hendrik

I’m not sure what youtube2peertube is. But Peertube has a feature to import and synchronize Youtube channels built in these days (needs to be enabled by the instance admin). It somewhat works. But Youtube applies heavy rate-limiting and also often blocks datacenter IP addresses and VPNs so it might not work on a vServer, just on a residential internet connection.

It is misrepresenting the facts quite a bit. I think microwave links might be able to do a bit more bandwidth. And laser can do way more than ChatGPT attributes to it. It can do 1 or 2.5 Gbps as well. The main thing about optics is that it comes without electromagnetic interference. And you don’t need to have a fresnel zone without obstacles, and you don’t need a license. The other things about laser being more susceptible to weather, etc should be about right. (And I don’t know a lot about cost and alignment, so I don’t really know if that’s accurate and substancially more effort for lasers. They sure both cost some money and you have to point both at the receiver.)

Sure. I think we’re talking a bit about different things here. I didn’t want to copy it, just know how it’s done 😆 But yeah, you’re right. And what you said has another benefit. If they want to protect it by law, we have a process for that: Patents. And those require to publish how it’s done…

Nah, all it takes is one person buying it, disassemble it and look at the mechanics to see whether there are things like motors and mirrors inside the transmitter to do new things like align it dynamically. And I mean the other things, physics, the atmosphere, lenses and near infraread lasers along with signal processing are well-understood. I think it won’t be a big secret once it turns into a real thing… I mean as long as it’s hype only it might be.

I wonder what they did, though. Because the article is omitting most of the interesting details and frames it as if this as if optical communication in itself was something new or disruptive… I mean if I read the Wikipedia article on Long-range optical wireless communication, it seems a bunch of companies have already invested 3 digit million sums into solving this exact issue…

I don’t really know why that is. If you want to bypass the issue and just solve it, try sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata on the command line.

(Edit: Mind that sudo on the command line generally doesn’t show any stars or such things. After being prompted for it, you type in your password blind and hit enter.)

I’m not sure about that. I think OP wants something like ATA secure erase. That would be hdparm and a bunch of options, and not blkdiscard. Unless they specifically know what they’re doing and what options to pick. And what the controller will do in return.

Yes, thanks. Just invalidating or trimming the memory doesn’t cut it. OP wants it erased so it needs to be one of the proper erase commands. I think blkdiscard also has flags for that, so I believe you could do it with that command as well, if it’s supported by the device and you append the correct options. (zero, secure) I think other commands are easier to use (if supported).

That’s also my experience. There isn’t really any noticeable performance hit, even on modern SSDs. It should be the same amount of data coming from the SSD anyway, since the SSD isn’t even the part doing the cryptography (with LUKS), so it shouldn’t have any effect. And the CPU handles the decryption just fine

Well, in fact it can. That’s “overprovisioning”. The SSD has some amount of reserved space as replacement for bad cells, and maybe to speed things up. So if you overwrite 100% of what you’ve access to on the SSD, you’d still have X amount of data you didn’t catch. But loosely speaking you’re right. If you overwrite the entire SSD and not just files or one partition or something like that, you’d force it to replace most of the content.
I wouldn’t recommend it, though. There is secure erase, blkdiscard and some nvme format commands which do it the right way. And ‘dd’ is just a method that get’s it about right (though not 100%) in one specific case.

SSDs don’t store the data like HDDs, where you’d overwrite the same part on a magnetic platter. The controller on a SSD will instead handle it, do some magic and decide what to do. So if you use dd to replace some part with zeros, it might instead invalidate the old data, allocate new memory to you and not really overwrite anything. That’s why SSDs have separate commands for wiping content.

I’d say google for “ssd secure erase”:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/Memory_cell_clearing
• https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/SSD/Secure-Erase/ (German language)

I think usually you’d use SANE for a scanner

• https://sane-project.gitlab.io/website/man/sane-pixma.5.html
• https://sane-project.gitlab.io/website/lists/sane-backends-external.html#S-CANON-PIXMA

https://help.zorin.com/docs/getting-started/upgrade-zorin-os/

Sure. Are the labels human-readable? Otherwise I’d rather type it in while I’m in front of the computer anyways, with the new DVD in my hand. Rather than end up with a directory with 200 cryptic filenames… I meaan the interaction with changing the disks can’t be skipped anyway…

I think the best bet to preserve them as is, would be dd or ddrescue (if there are read errors). You might be able to write a small shell script to automate stuff. For example open the tray, read a filename from the user, then close the tray, rip it and then repeat. That way you’ll notice the open tray, change disks, enter the tiltle and hit enter and come back 10mins later. Obviously takes something like 20 days if you do 10 each day. And you’re looking for roughly 1TB of storage, if it’s single layer DVDs.

Is a SSD’s cache even about wear? I mean wear only happens on write operations. And I would expect a SSD to apply the writes as fast as possible. Since piling up work (a filled write cache) means additional latency and less performance on the next, larger write operation. Along with a few minor issues like possible data loss on (power) failure.
And on read, a cache on the wrong side of the bottleneck doesn’t do that much. A SSD has pretty much random access to all the memory, it’s not like it has to wait for a mechanical head to move into position on the platter for data to become available?!

But I haven’t looked this up. I might be wrong. What I usually do is make sure a computer has enough RAM and it is used properly. That will also cache data and avoid unneccessary transfers. And RAM is orders of magnitude faster, you can get gigabytes worth of it for a few tens of dollars… Though adding RAM might not be easily done on the more recent Thinkpads… I’ve noticed they come with a maximum of one RAM slot for some years already, sometimes none and it’s soldered.

I think a SATA connection might be the bottleneck with its maximum throughput of 600 MB/s. So for that use-case you don’t need to be worried about the SSDs speed and cache, it won’t be able to perform due to the SATA slot. But I don’t know how exactly you plan to repurpose it later. Maybe skip the adapter if it’s expensive, buy a cheap SATA SSD now and a new, fast PCIe one in a few years once you get a new computer.

Yeah, sure. No offense. I mean we have different humans as well. I got friends who will talk about a subject and they’ve read some article about it and they’ll tell me a lot of facts and I rarely see them make any mistakes at all or confuse things. And then I got friends who like to talk a lot, and I better check where they picked that up.
I think I’m somewhere in the middle. I definitely make mistakes. But sometimes my brain manages to store where I picked something up and whether that was speculation, opinion or fact, along with the information itself. I’ve had professors who would quote information verbatim and tell roughly where and in which book to find it.

With AI I’m currently very cautious. I’ve seen lots of confabulated summaries, made-up facts. And if designed to, it’ll write it in a professional tone. I’m not opposed to AI or a big fan of some applications either. I just think it’s still very far away from what I’ve seen some humans are able to do.

I think the difference is that humans are sometimes aware of it. A human will likely say, I don’t know what Kanye West did in 2018. While the AI is very likely to make up something. And also in contrast to a human this will likely be phrased like a Wikipedia article. While you can often look a human in the eyes and know whether they tell the truth or lie, or are uncertain. Not always, and we also tell untrue things, but I think the hallucinations are kind of different in several ways.

I’m not a machine learning expert at all. But I’d say we’re not set on the transformer architecture. Maybe just invent a different architecture which isn’t subject to that? Or maybe specifically factor this in. Isn’t the way we currently train LLM base models to just feed in all text they can get? From Wikipedia and research papers to all fictional books from Anna’s archive and weird Reddit and internet talk? I wouldn’t be surprised if they start to make things up since we train them on factual information and fiction and creative writing without any distinction… Maybe we should add something to the architecture to make it aware of the factuality of text, and guide this… Or: I’ve skimmed some papers a year or so ago, where they had a look at the activations. Maybe do some more research what parts of an LLM are concerned with “creativity” or “factuality” and expose that to the user. Or study how hallucinations work internally and then try to isolate this so it can be handled accordingly?