bane

I've noticed that people seem to also have two working definitions of "reliability".

1. "This works as expected to without error or repair for longer than expected"

2. "This is easy and straightforward to repair, so when it breaks the halt in operations is only temporary"

I don't know why people seem to use #2 when it is obviously not the meaning of reliability, but some version of it almost inevitably brought up when discussing an unreliable technology that somebody still prefers to use over the reliable one.

This thinking infests everything from computing to cars.

"Sure my PC crashes all the time, but its a simple reboot and some configuration tweaks to get it back online, takes like 30 seconds"

"I love my car, the service from the repair shop is white glove whenever I bring it in. I'm usually in and out in the same day"

"My stand mixer is amazing, I only have to 3d print a replacement for the central gear every 10 or 11 loaves of bread and it's a 30 second swap out to get it working again"

"I love my new clothes dryer, the maintenance contract gets somebody in within 24 hours to get it back online"

To the point of the post, very few organizations track long-term reliability and repairs for products, even major expensive ones like cars and appliances. The segment of consumer who really cares about this stuff just isn't large enough to make it really viable to do so, and the segment of consumers who follow definition #2 undercut them anyways.

Related video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5n_Lpz328Q

Github source - https://github.com/antoniograzioli/VintageEmulatorStudio

oh wow! As somebody who grew up in the 80s, the number and quality of these individual games was awesome. The VFDs [1] on many of the games is unlike anything generally put on hardware these days. They literally looked like the future.

Slap them in a gorgeously designed silver metal and black plastic case and...wow...core memories were made.

My family owned a small printing company and growing up I spent lots of time hanging out there. Down the block was a family owned tailor shop who also would have their young kids hanging out during the day. I have wonderful memories of spending all summer with my friends in dark supply closets and changing rooms playing Pack Monster [2] with my friends, the only light was the blue and red glow of the VFD display. When we'd inevitably get kicked out of one family business we'd run over to the other and find another dark closet to play it in. The fun would last until we ran out of batteries.

I mean seriously, look at how beautiful the industrial design was on some of these games [3]. What a cool site.

1 - https://www.core77.com/posts/120090 2 - https://www.electronicplastic.com/game/?company=bandai&id=11... 3 - https://www.electronicplastic.com/game/?company=bandai&id=13...

People who name projects, please think very carefully if you want to use "Haystack" as the name of anything. There are literally thousands upon thousands of both overlapping and completely different products, projects, bands, initiatives, efforts, and so on with that name and all the possible variants you can think of (Haystax, Heystack, Heystax, Hay Stak, and so on).

And no, you probably won't be the first project with that name in whatever market/vertical/milieu that you are working in.

I found half a dozen different "Haystack" products and companies working in AI in 10 seconds of googling.

Please make it stop.

Happy Unraid user here.

The ability to mix and match drives in the main Unraid Array is of course the original feature and draw. Adding a few TB at a time for whatever leftover money I had after taxes each year is really appealing.

But they've added SSD write caching, VMs, Docker containers, a Docker "app store", and recently ZFS drive clusters (mostly for SSD storage).

It's pretty great and incredibly easy to admin. I presently have well over 125TB of mixed Unraid and ZFS cluster storage in a Fractal 7 XL. It's running around 30 containers, a handful of VMs, Tailscale and literally requires less than 20 minutes a week of system level administration (probably more like 5-10 minutes). Of course I'm spending far more than that messing with the actual apps, but that's a personal problem ;)

It gets regular updates, and I'm sure my uptime would exceed a couple of years except for reboots needed to handle the updates and the occasional power outage. You can ignore the updates of course to min-max your uptime. ZFS has been rock solid on my SSD array.

You can recreate the core array bits with a bit of effort and MergeFS and SnapRAID, add Docker, some VM host system, ZFS and a few other things and you can get Unraid "for free" with a fairly normal Linux distro, but the administrative overhead will be a bit more.

One tradeoff is that Unraid exposes a core set of features for each of these, but you could get to quite a bit more specific of a configuration if you go the regular Linux route. The Unraid devs are slowly adding more ZFS features (for example) to the regular interface, but it takes time. Some more expeditionary Unraid user attempt to use those features more or less at their risk with results reported in various forums.

Merle Tuve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Tuve

The proximity fuze - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze

My understanding is that Poland is also seeking smart win-win arrangements with some of these foreign sources. For example, Poland has initiated several big equipment buys from South Korean military suppliers on the condition that most of the manufacturing is done in Poland and that there is technical sharing for future self-sustainment.

It's basically importing expensive R&D for "free" while helping establish a heavy industrial base (which has also proven very fruitful for South Koreans). I'm sure there are other examples like this. You also get a better trained workforce, and then the import of the technical knowledge later where it is slower to digest but with the ability now to turn that knowledge into working production.

Question for those making Splats...how do you get such large environments? I've been playing around with them a bit and I'm finding I'm running out of memory with surprisingly little built even on an RTX6000. Any tips or ideas would be awesome!

The demoscene, while not unknown, is still quite niche amongst technologists and digital artists in the most of the world. It has a pretty thriving scene with dozens of get togethers worldwide (mostly in Europe) each year, is creative, communal, artistic, competitive, multidisciplinary, highly influential, and has a near infinite number of ways to engage with it. It has a long running internal culture, but is welcoming of outsiders willing to learn, and is kind of a "third way" to think about software and technology that can often radically change how you think about computing.

It's also a recognized UNESCO recognized intangible cultural heritage in at least half a dozen countries.

https://www.demoparty.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

There's a mistake I see in the comments here that "non-profit" = "charity". There are a large collection of non/not for-profits that are not even remotely in the charity business. Some of these companies have long legacies that stretch back to academic labs spun out of major U.S. educational institutions.

I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive.

At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff.

I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers.

All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit.

The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.

Totally worth a watch.

The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.

The fermentation traditions around soybeans are particularly interesting. The starting point is called meju [1] which are blocks of open air fermented soybeans in blocks.

From there you can continue to process and ferment them to produce a variety of sauces, pastes, soup bases, and so on - soy sauce is the most famous in the west, but the rest of the products have honestly mind-blowing, highly complex, tastes.

There's also a broad tradition of preserving and fermenting various seafoods, from the corvina to fermented skate (hongeo) [2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meju

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongeo-hoe

Oh whew, when I finally learned how Chocolate is made....mind blown.

The Western 19th and 20th centuries's approach to foods have been an incredible disservice to culinary and health history and modernist trends.