Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

10940X

“They say”, but they’re right. Ryzen chips do have worse idle power usage, but you’re talking about 10w or so, at most.

And uh, if you were looking at an X-series CPU, I can’t see how that 10w is a dealbreaker, because you were already looking at a shockingly inefficient chip.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.

I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.

Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There’s also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.

It’s not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it’s still reasonable if you have an era you’re after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don’t, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.

…stop looking at me like that.

There’s also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that’s a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian’s Digital Basement, Necroware)

I’m not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.

Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.

And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you’re right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the “right” computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.

(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it’s still pretty great.)

Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don’t know if that’s just physics being a pain or if it’s straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.

Anyway I’ll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.

Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.

I’m the same way. If it’s split license, then it’s a matter of when and not if it’s going to have some MBA come along and enshittify it.

There’s just way, way too much prior experience where that’s what eventually will happen for me to be willing to trust any project that’s doing that, since the split means they’re going to monetize it, and then have all the incentive in the world to shit all over the “free” userbase to try to get them to convert.

Fedora was always a bleeding-edge distro and never all that stable or reliable.

The problem is RedHat/IBM have been fucking with everything, and Fedora has suffered along with everything else and it’s just kinda decayed a bit over the past few years.

…Ubuntu went to shit at least a decade ago, if not longer.

You keep cloning and configuring shit on a Win10 instance because you can’t find the key?

That’s silly and you should just stop doing that: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

There you go! One less problem to deal with.

Honestly at this point it’d be your kids stealing your car, then blasting the Beastie Boys.

Shit’s old, and so are you, sorry for the bad news. <3

Ah yes, the bright future of a movie that uh, is primarily focused on a planetary genocide by someone who’s not too smart but very angry.

completely disable Windows Update

Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

Edit: for the OP, not you.

Snapraid parity is offline, so that’s not strictly accurate.

You build the parity, and then until you do a sync/scrub/rebuild they don’t do shit, so there’s no reason to keep them spun up.

If the drive are slow spinning up, then this is probably not a fatal concern, but there’s zero details here.

I honestly assumed STO died years ago.

I kinda quit playing it when greifing the ERPers stopped being fun (or even all that possible), since the rest of the game had stopped being fun quite a while before that.

Hard to say if someone other than Cryptic is good or bad for the game, given Cryptic was always pretty shit.

That could probably work.

Were it me, I’d build a script that would re-hash and compare all the data to the previous hash as the first step of adding more files, and if the data comes out consistent, I’d copy the files over, hash everything again, save the hash results elsewhere and then repeat as needed.

The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.

Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.

The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won’t be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.

As for data integrity, there’s a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.

The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you’re using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that’s not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the “good” hashes is on the drive, well, you can’t necessarily trust those hashes either.

So, 50 years isn’t a reasonable goal unless you have a pretty big budget for this. Essentially no media is likely to survive that long and be readable unless they’re stored in a vault, under perfect climate controlled conditions. And even if the media is fine, finding an ancient drive to read a format that no longer exists is not a guaranteed proposition.

You frankly should be expecting to have to replace everything every couple of years, and maybe more often if your routine tests of the media show it’s started rotting.

Long term archival storage really isn’t just a dump it to some media and lock it up and never look at ever again.

Alternately, you could just make someone else pay for all of this, and shove all of this to something like Glacier and make the media Amazon’s problem. (Assuming Amazon is around that long and that nothing catches fire.)

Do some people? Sure. There’s more than a few sects of evangelicals that are all in on the end of the world.

But, frankly, outside of certain religious sects and/or cults, I strongly doubt it’s all that widespread.

Even the preppers I know don’t want it to collapse, they’re just aware that society is fragile and is more likely than not going to collapse - knowing something is likely to happen and preparing for it is very very different than hoping for it.

I’m terminally doomer, but even I don’t really think that the “world is ending” is a likely outcome, even if the worst of everything possible happens.

The question, for me, has always not been ‘will humans die out’ so much as ‘can we stop squabbling over stupid shit long enough we don’t all die’.