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Comment I hate this cliche. (Score 0) 5

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

Comment Re:Newegg (Score 3, Informative) 19

> It used to be my go-to site for all things computer related.

Me too.

They were slightly cheaper than Amazon for the same product, then I did a big project which got slightly downsized and I wound up with $400 in "restocking fees" for a couple of pieces of factory-hologram-tape sealed network gear, after I paid $100 in return shipping.

Learned my lesson real fast.

Comment Re:Easy Fix... (Score 1) 38

Especially when basically all methods of sabotaging cables(except possibly very near shore) are 'remote'/disposable; if only at the tech level of 'put anchor on rope because water deep'. Nobody is going to give a damn about losing an inert metal chunk.

Reportedly, none of that is public, the business of tapping a fiber line underwater is considerably more fiddly, and enough mines might make that a hassle; but it would also make install and repair far more expensive and probably just theatre when you consider the risk that someone at the telco isn't updating their ASAs.

Comment Re:AI as a sacred prestige competition (Score 2) 26

I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.

I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.

Comment Re:Air cooling (Score 1) 26

At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.

There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a commercial or residential water bill.

If the purpose is cooling you can (fairly) neatly trade off between paying for it in power and paying for it in water; and when the price differs enormously people usually choose accordingly if they can get away with it. In the really smarmy cases they'll even run one of the power-focused datacenter efficiency metrics and pat themselves on the back for their bleeding edge 'power usage effectiveness'(just don't ask about 'water usage effectiveness').

You can run everything closed loop; either dumping to air or to some large or sufficiently fast moving body of water if available; but the electrical costs will be higher; so you typically have to force people to do that; whether by fiat or by ensuring that the price of water is suitable.

Comment Re:Deflecting adulthood responsiblities (Score 1) 35

Like buying booze, renting a car, purchasing a handgun, buying a lottery ticket, getting a tatoo?

(some of these vary by state)

I don't see how you're too immature to order a Chianti with your steak dinner but you're mature enough to go $200K in debt based on a sales pitch of returns after investment.

These aren't even reasonable equivalents from a neuroscience perspective.

Comment Re:Can one recharge them? (Score 1) 78

A read is supposed to be fine. At read time the firmware *should* rewrite the cell if the read is weak.

The firmware also *should* go out and patrol the cells when idle and it has power.

you can dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=2M once a year if your firmware behaves.

If your drive is offline you could
dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdX bs=2M iflag=fullblock conv=sync,noerror status=progress

to be sure, though write endurance is finite.

If you're running zfs you can 'zpool scrub poolname' to force validation of all the written data. This is most helpful when you can't trust the firmware to not be buggy crap. Which only applies to 90% of drive firmware out there.

Comment Re: And just like that, everyone stopped using Ple (Score 1) 76

> I have found that streaming directly to my Plex home server over TLS is generally smoother without going through Wireguard. Not quite sure why.

I recently had to solve this.

Wireguard should work with a regular 1500byte MTU connection at 1440 or 1420 bytes (the default) --- however --- if your ISP is routing your IPv4 using 4-in-6 internally (like my major cable company) everything goes to hell.

Try dropping your wg MTU to 1360, MSS at 1320, and set up a mangle table to clamp MSS to PMTU (e.g. iptables rule).

I got a 10x bump in TLS over wireguard throughput.

Total pain in the ass and lightly documented.

Comment Re:Can't Help But Think (Score 4, Informative) 25

JPEGXL really does everything webp does and so much more, and it's well thought out.

WebP isn't terrible; they are smaller than I would have guessed given that they have the container overhead, but there's no stunning argument for it. "Better than PNG for what we used PNG for." OK, true, but.

Google should just let AV1 be AV1 and focus on pushing HEVC out of the market with it. The real opponents of progress have left the image space and are mucking around with video and VR now. Google has the capability to do something about this and foster innovation.

Comment I'm not that optimistic. (Score 1) 98

Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.

Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thing from dealing with someone who is merely ignorant; but learning, especially if they are enthusiastic about it.

Even if everything is fine in terms of job pace and security and all; that seems like it is shaping up to be a really hellish aspect of dealing with bots. The experience is sort of a somewhat weirder simulation of dealing with a chirpy, people-pleasing, very-junior type; except they are far more likely to lie than to admit ignorance; and they never learn(possibly the SaaS guys hoovering up your interactions in the background will make the next iteration better, possibly not, progress seems to have slowed considerably after only a brief period of improvement; but a given release is more or less full groundhog day).

That seems like a nightmare. Everything that sucks about teaching or mentoring; but precisely none of the rewarding aspects.

Comment Re:Its going to happen whether we want it to or no (Score 0, Troll) 115

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.

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