NaibofTabr

you can’t really bomb a supply chain

Fuck yeah you can, hence my example of bombing ball bearing factories.

Train lines are also a classic bombing target. Fuel production/refining/storage/transport, any kind of logistics hub, shipyards, airstrips, warehouses… all things that are difficult to hide because there’s always activity around them. Flatten them and the dependent supply chain grinds to a halt.

China and Russia both trade heavily with Iran and don’t care about embargoes.

Also even if they could produce everything they need within the country, that doesn’t mean it’s practical to produce it all in one location. At some point you have to pull raw material out of the ground and refine it, and you probably can’t get everything you need all from the same hole in the ground. You probably can’t manufacture electronics very well next door to a mining and refining operation. There’s going to be truck routes or train lines and logistics facilities somewhere.

Supply chain. Drones are complicated pieces of equipment, they can’t possibly be manufacturing all of the components locally.

During WWII the Allies brought the German tank corps to a halt by bombing ball bearing factories.

It’s a story, you know, fiction, printed on cheap paper made from cheap wood pulp… maybe we could call it pulp fiction?

First and most important:

In the context of long-term data storage
ALL DRIVES ARE CONSUMABLES

I can’t emphasize this enough. If you only skim the rest of my post, re-read the above line and accept it as fundamental truth. “Long-term” means 1+ years, by the way.

It does not matter what type of drive you buy, how much you spend on it, who manufactured it, etc. The drive will fail at some point, probably when you’re least prepared for it. You need to plan around that. You need to plan for the drive being completely useless and the data on it unrecoverable post-failure. Wasting time and money to acquire the fanciest most bulletproof drives on the market is a pointless resource pit, and has more to do with dick-measuring contests between data-hoarders.

Knife geeks buy $500+ patterned steel chef’s knives with ebony handles and finely ground edges and bla bla bla. Professional kitchens buy the basic Victorinox with the plastic handle. Why? Because they actually use it, not mount it on a wall to look pretty.

The knife is a consumable, not an heirloom. So are your storage drives. We call them “spinning rust” for a reason.

The solution to drive failure is redundancy. Period.

Unfortunately, this reality runs counter to the desire to maximize available storage. Do not follow the path of desire, that way lies data loss and outer darkness. Fault-tolerant is your watchword. Component failure is unpredictable, no matter how much money you spend. A random manufacturing defect will ruin your day when you least expect it.

A minimum safe layout is to have 2 live copies of data (one active, one mirror), hot standby for 1 copy (immediate swap-in when the active or mirror fails), and cold standby on the shelf to replace the hot standby when it enters service.

Note that this does not describe a specific number of disks, but copies of data. The minimum to implement this is 4 disks of identical storage capacity (2 live, 1 hot standby, 1 on the shelf) and a server with slots for 3 disks. If your storage needs expand beyond the capacity of 1 disk, then you need to scale up by the same ratio. A disk is indivisible - having two copies of the same data on a disk does not give you any redundancy value. (I won’t get into striping and mucking about with weird RAID choices in this post because it’s too long already, but basically it’s not worth it - the KISS principle applies, especially in small configurations)

This means you only get to use 25% of the storage capacity that you buy. Them’s the breaks. Anything less and you’re not taking your data longevity seriously, you might as well just get a consumer-grade external drive and call it a day.

Buy 4 disks, it doesn’t matter what they are or how much they cost (though if you’re buying used make sure you get a SMART report from the seller and you understand what it means) but keep in mind that your storage capacity is just 1 of the disks. And buy a server that can keep 3 of them online and automatically swap in the standby when one of the disks fails. Spend more money on the server than the disks, it will last longer.

Remember, long-term is a question of when, not if.

Forty-Six

When the Tao is present in the universe, The horses haul manure.
When the Tao is absent from the universe,
War horses are bred outside the city.

There is no greater sin than desire,
No greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

Sixty-One
[…]
Therefore if a great country gives way to a smaller country,
It will conquer the smaller country.
And if a small country submits to a great country,
It can conquer the great country.
Therefore those who would conquer must yield,
And those who conquer do so because they yield.

A great nation needs more people,
A small country needs to serve.
Each gets what it wants.
It is fitting for a great nation to yield.

Thirty
[…]
Force is followed by loss of strength.
This is not the way of Tao.
That which goes against the Tao comes to an early end.

from the Tao The Ching (by Lao Tsu), as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English

Book 14 #3

The Master said: ‘When the way prevails in the state, be enterprising in speech and enterprising in action; but when the Way does not prevail in the state, be enterprising in action but prudent in speech.’

from The Analects (of Confucius), as translated by Raymond Dawson

Broad conclusions for a study conducted on a population of ~500 undergrad students at a single religious university in one city of one state of one country.

Fall of Civilizations might interest you. It covers the collapse of past empires, and tries to describe what life was like for the people living in them when they were at their peak, and what we know of life during the decline.

It is not specifically focused on religions, but for most of these cultures their religion was inherently bound up with their politics (both internal and external), economics, industry, and day-to-day life. Describing the society and culture includes a fair amount of detail about their religious beliefs and practices (for instance, you can’t really give a useful description of the Egyptian empire without mentioning their gods). Many of the largest surviving ruins have religious significance. Personally, I think framing the religion inside the sociocultural context and history of the civilization makes it more interesting and more understandable.

The Fall of Civilizations YouTube Channel has the podcast episodes set to video of the locations as they are today, along with photos of artifacts from the culture and artistic depictions of what it might have looked like.

Generative algorithms, and the people intent on replacing artists with them.

Also everyone labeling and/or peddling these things as “Artificial Intelligence”.

Also all of the corporations trying to shoehorn them into every product and service and ram them down user’s throats.

Also every user that patronizes these things voluntarily.

That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault. <--- You are here
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, You deserved it.

A Narcissist’s Prayer

I actually get the feeling that the US stock market is being turned into a pump-and-dump scheme, not piecemeal but entire.

So… there’s a practical difference between rendering markup, which is handled by the browser engine and generally benign, and running executable script, which is frequently malicious.

Allowing your website to load JavaScript means that I’m allowing you to execute arbitrary code on my hardware. Hopefully the potential blast radius of any malicious code is limited by safety precautions in my web browser, but a web browser is not a security barrier and should not be relied on to protect the local system from malicious code downloaded from the Internet. The most pernicious and seemingly unavoidable behavior of JavaScript on most websites is device fingerprinting, and to get a better understanding of how much of a problem that is check out https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

The simplest step to prevent a lot of this malicious behavior is to block executable script. This is not really a new thing on the Internet, as extensions like NoScript have been around for 2 decades and have millions of users. This should be anticipated by the web developer as a completely normal use case.

Competent web developers understand that they have privacy-conscious users who block external executable script as a matter of course. Your website(s) should be designed to account for this, and should at least render and display information in a readable way without needing to execute your un-vetted code on the user’s system. Maybe some dynamic functions of the website don’t work, but that’s OK as long as the majority of the site is accessible. A JavaScript-dependent website is no better than a Flash-dependent website, in terms of security, privacy, and professionalism.

NoScript frames this as a consent issue, and that’s probably valid:

NoScript enables consensual browsing: your browser, your choice!

You are the product of 4 billion years of ancestors who fucked.

…

C-C-C-Combo Breaker!

I think I saw a 2…

He’ll probably feel right at home in Klantee.

Neocities: https://neocities.org/browse!

Webrings: https://www.brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm

Usenet: https://www.spocket.co/blogs/what-is-usenet

Zombo: https://zombo.com/

Chans: https://allchans.org/ but also… here be monsters… lots of unmoderated content, NSFW, NSFL, etc

Also:

The Internet wasn’t just in everyone’s pocket all the time. Frequently, using a computer network was an activity that you did with other people in the same room, e.g. in the Computer Lab (computers were expensive and complicated and not every room in a school or office would have the necessary power or communications wiring, so all the computers were kept in one special room) or an Internet Cafe (not everyone had Internet-capable wiring at home, so you might go to a business that offered Internet-connected computers as a service just to check your email) or a LAN Party (people used to physically haul their beige boxes, CRT monitors and network devices to a place to meet, connect and play games together - frequently just someone’s garage). You went to a specific place to use the Internet, typically with other people around, and then when you left the place you left the Internet also, it didn’t just follow you around everywhere all the time.

How about some of that personal responsibility we’ve heard so much about from the right?

This just in: projection requires distortion.

This is expected, planned for, anticipated and even desired by the people pulling the strings. Violent resistance will be used to justify mass murder in response.

One of the major selling features of the Slate is their intention to make the truck as end-user repairable as possible and publish documentation and how-to videos to support that. Whether they actually follow through remains to be seen, but if they do the Slate would be one of the least locked-in proprietary vehicles ever made.