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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I’m not sure I buy that: Trump is a cult, and his cultists are going to have an absolute riotous fit if someone tries to depose him.

    Short of him dying or doing something you just can’t ignore - like, say, he eats shit out of his diaper on national tv - he’s not going anywhere.

    Vance isn’t smart enough to 6D chess his way into the presidency without his nominal constituency rioting over it, so I’m doubtful that’s his play.

    He’s probably just going to pull the last-guy-in-the-room thing, since that’s the only person Trump listens to or remembers anyway which means you keep the cultists happy AND you get the figurehead to do what you want anyways without the mess.



  • Mastodon is, like, fine, but it has one gaping flaw that makes it utterly unusable for me.

    Basically, the issue is you cannot be assured that any particular instance contains the entire conversation thread/replies, because they’re not necessarily sent to every server participating in the conversation.

    Bluesky fixes that by the ‘firehose’ feeds federating out to the PDSes and providing complete reply chains, which just flat out makes it a better experience since you can actually see what everyone is saying, not just what people on servers you might be following already are saying.

    It’s a giant stupid flaw in Mastodon (since other AP based platforms such as, for example, Lemmy don’t have it) and really should be addressed since it makes the platform darn near useless since why am I following people to only get half of what might be a useful thread?













  • contrast to their desktop offerings

    That’s because server offerings are real money, which is why Intel isn’t fucking those up.

    AMD is in the same boat: they make pennies on client and gaming (including gpu), but dumptrucks of cash from selling Epycs.

    IMO, the Zen 5(%) and Arrow Lake bad-for-gaming results are because uarch development from Intel and AMD are entirely focused on the customers that pay them: datacenter and enterprise.

    Both of those CPU families clearly show that efficiency and a focus on extremely threaded workloads were the priorities, and what do you know, that’s enterprise workloads!

    end of the x86 era

    I think it’s less the era of x86 is ended and more the era of the x86 duopoly putting consumer/gaming workloads first has ended because, well, there’s just no money there relative to other things they could invest their time and design resources in.

    I also expect this to happen with GPUs: AMD has already given up, and Intel is absolutely going to do that as soon as they possibly can without it being a catastrophic self-inflicted wound (since they want an iGPU to use). nVidia has also clearly stopped giving a shit about gaming - gamers get a GPU a year or two after enterprise has cards based on the same chip, and now they charge $2000* for them - and they’re often crippled in firmware/software so that they won’t compete with the enterprise cards as well as legally not being allowed to use the drivers in a situation like that.

    ARM is probably the consumer future, but we’ll see who and with what: I desperately hope that nVidia and MediaTek end up competitive so we don’t end up in a Qualcomm oops-your-cpu-is-two-years-old-no-more-support-for-you hellscape, but well, nVidia has made ARM SOCs for like, decades, and at no point would I call any of the ones they’ve ever shipped high performance desktop replacements.

    • Yes, I know there’s a down-stack option that shows up later, but that’s also kinda the point: the ones you can afford will show up for you… eventually. Very much designed to push purchasers into the top end.

  • I mean, recovery from parity data is how all of this works, this just doesn’t require you to have a controller, use a specific filesystem, have matching sized drives or anything else. Recovery is mostly like any other raid option I’ve ever used.

    The only drawback is that the parity data is mostly equivalent in size to the actual data you’re making parity data of, and you need to keep a couple copies of indexes since if you lose the index or the parity data, no recovery for you.

    In my case, I didn’t care: I’m using the oldest drives I’ve got as the parity drives, and the newer, larger drives for the data.

    If i were doing the build now and not 5 years ago, I might pick a different solution but there’s something to be said for an option that’s dead simple (looking at you, zfs) and likely to be reliable because it’s not doing anything fancy (looking at you, btrfs).

    From a usage (not technical) standpoint, the most equivalent commercial/prefabbed solution would probably be something like unraid.


  • A tool I’ve actually found way more useful than actual raid is snapraid.

    It just makes a giant parity file which can be used to validate, repair, and/or restore your data in the array without needing to rely on any hardware or filesystem magic. The validation bit being a big deal, because I can scrub all the data in the array and it’ll happily tell me if something funky has happened.

    It’s been super useful on my NAS, where it’s the only thing standing between my pile of random drives and data loss.

    There’s a very long list of caveats as to why this may not be the right choice for any particular use case, but for someone wanting to keep their picture and linux iso collection somewhat protected (use a 321 backup strategy, for the love of god), it’s a fairly viable option.



  • Hell I almost got snagged by one recently, and a goodly portion of my last job was dealing with phishing sites all day.

    They’ve gotten good with making things look like a proper email from a business that would be sending that kind of email, and if you’re distracted and expecting something you can have at least a moment of ‘oh this is probably legitimate’.

    The giveaway was, hilariously, a case of using ‘please kindly’ and ‘needful’ which uh, aren’t something this particular company would have actually used as phraseology in an email, so saved by scammers not realizing that americans at least don’t actually use those two phrases in conversation.


  • I just uh, wrote a bash script that does it.

    It dumps databases as needed, and then makes a single tarball of each service. Or a couple depending on what needs doing to ensure a full backup of the data.

    Once all the services are backed up, I just push all the data to a S3 bucket, but you could use rclone or whatever instead.

    It’s not some fancy cool toy kids these days love like any of the dozens of other backup options, but I’m a fan of simple and well, a couple of tarballs in a S3 bucket is about as simple as it gets since restoring doesn’t require any tools or configuration or anything: just snag the tarballs you need, unarchive them, done.

    I also use a couple of tools for monitoring the progress and a separate script that can do a full restore to make sure shit works, but that’s mostly just doing what you did to make and upload the tarballs backwards.