What is my cat doing on your mat, when she has a perfectly good beanbag to stretch out on? At least I know what she’s up to when she sneaks outside, now…

Scottish: got the painters in.

Some things cross language boundaries.

Yeah yeah, I know RAID.

If OP can’t afford the storage for ‘just a bunch of disks’, then paying twice as much for 100% redundancy in RAID10 is doubly unaffordable.

Also, consider what is being stored here. It’s music files that we obtained from a torrent. We need sufficient raw performance to read a few megabytes per minute so we can listen to them. As a bonus, we may wish to upload the torrent again, and can use any spare capacity for that. What benefit are you going to obtain from your very expensive storage solution?

RAID6 can lose any two drives, but at most two. RAID-10 can lose only 1 drive with guaranteed no data loss. Losing two might lose the cluster, if you lose a drive and its mirror. Yes, if you’re really lucky, you can lose up to half, but ‘feeling lucky’ isn’t how we plan data storage. Doesn’t matter, we’ve got a backup - download the torrent again ;-)

Looks like you can get refurbished 26TB drives for about £340, so 12 of those. PCIe -> 6x SATA adaptors run you about £40 each. Molex to SATA power adaptors about £5. So £4200 will let you store all that with a bit left over for postage and some duct tape to make a storage bay out of the boxes it all came in.

I’d probably want a few more drives for RAID6 and some hot spares, but if you go JBoD then at least you can just download the torrent again ;-)

Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.

I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.

They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.

I’ve always seen it as a “take turns at being the guesser, and whoever does best wins” kind of game. If you take six goes and your opponent takes seven, then taste that sweet victory.

A digression, but the “viking chess” game Hnefatfl basically guarantees a win for white as written. So you need to mix it up - play two games, see who wins fastest; or constrain it like backgammon, roll dice and that’s the moves you must make.

Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…

HDMI -> DP might be viable, since DP is ‘simpler’.

Supporting HDMI means supporting a whole pile of bullshit, however - lots of handshakes. The ‘HDMI splitters’ that you can get on eg. Alibaba (which also defeat HDCP) are active, powered things, and tend to get a bit expensive for high resolution / refresh.

Steam Machine is already been closely inspected for price. Adding a fifty dollar dongle into the package is probably out of the question, especially a ‘spec non-compliant’ one.

I’m going to guess it would require kernel support, but certainly graphics card driver support. AMD and Intel not so difficult, just patch and recompile; NVIDIA’s binary blob ha ha fat chance. Stick it in a repo somewhere outside of the zone of copyright control, add it to your package manager, boom, done.

I bet it’s not even much code. A struct or two that map the contents of the 2.1 handshake, and an extension to a switch statement that says what to do if it comes down the wire.

Java’s biggest strength is that “the worst it can be” is not all that bad, and refactoring tools are quite powerful. Yes, it’s wordy and long-winded. Fine, I’d rather work with that than other people’s Bash scripts, say. And just because a lot of Java developers have no concept of what memory allocation means, and are happy to pull in hundreds of megabytes of dependencies to do something trivial, then allocate fucking shitloads of RAM for no reason doesn’t mean that you have to.

There is a difference in microservices between those set up by a sane architect:

• clear data flow and pragmatic service requirements
• documented responses and clear failure behaviour
• pact server set up for validation in isolation
• entire system can be set up with eg. a docker compose file for testing
• simple deployment of updates into production and easy rollback

… and the CV-driven development kind by people who want to be able to ‘tick the boxes’ for their next career move:

• let’s use Kubernetes, those guys earn a fortune
• different pet language for every service
• only failure mode is for the whole thing to freeze
• deployment needs the whole team on standby and we’ll be firefighting for days after an update
• graduate developers vibe coding every fucking thing and it getting merged on Claude’s approval only

We mostly do the second kind at my work; a nice Java monolith is bliss to work on in comparison. I can see why others would have bad things to say about them too.

Apart from being slow, having discoverability issues, not being able combine filters and actions so that you frequently need to fall back to shell scripts for basic functionality, it being a complete PITA to compare things between accounts / regions, advanced functionality requiring you to directly edit JSON files, things randomly failing and the error message being carefully hidden away, the poor audit trail functionality to see who-changed-what, and the fact that putting anything complex together means spinning so many plates that Terraform’ing all your infrastructure looks like the easy way; I’ll have you know there’s nothing wrong with the AWS Console UI.

They are remarkably expensive, but ‘microchip reading cat feeders’ do exist, that only open for the pet with the correct chip in their back. There’s a token for their collars if they’re not chipped, too. Made mealtime with our three much less fraught - we’d have ended up with one spherical cat and two rake-thin ones, otherwise. Also make medical treatments easier - you know who’s the only one who could have eaten it.

https://www.surepetcare.com/en-gb/pet-feeder/microchip-pet-feeder

I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.

More specifically, my programming background is in industrial automation and I’d like to add some more ‘robust and flexible’ algorithms to CoolerControl so I can control my system fans / temperature better, but it’s written in a mix of TypeScript and Rust.

I’ve spent 20 years programming hard real-time z80 assembly and know quite a few higher-level languages. (Although I prefer the lower-level ones.) Not those ones, however, so it’s not just a couple of hours work to raise a PR against that project. Going to need to crack some books.

The industrial design has improved enormously since then, as well. The days of using the same connector for different voltages, or connectors which can be rotated are gone. Everything has a keyed connector or similar pokayoke that means it only fits to the correct place, and only one way around. CPUs don’t suicide if you forget to attach their system cooler, they just throttle. Much better, and obvious in retrospect that it should always have been that way.

Apart from the front panel connectors on a motherboard, of course. Those fiddly little bastards can get straight to hell.

Aww, sweet looking puss. Good work on taking her in.

Was kind of hoping that your other cats would be called Ryuk and L, but that might be asking for trouble.

The sound and the video would get out of sync if you left it on long enough, like 24 hours or so, for added confusion.

Good name, though - I like it.

Mark Z. Danielewski for the win. House of Leaves is superb; 50 Year Sword is interesting, but doesn’t quite scratch the itch. I see he’s got something new out this year as well, will need to check it out.

Vim is my preferred ‘IDE’ for C++, Python, Bash, and general configuration file editing. It’s got some big pluses:

• its text editing is superb once you’ve mastered it, but that’s a small part of its benefits when used as an IDE, and ‘Vim mode’ in other environments kind of undersells what else it can do

• Vim has some great plugins for development. YouCompleteMe is awesome for predictive completion and showing docs, but NerdTree for file management and TagBar for showing structure are amazing as well. They’re all very configurable and they get out of your way.

• Vim lives in your terminal window, so you can do splits and tabs using whichever terminal you like. Kitty is very fast and configurable and keeps out your way. Being able to have multiple tabs of Vim open, a tab for compilation, a tab for debugging, a tab for version control, a tab for man pages, and being able to flip between them without taking your fingers off the keyboard makes for a very fast workflow

• Vim makes it very easy to edit binary files and be precise about whitespace changes, so it’s easy to make a minimal change for raising a PR.

If you assign a hotkey to run a macro in Vim, then that can be made very flexible - saving and formatting all open windows, then invoking CMake to do a build and CTest to run all your unit tests can be put on a function key if you like. Trying to tell Eclipse to “just run CMake to do the build” seems to be an exercise in frustration; so many IDEs are terrible at “just getting out of the way”.

Work pays for an IntelliJ licence for using Java. Java is so unwieldy without a proper IDE that it’s hard to code in it without it. I certainly don’t love it, though, and they seem determined to make every new version worse with bizarre new features. Flexible minimalist editing with configurable plugins is all that you really need, and on that basis Geany looks pretty good - will give it a try.

Also no way that they’re going to build that thing for $200M. That won’t even cover the first round of grifting before a spade hits the ground.

Can’t help but laugh at all the steps in front of it too, when that fat fuck was complaining about the escalator at the UN being broken. How you going to get into that building, Taco? Someone have to carry you?