> a lot of our technology is sheer accident , serendipity, the way the cards happened to fall
What an absurd ahistorical fallacy.
> but thanks to mindwarping science fictional yellow-covered literature
Thanks to this you seem to have a confused and fantastical idea of the past and of our future.
> Imagine the pleasure of discovering one of these nice radioactive time-bombs six thousand years from now. Imagine the joy of selfless, dedicated archaeologists burrowing into one of these twentieth-century pharaoh's tombs and dropping dead, slowly and painfully.
Nonsensical. Uranium is part of the Earth's crust. There are plentiful natural deposits that already exist.
Aside from that it's not as if archaeology of ancient kingdom sites is perfectly safe now. There are various airborne health and physical hazards in doing this work.
> Shouldn't we give some thought to leaving them a legacy a little less lethal and offensive than our giant fossilized landfills and the radioactive fallout layer in the polar snows?
Peace requires prosperity. I'd trade all the land wars in history and those to come for some nuclear waste.
> some sort of data error detection (and ideally correction).
That's pretty much built into most mass storage devices already.
> If a disk bitflips one of my files
The likelihood and consequence of this occurring is in many situations not worth the overhead of adding additional ECC on top of what the drive does.
> ext* won't do anything about it.
What should it do? Blindly hand you the data without any indication that there's a problem with the underlying block? Without an fsck what mechanism do you suppose would manage these errors as they're discovered?
To your first couple points: I trust hardware less than you.
> What should it do? Blindly hand you the data without any indication that there's a problem with the underlying block?
Well, that's what it does now, and I think that's a problem.
> Without an fsck what mechanism do you suppose would manage these errors as they're discovered?
Linux can fail a read, and IMHO should do so if it cannot return correct data. (I support the ability to override this and tell it to give you the corrupted data, but certainly not by default.) On ZFS, if a read fails its checksum, the OS will first try to get a valid copy (ex. from a mirror or if you've set copies=2), and then if the error can't be recovered then the file read fails and the system reports/records the failure, at which point the user should probably go do a full scrub (which for our purposes should probably count as fsck) and restore the affected file(s) from backup. (Or possibly go buy a new hard drive, depending on the extent of the problem.) I would consider that ideal.
>> > some sort of data error detection (and ideally correction).
> That's pretty much built into most mass storage devices already.
And ZFS has shown that it is not sufficient (at least for some use-cases, perhaps less of a big deal for 'residential' users).
> The likelihood and consequence of this occurring is in many situations not worth the overhead of adding additional ECC on top of what the drive does.
Not worth it to whom? Not having the option available at all is the problem. I can do a zfs set checksum=off pool_name/dataset_name if I really want that extra couple percentage points of performance.
> Without an fsck what mechanism do you suppose would manage these errors as they're discovered?
Depends on the data involved: if it's part of the file system tree metadata there are often multiple copies even for a single disk on ZFS. So instead of the kernel consuming corrupted data and potentially panicing (or going off into the weeds) it can find a correct copy elsewhere.
If you're in a fancier configuration with some level of RAID, then there could be other copies of the data, or it could be rebuilt through ECC.
With ext*, LVM, and mdadm no such possibility exists because there are no checksums at any of those layers (perhaps if you glom on dm-integrity?).
And with ZFS one can set copies=2 on a per-dataset basis (perhaps just for /home?), and get multiple copies strewn across the disk: won't save you from a drive dying, but could save you from corruption.
> Which implies you can already correct errors through a simple majority mechanism.
I don't think so? You set copies=2, and the disk says that your file starts with 01010101, except that the second copy says your file starts with 01010100. How do you tell which one is right? For that matter, even with only one copy ex. ZFS can tell that what it has is wrong even if it can't fix it, and flagging the error is still useful.
> So just by having the appropriate level of RAID you automatically solve the problem. Why is this in the fs layer then?
Similarly, you shouldn't need RAID to catch problems, only (potentially) to correct them. I do agree that it doesn't necessarily have to be in the FS layer, but AFAIK Linux doesn't have any other layers that do a good job of it (as mentioned above, dm-integrity exists but halving the write speed is a pretty big problem).
> The disk is going to report an uncorrected error for one of them.
Emperical evidence has shown otherwise: I have regularly gotten checksum error reports that ZFS has complained about during a scrub.
The ZFS developers have said in interviews that disks, when asked from LBA 123 have returned the contents of LBA 234 (due to disk firmware bugs): the on-disk checksum for 234 is correct, and so the bits were passed up the stack, but that's not the data that the kernel/ZFS asked for. It is only be verifying at the file system layer than the problem was caught (because at the disk layer things were "fine").
A famous paper that used Google's large quantity of drives as a 'sample population' mentions file system-level checks:
Define "fs layer". ZFS has multiple layers with-in it:
The "file system" that most people interact with (for things like homedirs) is actually a layer with-in ZFS' architecture, and is called the ZFS POSIX layer (ZPL). It exposes a POSIX file system, and take the 'tradition' Unix calls and creates objects. Those objects are passed to the Data Management Unit (DMU), which then passed them down to Storage Pool Allocator (SPA) layer which actually manages the striping, redundancy, etc.
There was a bit of a 'joke' back in the day about ZFS being a "layering violation" because it subsumed into itself RAID, volume management, and a file system, instead of having each in a separate software packages:
The ZPL is not used all the time: one can create a block device ("zvol") and put swap or iSCSI on it. The Lustre folks have their own layer that hooks into the DMU and doesn't bother with POSIX semantics:
I do monthly scrubs on my NAS, I have 8 14-20TB drives that are quite full.
According to that 10^14 metric I should see read errors just about every month. Except I have just about zero.
Current disks are ~4 years, runs 24/7, and excluding a bad cable incident I've had a single case of a read error (recoverable, thanks ZFS).
I suspect those URE numbers are made by the manufacturers figuring out they can be sure the disk will do 10^14, but they don't actually try to find the real number because 10^14 is good enough.
> I suspect those URE numbers are made by the manufacturers figuring out they can be sure the disk will do 10^14, but they don't actually try to find the real number because 10^14 is good enough.
I am inclined to agree. However, I have one thought to the contrary. When a mechanical drive is failing, you tend to have debris inside the drive hitting the platters, causing damage that creates more debris, accelerating the drive’s eventual death, with read errors becoming increasingly common while it happens. When those are included in averages, the 10^14 might very well be accurate. I have not done any rigorous analysis to justify this thought and I do not have the data to be able to do that analysis. It is just something that occurs to me that might justify the 10^14 figure.
Fair, newest ones are, but two of my older current drives are IronWolfs 16TB which are 10^15 in the specs[1], and they've been running for 5.4 years. Again without any read errors, monthly scrubs, and of course daily use.
And before that I have been using 8x WD Reds 3TB for 6-7 years, which have 10^14 in the specs[2], and had the same experience with those.
Yes smaller size, but I ran scrubbing on those biweekly, and over so many years?
I'm not really sure how you're supposed to interpret those error rates. The average read error probably has a lot more than 1 flipped bit, right? And if the average error affects 50 bits, then you'd expect 50x fewer errors? But I have no idea what the actual histogram looks like.
Presumably there would be an open call where people would nominate themselves for consideration. These are problems that have come up and been solved in human organizations for hundreds of years before the kernel even existed.
There is no call. Anyone can volunteer at any time.
Software take up no space and there is no scarcity. Theoretically there could be any number of maintainers and what gets uptake is the de facto upstream. That's what people refer to when they talk about free software development in terms of meritocracy.
How would they know to volunteer? Are you saying I can perform a hostile volunteering to take over for a maintainer who does not want to give up the project? I don't think you understood what was meant.
> the dollar has been insanely overvalued post-COVID.
That's an odd way of saying the US doubled it's federal budget from $3T to $6T in response to COVID and has now ensconced this pork further into law. Under a "republican" administration, no less.
> The dollar losing its value is a return to the pre-covid norm.
Which is to say that even $3T contained an unjustified amount of debt spending just not as obscene as it is today.
Are you under the impression that this is surprising? Republicans are consistently the ones spending more when they are in power. It's time to dispel this myth that they are fiscally "conservative", they have presented more unbalanced/defficitary budgets than Democrats and the latter in recent memories are the only ones who managed to present budget with surpluses, under Clinton.
It's fairly obvious the reason he put it in quotes was because the Republicans and conservative movements claim to be all about "fiscal prudence and discipline", when in reality they're the ones responsible for the ballooning deficit.
Corruption has been compounding. Malicious business interests don't actually care which party has power. Just that they have access. It's telling that you have to reach back 30 years to find an example where the budget was balanced for one single year.
Right, because the guy after Clinton decided to cut taxes and start multiple wars that would last decades. You can do better than a gut "both sides" reaction.
Those "malicious business interests" clearly prefer the republicans, judging by how much more money their last campaign received from wealthy corporate donors.
But indeed, the dems are controlled opposition at this point. Most of them oppose progressive ideas, at least as much than the republicans.
I don’t disagree. But it’s also true that this will set precedent for future entitlement cuts. Younger people are not served by having entitlements treated as a sacred cow. I am in the opposite camp, cuts will and already have hurt me. I just wonder if maybe we should stop perpetuating a multi-generational Ponzi scheme that allows any generation with large enough numbers (eg baby boomers) to steal all the money from the cookie jar and spend it before anyone can figure out what the heck happened. Maybe that’s a problem with democracy more generally, but that it is a problem cannot be denied. If the dominant age cohort in power is over 85 they will have little incentive to worry about the budget ir nation beyond 5 or 10 years, let alone 80 to 100 years that are relevant to today’s youngest citizens. Not that we should ditch democracy but maybe we should limit entitlements to prevent abuse.
It’s not a Ponzi scheme, it’s successful class warfare. We had a balanced budget at the turn of the century and could easily have addressed the Medicare gap by removing the tax giveaway to the wealthiest and reforming our healthcare system to be more like literally every peer country in the world.
Instead, we blew an enormous hole in the budget with Bush’s tax cuts and wars of choice, followed by bailing out the bankers’ fraud under Obama, and then adding trillions more debt with Trump’s first tax plan. At each and every time, we could have hit financial stability by taxing the wealthiest quintile slightly more but instead chose to take on debt giving them a tax cut instead. The way you’re talking about it as a generational issue rather than a “tax rich people like it’s 1990” issue illustrates how successful the generations of propaganda have been furthering the goal of rolling back the New Deal despite every bit of sober analysis showing that social services have significantly transformed millions of lives and restoring taxes to sustainable levels at the top brackets would have minimal impact on the rich.
I don't think it's a ponzi scheme and I reject the notion it's unsustainable. Our social services are quite poor when compared to the rest of the developed world, and they seem to have figured it out.
I'm not saying we need to become Western Europe, but I am saying that it's certainly possible to have public services such as public healthcare support in the form of Medicaid sustainably.
Repeatedly, conservative fiscal voices proclaim we must cut social services in order to improve our quality of life and economic status. "Starve the Beast" has been the policy of choice for fiscal conservatives for many decades now. And, well, is it working? From where I'm standing, no. Nothing is getting cheaper. Everything is a little bit harder. And the private sector is decidedly not picking up the slack. And, I certainly do not have a lower tax burden. Why do we keep doing things when we appear to have decades worth of evidence that it does not work. I don't know, to me, it feels like insanity.
I think the most damning example is healthcare. We have private health insurance in this country and it's just bad. I don't even think we're at a point where we can humor people who say it's not that bad. No... it's bad, objectively, from every measure. We pay more per capita than any other country, including taxes, and our outcomes are consistently worse. It's losers across the board. But now we're going to be leaning into that even more with these Medicaid cuts. Which will, I'm convinced, greatly increase private insurance premiums. Sigh...
You do understand that those who paid into it earlier get much more out of it, right? So it is a Ponzi in that sense. We can agree to call it something else, but Ponzi is much easier than typing out “a system whereby those who got in early are guaranteed gains while later cohorts risk actual losses due to insolvency as the early cohorts cash out.”
Nursing homes (Medicaid) costs about $12,000 per person a month national average iirc. Cost cutting by fiscal conservatives is clearly not the reason nursing homes can charge so much. If anything it’s the exact opposite: it’s a monopsony so the cost is effectively set by whatever Uncle Sam decides it can pay.
The problem is not really the per capita costs though, but that the demographic time bomb has arrived and all at once a huge portion of Americans will stop paying in and start pulling out of the system that I won’t call a Ponzi. Both parties are run by boomers who have catered to boomers because most voters and donors have been boomers. As a result our politicians have done an awful job “paying it forward.” If the health care and social security situation doesn’t make that clear enough to you, then consider how they’ve left housing for the future age cohorts. Laws like prop 13 have allowed the “early in” to amass great wealth and cash out while using nimby politics to prevent new building and using loosened immigration (eg h1b, migrant farm workers), international free trade deregulation and other policy levers to increase the demand and price for the real estate and other assets they hold. A lot of tax breaks for those who were able to buy homes early, but no so much benefit for people at the other end of the not calling it a Ponzi system we have. If you see only the political parties but not demographics or wealth distribution across interest groups within both parties then you have fallen for party propaganda, the lie that the party matters more than money and special interest.
> You do understand that those who paid into it earlier get much more out of it, right?
No, I don't, because this is all theoretical. Sure we've made some policy changes like raising the retirement age, but the idea that SS will be insolvent is just a conservative wet dream. So, I'll treat it as such.
People on the right have been saying SS will be insolvent since the moment the pen left the paper. Take it with a grain of salt. Please remember these people are practically salivating at the idea of privatizing SS and taking their fat slice. So try to remember their incentives and why they might spread the propaganda they do.
Insolvency and prohibitive costs aren’t a hypothetical but have already arrived when it comes to elder care. And it will get worse. Class warfare is a thing but it is not every thing.
No, SS is not insolvent. And on the topic of elder care being prohibitively expensive, it's quiet simple: you can bleed the old dry because they don't have options. Meaning, it's not a free market, so any notions of competition vanish.
It's a problem with healthcare as a whole and that's why we see so-called "free market" healthcare fall apart. It's not a free market, and actually it is impossible for it to ever exist as a free market. Those same problems are amplified when it comes to elder care, because they're even more desperate.
I mean, think about it. I get chest pain and shortness of breath: which hospital do I go to? There's a market of exactly 1: I go to one hospital, whichever is closest and I believe has the best odds of caring for me. So there goes your free market, you actually have a monopoly. Despite the fact there are thousands of hospitals.
So when someone is actively losing their rights you feel the need to go out of your way to say you're unsympathetic. What did you /intend/ to convey with this? You support them, but at this dark moment, you felt the need to kick their shins also?
That you're unsympathetic. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
Sympathy(n): A feeling of pity or sorrow for the distress of another; commiseration. synonym: pity
There are limits to what people can concern themselves with, whatever the nature of that concern may be - both good and bad - by virtue of the shear magnitude of what's going on in the world and our limited ability to perceive all of it in the first place.
In the same vein that we must pick our battles, we must also pick what we give a fuck about, and some shit frankly, even if objectively wrong, just doesn't rate. An important point of order is that it's not a binary thing, but a spectrum. It's not that there's ZERO sympathy, but that there's not enough to critically cross that threshold of giving a fuck given all the other shit they may be concerning themselves with in that moment. Additionally, when a person does not give (enough of) a fuck about a given thing one moment, it may not hold true in another moment.
It'd be nice if I had the time and energy to address every injustice in the world, but that's not physically possible.
> What did you /intend/ to convey with this?
Simple. That you understand that what is happening is not right, but that you personally don't have the fucks/time/energy to give regardless.
I initially downvoted you, but on second thought I’m actually a bit sympathetic to your argument. We see a similar pattern happening elsewhere. E.g. US citizens being round up by paramilitary forces and shuttled without due process to places which can almost be described as concentration camps. All for the stated crime of maybe entering the country improperly. The argument goes that they do not deserve anything else because they are ”illegals”.
Doing one bad thing does not necessarily justify other bad things done to you.
That said, I don’t like this cheating-enabling software either and think the world would be a better place without it.
There's no inconsistency in holding both of these positions:
- the original software is clearly unethical, and I bear no goodwill toward its developer
- I support the consistent enforcement of the GPL
In a case like this, I think it's natural to state both points. If we only focus on the second, we may be contributing to a groundswell of support for the original project/developer. That's distasteful when we only want to narrowly support their right to have their licensing terms respected.
Aside from that you've got a linear scrambler into balanced drivers into twisted pair. It's about as noise immune as you can get. Unless you put the noise right up next to the cable itself.
Splitting hairs even further: the .then() returns a resolved value of the inner Promise, not the inner Promise itself, when the outer Promise resolves, so not "immediately" indeed. That's where the flattening occurs, AFAICT.
What an absurd ahistorical fallacy.
> but thanks to mindwarping science fictional yellow-covered literature
Thanks to this you seem to have a confused and fantastical idea of the past and of our future.
> Imagine the pleasure of discovering one of these nice radioactive time-bombs six thousand years from now. Imagine the joy of selfless, dedicated archaeologists burrowing into one of these twentieth-century pharaoh's tombs and dropping dead, slowly and painfully.
Nonsensical. Uranium is part of the Earth's crust. There are plentiful natural deposits that already exist.
Aside from that it's not as if archaeology of ancient kingdom sites is perfectly safe now. There are various airborne health and physical hazards in doing this work.
> Shouldn't we give some thought to leaving them a legacy a little less lethal and offensive than our giant fossilized landfills and the radioactive fallout layer in the polar snows?
Peace requires prosperity. I'd trade all the land wars in history and those to come for some nuclear waste.