simoncion

> ...how would they possibly be able to run this airgapped?

A logical airgap that the tool would have to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure to overcome [0] would be for the DC staff to put the machines running the tools under test on a VLAN that doesn't have access to anything other than computers on the VLAN. Try to cross over into some other subnet/VLAN or reach out to the Internet, your packets get dropped and/or rejected. It doesn't matter if you change your IP or MAC addresses because the infrastructure only cares about what VLAN your traffic comes from. If you attempt to tag your traffic to avoid this, the infrastructure drops it on the floor because it does the VLAN tagging.

As far as the possibility of physical airgaps, how do you imagine that AWS's Top Secret regions work?

The truth of the matter is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic wanted to actually isolate this stuff. Their conduct doesn't look like what you'd expect from people who believe that they're working on something so dangerous that it could plausibly wipe out all of humanity.

[0] ...and if the workloads running on client hardware are in a position to be able to attempt to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure, someone done fucked up...

> ...I believe that there should be laws specifically governing the development of AI...

Why? Existing truth-in-advertising, liability, safety, and -where and when appropriate- weapons-development laws and regulations constrain the past and current conduct of the LLM manufacturers just fine.

The only possible reason for making new laws that I can see [0] is that existing laws "don't work" because the LLM manufacturers are ignoring them. Which, like, _if_ the new laws are going to actually constrain their behavior, why the hell would the LLM manufacturers pay any attention to them? They've already demonstrated that they give zero shits about the existing laws that prohibit what they have been doing and continue to do.

[0] ...that isn't "The LLM manufacturers are engineering a panic with their very real, actual, and actually alarming conduct so that they can 'guide' lawmakers and regulators into 'accidentally' letting the LLM manufactures capture those who would regulate their behavior"...

> As of last month, Steam reports that >15% of their customers still have 4GB VRAM or less...

Based on my testing (and the fact that Factorio officially runs on the OG Switch) Factorio fits comfortably in less than 4GB of VRAM. So, the relevant percentage is 9.6%... the slice of their customers that have 3GB of VRAM or less.

But, the slice is actually smaller than that! The minimum graphics requirement listed on the Steam Store page is

> DirectX 11 capable GPU with 1GB VRAM - GeForce GTX 750 Ti, Radeon R7 360 or Intel UHD Graphics 730

Given that Wubi actively tested on hardware with 1GB of VRAM [0] and that they've proven themselves to be highly-technical people that sweat the details and talk about it both publicly and in-depth, I believe that to be an accurate minimum system requirement. Requiring 1GB of VRAM excludes 2.7% of those who chose to do the Steam Hardware survey.

Given that very few OpenGL/D3D/Vulkan 3D games [1] released in the past like ten years will run with 512MB of VRAM, 1GB of VRAM seems to be a fine cutoff point to me.

[0] <https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281>

[1] Yes, I'm aware that Factorio is a 2D game. The comment that started this discussion claimed that Factorio "uses so much VRAM" because it's a 2D game rather than a 3D one.

I'm going to restrict my commentary to the base game, both because you're deliberately ignoring the stuff in the Space Age expansion, and because I've not yet gotten to the new stuff in the expansion. While the following might sound like a "gotcha!", it isn't:

> I get bored whenever there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.

There is only one way to process iron ore: put it in a furnace. There is no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are only three ways to make electricity, and two of them require you to boil water. There's no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are so many examples of places where stock Factorio permits you only one way to do a thing and prevents you from inventing alternatives.

> The system for moving between planets is locked down. ... And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling.

All of the systems for transporting materials are locked down... it's hand-transport, belts, bots, trains, or nothing. Hand-transport's godawful scaling is why you build everything else. Bots are deliberately designed to scale incredibly poorly and belts to scale pretty badly, which is why you're -as it seems like you'd say- forced to use trains to transport materials over very long distances.

> The tech tree become more rigid. Exploration must happen in a more specific order. And then the graphics department takes over, adding more and more objects until a previously huge and open world is a tightly cluttered mess.

That hasn't happened to Factorio in the thirteen years that Wubi has been working on it.

> Wtf is life just court battles back and forth for everything forever now?

Not for peasants like you and me! We are forced to surrender our Seventh Amendment rights in order to be able to do most things that are part of everyday life.

> I think we need strong action now...

You and I and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang seem to agree on this. Excerpts from his interview with Ezra Klein: [0]

Klein:

  But what I hear the various people in the lab saying is: We are in this. We feel we are losing control of what we are creating. We want help to slow down where it’s not a collective action problem.
  
  So why are you resistant to that?

Huang:

  Because these are companies with agency. These are C.E.O.s with agency. ... They could absolutely take care of the situation.
  
  Ezra, it’s so weird. If a car company, competing with a bunch of other car companies, which they are — I’m competing with all kinds of companies, which I am. If I believe that I’m about to launch a product that is unsafe, it is completely in my ability, my power and my responsibility, and I’m incentivized to do so, to not launch the product.
  
  And so I can’t buy into the idea that somehow, all of Americans, around 400 million of us, are pushing them to launch untested products that are unreliable, engineered poorly, because they thought they were trying to help us. Don’t do it for me, OK?
  
  And therefore, I think we’ve got to break it down. I mean, it’s really, really serious.
  
  The fact of the matter is, there are so many laws, there are so many obligations, they’re so incentivized to ship safe products. If they ship unsafe products, their customers go away. If they ship unsafe products and they harm somebody, they could have a civil lawsuit. If they ship something and they did it knowingly, there could be negligence involved. There could be criminal lawsuits.
  
  The fact of the matter is, there are plenty of incentives for them to do it right. So I have to disagree with your premise that somehow somebody’s pushing them to do this. Nobody’s pushing them to do this. ... I’m saying that we have lots of laws and regulations. Apply it.

Former FTC chair Lina Kahn has suggestions, too. [1]

Thoughts?

[0] <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...>

[1] <https://x.com/linamkhan/status/2099204390548639960>

> What I dispute is that AI agents are simple tools.

You're in luck! I agree that they are not simple tools. I never claimed that they were. Slow down and read more carefully.

I couldn't disagree more with the insinuation that the LLM manufacturers are doing things akin to scary research on uncontrollable hazardous biologicals and with the claim that "rogue AI" is the correct thing to call those complicated tools. The first is fearmongering which I'll address indirectly in my second-to-last paragraph. The second shifts the conversation from

"How could you have not predicted that the computer-attacking tool you built, explicitly instructed to attack computers, [0] and connected to the Internet attacked someone else's computers that were connected to the Internet?"

to

"Wow, that thing went rogue. Noone's to blame but the tool, and it can't be blamed!".

There are so many extremely complex systems out there [1] and when they do things that we don't want them to do, it's not described as "going rogue"... either there's some error(s) in the underlying system that caused the confusing behavior, or the programmer didn't understand well enough how that system works.

> ...they are creating something dangerous that they have no idea how to control

Ignoring the fact that "put it in a box and don't let it out of the box" is the simplest possible control mechanism, [2] if they have no idea how to control the tools they've been building, it's because they haven't bothered to learn as they went. Tangentially related, there's a Tumblr post I saw recently that's a fictional conversation with the Tumblr user and the CEO of Anthropic. It went something like

  Amodei: We're building an incredibly dangerous tool that has a 10% chance of killing all humanity. We *must* be regulated to ensure everyone's safety!
  
  Tumblr User: Regulation takes time, please stop building the incredibly dangerous tool?
  
  Amodei: ...No.

[0] That is -after all- the task that the tool was put to when it attacked other people's computers.

[1] Have you ever tried to really understand a specific AMD x86-64 CPU, let alone the entire stack that makes up the system that is a consumer-grade PC and its installed software? Both are definitely way more than any one human can keep in their head at once, and are tasks that would take a very long time to complete.

[2] ...it's also the most appropriate control mechanism for the task that started all this conversation, and neither of the major manufacturers used it!

> The models were not trained on systems intentionally connected to the internet...

If Amazon connects an AWS Top Secret region to the Internet, it doesn't matter whether or not it's intentional... they're getting nailed to the wall by the US government either way. Frankly, it's way worse for them if it was accidental; deliberate, sophisticated sabotage is a much better story than rank incompetence and/or negligence.

A similar sort of thing applies to the manufacturers of tools that they claim to be dangerous, that have been deliberately built to exceed their authorized access to other computer systems, and are deliberately being tested on how well they can do the thing they've been built to do.

Deliberate, sophisticated sabotage by one or more humans in their employ is much more forgivable than "Whoopsie, we didn't think to make it literally impossible to connect this dangerous automated computer-hacking tool to the Internet.".

You're missing the point here.

If we take the major LLM companies' claims at face value, they're knowingly building WMDs that have a high probably of wiping out the entire human race. [0] Manufacturers that are designing, building, and selling that sort of thing need to have a dreadfully serious culture of safety.

When manufacturers run live tests of their extremely dangerous -again, the claim of danger is their claim- tools with the tools' safeties removed, one expects that those tests will be run on a carefully-controlled range cleared of all bystanders. One also expects that the results of those tests will be scrutinized and everything that got damaged that they didn't intend to be damaged will be noticed and noted very quickly after the conclusion of the test.

In actuality, these manufacturers connected said tools to the Internet and did not discover the unintended damage caused by those tools until weeks to months after the tests. In some (most?) cases, they had to be notified of the damage by the damaged party! This means that their safety culture is entirely inadequate for the dangerous task they've deliberately chosen to undertake.

[0] A 10% chance of causing the destruction of the entire human race is -given the stakes- _enormous_.

> The entities they committed the crimes against need to press charges.

If this were true, the DoJ would have been unable to prosecute Swartz. According to your logic, JSTOR was the aggrieved party. JSTOR settled with Swartz and -despite that- he was indicted by a Federal grand jury like a month later.

Incidentally, some of the things the DoJ nailed Swartz to the wall for sound awfully similar to what the big LLM providers have been doing. I wonder why the DoJ is entirely disinterested in pressing charges...

EDIT: Unless your point is that the USG is one of the entities that the big LLM companies have committed crimes against, which, I disagree with in Swartz's case, but strongly agree with in the case of the big LLM companies.

> Nothing about California's property tax decisions have anything to do with 99.9% of Zuck's (and others') wealth not being taxed!

That may be true, but you appear to have missed the part of the sentence you quoted that came after the semicolon:

  California reaches for exotic taxes because its normal one has been broken since 1978.

Property taxes make up a large portion of many states' tax income. 1978's Proposition 13 made it so that California is -more or less- unable to tax the actual value of any property in the state. Wealthy people who've held on to property for decades get to borrow against the "market value" of that property, but the value of the property used to calculate the tax owed to the state only increases at a maximum of something like 2% per year. This means that you'll see long-term landlords (and holding companies) getting the financial benefits of a -say- multi-million dollar property, but the state only gets the tax of -say- a multi-deca-thousand dollar property.

Because of Proposition 13, property tax increases in California will affect an extremely tiny slice of landowners, [0] so it must turn to other mechanisms when it needs more tax revenue.

In regards to private "wealth creation", it turns out that money is fungible and you absolutely can built a bunch of wealth off of a mortgage if the "market" value of that property has increased by a huge amount, but the costs of holding that property haven't increased much at all.

[0] This doesn't contradict what I've said, I've just left out some details. A quick summary:

Ignoring a few exceptions, when a property changes ownership its property tax is adjusted to be based on the current "market" rate. When nontrivial improvements are made to a property, the property tax is adjusted to account for the "market" value of only those improvements. [1] Some "clever" people have been known to get around the "property changes hands" trigger by making the property be owned by a company and distributing private shares in that company. Want out? Get rid of all of your shares. Want in? Get shares from someone who already has them, or maybe convince those who are in to make more for you. The property is still owned by the company, so its tax is not adjusted.

[1] It's important to note that repairs are not improvements. It's also important to note that the government can choose to ignore all of these rate-reset rules whenever it wants, as it did when all those extremely wealthy people in LA got their houses burned down in that big wildfire that hit LA.

> "...WHAT ABOUT THE DMV???"

And I'd ask them: "What about the DMV?".

Perhaps I'm uniquely able to read and understand simple instructions, or maybe I've never asked the DMV to do anything especially complicated, but I've never had the DMV fail to do what I came there to have it do for me. The worst I've gotten from a DMV was having to wait for literally an entire day when I made the mistake of going to the San Francisco DMV to get something done, rather than doing the smart thing and going to an office in one of the nearby towns. It's... very stupid that there's a single DMV office for a city of -last I checked- nearly a million people.

> If we're going by anecdote I know...

Given how sloppy you were with the article you implicitly claimed to have read, I have zero confidence in the accuracy of your anecdotes.

> Thank you for checking the source.

Respectfully, why the hell didn't you check it? It's only a couple of pages long. Did you do something dreadfully silly like employ some LLM to "assist" you with your conversation?

Exactly.

When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.

Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!

You:

  Only about 6% nicotine users manage to quit every year.

Your linked article:

  Yet, only about 6 percent of smokers are able to quit in a given year.

Other than when it talks about prescription smoking cessation tools, the article does not mention anything other than tobacco smokers. The last paragraph of the article actually discusses the observation that the ritual of smoking often provides substantial behavioral reinforcement to the smoker who is attempting to quit smoking.

I also note that I was able to quit nicotine cold-turkey after smoking cigarettes for two years. I've never been able to quit caffeine... and -although it is notably shorter in duration- caffeine withdrawal is WAY worse than nicotine withdrawal.

> Heck it's been 4 years and I still sometimes get dreams where I'm vaping.

It has been way more than four years for me, and I'll smell some cigarette smoke when I'm in a mood and be all like "Man, wouldn't it be nice if I got me one of those?".

But, I can say the same sort of thing about my reaction to the odor of coffee or caffeinated tea. Despite the fact that the very same place I get my coffee and tea from sells cigarettes -and wouldn't even card me because I'm so very obviously old- I've been able to quit nicotine. I've never been able to quit caffeine.

> ...vaping is fucking obnoxious for non smokers...

As a former smoker and non-smoker for a long time now, I disagree.

> ...clouds of awful smelling residue...

IME, most of the time it smells far better than cigarette smoke.

> ...and plastic shit everywhere.

Litterbugs are gonna litter, man. I know this because I live in a place with a very high concentration of them. Is the litterbug done with his drink, takeout, or other item that came in some disposable packaging? Is the trash can that's clearly visible from his current location more than two feet away? Then that packaging ends up directly on the sidewalk or tossed into the street.

Worse than that are litterbugs who are also dog owners. Their creed is "Pick up my dog's dogshit and put it in a trashcan? Hell no, fuck that, and fuck you!".

> ...it still felt as bad because of the smoke you're inhaling.

Unless you have an incredibly defective vaporizer, that "smoke" you're talking about is as much smoke as the "steam" in a hot shower is. If your vaporizer is producing smoke, you need to dispose of it and get one that doesn't set things on fire.

> Our lungs are extremely sensitive receptors and are pretty much supposed to interact with absolutely nothing else other than the air we breathe.

You might be astounded at how much junk is in the air we breathe, even in "clean" natural locations. Because the natural environment is so incredibly filthy and because the natural environment contains so many things that want to eat us (because -as it turns out- we're made of food!) our bodies are built to interact with and neutralize all sorts of contaminants.

> ...interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on...

By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?

If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.

EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.

> ...I pretty much always end up with a migrate and minor.

Minor what?

And yeah, two things:

1) It's telling that -despite the fact that the closest store that I get my coffee and tea from also sells cigarettes (and that I'm so obviously old that they don't ask me for ID, so that minor inconvenience isn't a factor)- I've been able to quit nicotine, but never able to quit caffeine.

2) I can't even count the number of times I've consumed a mug of tea or coffee for no other reason than to avoid withdrawal symptoms. Cigarettes were never like that for me. Just like caffeine, I inevitably developed a tolerance... but working through nicotine withdrawal was annoying, rather than _painful_.

From my ~25 years of using Gentoo Linux, I'd say that it's exactly what you describe in your first sentence. The complexity is there if you want it, but only if you want it.

Gentoo is quite a bit more work to get set up than other distros, but

* Once you get it set up, it just keeps on going

* If you're already fairly familiar with Linux system administration, the setup process isn't hard... it just involves a lot of waiting, unless you use the distro-provided precompiled packages

* There's really good documentation that walks you through the installation process and leaves you with a computer with a functioning bootloader and kernel, Internet access, and some pointers towards what you might want to install next

> ...most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection.

What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.

> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...

As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.

I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.

In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.

[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.

> You don't see ads and public health messages for quitting coffee, you don't see bans for coffee advertising...

That'd be because -unlike cigarette and cigar smoking- coffee doesn't create a substantially elevated risk of cancer.

Had we had the tech for portable personal nicotine vaporizers back in the 1600s [0] and retained it until today, I very strongly expect that -other than the "Drugs of all kinds are bad!" moralizers- you'd not see much of that sort of concern.

> Besides, nicotine withdrawal is utter hell.

Waaaay back when when I quit cold turkey after smoking for a couple of years I was very grouchy and irritable (and knew that a cigarette would fix it) for like a week. That was it. I've not tried nicotine vaporizers, but I'd be interested to see if -given similarly sized nicotine doses- quitting vaporized nicotine after a couple of years is as annoying as quitting cigarettes was.

> Caffeine withdrawal usually is solved by a night of good healthy sleep...

That tells me that you haven't gone through serious caffeine withdrawal. The effects from quitting caffeine cold turkey last for less time, but way more unpleasant than quitting cigarettes.

[0] ...or whenever it was that tobacco smoking started to become A Thing...

Yeah, once you remove the hazards inherent in cigarette and/or cigar smoking from the discussion, the only solid objection I've heard to nictotine consumption is that it's probably more addictive than caffeine.

I understand why personal vaporizer use was demonized, but -goddamn- that's going to be a public health disaster only an order of magnitude or two smaller than when folks started demonizing nuclear power back in the mid 1900's.

The lightly-edited transcript, relocated to a second comment to maybe avoid folding up the report:

  # lvcreate --size 3T --name testlv --stripes=2 testvg
    Using default stripesize 64.00 KiB.
    Logical volume "testlv" created.
  # mkfs.btrfs /dev/mapper/testvg-testlv
  btrfs-progs v7.1
  See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io for more information.
  <extra crap removed>
  # mount -o compress-force /dev/mapper/testvg-testlv /mnt/test/
  # btrfs fi usage
      Device size:     3.00TiB
      Device allocated:     2.02GiB
      Device unallocated:     3.00TiB
      Device missing:       0.00B
      Device slack:       0.00B
      Used:    320.00KiB
      Free (estimated):     3.00TiB (min: 1.50TiB)
  <extra crap removed>
  # dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/5TBFile bs=4MiB count=5TiB
  1310720+0 records in
  1310720+0 records out
  5497558138880 bytes (5.5 TB, 5.0 TiB) copied, 2510.22 s, 2.2 GB/s
  # /usr/bin/time --format='** fi sync %e' btrfs fi sync /mnt/test
  ** fi sync 0.00
  # btrfs fi df /mnt/test/ | grep Data
  Data, single: total=160.00GiB, used=160.00GiB
  # /usr/bin/time --format='** totalTime %e' bash -c "
    /usr/bin/time --format='** 20gbTime %e' bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/20GBFile bs=4MiB count=20GiB status=none; du -h /mnt/test/20GBFile; rm /mnt/test/20GBFile'&
    /usr/bin/time --format='** 10gbTime %e' bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/10GBFile bs=4MiB count=10GiB status=none;  du -h /mnt/test/10GBFile; rm /mnt/test/10GBFile'&
    wait"
  10G /mnt/test/10GBFile
  ** 10gbTime 2.42
  20G /mnt/test/20GBFile
  ** 20gbTime 4.95
  ** totalTime 4.95
  # date
  Sun Sep 20 10:19:46 PM PDT 2026
  # /usr/bin/time --format='** totalTime %e' bash -c "
    /usr/bin/time --format='** 05tbTime %e' rm /mnt/test/5TBFile &
    sleep 5 # It takes a few seconds for the delete to start making things slow when the file has been compressed. The operations on the 10GB file will complete in a normal amount of time if this sleep isn't present.
    /usr/bin/time --format='** 20gbTime %e' bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/20GBFile bs=4MiB count=20GiB status=none; du -h /mnt/test/20GBFile; rm /mnt/test/20GBFile'&
    /usr/bin/time --format='** 10gbTime %e' bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/10GBFile bs=4MiB count=10GiB status=none;  du -h /mnt/test/10GBFile; rm /mnt/test/10GBFile'&
    wait"
  10G /mnt/test/10GBFile
  ** 10gbTime 183.64
  20G /mnt/test/20GBFile
  ** 20gbTime 259.47
  ** 05tbTime 1026.21
  ** totalTime 1026.22
  # date ; /usr/bin/time --format='** 20gbTime2 %e' bash -c 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/20GBFile bs=4MiB count=20GiB status=none; du -h /mnt/test/20GBFile; rm /mnt/test/20GBFile' ; date
  Sun Sep 20 10:36:52 PM PDT 2026
  20G /mnt/test/20GBFile
  ** 20gbTime2 23.04
  Sun Sep 20 10:37:15 PM PDT 2026

I don't see that as odd. It looks like it was released at about the same time that zstd was getting added to filesystems, and a little bit prior to when IBM acquired Red Hat. It's quite possible that IBM decided that "little" things like enhancing LVM aren't worth the money.

Thanks for the information.

I made a ~3TB btrfs FS and mounted it with 'force-compress', put 5TB of zeros on it (which compressed down to like 160GB), and did a delete along with some concurrent operations on that same FS. Based on what I saw, btrfs doesn't "block access for minutes" while a large delete is in progress, but access to the volume that has the delete in progress is dreadfully slow. I used vim to create a new file in the mountpoint and saw that write delays were between ten and twenty seconds. Really bad, but still functional. Not at all blocked.

Someone in that Reddit discussion that you linked to says that all btrfs filesystems hang during an extremely large delete. This is not what happens for me. The only btrfs FS made slow was the one that had the ongoing delete. I have four other btrfs filesystems mounted and they're all just fine, whether or not they're on the same physical disk that has the ongoing delete. space_cache is v2 on all of my btrfs filesystems.

On my system, it looks like an events_unbound kworker was eating 100% of a single CPU while the big delete was in progress. No other kernel threads seemed to be consistently occupied.

For fun, I re-ran the thing I document below when mounted without compression, and then with an uncompressable file when mounted with non-forced compression. I had to reduce the size of the file to 2TB for both scenarios, but omitting compression writes out like 10x the data to disk, so it still seems like a fair test.

I'm not going to the trouble to provide a transcript for those two runs, but both when mounted without compression enabled and when an uncompressable file was written to a compression-not-forced volume, I saw absolutely no delays in filesystem operations while I was deleting that 2TB file. FWIW, putting 2TB of /dev/zero on that compression-not-forced volume and deleting it behaved the same as it did on a 'force-compress' mount.

Whatever is causing the dreadful slowness is directly linked to transparent compression, rather than being something you get when you run btrfs in all configurations. "Why run btrfs if not for transparent compression?" you might ask. I would answer: "Snapshots and reflinks, and yes, I know that XFS has reflinks too.".

A lightly-edited terminal transcript follows for if you want to double-check my work up to the end of the 'force-compress' run.

> it blocks access to fs for minutes if you remove large files.

How large is large? I've deleted files with sizes of tens to hundreds of GBs and not seen that, and can probably whip up a test with a single-digit TB file if motivated.

Do you perhaps have 'discard=sync' in your mount options, or are using a kernel earlier than 6.2, which is the version -according to the docs- where async discard became the default?

> would want to have compression..

I learned about VDO today. [0][1] I'd never heard of it before, but I'm using Gentoo Linux and both the dm-vdo kernel module and the 'vdo' software provided by [1] are distributed by Gentoo... so this isn't some weirdo Red Hat thing. It looks like you manage and used these just like any other thin-provisioned LVM volume [2], but -like I said- I've not used this before, and have only just skimmed the docs, so it's possible that I'm missing something important.

[0] <https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...>

[1] <https://github.com/dm-vdo/vdo>

[2] <https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...>

> Those contracts and licenses are just a form of protection enforced by the State.

Yes, that's how property works most anywhere that has stable government. Societies where The State has a monopoly on violence are usually far more stable and pleasant to live in than ones where vigilantism is how correction of injuries is done.

> Reddit comments are freely accessible by the public, yes?

In exactly the same way that the books in my local public library are freely accessibly to the public, yes. I'm sure that you're aware there are so many things you can't legally do with books in your local public library. Reddit isn't substantially different... go read the "User Agreement" contract that governs use of the site when you get a free hour or two.

> To read this post you must pay me $5. Please leave your contact information...

You can totally prevent me from -among other things- making many sorts of commercial uses of your post, but -as I'm sure you know- the made-up system you're gesturing at not how software licenses have worked for roughly as long as software has been a thing that was commonly licensed.

Anyway. It sounds like you want a return to "publish nothing, keep everything of worth secret to anyone not in the guild, and do what needs done to people who the guild suspects has betrayed its secrets". Those were the really bad old days, and the awfulness of that system was why the US adopted the patent system back in the late 1700s. It's also part of why it adopted the copyright system [0] as well as limited term lengths (fourteen years, with an option for fourteen more if the work's author was still alive and explicitly requested an extension).

[0] Though, you had to explicitly register your work with the relevant authorities to get protection... unregistered works received no protection. Things stayed this way for roughly two hundred years, and -IMO- should have stayed that way.