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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • They threw paint at some military aircraft, which is a far cry from “destroying”.

    They didn’t blew up anything or even significantly damage it, they did just enough to be considered “damage” per that insanely broad law, kinda like in Britain somebody talking loud during a demonstration is enough to be considered “disturbing the public order” giving the coppers a legal excuse to arrest people participating in that demonstration.

    No idea were you pulled that “destroying” from.


  • Personally I had lost all hope on those fuckers as soon as I saw how they went after Corbyn.

    Then again I was just an EU immigrant in the UK and left after the Leave Referendum because that was the last drop for me and I lost all hope for the UK as a country (I kept following UK subjects for a while, hence actually caring about the whole Corbyn thing, but that slowly tailed of after a few years)

    In the years since periodically some news or other comes out of the UK that just confirms my decision to leave Britain as one of the best in my life.

    PS: Also, full disclosure, I was a Greenparty member back in Britain, so I was always significantly left of New Labour and didn’t have a good opinion of them. Mind you, they still exceeded my expectations … on the downside.


  • The politicians who wrestled back control of the Labour party through a campaign of smears with the help of Israeli-linked Jewish groups and who, immediately after that started at purge of any with dissenting opinions from that party, had more than demonstrated their love for Machiavelism, even before rising to Government purely on the back of the First Past The Post system and Reform splitting the far-right vote thus costing the Tories lots of seats.

    Also, as others pointed out, this faction of Labour has long had an autoritarian streak, both in terms of the insane civil surveillance infrastructure they built last time they were in Government (as exposed by the Snowden Revelations) and their relentless weakening of privacy and even pretty basic legal rights.

    This is really not surprising: the goose stepping into Fascism in the UK has started a while ago, it’s just that it’s a posh kind of Fascism wrapped in layers of deceit and disguised as “Rule Of Law”, unlike in places like for example Hungary were it was closer to the more traditional “strong-man with an iron-fist” Fascist image.






  • As long as they keep selling the flash memory chips to drive makers, what’s the big deal of them dropping the SATA protocol from their consumer devices?

    There are plenty of China-based companies which still make flash memory drives with a SATA interface using Samsung chips and at this point that tech is so mature that there really isn’t any great added value in terms of performance from getting Samsung SATA drives over getting some generic SATA drives with Samsung chips.

    It actually makes some sense that Samsung is focusing their consumer-facing device production in a higher performance protocol which is very well established now and were the device speeds are not constrained by the protocol itself, rather than in a protocol were the maximum speed of the protocol (600 MB/s) is actually what constrains the device performance since the memory chips themselves are capable of more.

    As a consumer, 6 or 7 years ago it definitelly made sense to get a Samsung SATA drive because they were actually some of the fastest in the market, but these days even shitty-shit no-name brand has SATA devices with 580MB/s read speeds (and, if large enough, similar write speeds) which is near the theoretical maximum of SATA3 and M.2 devices supporting PCI4 x16 offer several times the speeds of that.


  • There are a number of simultaneous bubbles at the moment, the AI one being a lot like the Internet bubble of the late 90s but possibly worse (bigger share of GDP and it seems there is actually less value in most of the tech invested in as “AI” than on the Internet-related tech) and at the same time there is a financial debt bubble like in 2007 (in the US mainly around loans for car purchase, but more in general overall consumer indebtness has reached the 2007 levels), a worldwide realestate bubble (measured in terms of house-price to income ratios) and a stockmarket bubble measured in terms of P/E ratios, just to mention the biggest ones.

    The risk is that when one blows the rest blow by contagium: something the 2008 Crash showed us is that in modern markets when there are sudden large losses on a asset class it pulls money over to cover them from all other asset classes, in turn creating downwards price pressure in those other asset classes, which in turn might cause price collapses there with large losses and that will pull even more money out from other asset classes. IMHO assets classes with historically high valuation not backed by fundamentals (for example stocks with P/E which are 10+ times the historical average) are likely to be far more likely to collapse when money gets pulled away from them to cover losses elsewhere. Also there is the panic factor: fearing exactly what I describe, many investors will preemptivelly sell their assets in those assets classes they feel as more speculative - i.e. less supported by fundamentals - possibly creating the very problem they fear in those markets by starting a stampede to the exits.

    All this to say that I expect this one when it blows up will be bigger than 2008 and 2000, possibly bigger than both of those combined.


  • Kudos for Iceland.

    So far it’s a disgracefully short list of Western nations willing to do merely the easiest simplest most symbolic of actions imaginable of shunning the mass murdering new-Nazi state of Israel in a frigging song contest.

    Remember this next time the regularly talk of “bringing Freedom and Democracy” is coming out from the usual French, British, German (to name just the 3 largest European nations by population in Eurovision) bullshit mongers and all other such sociopath warmongering politicians in the West.

    Millions of WWII veterans are turning on their graves at how the NAZIs of this era own politicians in most of the West.


  • Mate, I’m not the person who answered your original comment.

    I just saw you making claims about somebody else making fallacious statements when in fact it was you who started with a big fat fallacy and then bitched and moaned about how they were the ones being fallacious when somebody else countered it by pointing out that at least one of the points of “evidence” that you yourself presented for Mr. Krugman’s “pretty good track record” (whatever the fuck such vague and ill-defined expression means) was in fact a Swedish Central Bank Prize For Economics In Honor Of Alfred Nobel, which is commonly misportrayed as a genuine Nobel Prize - even by Krugman himself - when it is no such thing.

    Of all the things to use to claim somebody has a “pretty good track record”, him having something he himself calls a Nobel Prize which is not in fact a Nobel Prize actually weakens that point rather than strengthens it, as it casts suspicion on his honesty.

    As it so happens for a while I had a lot of exposure to Mr. Krugman’s opinions - on and after the 2008 Crash, when I in fact worked in the same Industry as he did - and in my opinion he was often full of shit and all over the place, at least back then, and a pretty good illustration of the caricatural Economist “who has predicted 10 of the last 2 downturns”. One could say that he likes to throw shit at the wall, wait to see what sticks and then claim he was a genius for spotting it.

    I’ll repeat myself: had you not started with an Appeal To Authority in your original post and absent all those words of praise for the person making that point, just let the logic of the point speak for itself, you would have been better off.





  • The way one designs hardware in is to optimize for the most common usage scenario with enough capacity to account for the peak use scenario (and with some safety margin on top).

    (In the case of silent power sources they would also include lower power leakage in the common usage scenario so as to reduce the need for fans, plus in the actual physical circuit design would also include things like airflow and having space for a large slower fan since those are more silent)

    However specifically for power sources, if you want to handle more power you have to for example use larger capacitors and switching MOSFETs so that it can handle more current, and those have more leakage hence more baseline losses. Mind you, using more expensive components one can get higher power stuff with less leakage, but that’s not going to happen outside specialist power supplies which are specifically designed for high-peak use AND low baseline power consumption, and I’m not even sure if there’s a genuine use case for such a design that justifies paying the extra cost for high-power low-leakage components.

    In summary, whilst theoretically one can design a high-power low-leakage power source, it’s going to cost a lot more because you need better components, and that’s not going to be a generic desktop PC power source.

    That said, I since silent PC power sources are designed to produce less heat, which means have less leakage (as power leakage is literally the power turning to heat), even if the with the design having been targetted for the most common usage scenario of that power source (which is not going to be 15W) that would still probably mean better components hence lower baseline leakage, hence they should waste less power if that desktop is repurposed as a NAS. Still won’t beat a dedicated ARM SBC (not even close), but it might end up cheap enough to be worth it if you already have that PC with a silent power source.


  • When I had my setup with an ASUS EEE PC I had mobile external HDDs plugged to it via USB.

    Since my use case was long-term storage and feeding video files to a Media TV Box, the bandwidth limit of USB 2.0 and using HDDs rather than SDDs was fine. Also back then I had 100Mbps ethernet so that too limited bandwidth.

    Even in my current setup where I use a Mini-PC to do the same, I still have the storage be external mobile HDDs and now badwidth limits are 1Gbps ethernet and USB 3.0, which is still fine for my use case.

    Because my use case now is long term storage, home file sharing and torrenting, my home network is using the same principles as distributed systems and modern microprocessor architectures: smaller faster data stores with often used data close to were its used (for example fast smaller SDDs with the OS and game executables inside my gaming machine, plus a torrent server inside that same Mini-PC using its internal SDD) and then layered outwards with decreasing speed and increasing size (that same desktop machine has an internal “storage” HDD filled with low use files, and one network hop from it there’s the Mini-PC NAS sharing its external HDDs containing longer term storage files).

    The whole thing tries to balance storage costs and with usage needs.

    I suppose I could improve performance a bit more by setting up some of the space in the internal SDD in the Mini-PC as a read/write cache for the external HDDs, but so far I haven’t had the patience to do it.

    I used to design high performance distributed computing systems and funnilly enough my home setup follows the same design principles (which I had not noticed until thinking about it now as I wrote this).


  • Yeah, different hardware is designed for different use cases and generally won’t work as well for other use cases, which is also why desktops seldom make for great NAS servers (their fans will also fail from constant use, plus their design spec is for much higher power usage so they have a lot more power waste even if trottled down).

    That said my ASUS EEE PC lasted a few years on top of a cabinet in my kitchen (which is were the Internet came into my house so the router was also there) with a couple of external HDDs plugged in, and that’s a bit of a hostile environment (because some of the particulates from cooking, including fat, don’t get pulled out and end up accumulating there).

    At the moment I just have a Mini-PC on my living room with a couple of external HDDs plugged in that works as NAS, TV Media Box and home server (including wireguard VPN on top of a 1Gbps connection, which at peak is somewhat processor intensive). It’s an N100 and the whole thing has a TDP of 15W so the fan seldom activates. So far that seems to be the best long term solution, plus it’s multiple use unlike a proprietary NAS. It’s the some of the best €140 (not including the HDDs) I’ve ever spent.


  • Stuff designed for much higher peek usage tend to have a lot more waste.

    For example, a 400W power source (which is what’s probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on (unless it’s a very expensive one), so in that example of yours it should be replaced by something much smaller.

    Even beyond that, everything in there - another example, the motherboard - will have a lot more power leakage than something designed for a low power system (say, an ARM SBC).

    Unless it’s a notebook, that old PC will always consume more power than, say, an N100 Mini-PC, much less an ARM based one.


  • True for notebooks. (For years my home NAS was an old Asus EEE PC)

    Desktops, on the other hand, tend to consume a lot more power (how bad it is, depends on the generation) - they’re simply not designed to be a quiet device sitting on a corner continuously running a low CPU power demanding task: stuff designed for a lot more demanding tasks will have things like much bigger power sources which are less efficient at low power demand (when something is design to put out 400W, wasting 5 or 10W is no big deal, when it’s designed to put out 15W, wasting 5 or 10W would make it horribly inefficient).

    Meanwhile the typical NAS out there is running an ARM processor (which are known for their low power consumption) or at worse a low powered Intel processor such as the N100.

    Mind you, the idea of running you own NAS software is great (one can do way more with that than with a proprietary NAS, since its far more flexible) as long as you put it in the right hardware for the job.