Yeah, man, storage is storage. Once you get down the redundancy chain enough even a crappy salvage drive on its last legs may end up being a cost-effective way to prevent some data loss later.
I’m actively considering going on a drive plunder run of old, semi-busted hdds both at home and in used sales sites to eventually build a static redundancy backup of files I know aren’t going to change in the foreseeable future. Because why not.
Huh This seems like such a pointless scam when the refurb drive market is such a widespread thing. These days you can just say they’re used and still offload them for decent prices.
This seems like a you thing. I mean, with no big algorithmic promotion engine and no immediate reward for upvotes I just don’t see the point either way.There’s like a dozen of us around here and no prize for being popular. Who gives a crap? It’s a little button thingy that helps you feel like you did a thing to the thing wihtout having to write a post and clutteirng the feed. It does its job.
Pretty sure that one was consensual.
For a change.
Yeah, I guess that’s how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it’s quite the win/win.
Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.
A fun one to put in perspective how hideously power hungry modern desktop PCs are is that I have an old (ish) laptop running as a local Plex server that also has a LLM loaded in there and a few other docker bits and pieces and it just sits happily humming at 10W idle (which is as much as my TV draws when it’s turned off).
I’ve looked into building a small form factor PC to replace it at some point but all the spare parts I have lying around would draw as much idle as when that tiny thing is going full tilt and I just can’t justify it for something that just stays on waiting for me to feel like rewatching The Matrix or whatever.
Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.
Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?
They already made it simple, are you kidding me? You are running a different OS inside an entrirely fictitious computer that doesn’t exist, and it takes a few clicks to set up on stock software that comes with your OS or is freely downloadable online. The whole thing is magic.
Magic that is still way below the awareness of common users. I’m not acting like “no one” wants to use VMs, I’m telling you that, at scale, this is not key functionality for the vast majority of the userbase. Which is entirely accurate.
And because the vast majority of the userbase is on Windows and doesn’t even know this would be a problem, that’s not WHY they’re on Windows or not on Linux. It’s not even a “tiny brain” thing, it’s just what people use (and don’t use) computers for.
That seems more like a teaching methodology problem than a target language problem. Honestly, I don’t know where you are, but the way English is taught in schools in many regions is terrible, so that doesn’t tell you too much about the relative merits of learning Esperanto.
But hey, if you got it out of your system that’s good for you. I don’t begrudge anybody learning a language, even if it’s a made up one. I just wouldn’t want to support the idea that monolinguals should go out of their way to tackle conlangs, or Esperanto specifically. Go learn something you’re curious and motivated about.
Man, TED talks suck.
That guy scammed you into learning a conlang with the excuse that it does something that all languages do and nobody is even telling you.
Just learn a romance language if you want access to a family of concepts that will carry over easily, friend. It comes with the bonus of being able to talk to people.
Anyway, I’m often light on personal info here, but I’m in a bilingual territory, learned English as a kid, the basics of a couple others through life stuff and I get a few more through osmosis because all languages do that Esperanto trick.
This little exchange makes my point beautifully.
But we did. We used a 3 1/2 floppy disk, which only made sense referentially very briefly (after it took over from 5 1/4 floppies, but before all the saving was handled by a hard drive), and then that became the convention.
You’re asking if there’s a referential equivalent you could do now. You could do a little cloud or whatever else, but it wouldn’t be any less “taught”, because the teaching happens, like any other UI iconography, by having a bit of text next to it in a menu or a tooltip and then it becoming an arbitrary icon that just means that thing.
The point of the icon referencing something (star for bookmarks, a down arrow into a little box for download and a puzzle piece for extensions in my Firefox bar right now) is to make it easier to remember later because there is some context that connects the visual to the functionality. It’s not necessarily to make it so that I don’t have to learn what the functionality is in the first place and just intuit from the visual. That just happens because I have decades of knowledge about what the functionality in browser is supposed to be and what the arbitrary convention for certain functionality across other apps ends up being.
I think that’s more of a UX issue than an issue of iconography, though. Could-synched stuff synchs in the background, so there’s just no interaction involved.
I don’t know how far down that road it’ll go, but I wonder if eventually the concept of “checkpointing” in games becomes more frequent than old document saving and that’s how we think about version control going forward.
It’s a floppy disk. Which is the universal icon for saving, the same way a red light is a universal symbol for “stop”.
You underestimate the power of arbitrary symbols. Welcome to all of human semiotics.
That seems extremely inefficient. You already have a panel in your house with some capacity to push power to your appliances. It makes a lot more sense for most applications to just set up enough panels to feed that power and put them through an inverter.
I don’t see a scenario where you build a bunch of blank scaffolding in your roof (assuming you have an accessible roof in the first place) and then have to climb up there every time you buy a new microwave.
Yes, it’s a lot of work because the alternative is no work. Of course Google does the same thing, they just do it in the back, where you’re not looking, financed by all the data and money they syphon from you.
I’m not saying competing for free is easy, I’m saying that’s where the bar is.
Hey, I do keep multiple copies in multiple locations. But I’m a nerd. Just one self-aware enough to understand how everybody else is doing it and what the usability bar is.
Well, yeah, but that’s a lot of work and Google is already doing it for you.
Which is why most people just set up a GDrive and move on with their day.
You want to compete with them, it needs to work the same way, just as reliably.
It doesn’t matter why. What matters is if you build an alternative to a server-based alternative you need to match their functionality and UX.
For the record, proper storage at scale costs a whole lot more than 50 euros. I think self-hosting is set to become way more popular in the future, but it gets harder if data keeps evaporating.
Right. Most people in that situation will learn the following, very important lesson:
Put your stuff on Google/Meta services.
All the tut-tutting in the world won’t change more minds than a corporate service with 99.9999 uptime and a small country’s power budget in data centers. If you’re trying to OSS or crowdsource services on the Internet your one and only priority should be UX.
There is definitely a market pressure not being fulfilled that I think does accommodate much more effective tech workers.
At least in the spaces I frequent the cap isn’t as much the volume of work you have to do, it’s how much of it you can’t get to because the people you do have run out of time.
The real question is whether at the corporate level there will be a competitive pressure to keep the budget where it is and increase output versus cut down on available capacity and keep shipping what you’re shipping. I genuinely don’t know where that lands in the long term.
If smaller startups are able to meet the output of shrunk-down massive corpos and start chipping away at them maybe it’s fine and what we get is more output from the same people. If that’s not the case and we keep the current per-segment monopoly/oligarchy… then maybe it’s just a fast forward button on enshittification. I don’t think anybody knows.
But also, either way the improvements are probably way more incremental and less earth-shattering than either the shills/AIbros or the haters/doomers are implying, so…