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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s one of the best reasons to actually RTFM: “How does the guy that designed this think it works? What did they intend for it to do?”

    I also find it’s useful when I’m vague on the specifics, especially with network protocols. I might be expecting it to do something and then find out, oh, this doesn’t solve that problem, I’m in the wrong config file.





  • The most genuine, personal emotion is grief. I think for people who understand grief, watching a character depict it in a story is deeply compelling, possibly to an unhealthy degree.

    It is functionally impossible to share grief in any meaningful way, even with other people who are grieving for the same thing that you are.

    If you could share the deeply personal parts, they would cease to be personal and thus cease to be meaningful.

    This doesn’t mean that you should camp out on your grief, indulge in it long-term, wallow in it like a pig in mud.

    It does mean that you should spend some time thinking about the things that make that feeling of grief so sharp, so personal for you, and treasure them. Only humans can create meaning, can produce it in other things, can extract it out of the mundanity of existence. You did, and you should hold on to the reasons for that, even as you allow the pain of the grief to fade.


  • Well the “critical/irreplaceable” qualifier is kind of important - that’s why I specified it. It’s up to you to decide what that means for your data and risk tolerance.

    For everything that I consider irreplaceable, I’m not comfortable with anything less than 100% duplication on the live system, and also an external offline backup. Even with enterprise-grade hardware, I don’t trust storage devices, they’re all destined to fail. Storage is the most important part of a data server, and should be treated like it is constantly trying to light itself on fire, like a library with wooden shelves lit with torches. All the other components are just as unreliable, but more expendable.

    Admittedly, when you account for hot standby drives, the cost is that my storage availability is only 40%. A 16TB storage pool is in fact 5x 8TB drives: 2 mirrored pairs and 1 standby. On the plus side, thanks to ZFS and TrueNAS those drives can be whatever, no need to worry about RAID considerations for matched drives. SAS or SATA? who cares? They can even be different speeds, ZFS will compensate. Buy whatever is the right size for the pool, let the system deal with the other issues.

    Can you put a price on stability? longevity? peace of mind?

    The server hardware is all old repurposed stuff - a desktop build from 2013, secondhand data center surplus, refurbished/used drives, none of it’s worth much and almost all of it is well past end of life, any part of it could fail without warning at any moment. It doesn’t matter, it is highly reliable because the redundancies have redundancies, including the boot drives. Trying to squeeze every bit of value out of the hardware is a losing game because it’s basically worthless anyway, but the same would be true if it were all new top-of-the-line gear. The hardware is expendable, the data is not. Buy more cheap hardware, plan for it to explode, learn how to build stable, recoverable systems.


  • Used data center drives are great for a home lab. They’re built like tanks for hundreds of thousands of hours of constant operation. Unless you’re running a business hosting a bunch of public-facing websites out of your garage, you don’t have that kind of workload (and if you are doing that you should just be buying new drives anyway and writing them off as a business expense).

    Data center drives get replaced when they hit a ceiling of operating hours, with no actual faults, or if they experience any minor faults (it’s a business expense - drives are consumables - data centers have storage rooms of spares sitting around, they just replace them).

    Any competent reseller should be able to give you a SMART report, and that should tell you if there are any major issues (generally they don’t get resold if there are, nobody will buy them). If the seller won’t give you a SMART report then obviously don’t buy, they’re either a scammer or incompetent.

    If your array redundancy is set up properly then there’s no reason to be “scared” or trust in “good luck”. Assume luck will be bad. Mirror every storage device that has critical/irreplaceable data on it, and have at least one hot standby drive in every pool. Don’t bother with complicated striping schemes to try and scrape a little more storage space out of your drives, that’s dumb. One-to-one mirroring for every drive. Storage drives are consumables. They will fail, not if but when, even if you only buy new. Learn to read a SMART report. Enjoy quality hardware with no real problems at low prices.


  • I am talking about if all agents connect globally

    What agents?

    all information can be accessed instantly at once

    In the 80s there were AI researchers who believed that once all of human knowledge was stored on a computer system, it would spontaneously become intelligent. This, of course, was magical thinking, and no such thing happened.

    It still won’t happen.

    Listen to what the actual experts are saying

    I do, and the actual experts all understand that the current generation of machine learning models are optimization algorithms that have been refined to locate specific areas of large datasets based on input prompts. They’re fancy search query tools, nothing more. There’s no “intelligence” at work.

    When you have a “conversation” with an LLM, and it gives you a seemingly-intelligent response, what you’re getting is a dump of some copied text that is related to the input you’ve been feeding the text entry field. The “intelligence” that you perceive in the response is actually that of the human who made the original writing that was scraped for training data.

    Keep your credulity in check. The algorithm has no understanding of what it regurgitates, no comprehension of the information it handles. It does keyword association really really well, and it can sift through lots and lots of data impressively fast. It’s a great, big, environmentally destructive Chinese room.