Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)

The valid sentiment behind "disk space is cheap" is that you shouldn't hyper-focus on optimizing storage utilization *at the expense* of other, *more* expensive stuff, like wasting the user's time requiring them to micro-manage every individualized storage allocation or burning tons of CPU or I/O attempting to compress things. This is a valid heuristic and when used this way it is indeed a big upgrade to historical user experiences where software was much more high-maintenance.

The confluence of a million decisions made by someone muttering "disk space is cheap" before crossing out something on the backlog has lead to a situation where i am spending hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of my time staring at progress bars transferring data between various systems.

We live in a world of accretive append-only data stores. Your photos library keeps getting bigger until you die, and then your kids inherit it. Your "app data" lives in the cloud and when you stop using an app it's not clear if it should be deleted or archived. Steam does not (and should not!) delete your saved games for game A just because you aren't playing it right now and have switched over to game B. We all produce an unceasing contrail of data exhaust which we expect to be available.

The difference, I guess, is between "disk space is cheap" (true, valid, good to think about, prompts you to investigate the cost of storage rather than assuming it is worth fretting over) and "disk space is free" (false, bad, leads to impossible-to-manage monolithic data stores which cannot be managed or partitioned by users without ruining their experience and creating tons MORE work)

However, when it goes from an heuristic or a suggestion to a *rule*, it hardens into something really toxic. "Don't waste the user's time with repetitive, minor storage allocations" becomes "never tell the user about any storage allocation; just gobble up their entire disk without asking with a single file called 'UserData.db'"; "don't waste CPU on compression or deduplication" becomes "any time you have a duplicate copy, just save an unlabeled copy, who cares"

Sometimes when I have a Very Computer Toucher problem like this I look to what normies are doing to see if they have a superior coping strategy that would not have occurred to my overly-fussy ADHD software-dev brain. But the storage/backup solution I see when I talk to less computer-focused people is that they mostly just keep all their data on one device, and then it all gets deleted every so often when they lose or break that device, and then they are sad.

I don't like that solution.

Surprise, unscheduled, middle-of the night stream at https://www.twitch.tv/glyph_official in a couple of minutes, testing out some enhancements to my streaming setup (new aspect ratio! a chat window! music display!). I guess I'm going to noodle around writing code to merge two databases with each other? This one is probably going to be pretty short, since it is waaaay too late, but better this than doomscrolling (and there is so, so much doom at the moment)

very kind of @NorthBayPython to extend their CFP deadline because I was distracted since my computer broke and, I assume, for no other reason https://social.northbaypython.org/@NorthBayPython/113987256852278237

Another data-restore fun fact: Signal claims you can't restore backups on a mac, but as far as I can tell this is just false. I guess they don't support it, but then, were you going to call them up and ask for technical help anyway? It seems to work fine. Just put ~/Library/Application Support/Signal back, and you seem to preserve your message history. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages#desktop_restore

It's "Orb" and not "Netherese Orb" because while I enjoy thumbing my nose at fate, I am not stupid enough to put a space in _every_ universal path name

It is now close enough that there is a map on the package-tracking website. It is 5 blocks away. At one point, it was 2 blocks away. I guess I'm not doing anything but refreshing this web page for the rest of the day

Okay. Several hours later, got an actual tracking number, and a notification, and confirmation that it is going to the correct address, even. We are *explicitly* in the “shipper created a label” state on the carrier’s website. Everyone who said “it’s just on its way to the shipping department” was correct 😊.

In the home stretch.

Even worse. It has allegedly shipped, but, no notification, no tracking number, and this is supposed to be a signature-required delivery from … a courier, maybe? FedEx? UPS? Who knows! It’s been a while but I could have sworn this process used to be a lot smoother and provide more details. I guess I just can’t leave my house until it arrives?

I could weep for joy

(Score not representative, the system was otherwise heavily loaded from doing other things; the salient point is that it has completed and not kernel panicked or started displaying a black screen or gotten stuck at "Preparing project…")

lfgggggggggggggggggg

A new logic board—since it's basically a new computer—requires a new hostname. The ill-fated doomed machine was named El, as in Galadriel from _A Deadly Education_. The hard drive was thematically named "Enclave", and if you've read the whole Scholomance series, you may understand how I doomed myself there.

I'm going to call this one "Gale"; the hard drive will be "Orb", because while it is also extremely powerful we are going to try to NOT turn ourselves into a smoking crater this time.

For Music, the solution is to start it while holding down Option, create a new temporary library, quit, restore the old one, restart Music while holding down Option again, and then select the restored one; you can delete the temporary one at this point. For photos I'm pretty sure a similar dance will work. (Remembering of course to disable iCloud Photos first, and to set the System Photo Library at the end <https://support.apple.com/en-us/104946>)

As I am entering the next phase of problems I have created for myself, looking at these progress bars I feel validated in my choice to avoid Migration Assistant (I would like to begin using this system _before_ 48 hours have elapsed), but now I really need to figure out how to manually do the relevant switcheroo for replacing the Photos library, Music (and Media) library, and maybe Messages history, without causing some background process to scribble on my manual restore midway through

gosh it sure seems like there are a lot of plane crashes happening, did something change about the way air traffic control, or maybe the federal government more generally, is run recently https://www.nj.com/entertainment/2025/02/airplane-owned-by-rock-legend-crashes-1-dead-and-3-injured.html

just going to put this out there, if you make good art that a lot of people enjoy, please don't do sex crimes