HDDs are another regret of mine, along with trying to save a bunch by opting against a chassis with hot swap. I went with four 10TB Red Plus drives. That ended up being about 26TB actual in a RAIDZ1. I failed to consider just how quickly I would start filling it between archiving some YouTube videos and taking DVDs and BluRays out on loan from the local library.

If prices ever improve I’m tempted to get at least a 12 bay, switch to RAIDZ2, and up the number of drives to start with. After migration I’ll probably repurpose the old chassis to be a dedicated NVR. Something lower power that hopefully won’t have to shut off right away if there’s a power outage. As it stands when the lights go out so does TrueNAS and 98% of what I host.

That’s the dream, anyway. Time will tell if it pans out.

I paid $158.99 in November of 2024, building my TrueNAS server. Wish I’d doubled up back then.

Because this reminded of it: For a similar reason, and if you own an older vehicle, you don’t want to replace the warning lights (battery, oil, engine/MIL) with LED bulbs. Or you’ll need “error free” bulbs with built-in parallel resistors. LED gauge lights are usually fine but, on a lot of vehicles, an incandescent bulb is expected on the warning light circuits. If you replace, for example, the battery bulb with an LED - the alternator might not engage as it should, because there won’t be sufficient current for it to do so, and your battery could drain despite a running engine.

(I’m far from an electrician, nevermind an automotive one, but I did a lot of research before upgrading/replacing my burnt out dash lights and that’s a mistake I would’ve otherwise made)

Fail secure sounds good but now you also need to consider how quickly the brakes engage. Don’t want some random electrical hiccup locking up your brakes mid curve while you’re three-wide doing 70 on an interstate. Slowly draining capacitors or whatever to gradually engage them might be an option. Then you also, preferably, need some means of physically disengaging them. Otherwise you’re gonna get disabled vehicles in the middle of roadways that have to be dragged up onto flatbeds or the side of the road because the wheels won’t roll without restoring brake power first.

The actual article title is only slightly more decipherable. Meta hired a company, which employs a number of people in Kenya, to review videos recorded by Meta’s AI/Smart glasses. The employees were to provide manual annotations to the videos in order to train Meta’s AI. Meta terminated the arrangement stating expectations weren’t met. The employees of the firm claim they had to review obscene or intimate content. Examples mentioned include a man leaving his glasses on, on a nightstand, where his wife later came in an undressed, instances of glasses wearers engaged in intercourse, etc.

So 1100 people are out of work. Meta says they axed them for poor performance/redundancy. The company says “that’s bull” and it’s because employees raised awareness about what was being recorded.

Sucks for the folks out of work. With regard to the users, I personally can’t feel bad for anyone who willingly brings a Meta device into their home or who uses their apps. As for third parties, who don’t want to find themselves part of a porno they didn’t agree to star in, I guess people need to add “glasses go in the drawer” to their pre-coitus checklist. Maybe just file all Facebook and Insta users under “unfuckable” and call it a day.

Facial recognition is just one way to begin or build upon a profile, but there are others. Cameras would also be looking for things like specific brands of clothing being worn. Raggedy, no-name work shirt? You get a pass. $80 Carhartt jacket? Maybe we add a buck fifty onto that tub of Folgers you rely on to get through the day. Wearing the latest $300 T-shirt drop from the Foofoo X MTBLZ brokemaxxing collab? Hell, I’d personally wanna charge you extra on principle.

Even without cameras and their “AI” trying to gauge your wealth, past purchases can just as easily be associated with the credit/debit cards used to pay for them in order to build a profile. If they know what you regularly buy they can start nickel and dime’ing those things to test the limits of what you’re willing to spend. I feel like I also heard about some stores using Bluetooth or NFC triangulation. So your phone, smart watch, fitness tracker, etc could essentially serve as their means to watch you movements. They know the moment you entered, how long you lingered in a specific spot in any given aisle, and what register you checked out at. Now there’s a profile for those devices. Paid with debit/credit again? Then those devices and the purchasing method are connected and the overall profile has grown.

I’m kind of curious how much longer places are going to accept cash. It’s anecdotal but, from grocers to department stores, there never seems to be more than a single staffed checkout lane around here anymore. Then, of course, the self checkouts don’t accept cash (or the few that do seem to always be out of service). Probably equal parts “we don’t want to pay more employees” and “we want your data” motivating that shift.

We’re decades into dystopian already.

set -o vi

:D

Do you believe law and ethics are separable? Does your “these systems save lives” not speak to the very reasoning employed to codify an ethical position into the law of the land?

I’d love it if their equipment racks all simultaneously burst into flame the day it pops so they can’t pivot or hock their hoarded hardware to recoup the investment. Then again, if that finger on the monkey’s paw did curl, they’d probably all get bailed out by the taxpayers the following week anyway.

I paid $160 US for 2x32GB DDR4 3200 ECC almost exactly a year ago, when I built my TrueNAS server. I told myself I’d grab another pair down the road to fill out the last two slots in my board. Now I can’t find the same pack anywhere for less than $350. Upgrades are indefinitely postponed, to say the least.

Some of us are old enough to remember when “that command terminal thing” was computing. Now there’s something about text on a black screen that seems to make people’s eyes glaze over and their brains turn off today. You’d think they were being asked to decipher the Matrix. Too many generations removed I suppose.

The reality is I’m definitely not figuring out how my compositor works, almost never touching system files, infrequently scripting, and almost always using “a tool NOW for a SPECIFIC thing.” I’m not a tech luddite. Modern computing is shiny and awesome. You want graphical tools for graphical tasks. But there are so many excellent specific-purpose CLI tools, typically included by default across nearly every distro, that make so much more sense to use over a GUI. Maybe not always but most of the time.

Simple example, damned if I’m gonna open a file browser, navigate to my downloads directory, right click - Cut (or Ctrl X), navigate to another directory, paste, then right click - Rename. Not when I can just open a terminal (realistically, I always have it open) and mv ~/downloads/kewlwallpapers_abstract_dark_blah_blah.jpg ~/pics/wallpaper/abstract_003.jpg Especially when tab completion means I just have to type a partial path or filename and slap Tab to fill in the rest. It’s just so quick.

I hate it because I don’t know how to do anything

Some examples of what you’ve been unable to accomplish might add clarity.

but I’m not smart enough to learn terminal

Bull. Shit. You’re just not used to it and, even without picking up any knowledge of shell scripting, you’re only a man somecommand away from understanding what specific command line programs do. somecommand --flag --another-flag /home/me/thing typically isn’t much different from opening some GUI app on Windows, ticking two boxes, opening the file picker and selecting C:\users\me\thing then clicking a button.

All that said, now we really need examples because there’s probably no need for you to be messing with the terminal to begin with. At least not if you aren’t doing anything outside basic computing like web browsing, chat, productivity tasks and such. So what are you trying to do in the terminal that the OS failed to provide a GUI for?

Flatpaks… NOOOOO…

I haven’t used Zorin but flatpaks are enabled by default if I understand. Yes, you can install them via the command line but it looks like you could just open the built in software center and search for whatever it is you want. The only exception I can imagine is if you’re trying to install from a source other than whatever Zorin uses by default (Flathub, I would guess).

dependencies not found

With Flatpaks? Wat? With some other command? Context, please.

Anytime I have to use terminal I ALWAYS make a backup

You’re competent enough to image and restore your drive but not stay out of trouble in your OS? You presumably had to learn whatever software, and the underlying concepts, you’re using for that. Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, Macrium Reflect, etc all exist to make it easier but you’ve gotta know what an “image” is, what it means create it and subsequently write it onto a drive. How to identify the correct drive so you’re not wiping out something unintentionally.

So, are you not spending even a few minutes to check if the code snippets you’re pasting are applicable to your specific distribution? At least skimming the man page for the commands you try to run? Are you assuming “it’s all just Linux, right?” and that there isn’t nuance between distributions? Running shell commands you don’t understand is like running whatever backup solution you’re using without understanding it - just blindly clicking buttons and maybe you get a backup or maybe you format a drive and lose decades of family photos, your research paper draft, and whatever else. And if a fuckup costs me a literal day of my life in restoration time, I’m making it a point to use that time to figure out why so I hopefully don’t repeat the process in the future.

There’s little substance in your complaints and I’m left just so genuinely confused. In my head I’m imagining a walking talking XY Problem. Some specific examples of what you were trying to achieve or the snippets you were blindly pasting might shed some light but, left to guess, your actions sound akin to gamer kids running random batch scripts claiming to tweak power settings or whatever else in order to eke out a few extra FPS. Windows isn’t going to protect anyone who treats it the same way you have seemingly treated Linux.

I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.