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volkl48

1,541 karma · joined June 29, 2017

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volkl48··on Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS.

I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.

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As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.

It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.

For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.

It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.

volkl48··on Germany must stand firmly against client-side scanning in Chat Control [pdf]
In Germany they certainly do.
volkl48··on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
Not a lawyer but the de facto law has always appeared to only care about uploading.

Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case.

Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.

volkl48··on Repasting a MacBook
Kind of a thing that isn't uniquely difficult if you've ever worked in a laptop before, hard if you've never done it.

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The ZIF connectors for those fans aren't different or much more fragile than the ones in most other laptops.

The adhesives on certain cables tend to trip people up a bit with causing them to pull more than they should and damage things.

Gently working under and releasing the adhesives on those fan cables with the spudger (or a fingernail) before you even start trying to move/unplug them will work a lot better for not tearing things than grabbing them with tweezers will.

The TouchID cable is fragile. Still shouldn't be any serious risk of breaking if you know to treat it with caution, but that would always be the one to take the most care with and watch the most closely while you're working around it.

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The secondary challenge is pretty much just making sure you have all the cables out of the way when you're putting the board back in, because you've got a dozen or more that you need to watch the positioning of and/or tape out of the way.

volkl48··on The death of partying in the USA
I'll suggest you are thinking of the teenage years where anything involving your parents is mortifying.

That's not really the case with elementary school age kids.

volkl48··on Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
The piece of the puzzle that you're missing is the dams at the far end of the road divert the Caniapiscau River into the La Grande River, which provides close to half the water that eventually feeds all of the generating stations downstream.

Additionally, the reservoirs formed are important for making the system provide reliable power to match demand - demand for power in Quebec peaks in the coldest parts of winter, and the natural peak of runoff/river flow....is not then.

So, the generation out there is useful but is not the primary reason why the road was built all the way out to there.

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No special insight on the difficulty/expense of constructing the transmission, but ~788MW of extremely cheap power forever for constructing/maintaining ~130mi of extra transmission doesn't seem completely improbable to work out financially, especially at the time.

I'll also note:

- Vegetation maintenance costs are probably low given how slow things grow out there.

- This was constructed long before the modern era of cheap(er) renewables.

- Even today, Quebec's location, weather, and time of year of peak demand make the calculation for solar's cost-effectiveness a lot harder.

volkl48··on Trans-Taiga Road (2004)
If you want to know what virtually any wildly remote road is like, one of the best places to check is usually where people doing motorcycle/off-road adventures post, like advrider.com

Someone, somewhere, has almost certainly gone there and done that, with pictures, documentation, and enough mentions of other things that you can look up for more details.

On that note, here's a 2021 trip from someone that I read a few months ago: https://forum.expeditionportal.com/threads/riding-the-most-r...

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But for a quick summary of what I got out of it/minor additional research:

- A few company (Hydro-Quebec) outposts of a few buildings each for workers out there at the hydro sites that are why the road exists and some rural airstrips for the same purpose. Presumably like any other isolated worksite in that sense.

- An outfitters near the mid-point with lodging, supplies, etc that seems to serve both the workers traveling the route and some tourism. Looks like some very good fishing out there and I see other notes on the internet of people trekking out that way to fish - both indigenous people and tourists. (Also quite pretty if you like the taiga + lakes environment).

- There appear to be some other travel groups that have some private camps in the region and fly people in for fishing via floatplane, too.

- Doesn't appear to be any other permanent settlement along the road.

volkl48··on Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being
We created office jobs that required sustained individual focus.

The traditional (high-walled) cube farm may be ugly, but it's also one where an employee could often work at their desk with relatively few distractions. If you're not going to build private offices, they're not that awful of a compromise for enabling focus.

Then in the past decade or two, we had the open-office trend, and changed the office to one full of endless visual and auditory distractions making focus difficult.

Employees wearing headphones at work is an obvious attempt by many to reduce the distractions that bad office design has created.

volkl48··on Glubux's Powerwall (2016)
Now.

I will point out that in 2016 when they started this project, the cost of new batteries would have been multiple times higher than it is today, so it would have been a moderately more "sensible" thing to do than it currently seems.

volkl48··on Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
A crashing plane has roughly two possibilities, screaming wildly seems like the least useful and least pleasant option for either:

- You are going down in a way that might be survivable - If you want to live, you want to shut up and prepare yourself and your peers as best you can. If you're completely prepared and have time to kill, see below as long as it doesn't impair being ready when the time comes.

- You are going down in a way that obviously isn't going to be survivable - Your remaining lifespan has been suddenly reduced to minutes or seconds and there's no solving it. The only choice you have left is how to spend that time. Accepting the hand you've been dealt quickly and doing the best you can with the choices available to you rather than panicking or raging about things out of your control, is....sensible. Taking a last view of the world out the window, listening to a favorite song, a conversation with a loved one or even a stranger, etc, all seem like far more satisfying ways to spend your final moments than screaming like it's going to do anything.

> I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal.

I'm not much of a biologist, but there seem to be plenty of animals, especially more intelligent ones, that pretty much calm down and await death when they recognize they are not long for the world for reasons they can't control and have no hope of escaping. (age, illness, etc).

volkl48··on State of emergency declared after blackout plunges most of Chile into darkness
Curfews are commonly imposed during/immediately after major disasters in any significantly populated area, pretty much anywhere I have ever heard of in the world.

It's certainly the case in both the US + Europe in my experience.

volkl48··on Fluoxetine promotes metabolic defenses to protect from sepsis-induced lethality
Sepsis is one of the leading causes of death and causes ~20% of all global deaths.

Research into quite literally anything that might give additional help to treating it is so obviously one of the most beneficial things we could be doing in terms of medical research that reading your post sounds completely foreign to me.

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Many cases of sepsis are relatively predictable in that they already know that this person is at high risk of it due to their condition or the type of intervention that's going to be required for their condition.

We're just not that great at stopping it from occurring with the tools currently available - antibiotics are not sufficient to solve/prevent it like you seem to think they are, or there'd be a lot less people dying of it.

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Presumably, if this research panned out in many additional trials, it's something that might be added to treatment protocols.

Even if it turned out to be useful but had limitations like being needed to be administered days in advance - there would still be significant utility for a lot of medically necessary but not immediate high-risk surgeries.

volkl48··on Steam makes its ban on in-game ads explicit
I take it you did not click on the article at all before commenting.

Racing games with real advertisements on the cars are explicitly given as an example as the type of thing that is fine in the article.

volkl48··on Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at end of Tokyo Chuo Rapid Line
Most places don't have a mostly continuous street wall with little/no setback from the public street/sidewalk.

Part of the problem in Manhattan has been that many buildings really do not have any place they could store those sorts of bins, or at least not in the quantity of them that they need for their trash output.

volkl48··on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
Historically/as national origin story, no.

But it has in recent decades accepted quite a large number of immigrants, and is at this point at a higher foreign-born % than the US, if still lower then Canada or Australia.

That's not quite the same as having a culture rooted in the immigration narrative, but it has changed significantly.

And I'll also mention that while integration of significant immigration into an existing society is clearly a challenging prospect everywhere, the UK is overall, doing noticeably better with it than most of it's European peers. Both from my subjective perspective as a somewhat regular visitor, and from a lot of the metrics I see.

This is a decent piece for the data side of that claim: https://samf.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-integration

volkl48··on The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
Russia has basically burned up their entire ex-Soviet equipment + munitions stocks blundering around in Ukraine. They're not really in a position to open another front with any substantial state.

I'd still be a bit worried if I was Georgia, possibly Moldova, maybe the Baltics if European defense commitments start looking even weaker, but to a large degree they're safer right now than they'd been with how badly depleted Russia is, not more at risk.

Poland's spending heavily right now (2025 projection is 4.7% of GDP) and rapidly up-arming itself. In terms of conventional conflict they're going to be in a pretty decent position.

I don't really see much in ways for Russia to be particularly "expansionist" beyond the places they're already an ongoing problem in. (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova).

volkl48··on The Aging Programmer
Not really an expert in the topic, and so I can't comment much on the mechanisms why, but AFAIK there's a decent body of evidence that hypermobility is significantly more common in the ADHD + Autism populations than the general public....and I don't think there's much debate that those populations are more likely to be programmers than the general public.

Haven't reviewed in depth, but here's an example to support that claim that looks reasonably credible from a quick review - for some types of hypermobility at least, 5x more likely for Adult ADHD, we're not necessarily talking some kind of small/statistical noise level difference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34560594/

volkl48··on Spotify is full of AI music
That's not how any of this works, though.

Spotify has the same licensing agreement.

The difference is that Spotify has a free tier (lower revenue from those users), their users listen more, and they may also have more customers in lower-income countries with lower subscription rates.

Which is to say - of you took a specific category of users - say, US-based paying subscribers and kept their listening activity the same - every streaming service would pay out roughly the same amount of royalties per-stream for that group of listeners.

volkl48··on NY governor signs law making the restaurant reservation black market illegal
To be a blunt as possible here: Then you don't get to go.

I recognize that the particular demographic that this board attracts probably doesn't like that answer. But among the general public, I'd say it's an extremely popular answer - and "addressing a problem in the market" this way looks like yet another way to make society unfair and biased to the rich, and the average person absolutely hates it. Which is why this law will have broad popular support.

volkl48··on Ghost artists on Spotify
Yes and no.

They do not pay out per stream. They pay out a set % of their total revenue to rights holders. Spotify has to pay the exact same amount of money before and after that change.

The savings for Spotify is in not having the (not so insignificant) administrative overhead of trying to make hundreds of thousands of basically worthless payouts to different individuals that are worth <$5 or even <$1.

I think it's fairly reasonable to draw some sort of lower bound on the minimum you need to reach to get a payout, especially in a world where basically anyone can put music on their service.

volkl48··on Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video, demonstrated on ThinkPad X230
Just to note: Apple will refuse to cover any screen damage under warranty if one of these sorts of things was in use.

I would not be surprised if the same is true for some other manufacturers, too, but I can only speak definitely to Mac.

The issue is that lids close too closely + tightly now, and so anything more than a piece of tape winds up focusing all the pressure applied to the closed lid on that one spot in the glass, since the cover winds up holding the display slightly off the base of the laptop when in the closed position.

volkl48··on USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas
> From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.

Great, but it's not contiguous. This stretch is about 70 miles long and merges back into I-40 at either end, and is the part of it we are talking about. What I said is accurate.

> The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist.

The farm in the middle of the desert that is a front for a decades-long attempt to loot and export the aquifer underneath it, regardless of the permanent damage it will cause, that one? That explicitly shouldn't exist.

It's also about 9 trailers and a house or two. And still has road access, as I noted and you appear to agree.

> Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover.

Meaning the actual paved road to get to the area, or the unmaintained (unofficial?) path from the road, under the tracks, to the hill itself?

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But this is getting into the debate weeds. I'll be very generous and call the population along this stretch of road about 50 people.

There's close to 100 timber bridges in need of replacement, 70 miles of degrading asphalt, and of course - perpetual maintenance costs for both over the long term. It serves basically zero transportation function today.

I'm not a small government type, but the many, many millions of dollars it would cost to actually repair this road (not to mention continue to maintain it), do not seem remotely justified by it's utility.

The very tiny populations, tiny amount of industry, and very limited north-south function (Amboy Rd) here can be served by keeping the ~10mi Amboy-Chambless stretch and abandoning the rest of it/downgrading it to a 4WD track across the desert just like the dozens of other roads. Maintained/paved access via I-40 from Kelbaker Rd only.

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tl;dr - This is not, in my view, a case of government being unable to maintain infrastructure. This is a case where a large portion of the population would not feel that putting money into keeping this road in existence as a paved/2WD road along it's full length, is a worthwhile endeavor. You clearly have a vested interest in it.

volkl48··on USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas
> Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.

I feel like it's extremely misleading to give this example without providing surrounding context.

"Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today.

It's not very obvious at all that it makes sense to spend money replacing the 100+ timber bridges along the stretch rather than just abandoning most of the road/downgrading it to a 4WD road with no bridges - although repairing/rebuilding it does seem to be what San Bernadino County hopes to eventually do.

Many of the bridges, while partially failing due to age, are also failing due to flooding damage - which is what caused the 3 ton weight restrictions to go in place in the first place and the sections that have been closed since 2014/2017.

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Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population, and there's basically zero regional significance to the closure beyond mildly inconveniencing a few people in Amboy who can now only go West to get to I-40/civilization. (Especially since most reports I've seen suggest you can continue to the unpaved/rarely traveled Cadiz Rd anyway, which was the only connection that could only be accessed from the closed section).

The road from Ludlow to the Dish Hill Volcano is open, just less convenient if you used to get to it from the East.

Citation: https://dpw.sbcounty.gov/operations/road-closures/

volkl48··on USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas
Thacker Pass appears to be federally owned (Bureau of Land Managment) land.

The public does own this land and does deserve some degree of a say in what's done with it.

I have no issue with this project, and I certainly don't think that means a loud but tiny opposition should be able to derail it, just noting that this isn't private property and thus public oversight should be higher.

volkl48··on A $1k Wheelchair
I do what your sister used to do. (Left hand mouse use, buttons left at default).

Even game that way. Started using it that way as a kid, by the time I learned it was possible to switch the buttons that seemed less natural than leaving it as default.

Also made it much easier to use shared computers in school labs and the like.

volkl48··on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
I think you're assuming that all pagers of this model were being sent out like this. That's unlikely.

Much more likely is they compromised someone in Hezbollah that was doing the ordering, or the distributor/vendor they ordered from, modified a couple thousand devices and sent them pretty much directly to their enemy, and only their enemy, to distribute among themselves. Then waited a bit, and set them off.

volkl48··on The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
At least in the US, most aircraft have internet now - many people are not offline. And even if they're not paying for the internet service, a number of airlines deliver their free entertainment services through personal devices - so they may be watching the same sort of content that would be in a seatback TV on other airlines.

Speaking personally:

I also tend to just load entire books onto my phone for flights. Reading on a small screen doesn't bother me.

With regards to talking - I like talking to strangers. However, the plane is one of the few places I try to avoid striking up conversations. People around me having loud (and it is loud, because talking quietly on a plane is impossible) conversations for hours about nonsense is something incredibly annoying to be on the receiving end of. While I enjoy actually having a conversation, I also know that by doing it I'll be annoying a half-dozen other people not involved in it but forced to listen to it in an environment where they can't do anything to escape it, and it feels rude to do that - especially since I don't enjoy when I'm in their position.

volkl48··on CrowdStrike representatives issue trademark infringement notice to ClownStrike
I mean, there's now what, 2,000 TLDs and growing? I'm not sure it's going to be practical to own every likely parody domain at every TLD.
volkl48··on Initial details about why CrowdStrike's CSAgent.sys crashed
It's not an option. While the admins at the customer have the ability to control when/how revisions of the client software go out (and this, can + generally do their own testing, can decide to stay one rev back as default, etc), there is no control over updates to the kind of update/definition files that were the primary cause here.

Which is also why you see every single customer affected - what you are suggesting is simply not an available thing to do at present for them.

At least for now - I imagine that some kind of staggered/slowed/ringed option will have to be implemented in the future if they want to retain customers.

volkl48··on Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items
Entirely serious suggestion: Make an aggressive sign, go stand in front of a federal office, and call a few news outlets.

A man who is going to die because of an incompetent government clerical error is the kind of thing that makes for a great outrage story.

And will also likely get someone intervening at a high level immediately once it's the subject of the news.

You shouldn't have to do this, but as far as methods within your grasp to fix it - it can be one of the most effective.

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