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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2023

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  • I lament Nova’s demise, too…

    I think the reason that the tech companies won’t allow us to have our devices our own way ( Microsoft was doing this decades ago ), is “religious”/ideological, not practical:

    I think they “need” to keep everybody permanently in a headlock, with our heads all twisted, because only if we are all in permanent learned-helplessness, only then can they automatically get away with everything they intend to be getting away with, in our world.

    IOW, our autonomy violates their totalitarian religion, see?

    It’s the same as how ANY spirituality grates on Dawkins’ blood: he wants it all gutted/butchered/destroyed, & suicides of ones he destroyed are no problem for him, & no alternative ever can have any validity to him.

    Totalitarianism, whether traditionally “religious”, or in any other ideology/prejudice/religion, is the same: it HATES violation of its homogenous dominion.

    ( comically: homophobic-religions want a homogenous het humankind, with no violation of that homogeneity. The existence of homosexuals is too heterogenous for them )

    Autonomy is something that totalitarian supremacism ideology “needs” to obliterate from the whole world.

    Consistently.

    It seems to be a damn-good diagnostic for it, even!

    _ /\ _




  • Power-consumption.

    Also, the vibration produced by the 2.5" drives is less, but they’re more-sensitive to it, to begin with.

    I’d not even consider spinning-platter drives, nowadays, though:

    SATA SSD’s for a NAS strike me as being the sanest choice.

    Samsung what are those called, Evo drives?

    excellently-high MTBF, ultra-short ( compared with rotating-platters ) seek-time ( literally orders-of-magnitude quicker ), etc.

    I don’t know of ANY reason to go with spinning-platters, nowadays.

    ( & I’m saying that as a guy stupid-enough to have not realized this in time, & who spent money on such a thing, when SSD’s really were the answer )


  • My experience is that USB storage sometimes breaks-connection for no discernable reason.

    That if one REALLY wants to do USB storage, then put it inside the housing, and don’t use one of the external-connectors, use something you can permanently-fix, so nothing can even sneeze in its direction.

    This mayn’t help you with your puzzle, but it’s bedrock and unchangeable, in my experience.

    USB-storage is an unreliable joke.

    ANY revision of it, that I’ve tried.

    hth…


  • Hierarchical organizing is a balance:

    You can do things the Apple way, & have only 3 choices at each level, but then you either need to dumb-down everything so it fits in a sane depth, discarding most potentials, XOR you run into near-infinite-depth…

    Or you can do thing the other way, with wide selections at each level, and much fewer levels…

    but then you get the visual/cognitive clutter…


    Sometimes I do it so that at the top I’ve got something like…

    • Humanities
    • Geekery
    • Art
    • Apps
    • Projects
    • Books
    • Articles

    ( I’m just doing this off the top of my head, hence the not-in-alphabetical-order-or-any-other-sane-grouping )

    In other cases I might do this…

    • Books___Technical
    • Books___REF
    • Books___Psychology

    etc.

    IOW, limit the number-of-things visible at each level,

    AND fan-out enough so that I reduce the stuff at the next stage, see?

    That balance is the whole key.

    However you impliment your right-balance, it’s the most important thing in getting it usably-right for you, long-term.

    It may require you to develop a couple new habits, like more-careful organizing, or like bearing something that you don’t like, aesthetically, but the reduced-waste-of-effort in having things FINDABLE can become significant, long-term, see?

    _ /\ _


  • Any organization which establishes its vision/mission/culture and then, much later forms a committee about safety…

    isn’t going to change.

    the committee is a “bandaid”: cosmetic, only.

    Organizational-culture is set right at the beginning, & to change it, you have to do a grass-roots campaign, that includes everybody, until the grass-roots motivations themselves force-turn-the-tide.

    This is 95%-certain to be appearances-only.

    iirc, GE did an actual culture-change accomplishment: their CEO set up a system where the low-level managers went on retreats/workshops, and the result of those workshop/retreats was that they had to come up with a way of improving things in their part of the company…

    ( the problem this program was fighting was the top-down culture-of-authority-and-no-adapting )

    Their boss had to OK or disallow their solution on the spot, when they got out, I think…

    Once enough percentage of the low-level managers had been through the process, then the tide turned, & became a tsunami of change, wiping-out all obstacling before it.

    Notice the difference, though:

    a committee won’t produce culture-change.

    Grass-roots can, but it has to be done correctly.

    _ /\ _


  • Paragone@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldIs RAID1 over USB Reliable?
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    4 months ago

    USB-storage isn’t reliable.

    Period.

    ANY fscking thing that bumps any connection, can break the dam link.

    Then your kernel can re-label the device when it re-connects,

    and you’ve got to reassemble your RAID.

    just my experience.

    use ANY other method you can, other than USB.

    stick a SATA adaptor on there somewhere, if you can.

    Get a different motherboard.

    ANYthing, but not USB.



  • Paragone@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldCheap, but reliable SSDs?
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    5 months ago

    Reliability’s kinda high on my priority-list.

    Try Samsung.

    Nowadays I can’t imagine using SATA for anything but archival storage ( get the fastest NVMe you can for your operating-system, and be stunned by how much quicker your machine is ).

    Last time I was digging into stats, the reliability-rate for Samsung devices was much higher than that of Western Digital,

    and the off-brands … often are a bit of a bad-joke, for reliability ( Adata & Kingston, I’m looking at you, and will never trust such scum again ).


    just my experience/opinion, is all.


  • SanDisk usb-keys work.

    You really want to use the thing for read-only, though, if you can:

    the writes it takes to kill some portion of a filesystem, vs the writes you get before corrupting things, on a USB driver, don’t line-up.

    Use NVMe as your 1st-choice for storage ( future purchases, obviously ), the fastest you can get, and be stunned by how much faster the same motherboard is, with superfast OS storage…


    I’d stick /home, not /usr, on the USB.


  • IF JBOD, && Linux, THEN yes you can know, through SMARTTOOLS, or something like that…

    However, I can’t imagine how you’d get 2 separate PCIe

    ( presuming NVMe devices …

    … no, this thing must be presuming SATA, NOT NVMe …

    even in SATA, there’s no bifurcator for SATA, I don’t think:

    SAS has expanders, which can take a single SAS channel & attach something like 128 SAS devices onto it,

    PCIe has some kind of equivalent, and there is a PCIe card which crams loads of NVMe’s into it, out in the last year, but SATA??

    Hmm… )

    shrug



  • There was a youtube vid, testing multimeters, & there was a specific condition that produced wrong results in all the meters except Fluke, who had engineered to prevent that wrongness.

    That was what decided me on trusting Fluke, in the future.

    been years, no idea what channel it was on, sorry, but it should be findable for someone with patience, knowing that only the Fluke got it right, of the ones tested.


    Do pay attention to the calibration-certificates, though:

    Anybody paying for Fluke who ignores that their handhelds have no more than 2.5-digits of actual-accuracy, is foolish/incompetent.

    ( the cheap ones are sooo much worse… )


  • I am trying to lear basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript ( again, last learned HTML back in the 1990’s, am using “JavaScript: The Good Parts” & other books ),

    & have discovered that you can have, on the same phone/tablet, Termux/Nginx running,

    you have to feed /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/etc/nginx/nginx.conf the root-dir you want it to use

    ( which is actually in a proot-distro install, down below

    /data/data/llcom.termux/files/usr/var/lib/proot-distro/installed-rootfs/ … )

    … and then you can have your browser hit

    http://localhost:8080/

    and it’ll grab index.html.


    Notice that that is http, NOT httpS.

    None of the browsers I’ve tried can get the default connection to localhost, because they all default to https, & nginx isn’t serving https.

    That wasted an entire fscking day, to discover.


    Now learning can begin!


  • Paragone@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSelf hosted LLM
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    7 months ago

    Thanks to this post, and the other comments in here, I’ve discovered that the ultimate ui for ai-models may well be

    https://github.com/ParisNeo/lollms-webui

    and on HuggingFace ( that name is aweful: to me it is the creepy-horrible FaceHugger, from the movie Alien, that I saw so many decades ago ) TheBloke has some models which are smaller

    https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/

    so you can choose a model that will actually-work on your hardware.

    I think Llama-2 for brainstorming & CodeLlama-instruct for learning programming examples seems to be the cleanest pair, from what I’ve read, and he’s got GGUF versions with different quantizations, so you can choose what will actually-fit on your hardware.

    There are other models on huggingface which seem very useful, like

    • whisper-large-v3 for speech-to-text,
    • whisperspeech for text-to-speech,
    • sdxl-turbo for image-making ( for some copyright-free subjects to practice drawing with ), and so-on…

    Some models require GPU, not all.

    Damn things moved fast!


  • Paragone@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSoftware vs Hardware RAID
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    8 months ago

    I read somewhere, years ago, that RAID6 takes about 2 cores, on a working server.

    That may have been a decade ago, and hardware’s improved significantly since then.

    Bet on 1 core being saturated, min, with heavy use of a RAID6 or Z2 array, I suspect…


    I’d go with software raid, not hardware: with hardware RAID, a dead array, due to a dead controller-card, means you need EXACTLY the same card, possibly the same firmware-revision, to be able to recover the RAID.

    With mdadm, that simply isn’t a problem: mdadm can always understand mdadm RAID’s.

    _ /\ _



  • I’ve used Linux since about 1996, when only Slackware worked for me ( Red Hat didn’t work right, & I never tried Yggdrasil ).

    Ian began his Debian distro sometime around then ( Deb was his partner, hence the distro’s name )


    About a year ago, I was using openSUSE, both Tumbeweed & their more-stable LEAP.

    They removed the drivers for my wifi adapter, in an update.

    They broke my desktop.

    Again.


    I’ve been told by Steam support ( in 2023, iirc ), directly through their system, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family of Linuxen.


    UbuntuStudio stuck with XFCE for YEARS, even though XFCE is rigged to prevent one from being able to grab the corner of a window, because almost-all of its different options ( themes? ) permit only a 1px thick window-grabber, and that isn’t usable.

    Why??


    Try installing Haskell Stack on Void Linux for ARM.

    You can’t:

    Haskell Stack requires GMP lib, for arbitrary precision arithmetic, and you can’t get that to work on it.

    They won’t add it, to make Haskell Stack installable.

    So, if the only machine you’ve got is ARM based, and you need to learn Haskell, go get a different distro.

    ( “Haskell Programming From First Principles” requires Stack )


    I used Ubuntu Server on ARM, for awhile, and the Ruby it included was broken, with a hard-coded bit in one of its scripts that had the wrong-location for one of the basic things in Linux…

    can’t remember what it was, perhaps it was /usr/bin/mv instead of /bin/mv or something … it was stupid, though, and it was in the Ubuntu version of Ruby, which was a deprecated version of Ruby … so…

    the upstream Ruby maintainers wouldn’t fix it, because they only maintain the maintained versions of Ruby, AND…

    Ubuntu wouldn’t fix it, because they insisted it was upstream’s problem, even-though they wouldn’t include a maintained version of Ruby.

    Fuck idiocy.


    On & on & on.

    Fix 1 thing, & break 3 more , seems to be the “religion” of the various Linuxen.

    I’m old, & tired of being beaten-on by “friends” and “allies”.

    Abusers are abusers.


    IF I ever succeed in fixing my health, breaking ( permanently ) my health-obstacles,

    THEN I want to do a linux-distro that simply excludes all bullshit, & enforces correctness-of-function.

    Funtoo seems to be part of The Right Answer ( it is the evolution of Gentoo ), in that people get the benefit of whatever hardware they’ve got, instead of a dumbed-down version which is more sluggish than need-be.

    I’d want it to be based entirely on Haskell, & Julia, leaving-out pretty-much all other languages ( Haskell’s correctness & Julia’s ruthless-efficiency ).


    Notice how there is a huge push to replace X.org with Wayland?

    Wayland removes ability to run The Linux Terminal Server Project, so you can’t have little arm-terminals stuck on the backs of displays, and 1 single real-computer in the back, with an ocean of RAM, for all the students to use for their real apps…

    This “improvement” forces all to either have a powerful-enough desktop or … not be allowed to run the modern distros/Linuxen at all.

    War against inclusion of people in poorer places, where it is much more doable to afford a bunch of RasPi-terminals than it is to afford dozens & dozens of x86-64 machines, is warring for … fashion & class-status??

    The X Window System works. Through it, TLSP works.

    It enables people to have their Blender-renderer machine in the other room, where its fans-noise isn’t going to bother them.

    Fashion-motivated or fad-motivated “strategy” consistently solves the wrong problem.

    Same as breaking people’s wifi solves the wrong problem.

    WTF “loyalty” for a distro can ANYone have,

    … once one has been “punched-in-the-face” by them, enough times??


    I’ve read OpenBSD’s statement that “lack of a manpage IS A BUG”.

    That IS PROPER.

    They GET it.

    There are development/programming methods that hold-to the same kind of properness:

    Behaviour-Driven Design, e.g.

    Test-1st.

    As somebody pointed-out, of all the “agile” methods, XP included engineering-processes, like test-1st whereas … the rest, like Scrum, don’t…

    That difference-in-religion, XP’s objectivity MATTERS.

    Any “improvement” which breaks the functionality-tests or behaviour-tests, and you don’t get the “improvement” in.

    Nobody has the integrity to do that, at the distro-level?

    I wouldn’t permit any desktop-environment which is hard-coded to have 1px window-grabbers to be included in a distro, hence XFCE would have to get fixed, or it would be locked-out, explicitly for that usability-defect.

    I wouldn’t permit breaking of people’s network-access to be an official update’s component.

    MAKE IT WORK RIGHT.

    That needs to be SOME distro’s spine, that is usable-by-most, and efficient, and including the capability that people actually need to get stuff done…

    I want low-vision people being able to use it.

    I want blind-readers working in it.

    I want deaf people having full function through it.

    I want quadraplegics being able to work through it.

    I want TLSP working, so a single x86-64 machine, plus a batch of displays & RasPi’s stuck on their backs, give a classroom the ability to teach calculus with Julia which is the proper way to be learning algebra or calculus ( seriously, try Julia: it’s wonderful ).

    Anyways, you’re seeing a tiny sliver of the decades-of-abuse that operating-system makers have put in us, that is in me.

    I won’t willingly run any MS software ever again, due to their religion of molestation-of-priivacy & abuses ( I was one of the ones stung by their stolen from STAC disk-compression tech, in DOS 6.20, and their Vista era sending all searched-terms from the desktop to Microsoft violated privacy-law for both health-care sytems & for police systems, but … they’re “too big” to make accountable?? etc. )

    But the Linux world seems to have one hell of a religious-problem against stable usability.

    Distro-runners need to read a book by Al Ries: “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”, and understand that that stability/identifiability is a REQUIREMENT for a userbase to be not-sabotaged by one’s distro.

    DON’T KEEP CHANGING THE WAY EVERYTHING WORKS, and expect your userbase to love you for it.

    KDE 3.5 had much right-idea, but nowadays … wtf??

    Too complicated to be allowed to see where one is, within the menu-system??

    That isn’t a “feature”, that is “fashionable” mental-illness.

    And I despise the Apple-style contextless GNOME way.


    /grouch

    just an opinion, of an old, useless bastard, who’s tired of being obstructed/abused by distro-decisions.

    _ /\ _



  • Even looking only at the healthcare costs of the exhaust-induced unhealth, you see massive economic benefit.

    It’s the old star-topology vs decentralized-mesh-topology question…

    It is much more efficient to have 1 giant windmill, rather-than a zillion little ones.

    It is much more efficient to have electric-trams than the number of cars required to move the same number of people.

    As for electric-cars vs internal-combustion-engine-cars, the relocation-of-cost from always buying gasoline, to just plugging-in at night, is something that many people have openly adored.

    The Engineering Explained yt channel bluntly stated that if you’re in the city, it’s a no-brainer.

    Rurally, or in the arctic, you can be screwed, however.

    I’ve no idea what the equation is for how much exhaust per mile-driven is produced, between

    • star-topology fuel-burning electric-grid powered cars
    • mesh/distributed-topology of the same number of I.C.E. cars

    but it wouldn’t surprise me if it is significantly more efficient, just due to getting the maintenance up to industrial standards.

    ( sloppy maintenance costs, and some companies push sloppy maintenance, not changing oil frequently enough, e.g. in order to produce engine-wear, forcing required-replacement.

    Some yt mechanics call-out this practice. )

    _ /\ _