorinox with the plastic handle. Why? Because they actually use it, not mount it on a wall to look pretty.

The knife is a consumable, not an heirloom. So are your storage drives. We call them “spinning rust” for a reason.

The solution to drive failure is redundancy. Period.

Unfortunately, this reality runs counter to the desire to maximize available storage. Do not follow the path of desire, that way lies data loss and outer darkness. Fault-tolerant is your watchword. Component failure is unpredictable, no matter how much money you spend. A random manufacturing defect will ruin your day when you least expect it.

A minimum safe layout is to have 2 live copies of data (one active, one mirror), hot standby for 1 copy (immediate swap-in when the active or mirror fails), and cold standby on the shelf to replace the hot standby when it enters service.

Note that this does not describe a specific number of disks, but copies of data. The minimum to implement this is 4 disks of identical storage capacity (2 live, 1 hot standby, 1 on the shelf) and a server with slots for 3 disks. If your storage needs expand beyond the capacity of 1 disk, then you need to scale up by the same ratio. A disk is indivisible - having two copies of the same data on a disk does not give you any redundancy value. (I won’t get into striping and mucking about with weird RAID choices in this post because it’s too long already, but basically it’s not worth it - the KISS principle applies, especially in small configurations)

This means you only get to use 25% of the storage capacity that you buy. Them’s the breaks. Anything less and you’re not taking your data longevity seriously, you might as well just get a consumer-grade external drive and call it a day.

Buy 4 disks, it doesn’t matter what they are or how much they cost (though if you’re buying used make sure you get a SMART report from the seller and you understand what it means) but keep in mind that your storage capacity is just 1 of the disks. And buy a server that can keep 3 of them online and automatically swap in the standby when one of the disks fails. Spend more money on the server than the disks, it will last longer.

Remember, long-term is a question of when, not if.

If you really wanted to do it by hand, then basically perform the same actions as the washing machine: submerge the clothes in soapy water and agitate them for awhile, then submerge them in fresh water and agitate them for awhile, then wring out the water as much as possible, then hang to dry.

You can accomplish this process with a bucket, a stick, and a rope (plus soap and water). Also a lot of manual labor.

Forty-Six

When the Tao is present in the universe, The horses haul manure.
When the Tao is absent from the universe,
War horses are bred outside the city.

There is no greater sin than desire,
No greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

Sixty-One
[…]
Therefore if a great country gives way to a smaller country,
It will conquer the smaller country.
And if a small country submits to a great country,
It can conquer the great country.
Therefore those who would conquer must yield,
And those who conquer do so because they yield.

A great nation needs more people,
A small country needs to serve.
Each gets what it wants.
It is fitting for a great nation to yield.

Thirty
[…]
Force is followed by loss of strength.
This is not the way of Tao.
That which goes against the Tao comes to an early end.

from the Tao The Ching (by Lao Tsu), as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English

Book 14 #3

The Master said: ‘When the way prevails in the state, be enterprising in speech and enterprising in action; but when the Way does not prevail in the state, be enterprising in action but prudent in speech.’

from The Analects (of Confucius), as translated by Raymond Dawson

Fall of Civilizations might interest you. It covers the collapse of past empires, and tries to describe what life was like for the people living in them when they were at their peak, and what we know of life during the decline.

It is not specifically focused on religions, but for most of these cultures their religion was inherently bound up with their politics (both internal and external), economics, industry, and day-to-day life. Describing the society and culture includes a fair amount of detail about their religious beliefs and practices (for instance, you can’t really give a useful description of the Egyptian empire without mentioning their gods). Many of the largest surviving ruins have religious significance. Personally, I think framing the religion inside the sociocultural context and history of the civilization makes it more interesting and more understandable.

The Fall of Civilizations YouTube Channel has the podcast episodes set to video of the locations as they are today, along with photos of artifacts from the culture and artistic depictions of what it might have looked like.

In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Generative algorithms, and the people intent on replacing artists with them.

Also everyone labeling and/or peddling these things as “Artificial Intelligence”.

Also all of the corporations trying to shoehorn them into every product and service and ram them down user’s throats.

Also every user that patronizes these things voluntarily.

Oh I understand the word, it just seems like a lot of syllables.

estadounidenses

people actually use this in conversation?

I think I saw a 2…

However, sustaining broad-spectrum jamming over a large area is expensive and impractical.

If the mesh network is wide enough, redundant enough, mobile enough, then traffic can be routed around jammed areas.

Every obscure website was a passion project. Forums were mainly for people being enthusiastic about something.

Though as a side note, those forum discussions would go on for years, with possibly months in between new posts. Enthusiast forums were mostly small communities with only a handful of users adding content.

Here on the Fediverse we have similar small communities sustained by small groups of active posters, but it feels like most users lose interest in posts and comment discussions very quickly, usually less than a day.

I guess my point is that one of the aspects of the Internet of the 90s/00s is that it wasn’t immediate, and people tended to show more patience with each other and with the technology. Even an IRC conversation might stretch out over days or weeks, especially if you were talking to someone multiple time zones away.

Neocities: https://neocities.org/browse!

Webrings: https://www.brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm

Usenet: https://www.spocket.co/blogs/what-is-usenet

Zombo: https://zombo.com/

Chans: https://allchans.org/ but also… here be monsters… lots of unmoderated content, NSFW, NSFL, etc

Also:

The Internet wasn’t just in everyone’s pocket all the time. Frequently, using a computer network was an activity that you did with other people in the same room, e.g. in the Computer Lab (computers were expensive and complicated and not every room in a school or office would have the necessary power or communications wiring, so all the computers were kept in one special room) or an Internet Cafe (not everyone had Internet-capable wiring at home, so you might go to a business that offered Internet-connected computers as a service just to check your email) or a LAN Party (people used to physically haul their beige boxes, CRT monitors and network devices to a place to meet, connect and play games together - frequently just someone’s garage). You went to a specific place to use the Internet, typically with other people around, and then when you left the place you left the Internet also, it didn’t just follow you around everywhere all the time.

slugs

AI coding tools can do common, simple functions reasonably well, because there are lots of examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a large corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools can’t do sophisticated, specific-case solutions very well, because there aren’t many examples of those for any given use case to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a small corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools can’t solve new problems at all, because there are no examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is no corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools have already ingested all of the code available on the Internet to train with. There is no more new data to feed in. AI coding tools will not get substantially better than they are now. All of the theft that could be committed has been committed, which is why the AI development companies are attempting to feed generated training material into their models. Every review of this shows that it makes the output from generative models worse rather than better.

Programming is not about writing code. That is what a manager thinks.
Programming is about solving problems. Generative AI doesn’t think, so it cannot solve problems. All it can do is regurgitate material that it has previously ingested which is hopefully close-ish to the problem you’re trying to solve at the moment - material which was written by a real thinking human that solved that problem (or a similar one) at some point in the past.

If you patronize a generative AI system like Claude Code, you are paying into, participating in, and complicit in, the largest example of labor theft in history.

This is a good suggestion because even if you’re unable to dissuade the interest in guns, you might at least make the kid think twice about safety before they eventually handle one and thus prevent a tragedy.

This may not be the approach you have in mind, and it kind of depends on the kid’s personality, but one of the ways to de-glorify and de-romanticize something is to de-mistify it, to take it out of fantasy and make it real (to the point of being mundane).

To that end, consider Forgotten Weapons on YouTube. Ian will discuss a single gun, its design history, manufacturing, intended use, disassembly and cleaning, along with regular reminders about gun safety. Ian will even talk about the political and financing decisions that led to a particular gun being made (accounting is of course the height of glory).

If the kid finds the history, engineering and basic maintenance discussion to be boring, they might lose interest in the topic altogether. Alternatively, if they find it interesting, you might steer an unhealthy interest in violence toward something productive (history and/or mechanical engineering).

Keep in mind that forbidding access to something just adds to the mystery and romance around it and can have the effect of increasing the desire for it.