The biggest problem I had with the Jodie era was the companions.

Doctor Who has a rich history of the Doctor/Companion interactions following traditional gender roles. The Doctor is a powerful man who can bend time and space to his will, and his companion is an empathetic woman who can keep him grounded and retain his humanity. While there have been exceptions, this is the default formula.

When Jodie started, this all got turned upside-down. How should a woman Doctor act? Do they maintain the same character archetype (as they did with the Master/Missy), or do they make the character more feminine? What effect should that have on her relationship with her companions? Should the companion continue to be the traditional feminine role? Headstrong and masculine, but powerless? Wise and sage, like an advisor? This is a difficult plan for even the most accomplished writer.

Chris Chibnall was apparently not up to the task. Instead, he threw all of the options in at once. At best, it felt crowded and disjointed. But more often, it felt like they were focus-group testing. And by the end, it seemed clear that Kaz was the most popular with test audiences.

Yes, because of Disney’s refusal to commit to the series. The production schedule is entirely too unpredictable right now, and Ncuti has (a lot of) other offers.

I can’t elaborate without major spoilers.

Without exception, every single time someone is looking for “free speech”, this applies:

https://m.xkcd.com/1357/

EDIT: autocorrect

Kind of. They will be multiples of 4. Let’s say you got a gigantic 8i8e card, albeit unlikely. That would (probably) have 2 internal and 2 external SAS connectors. Your standard breakout cables will split each one into 4 SATA cables (up to 16 SATA ports if you used all 4 SAS ports and breakout cables), each running at full (SAS) speed.

But what if you were running an enterprise file server with a hundred drives, as many of these once were? You can’t cram dozens of these cards into a server, there aren’t enough PCIe slots/lanes. Well, there are SAS expansion cards, which basically act as a splitter. They will share those 4 lanes, potentially creating a bottleneck. But this is where SAS and SATA speeds differ- these are SAS lanes, which are (probably) double what SATA can do. So with expanders, you could attach 8 SATA drives to every 4 SAS lanes and still run at full speed. And if you need capacity more than speed, expanders allow you to split those 4 lanes to 24 drives. These are typically built into the drive backplane/DAS.

As for the fan, just about anything will do. The chip/heatsink gets hot, but is limited to the ~75 watts provided by the PCIe bus. I just have an old 80 or 90mm fan pointing at it.

The one I had would frequently drop the drives, wreaking havoc on my (software) RAID5. I later found out that it was splitting 2 ports into 4 in a way that completely broke spec.

I don’t want to speak to your specific use case, as it’s outside of my wheelhouse. My main point was that SATA cards are a problem.

As for LSi SAS cards, there’s a lot of details that probably don’t (but could) matter to you. PCIe generation, connectors, lanes, etc. There are threads on various other homelab forums, truenas, unraid, etc. Some models (like the 9212-4i4e, meaning it has 4 internal and 4 external lanes) have native SATA ports that are convenient, but most will have a SAS connector or two. You’d need a matching (forward) breakout cable to connect to SATA. Note that there are several common connectors, with internal and external versions of each.

You can use the external connectors (e.g. SFF-8088) as long as you have a matching (e.g. SFF-8088 SAS-SATA) breakout cable, and are willing to route the cable accordingly. Internal connectors are simpler, but might be in lower supply.

If you just need a simple controller card to handle a few drives without major speed concerns, and it will not be the boot drive, here are the things you need to watch for:

• MUST be LSi, but it can be rebranded LSi. This includes certain cards from Dell and IBM, but not all.
• Must support Initiator Target (IT) mode. The alternative is Initiator RAID (IR) mode. This is nearly all, since most can be flashed to IT mode regardless
• Watch for counterfeits! There are a bunch of these out there. My best advice is to find IT recyclers on eBay. These cards are a dime a dozen in old, decommissioned servers. They’re eager to sell them to whomever wants them.

Also, make sure you can point a fan at it. They’re designed for rackmount server chassis, so desktop-style cases don’t usually have the airflow needed.

To anyone reading, do NOT get a PCIe SATA card. Everything on the market is absolute crap that will make your life miserable.

Instead, get a used PCIe SAS card, preferably based on LSi. These should run about $50, and you may (depending on the model) need a $20 cable to connect it to SATA devices.

Manhattan Special Espresso Soda. Diet option is available.

They want my name and email, and someone will get back to me to find a retailer? Hard pass.

I did this back in the days of Smoothwall, ~20 years ago. I used an old, dedicated PC, with 2 PCI NICs.

It was complicated, and took a long time to setup properly. It was loud and used a lot of power, and didn’t give me much beyond the standard $50 routers of the day (and is easily eclipsed by the standard $80 routers of today). But it ran reliably for a number of years without any interaction.

I also didn’t learn anything useful that I could ever apply to something else, so ended up just being a waste of time. 2/10, spend your time on something more useful.

Watts (and gigawatts) are not a unit of energy. They are a unit of power, or you can think of it as a rate.

900 watts for an hour is 900 watt-hours, or 0.9 kWh. For 24 minutes (3 minutes x8) is 360 Wh, or 0.36kWh.

All of the major public LLM and diffusion models (ChatGPT, copilot, Grok, etc) are absolutely using more than a gigawatt. And I mean constantly. They are trying to create nuclear power plants exclusively to power an AI Datacenter. You could math out how much that is per query (not per person), but it’s absolutely insane.

The issue here isn’t about charity for the less fortunate. Many of the people begging make a decent living (from begging), and moreso than those working shitty service jobs. I don’t want to give money to someone that dresses homeless and puts on an act. I would happily give money to anyone that genuinely doesn’t know where they will sleep next week, or where their next meal is coming from.

The problem is that I’m not in a position to evaluate that. As such, I would rather give money to food banks and the like, since they are in a better position for that.

Searching through the trash means they genuinely need the money, and are willing to work for it. That’s worth something.

It’s cringe pretending to be humor.

Call his fucking bluff. The only way anything would close is if it isn’t profitable (enough). And if they can’t turn a profit, well then they need to be better at business! (/s).

The big caveat is that the BIOS must allow it, and most released versions do not.

Uber and the like have specific warnings about that, too. Of course, you can just ignore them and say you’re going to see someone else that’s in the ER.

Not OP, but mildly controversial was his movie Red State. It was a not-so-subtle take on the Westboro Baptist Church and their stance on gays.

Or maybe they’re still upset about Jersey Girl, which was way too common and wholesome for the guy behind Jay and Silent Bob.

(Hot take: if Jersey Girl didn’t have Smith or Carlin, it would’ve been mildly praised at the time and then mostly forgotten)

I’m sure the history is that, for most daily purposes, it was useful to know both. Knowing the larger element (the month) first sets the context for the smaller detail. For instance, saying I met someone for dinner on December 12 gives you the broader context (e.g. the season, possible relevant events) before the smaller detail of the day.

This is full of weasel words. Here are just the ones that stood out to me:

• “Censorship”, which is just “free speech” with makeup.
• “Regular people”, implying that anyone disagreeing with you isn’t regular
• “Hysteria”
• “How bad things (are)”
• And of course, “trans agenda”

Everyone believes you are asking in bad faith, because it’s clear that you are.

(And as always, XKCD 1357 applies)

The explanation I heard back then was that Pluto wouldn’t qualify as a planet, EXCEPT that it has a moon. I’m not sure why that exception would apply, but it seems it’s no longer good enough.