Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2022) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2022) [video]

tom7.org

425 pointspabs371 comments

Do yourself a favor and watch the entire back catalog. Not sure there’s anyone more creative than tom7 working right now.

SIGBOVIK is always fantastic, and Tom7 is consistently the star of the show

Seconded. My first experience with Tom7 was the "Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel..." I've been hooked ever since.

100% agree. This guy is next level.

I wonder how many people here are discovering tom7 for the first time beacuse of this video.

Me!

#metoo

It’s like when you think of something that will never exist, because it is just too absurd. However, this guy not only has an even more absurd idea, he also brings it into existence and shows why it’s a great idea to build a sustainable future!

#nohate

Wait until you encounter his executable research paper about executable research papers.

The NAND gates video is probably the closest humanity will ever get to perfection though.

I've never heard of this guy but that was fantastic. Subscribed!

Some of these ideas are as old as time but the comic seriousness is great.

Reminds me of older analog delay circuits where the signal was sent as a sound wave in glass IIRC ... with multiple taps for different delays.

EDIT: Here's a cool example that maybe warrants its own submission: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/glass-ultrasonic-dela...

This is the first time I encounter a tom7 content. I expected a fun, nerdy video.

I walk away with goosebumps, cathartic feelings. I didn't see it coming how the end switches to a pretty serious topic. The whole composition is award winning in my mind, but then he also put a ton of engineering effort in it, at a level of quality that I could at most wish that I could achieve in a lifetime.

Wow.

My favourite feature of this video is that he uses the "Network Block Device Kit" to make a kit of 3 drives, each using one of those words as the main point:

"Network" storage, "Block" storage, and "Device" storage.

I remember lcamtuf mentioning very similar concept ca. 2003.

In his version you would partition secret data and send it out to non existing email addresses, just to get them bounced back within a couple of days.

If you want to get your secrets back together you would simply start gathering appropriate parts (you need to keep track of all the chunks somewhere), otherwise you'd simply send them to another non existing email address.

http://tom7.org/papers/murphy2022harder.pdf

Fair, but Tom7's video presentations are always really fun too.

That said, if Tom7 wasn’t meticulous about typesetting all his results, we would never have been blessed with https://youtu.be/Y65FRxE7uMc

The basic premise of the ping-based drive, taking advantage of ephemeral media i.e. transmission time of a packet, was the idea behind clacks (https://github.com/AlexanderParker/clacks). I got excited to see someone else had a similar idea and explored it.

My approach was more as a p2p system of mutual random packet bouncing rather than using ICMP ping.

Edit to add: I simulated a network of peers and rendered some videos of a single message propagating through the network: https://github.com/AlexanderParker/clacks-tests/blob/main/pr...

Recovering your file in this way would take some time... "Eventually" you'll get it back...

The idea of buffering data by transmitting it somewhere far, bouncing it off a moon or whatnot, and using that distance of radio waves as your memory is my favourite thing ever.

There's a great sci-fi short story (well, two, I guess) that I can recommend based on this - although, knowing what you said is a slight spoiler for them.

Please do!!

One of them is https://qntm.org/transi. I don't know about the other.

That's one of the ones I was thinking of!

Another one is "The Hundred Light Year Diary", by Greg Egan.

In Conway's Game of Life, the first self-constructing machine used this principle. It has two construction arms, and the recipe for them to create new copies of themselves is encoded in gliders and bounced back-and-forth between them. This turned out to be much simpler than building any kind of storage device.

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Gemini

Sort of like a really, really long delay-line memory tube, it's just mostly-vacuum instead of mostly-mercury...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

OTOH, you’d be building one of the largest computers in the solar system. Count me in.

Used to be a common thing for storing analog signals in the past :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

+1 this is discussed in the Andrew Hodges Turing biography (and no doubt many other books)

Delay-line memory used this concept in a variety of ways, such as by bouncing slow sound waves around a chamber and by transmitting twists along a long coiled wire.

Except access times are not so good, generally.

Unfortunately due to free-space path loss limiting the Shannon-Hartley channel capacity, the total amount of information storable using this method asymptotically approaches zero for large distances.

For reference, the combined formulas are C=d×B×log_2(1+(Dc÷4πdf)²×S÷N)÷c. And lim->∞ d×ln(1+1÷d²) unfortunately = 0. (Curiously, attempting to store more information by increasing bandwidth -- and thus center frequency -- suffers the same limitation.)

(Wolfram Alpha isn't forthcoming yet with a closed-form solution for the optimal distance...)

One of the things preventing us from seeing dinosaur images reflected back to us from the objects at 33Mly+

This presumes current antenna, so "currently prevents" would be more accurate.

Yes, things spread over distance. However, building quintillions of tiny sensors and spewing them across immense distances, and using it as a spread-array sensor net would enable capture that might otherwise elude us.

This is why I don't like "prevent" as a term here, even though I 100% get your reason for using it. 300 years ago, some might have cited innumerable reasons why the distance to the moon "prevents" us from ever getting there! After all, it would take a ship+sail centuries to cross the void, everyone would be dead!

The soft limit is the size of a solar system, a practical one is the furthest and the biggest body in it, so... Jupiter/Saturn?

Need to praise the inception here - the whole time I was watching it, I was feeling clever, thinking "all of these silly and wasteful methods for storing data are still pretty efficient compared to 'blockchain'".

Then it turns out that that that was secretly the whole point :)

41 comments, 2 years ago:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The concept of storing data within the transfer process like that heavily reminded me of a short story that invoked a very similar idea, Valuable Humans in Transit by qntm: https://qntm.org/transi

Finally, I understand what the Dark Net is :D

It'd be nice if there were a topic summary. What is this about? I'm not going to devote part of my day reading/watching something about chainsaws to understand what the topic is

Tom7's relatively small oeuvre of videos are frequently re-posted here and just as frequently re-upvoted, and they deserve to be.

Discovering what the video is about as it discursively unfolds is part of the joy. There comes a moment in every video (multiple moments, even) where you'll suddenly be like, "wait, I can't believe what you appear to be suggesting", only to find out that not only is he suggesting it, he actually implemented it. There are few video creators who are as attuned to the hacker mindset as Tom7; I decline to summarize and instead strongly recommend you watch it and find out for yourself. It's a video about the logistics of juggling a trillion chainsaws, in a manner of speaking.

Your comment makes it sound even less appealing since I avoid getting nerd sniped by my hacker mindset and go on to topics that actually interest me

I don’t think Tom7 videos will ‘nerd snipe’ you. Nobody has watched a Tom7 video and thought ‘wait, I need to implement something like that’.

They will give you some things to think about, some new metaphors to use (you clearly like geeky creators who give you metaphors to employ since you are aware of XKCD’s ‘nerd sniping’), and they will entertain you.

Throwing chainsaws in space is probably a more reasonable "juggle" that for example using blockchains as mass storage. It's also probably cheaper for the environment to boot.

I really need to add Tom's plugin to nbdkit upstream ...

this lives in my head rent free for the rest of my life

Haha..., storing data volatile, with not good retrieval success, slow speed in thousands of heads... I wonder if you could make a harder drive out of this approach... And how much you could store there. And does it benefit society?

Like automatic phone calls..., texts... :-D

GNU Terry Pratchett

is there a TL;DW on this? I don't have the patience for these long drawn out videos with bad audio.

Yes, previously submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159075

It's very hard to summarize

Try it, or work towards it as a goal

Unfortunately no. With a short attention span, you will just have to miss out on what makes his videos awesome. For this type of thing, making it accessible for you would ruin the magic.

The commenter could have ADHD or some other disadvantage outside of their control. Imagine applying what you said to someone in a wheelchair—“making it accessible to you would ruin the magic.” Gross.

Huh? Making many things wheelchair accessible would ruin them. Stad for wheelchair people, but not a bad thing to acknowledge... Right?

Why are you asking me again when I’ve already stated my position?

So I sat down and watched the entire thing. I didn't find it awesome or magical. Just annoyed that he stretched a concept that could be explained in 60 to 120 seconds into a whole lot of unentertaining, onanistic nonsense.

Loads of people are being criticised for criticising the video, by people here who are clearly fans of the guy's style of content.

It's okay to express dislike for something for a reason as much as it is to express like for something for a reason, people.

I've never watched one of this guy's videos before either and whilst I appreciate the time that went into it, it's too roundabout for me compared to someone like Breaking Taps (https://www.youtube.com/@BreakingTaps/videos). And that is a perfectly valid criticism, as is all the others here. We should encourage discourse.

Not sure calling something „onanistic nonsense“ constitutes discourse

The PDF a couple of weeks ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159075 Not sure if that counts as a dupe.

Also, it needs [2002] tagging.

*2022

Yeah I submitted that. Why is it #1? Should I flag it?

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