Notices by 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 (brouhaha@mastodon.social)

@bruces
The great thing about making your product fully buzzword-compliant is that you can make up new buzzwords to be compliant to.

@ryanc
Bester knows.

@ryanc
Psi

@ryanc
Yowza!
My main file server has 384GiB of ECC RAM, but only because I got a good deal on a used 4U dual Xeon in that configuration. It would probably be fine with only 64GiB of RAM, which is how much my main desktop and main laptop have (both also ECC). I usually only wish for more RAM on the desktop or laptop when I'm working on very large FPGA designs, though I could run those in a VM on the file server.

@amszmidt
We can create more program bugs faster than ever before.

@thomasfuchs
The USB standard defines required characteristics for such a port, in terms of mechanical, electrical, and functional specifications, Just as the IEEE 802.3 standard for Ethernet specifies requirements for Ethernet ports.

@thomasfuchs
I disagree. The protocol(s) are only one aspect of USB. From the original 1.0 standard:

"This document defines an industry standard Universal Serial Bus. The specification describes the bus attributes, the protocol definition, types of transactions, bus management, and the programming interface
required to design and build systems and peripherals that are compliant with this standard."

Nothing I can see the the standard suggests in any way that a computer can't have a "USB port".

@inthehands
Anyone who says the solution to this problem is "just do x" can immediately be blocked for cluelessness. They have nothing remotely practical to contribute to the discussion.

@selzero
In my opinion, agnostics claim that the existence of a deity _might_ be plausible. In other words, that the existence of a deity isn't definitely impossible.
I consider myself agnostic, but if a religious person asks me about my beliefs, I say that I'm atheist, because I don't believe in whatever deity they believe in.
I'm amused by Vonnegut's "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent", but a IMO a deity that is utterly indifferent is indistinguishable from one that doesn't exist.

I don't take a strong anti-AI stance, because I don't know enough about AI. Arguably, no one does, because it doesn't actually exist. We could discuss whether AI is a good idea as a purely hypothetical undertaking. I do have opinions on that.
However, I do take a strong anti-"AI" stance, because the stuff they're now constantly shoving down our throats at breakneck pace is not artificial intelligence, but rather, utter bullshit.

American Academy of Pediatrics loses government funding after criticizing RFK Jr
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/17/american-academy-pediatrics-funding-rfk

This administration is all corruption, all the time. The future Republicans want.

Google appears to have a lot of money. Maybe we could convince them to fund an open-source privacy-respecting browser.
@ploum

@ryanc @f4grx
You mean, bad beyond the fact that the whole concept is bad?

@alice
It is unfortunate that most of us are so quick to criticize and find fault, but so slow to praise. I try to remember to post positive comments.

Someday, I will be marooned on an island, with a near-infinite supply of Duracell CR2032 coin cells in blister packs, and a medical device upon which I am critically dependent, which requires such coin cells, but no knife or scissors. I'll die trying to sharpen a piece of coconut rind to extract a Duracell CR2032 from its packaging. Or I'll die, trying to wrestle a shark to shore, to pry loose one of its teeth, for the same purpose.

@whitequark
If it weren't for the requirement for preexisting themes, I would have said emacs, or even vi or nano.

Positive adjectives are good, but comparatives are better, and superlatives are the best!

@felipe
In practice, if not stored at high temperature, they'll probably hold data a lot longer than those guaranteed minimums, but you shouldn't expect five years or more.
If you do use an SSD for offline data storage, you should probably power it up periodically, and do something that forces a read of the entire device. In Linux or macOS, something like "dd bs=1M if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=/dev/null" (substitute correct device name) would be suitable. I'm not sure of an equivalent for Windows.

@tomjennings @Lydie
As I just wrote in another reply, that's the rated minimum over the full temperature range, so in reality it generally isn't quite that bad. It's sort of the storage industry's deep dark secret. It's not actually a secret, but the manufacturers definitely do not want to call attention to it.
NOR flash has historically been rated for decades of retention, so many of us incorrectly assumed that ultra-high-density NAND would be similar, but unfortunately it isn't.

@Lydie
SSDs are rated to retain data unpowered for six months for consumer grade devices, and for three months for enterprise grade. They need to stay powered up so that they can scrub (refresh) memory cells that lose their charge over time. This is because each data bit is actually stored by a surprisingly small number of electrons in modern NAND flash devices.
Spinning drives, despite their potential mechanical failure modes, are actually better for cold storage than SSDs.