Also the Epstein-Barr virus causes Mono, the clone of .NET, which was created by Bill Gates, known associate of Epstein, whose father was president of the Washington State Bar Association. And you know who else works in Washington? Join the dots, people.
We call people who make connections like these "conspiracy theorists," until they're right, at which point we call them "right". And somewhere in between, if they manage to get a job, we call them "Simpsons writers."
Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.
Indeed, that's why it bothers me that major technology vendors, especially Apple, would like to do away with the very concept of files, at least for non-power users.
They make it seem like data is bound up with apps, and should not have an independent existence. They also make it hard to import/export data, except via backups, which a very crude way of taking control of your personal data.
I'm working on a tool to work around these issues to the extent possible, allowing users to extract their information, as granular files, from device backups into their personal digital library. For immutable data, archival is ok, but for editable data, the biggest challenge is how to make the extracted data "live", i.e., available and editable on the devices again, preferably in the same apps used to create them. There seems to be no good solutions.
Apple keep their casual users on a short leash, but for those willing to tinker, iOS device backups are actually quite good for that archive use case, as you can extract most of your important data in the form of SQLite database files. The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking, but the fact that this route still exists at all is encouraging (in the sense that all hope is not yet lost). They could very easily have hidden all these files behind an Apple-managed encryption key. On the other hand, this niche affordance may serve to placate the power users who would be most likely to cause noise and revolt if our personal needs were not met. On the gripping hand, the device backup mechanism via iTunes feels so ancient that they probably just haven’t thought about it.
> The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking
Yeah, that's what I want to abstract way. There are tools that do this to some extent, but they stop at backup extraction, without helping you to integrate the extracted data into a proper personal digital library with easy retrieval.
Configuration files are the greater than a central repository like Windows Registry. They allow temporary changing and ease of sharing how an application operates. They also create a well defend meaning of the settings.
This is why I do not like how Windows has been implemented, they treat files like a 3rd class citizen versus a 1st class.
I would add that it’s largely due to LLM’s extraordinary ability to infer. Natural plain language live in files and we no longer have to worry about structure. Legibility is the spec and anyone decent enough to be legible will write to a file. REPL away.
I swear, I respect Vinge more and more based on how well he seems to understand human tendencies to plot some plausible trajectories for our civilization.
There's a little throwaway thing in the book (or maybe it was in the prequel) that I always liked, re understanding human tendencies. They're still using Unix time, starting in Jan 1st 1970, but given that their culture is so space-travel-focused they assume the early humans set it to coincide with man's first trip to the moon.
I wish he could have seen the current state of GenAI. Several times in the book he talks about how the ship understands context clues and sarcasm, and that effective natural language translation requires near-sentience.
Legitimately listening to this book for the first time after a coworker recommended it. It's rapidly becoming one of my favorite books that balances the truly alien with the familiar just right.
Not so ironically, it came up when we were discussing "software archeology".
I've only just heard of it. But, I already knew to not run random scripts under a privileged account. And thank you for the book suggestion - I'm into those kinds of tales.
LackRack is cute in that it works and fits, but the real home datacenter is wire shelving - one of THOSE bad boys can support hundreds of pounds AND have good airflow (and sneaky cable routing!).
If you trawl auction sites for business liquidations, you can also usually pick up an actual rack for pennies on the dollar.
It doesn't even have to be a tech business; most random offices have a small rack in a closet somewhere with some networking equipment on it, and the whole thing usually sells as one lot to anyone with $50 and a screwdriver to remove the equipment from the site.
They're not hard to find as you say (you can even find them at scrap yards and such) - though then you can find the fun of getting the right mounting hardware to actually PUT things in the rack (and you get to learn the difference between telco racks (very common) and server racks (somewhat less common).
If you've accidentally purchased a telco rack it won't be ideal, but modifying it into a server rack is going to yield a better rack than a coffee table or bookshelf.
Yeah for a lot of things these days I actually prefer a telco rack, as you’re unlikely to be shelving giant rack mount chassis and UPS as much as you used to.
I keep wanting to build this but I have seen people talking online that they changed the legs and they are now hollow and not really suitable for this.
That has made me very cautious to use this for any serious amount of mounting.
Edit: Apparently there is a section on that page about it, but does not give a ton of confidence that it won’t give me a lot of issues.
I swear every year that passes it sounds more plausible that IKEA has a bunch of people chewing on wood and putting it together into furniture like they were building wasp nests. Their stuff makes frickin' papier-mâché look like a steel girder in comparison.
I have an old Lack (20 years) and while I've never used it as a rack, it'd just been retired from under the TV as I got a new one with a wider base. I notice that even though it's never been moved much, it doesn't feel very stable any more and I wouldn't trust it with a rack of heavy equipment, especially with HDDs that could suffer catastrophic failure if they fell. That said, attaching brackets would sure up the legs a bit. Ideally you'd want to attack brackets at the back as well I guess.
I also had a Billy sat next to it, and did similar to this (but again not racked), with all of my AV gear inside. The door was great, it'd make any status lights diffuse and so they wouldn't interrupt watching a film in the dark (and my old Sky box used to have annoying blue LEDs with an animation when playing back a recorded show), but at the same time remote controls still worked through the glass. Literally best of both worlds. I cut a big hole in the back for cables, which also served well for airflow. I considered adding a fan, but never needed it. I suspect there would be issues with negative pressure doing that though.
The tops of the posts are still solid. You could mount a single rack unit and be okay, but fully populating lack legs is not recommended. Cute way to hide a network switch, though.
Wait until we find out that all of tech (ever) has been subsidized by the true-so-far assumption of continued growth, allowing today’s costs to be paid for by tomorrow’s larger market.
I strongly suspect that most of the things we now know to be problematic were also known to be problematic to the ancients, but were thought still to be worth it for their rewards. That’s pretty much where we still are today. Nobody likes breathing pollution, everybody likes modernity.
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