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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn’t even have to have HDs for every system.

    These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.


  • You can configure HA to use an external database, so you could (presumably) config two instances to use the same DB. Not sure how much conflict that would cause for entities that are only attached to one of those instances, but it seems like both should have the same access to state data and history. Could probably even set one instance up with read-only DB access to limit data conflicts, although I imagine HA will complain about that.

    Even with an external database, HA still uses its internal DB for some things, so I don’t think you’d ever get identically mirrored instances.


  • Remember the Arab Spring? Massive protests in multiple North African countries, mostly peaceful regime changes. Those protests were hundreds of thousands of people - less than 1% of most country populations. Most of those nations were still going about their daily business like normal. Complaining about the awful government. Complaining about the disruption of the protests.

    It’s really had to get people out of their daily routines.

    In the US, there’s the extra issue that a significant part of the population are actually happy with recent events because they think it’s going to work out well for them, personally. Some of them think that the chaos is exactly the overthrow of 4 decades of terrible government they’ve been hoping for, and they don’t care what comes after.


  • If you make it to Medicare age, it gets a lot less stressful. eg: my folks have had 4 knees replaced with very little out-of-pocket cost. There’s still supplemental insurance, but Medicare, not the profit-driven insurance company, determines what gets covered, and they mostly listen to doctors. There’s always edge cases, where some treatment might not be covered, but I feel like those are uncommon.

    One way or the other, my ultimate health care plan is 9mm.



  • I’ve always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won’t corrupt/damage the backup.

    Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.


  • 3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.

    2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing

    1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.

    If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it’s really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I’d probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.

    All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.


  • I have 8 Z-wave devices now, including a couple “long range” devices. With the first couple, I would sometimes have trouble with the farthest, battery-powered device dropping out of the network occasionally, but that hasn’t happened as I’ve added more devices. I fought with pairing the initial devices - clicking the right series of buttons at the same time as telling HA to look for devices to join - but all the recent devices have just has a QR code - scan it into HA, and the device just shows up when I turn it on. I don’t know how much of this difference between new and old is my learning curve vs better product support, but I am really happy with my Z-waves now.

    Z-wave rather than wifi so I know they aren’t phoning home.





  • I feel like ‘normal’ politicians are more beholden to old-guard oligarchs, because those are the ones that brought their parents and grandparents to power. The people who’ve been funding them through their whole, 50-year careers. Those oligarchs have generally learned to avoid the public eye, including politicians that attract public scrutiny.

    Donald Trump doesn’t care about relationships, heritage, or established trust. He just wants money and flattery, right now, in great volume, and that makes him uniquely susceptible to new money tech bros.






  • Exactly. Galaxy brains on Wall Street realizing that nvidia’s monopoly pricing power is coming to an end. This was inevitable - China has 4x as many workers as the US, trained in the best labs and best universities in the world, interns at the best companies, then, because of racism, sent back to China. Blocking sales of nvidia chips to China drives them to develop their own hardware, rather than getting them hooked on Western hardware. China’s AI may not be as efficient or as good as the West right now, but it will be cheaper, and it will get better.



  • My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.

    I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I’m at the point where it wouldn’t be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.