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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • With 2 disks that would be type mirror in ZFS-speak, completely built-in. Equivalent to RAID1 in terms of hardware fault tolerance.

    You could do a 3-disk mirror or n-disk mirror really. The RAID5/6 rough equivalents are called RAIDzN where N is the number of disk failures they tolerate. E g. RAIDz1, RAIDz2, etc. You probably want a mirror unless you need more space than a single disk provides.




  • Yup, turn it on, let it do a scrub, then turn it off. I’d still use redudnancy though. Not merely to cover the case of the drive failing, but also to cover the bit rot use case. It’s exceedingly unlikely bits to rot at the exact same spot on two or more disks. When ZFS finds a checksum mismatch during a scrub (which indicates bit rot), it’ll be able to trivially recover the data from the drive where the checksum matches. It’ll then rewrite the rotten part.



  • I don’t disagree with these points in general. However this isn’t simply about the tools. Tools go along with people and their skill and experience. There are developers and developers. There are people with lots of experience who create much higher quality C code than others. Personally I’d never touch C if I can avoid it as I don’t trust myself as much. I’d always go for C++ instead. Modern C++ with RAII is great. It’s what most of the software at our corpo is written in. Maybe Rust would end up becoming the default standard at some point. Maybe something else would. I would never go shit on a coworker who has produced tons of well functioning code that they better reskill in something that may or may not stick around, or that they may not become as productive with for a long time. A team skilled in C or C++ may be able to produce higher quality software, quicker than a less skilled team Rust. Rust might be better for teams that just start in native programming. I don’t know. If it grows enough in use, reskilling people and reworking software to cooperate with it might become an obvious choice. For now, as I see it, it depends on the team.


  • In the short run, yes. However in the long run, their profits have to shrink. They’ll try recovering that from labor. If labor responds with organizing, the oligarchs would see their profits shrink further. Further, the West won’t close up wholesale. Some parts would, others wouldn’t. If people in the insular parts see people having it better across the border, they might vote to have that too. Assuming such a change could happen somewhat democratically. I don’t think the West would be able to insulate long term. But that’s a bet based on a lot of assumptions that could turn out wrong.



  • While that isn’t going away, chief executives of large pharmaceutical companies are broadening their horizons. Why spend $10 billion acquiring a U.S. biotech with a mid-stage drug when a similar molecule can be licensed from China for a fraction of the price?

    So these fuckers are going to run the research sector through the same outsourcing treatment they ran manufacturing won’t they.

    I’m wondering what would happen if PRC doesn’t profit maximize their product in the long run. As standard of living increases the cost of labor in China would get close to the cost of labor in the West. If the difference in cost of labor isn’t a significant factor and Chinese product (manufacturing and IP like drugs) is sold close to the cost of labor and materials, wouldn’t that force the Western firms to operate as non-profits? If they can’t make significant profit on anything, won’t that significantly disrupt the current capitalist model?




  • ZFS with automatic snapshots and scrubbing. This will keep as many and as old snapshots as your like. It’ll ensure the files don’t rot. It’ll ensure the media doesn’t die, so long as you have enough redundancy and you replace disks as they die. This is what I’d trust for long term storage because I think I understand how and why it works. It should last as long as I feed it disks. If I delete something, I should be able to restore it from a snapshot. The hardware doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Just a Pi 4/5 with a couple of WD Elements would be fine. Could add more disks for more redudnancy. I’m running 2-disk residency.

    You don’t have to touch the software if it’s not exposed to the Internet. Whatever works today on it will work 20 years from now, so long as the hardware works. A couple of spare Pis, SD cards and power supplies should let it last for decades.