- If you are interested in keeping backups, including the ability to go back in time to recover accidentally deleted/changed files, then ZFS with its reliable snapshot facility is fantastic. Other file systems offer some version of this, e.g. btrfs, but they don't have the same reliability as ZFS.
Snapshots on ZFS are extremely cheap, since it works on the block level, so snapshots every hour or even 15 minutes are now doable if you so wish. Combine with weekly or monthly snapshots that can be replicated off-site, and you have a pretty robust storage system.
This is all home sysadmin stuff to be sure, but even if you just use it as a plain filesystem, the checksum integrity guarantees are worth the price of admission IMO.
FWIW, software RAID like ZFS mirrors or mdm is often superior to hardware raid especially for home use. If your raid controller goes blooey, which does happen, unless you have the exact same controller to replace it, you run a chance of not being able to mount your drives. Even very basic computers are fast enough to saturate the drives in software these days.
- You can tell it's great visual storytelling because you don't even need to know the words.
I guess the McDonald's ad didn't need words either, but it was just depressing and awful.
- Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
- I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.
This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.
- Quite a lot of the low-hanging fruit from pharma has already been picked. The modern business model for pharma involves coming up with a patentable new drug that does the same thing as an older drug that's now out of patent and available for manufacture as a generic.
Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.
- gitolite is great. It's simple and extremely lightweight.
- If at all possible, find a local independent book store and buy from there. If they don't have it in stock, often they'll order it for you.
I have one that's been around since I was a kid, and I love taking the family there. Everybody picks a book, and it might cost anywhere from $80-120 (I've got a good sized family), but these days that's about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book, you can swap when you're done.
We also started celebrating Jolabokaflod a few years back, which is an Icelandic post-war tradition of giving books as gifts on Christmas Eve and reading them. This is a lot of fun, and it's a great excuse to hit the book store.
- >Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name
I know this pain.
What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.
I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.
Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.
- >why single out the debt Social Security owns for that treatment
Because it's the biggest slice of the federal budget pie, and currently it goes to the segment of the US population with the highest average net worth.
Whether you think it's right or wrong, it is a massive chunk of mandatory spending. Combined with Medicare, it's close to 40% of the entire budget, and it is ultimately unsustainable.
- Isn't diversity a positive metric? Mississippi has the highest black percentage of all the states. If one wants to use statistics, use all of the statistics.
- >because the manufacturing infrastructure of Europe was decimated after some pretty intense warfare
Exactly this. The US coasted as the last major economy standing for a very long time, and we built our expectations upon this very temporary quirk of geopolitics.
Our economy may seem like it's thriving to some, but the fact remains that an economy that does not make things is in trouble. You may be able to make a lot of money by moving money around, but that is not viable long-term. Big Fortune 500 corporations may add a lot to the GDP of a nation, but a big F500 corporation is not going to sponsor your local Little League team.
The GP is right, in the narrow aspect of "businesses need to adapt and evolve", but what we moved to in the US is very heavy on the service side. There is a cost to this; there is a cost to everything. It's showing up now in some surprising places, such as high-end chip manufacturing. We let all of that go to Taiwan (Ricardian comparative advantage!), and now all we have is Intel, which has been coasting on inertia for more than a decade.
- >They're doing it because they have the money and feel it's worth the risk in case it pays off.
If the current work in AI/ML leads to something more fundamental like AGI, then whoever does it first gets to be the modern version of the lone nuclear superpower. At least that's the assumption.
Left outside of all the calculations is the 8 billion people who live here. So suddenly we have AGI--now what? Cures for cancer and cold fusion would be great, but what do you do with 8 billion people? Does everybody go back to a farm or what? Maybe we all pedal exercise bikes to power the AGI while it solves the Riemann hypothesis or something.
It would be a blessing in disguise if this is a bubble. We are not prepared to deal with a situation where maybe 50-80% of people become redundant because a building full of GPUs can do their job cheaper and better.
- The graphic design version of this is "Get it done, make it beautiful," but it works for code too.
I used to get hung up on things like doing a loop when a ternary operator would work. "Somebody is going to see this and be rude about it." But sometimes you write code how you're thinking about the problem at the time. And if you think of it as a loop, or a series of if statements, or whatever, do it that way.
If it makes you feel better, note it in a comment to revisit later. And if somebody is rude about it, so what. It's not theirs, it's yours.
- I'm all for playing the "oh, the children!" card. As a parent it's nice to not have to worry about that sort of thing.
It does ring hollow when the Screen Time controls that Apple includes is such a muddled mess. And, sometimes, it just doesn't seem to work properly at all. Working properly, the browser bypass isn't really a problem, but it's very twitchy and fiddly to set up.
- We called it the Orient because at one time to orient yourself meant to face east towards the rising Sun. So maps with east at the top make sense.
- I thought this was great, very much the sort of thing I would have done when I was younger and had the time (and patience!). I don't usually watch long-form videos (that patience thing again), but I watched all the way with this one. I like the understated humor.
I have no doubt that this phone will not be perfect. With all the things sticking out it will catch on stuff, and it will be awkward to hold up to your head to talk, etc. But who cares? He made it himself, and will have a lot of attachment to it if only for that fact.
And I agree with his main point: phones used to be interesting. We all stroke our plain black slabs like monkeys before the Monolith these days, and it's sad.
- Yes, vehicles driven by amateurs are more dangerous than high-capacity vehicles with professional drivers/pilots. People talk about the high number of fatalities as if you have to drive over the scattered dead every day like gruesome speed bumps.
I just think that, considering the number of miles driven in the US and the poor quality of your average driver, the number of deaths is surprisingly low. This is probably at least partially due to the safety regulations that have made cars a helluva lot less of a killbox than they used to be.
If you don't recognize that while driving you have at least some control over your own safety I don't know what to say. Total control? Of course not. Can you not speed, not read HN while eating a burger, not blow through traffic lights without looking? Of course you can.
It would be like arguing against buses because a bus driver can wig out and drive through a cliffside guardrail and there's nothing you can do about it.
- Fair enough, though I'm not offended. I detected condescension where none was meant, and I apologize for that.
- That's an amazingly reductive take on a complex issue, and it infers something which was not implied.
At no point did I suggest that walkable cities were not in demand, only that the current state is less than ideal for a large number of people, to which your solution was "be rich".
- Well, panhandling was just one thing mentioned, and to focus on that to the exclusion of the others seems disingenuous.
But it does depend on the nature of the panhandling, doesn't it? Passive panhandling is one thing, and aggressive panhandling is something else, right?
The point is that people will accept some level of anti-social behavior, however they define that, and above that level they do not. No amount of bluster or "why I just never" or incredulity doesn't change that. If you want walkable cities with good public transit you make it attractive and hospitable to a wide majority of people.
Or don't, no skin off my nose, but acting shocked that there are people who think and react differently than you do is silly IMO.
- There is "housing shortage" and "affordable housing shortage", and these are two things that sound similar but are actually very different.
- "Nobody I know voted for Nixon."
Many cities have been losing population for a while, regardless of your intimate knowledge of what other people do or don't feel. Incredulity isn't really much of a solution if you want to address issues that people might have.
- My wife is far more risk adverse than I am. We'd be moving if she had to bike through a Hooverville to buy milk.
- I'd think "it can be both" would be obvious, but clearly not.
Rich people have been enjoying a different standard of life even in the midst of abject poverty since forever, but I guess this is news to some.
- According to Zillow they start at about a million for 2/1 apartments and go up from there.
We have completely different definitions for affordable, unless $250K+/yr jobs are just falling out of the sky.
- >Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?
Because I'm not in the top 0.1%.
"Why don't you just move into a $2-5 million dollar home?" is an astonishing take.
- That's a non-answer, so I assume that's a "no" on the wife, kids, and/or letting them pedal through tent city.
In any event, homeless people are low on the threat scale because people generally avoid riding a Schwinn through homeless encampments, which should be perfectly obvious but I guess not.
- From the MS blog post:
>Users with AD credentials can request tickets to any service account in AD.
I assume it means you can derive the service password to leapfrog up the chain to wherever you want to go.
- Do you have a wife? Kids? Would you let them bicycle through the homeless district?
I don't get hassled either, but it's not about me. My job as a husband and father is to protect my family.
I won't take it for granted now.
As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)