jabberwcky

You are literally commenting on the thread for a blog post describing the mess that occurs when a drive is incorrectly erased. JFC

> This is not remotely accurate

At least Ext4 repeats the complete superblock at the beginning of every block group, so yes, it is not only remotely accurate, but entirely accurate. In the case of GPT, Linux requires explicit command line options to enable alternative GPT use, but do you know this is true for all systems in existence and all versions of Linux?

> Rebooting and re-detecting everything between partitioning and mkfs is not part of any ordinary OS installation procedure

Yes, I've personally bumped into this on desktop and unattended server installs - numerous times.

But you're externalizing the onus to prove cases where some hacky approach won't ever break when there is a vastly simpler way to avoid this entire class of problem. This is exactly the reverse of sound logic -- I'm offering you concrete real world examples of why you should avoid the hack and you're simply ignoring them

At this point I'm considering this not only to be offering up worst-practice advice, but actively trolling. Possibly the worst case of "a little knowledge is dangerous" I've seen recently. Regards

GPT along with most filesystems store a bunch of stuff at random places around the disk, for many filesystems it's even configurable.

The most usual problem with your approach is recreating a set of partition tables exactly matching the old tables, while failing to wipe out a filesystem signature buried halfway into the disk. One reboot later, and magic header bytes start to be recognized as valid filesystems by whatever OS installer or BIOS utility you happen to be using. Even worse if you're been taking some hacky shotgun approach to blowing holes in the drive by zeroing out random sectors that belong to one of those recognized filesystems.

So once again,

> The only portable, reliable, robust way to accomplish this is wiping the drive

> But right now we're just trying to make a device appear functionally empty so that we can re-install an OS without remnants of any previous installation getting in the way

The only portable, reliable, robust way to accomplish this is wiping the drive. If the original author had issued a secure erase, they would not have encountered any subsequent difficulties, all of which were due to partially erasing the device.

It is still bad advice, zero filling an SSD is not nearly the same as erasing it due to the presence of large (up to 10% or more of the drive) overprovisioning areas present in all devices, ignoring the permanent wear zero-filling the drive also causes, and the fact the controller believes real data remains stored, placing restrictions on its ability to perform internal maintenance

This option is horrendously inefficient on most modern drives. For many SSDs, issuing a secure erase request is an almost instantaneous process as it only requires the drive to generate a replacement encryption key, and need not even entail bulk writing or erasing physical flash pages

The worst experience I had with this involved 4 customer service representatives simply hanging up (after a 30+ minute wait) after exhausting their script. I simply recorded the final call, stopping paying the bill, and sent the documentation I had to the credit reference agency when the contract went into default

At some point they sent a debt collection agency, that was much less stressful than it sounds. They called me up, "you owe $telco money", "No I don't", "oh?", "Yes, I have complete documentation of cancelling it, but their CS reps kept hanging up. Sorry, you've been had.", "Oh, this again. Sorry to have bothered you.", never heard from the debt collection agency again.

Substantively, this is a battle between a US media powerhouse and a sovereign nation over control of its local media. This isn't "ideological flamewar", it is an inescapable reality underpinning the case.

I like the idea of flipping DIMMs to get capacity and processing improvements, and also the thought that mass-produced memory with this tech could potentially significantly reduce the cost of AI hardware through commoditization

Thanks

(obligatory scihub reference)

Dubious energy savings claims, but sounds like potentially awesome tech. Looking forward to their slides/paper next week

We can conveniently nitpick whether or not we treat Apple products as an integrated hardware-software product, the reality is thousands of these units have shipped and from those screenshots, many have already racked up 2-4 years wear in a matter of weeks, for a component that cannot be replaced without replacing the entire motherboard.

The product configuration as shipped inflicts permanent damage on itself, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a manufacturing defect.

Love this! Please make landing screen a teeny bit prettier and you could definitely start recommending this to regular 'retail' folk. I'd consider putting the about text below the main 'create room' panel for example

It looks like a nerd app, just needs a tiny bit of swish to make it a mom and pop app too

That's perhaps unsurprising.. it certainly would be far from the first industry to suffer from institutional blindness to any inconvenient metric that might challenge a self-stated purpose

In paragraph 27, after spending paragraphs 3-26 documenting the public reaction to a dramatic half-truth revealed in paragraph 2. This is called storytelling. You're likely aware article order is deeply important, but if not, consider reading https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-... . The bottom line is most visitors likely only read the half-truth.

I got the screenshot from one of the deposed mods, who has been around since 2012 (I'm one of the earliest sub members FWIW, but never a mod), he was part of the last cohort of "good ones" following the deposing of the sub founder. This person certainly is not a friend, I'd generally struggle to befriend the kind of personality attracted to Reddit's system of moderation, and especially not after already witnessing the many concealed knives.

Hopefully this also answers the question of why you haven't seen it before.

Is any of this unexpected? Not at all, it's Reddit, this is structural. That's why I find the actions and encouragement from the admins far more interesting.

> many screenshots, a Discord discussion, a discussion in a moderators-only group

These all refer to exactly the same thing.

How do you suppose the article's tone would change had they mentioned in the second paragraph plans to donate any earnings to charity?

As usual the times is great at telling a story, but in this case one built entirely on a cropped screenshot. See https://i.imgur.com/KZGwIw9.png for the reality of the naked profiteering the mods were planning.

I think it's more interesting how Reddit responded to it. Their willingness to quickly roll the heads of folk pouring months of their lives into moderation suggests perhaps they capitalize on these dramas to shore up control of their own communities. It makes a lot of sense from Reddit's perspective to not have any superstar moderators be seen to 'own' or have excessive user loyalty from the group they're responsible for. Such things could easily lead to exoduses or public spats with the admins that could be overall bad for the site.

Also consider the public rationale ("we don't care why, disruptive folk will always be removed") applied to moderators when in both of these uproars, it was actually a single user ("SpeaksInbooleans") responsible for lighting the fires. AFAIK he is still a member of the group

Nothing close to 120 gigawatt/sec (going by one estimate)

The inverse of effeminate by definition is butch, I purposefully avoided using it as it invokes yet more popular and inaccurate gay stereotypes that in no way capture the folk I was describing

> effeminate male

> gay son

This is a dangerous stereotype that is equally harmful to people of any sexuality, I'd encourage you to correct it. Most of the gay folk I know personally tend towards the athletic end of the spectrum

I'll be gone from Reddit completely the day they turn off old.reddit.com, which surely must be fast approaching.

Meanwhile, limited to subreddits of only a few K users still captures something of that original feel, but smart conversation has long since moved elsewhere.

If you think you can beat the system you have the option of a voluntary self-assessment for under 100k, over 100k you have to file one anyway and it offers plenty of wiggle room. Self assessment is such a non-event the entire procedure always feels new by the following year.

Are you attacking him because he's using TLS? Will you ever be satisfied?

TLS fixes a whole lot more than just privacy, it's also authenticating the remote end. Are we really suggesting dumping something that is trivially accelerated in hardware to do some homebrew crypto crap just for the sake of a forum thread?

Netflix solution is fine, and the concentration of interest in TLS means it only gets cheaper over time to build Netflix-like configurations, which is especially great since we've spent the past decade or more trying to convince the entire industry this configuration is also best practice

This site is designed to destroy old eyeballs. Is it just me or is the font razor-thin? Firefox Ubuntu 19.04 HiDPI

Changing <body> CSS rule to "color: black; font-weight: normal" was required to actually read the page here

Which could have been anywhere between an 81% to 810% drawdown in a typical leveraged strategy. Very few levered positions would have survived it without stopping out or completely blowing up, but an unlevered position absolutely could have -- and most (long term buy and hold) did

It should also be noted Melvin would not have achieved these results without leverage, which is precisely why a single holding almost destroyed the fund. Comparing unlevered benchmark index return to ultra-levered fund return simply doesn't work. The S&P most certainly outperformed Melvin on a risk-adjusted basis due to this single drawdown alone.

Only watched the video, was disappointed by https://youtu.be/gCKJ29RaggU?t=408 , where they are comparing against tiny b*tree page sizes that nothing uses any more - 4k, 16k and 64k are way more common

It never ceases to amaze me how easily the attitudes of finance folk so easily leak out. It seems performing a worst-case O(log N) lookup and spitting out the resulting 100 bytes over UDP counts as harder than Twitter, parent comment clearly has no idea how much work Twitter needs to perform for every tweet (URL previews much?)

Meanwhile, could have simply said you work for NYSE.

A browser and its bookmarks are my personal window to the world, I wouldn't enable a feature like sync for love or money. What a crazy idea: hey ad company, here is everything I bookmarked that I wouldn't dare even mention to my closest confidants