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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Maybe yeah. Also got the sense from the strong opinions that this is a preexisting debate, presumably in the context of continuous workloads or cached arrays with minimal spindown intervals. In that context it’s true that rotational disks still often win in energy efficiency and robustness (assuming we’re comparing them to consumer SSDs and not the latest enterprise u.2 stuff that’s rated for continuous work).


  • Not sure what everyone is arguing about here. Clearly SSD is better for intermittent r/w, whereas HDD can be more efficient at continuous r/w (especially in terms of watts/TB)

    Just looking at specs should be enough to see that. SSDs can idle in ready state at close to 0 draw (~0.05w) whereas HDD requires continued rotation to remain ready. So consider an extreme case of writing for 1 minute then maintaining ready state for the rest of the day. For that the SSD will be far more efficient, obviously.






  • Thank you for your service.

    There’s an element of privacy fatalists around here who require no evidence for their claims and will doggedly ignore any evidence to the contrary. While I think zero-trust is a proper approach to security problems, propagandizing the technical aspect with hearsay and falsehood is useless.

    Many tolerate it thinking we share a common enemy, but they’re wrong. Ignorance is the enemy, and tolerating it is why the community of privacy advocates is being swallowed by the much much larger community of online conspiracy brokers. Anyway, thank you for not tolerating it and doing your part.


  • There are already a lot of good answers here, so instead I’ll offer you a game you might enjoy.

    For context, I used to have the same problem, but I stumbled into a hack that turns it into a fun pastime rather than a nuisance or concern, and now it’s one of my favorite parts of taking up a new post.

    What: Seed your own wild rumors by baiting known gossips with decoys.

    How: While I’m often surprised by which rumors have legs, it seems prompt technique is the key controllable factor. Prompts that are more off-hand, indirect, and opaque seem to cultivate rumors with better proliferation and more colorful embellishments. I’m not sure why less is more here, but my theory is that the more gossips have to make up, the more they “own” their version of your story and the better they are at selling it. If necessary, you can drop some facts here and there (use only truths) but in general try to avoid details. Gossips are insanely good at filling these in on your behalf.

    Who: This part is easiest. Gossips will always come to you. Usually they are some of the first people to approach you at your new job, looking for the scoop. The first you meet are usually the defacto gossip leads, but the rest reveal themselves quickly, especially if your rumors are good. You will learn to recognize them by the way they sidle up in the break room or pry opportunistically in conversation, however the easiest sign is that they respond to evasiveness and deflection in the opposite way others do.

    Why:

    1. Reconciling their conflicting versions of your personal story and private life disrupts their rumor mill internally and erodes their legitimacy externally.
    2. You have the unique pleasure of receiving, over time, fragments of “your story.” This has utility for tracing the leaks and determining network composition, but mostly it’s just hilarious to see what they come up with, and interesting to know the versions of you that people will entertain.
    3. As to social risk, so far none of my rumors have developed into anything terribly embarrassing — usually what they come up with is far more interesting than reality, sometimes even flattering — but the few times I’ve had to correct a story in conversation it was met with instant acceptance of the more realistic take. Most people know to take hearsay with a grain of salt.
    4. I suppose the gossips might be mad if they realized you were toying with them, but I suspect they would just treat you as a dry well and leave you alone, which also solves your problem.
    5. It’s relatively victimless as mischief goes. You don’t even have to lie. In fact it works better if you don’t.
    6. And it requires almost no effort.

    TL;DR: You can bait the nosy nellies into writing fan fiction for you. It’s easy, fun, and good for the environment. Your personality traits make you a natural at this game —others might need to tone down their instinct to overshare or practice being pointedly vague — but if in doubt just remember, storytelling is the gossips’ job and you are their humble yet beloved muse.


  • The reason these discussions often break down right about here is because the participants have in mind completely different working definitions of “tolerance.”

    For example, the social contract comment above assumes an active definition like recognizing others’ personal sovereignty, i.e. their right to act and not be acted upon. To aid understanding, we can represent mutual tolerance between people as a multinational peace treaty between nations. Intolerance is equivalent to one of these nations violating the treaty by attacking another.

    Defense or sanction by neighboring states against the aggressor doesn’t violate the treaty further, of course, since it is precisely these deterrents which undergird every treaty. Likewise, condemning and punishing intolerance which threatens the personal sovereignty of others is baseline maintenance for mutual tolerance, because there’s always a jackass who WILL fuck around if you don’t GUARANTEE he will find out.

    Conversely, another popular notion of tolerance — the one you may have in mind, as I once did — is a passive definition that amounts to tacit approval of others’ value systems, i.e. relativistic truth, permissive morality, etc.

    This kumbaya definition is a strawman originally used by talking heads because, I suspect, it quickly invokes well-worn mid-century tropes, especially for those who grew up in the era, of namby-pamby suckers and morally compromised weaklings which still trigger strong feelings, like disgust and contempt, that reliably drive ratings and engagement. These days the only regular mention of this term is this manufactured paradox using the bad-faith definition, so the original idea is commonly misunderstood.