fpoling

What are the alternatives to btrfs? At 12 TB data checksums are a must unless the data tolerate bit-rot. And if one wants to stick with the official kernel without out-of-tree modules, btrfs is the only choice.

Physical SIM cards are just as secure as the security enclave on the phone. In Norway few years ago banks even used that for secure authentication that worked on dumb phones with local mobile network providers pre-installing the required software on their SIM cards.

But then to save cost including the support cost banks stopped and instead started to require a non-rooted Android/iPhone.

I wonder if manufacturers opt to install less memory.

Nuclear is not that steady. Nuclear plants require a lot of water to cool things. And when a particular hot summer happens, rivers dry out and nuclear reactors have to scale down the power production or even be shutdown. And then they require quite significant maintenance periodically.

Granted, in Europe a hot dry summer is when solar is at its peak. So it is much lesser problem than a cold winter with a lot of cloudy days with no wind when nuclear energy is ideal.

Still from a perspective of 20 years ago with unknown prospects about renewables natural gas power stations were considered much more reliable and flexible power source compared with nuclear and way more cleaner than coal. Of cause, as long as one gets gas.

It is more funny if one watched the original Total Recall.

Shahed shape is dictated by the need to sustain very high G and aerodynamic forces during the launch from a truck which in turn allows for a very fast deployment. Anything more aerodynamic will imply stronger, more expensive frame and less payload.

Shahed has sufficiently bright IR that even a basic seeker works. To keep the cost low no efforts were applied to minimize the signature.

It is fascinating how well designed Shahed was for its intended purpose of being the cheapest mass-produced platform that would saturate any advanced air defenses while hard to track launch site. However, with appearance of cheap mass-produced counter-measures it may no longer be optimal.

The latest APKWS is IR guided and works in fire and forget mode that works nicely from the ground. And then drone interceptor struggles with Russians Shaheds with jet engines.

On the other hand the latest development with drone interceptors is rocket booster to quickly bring in within Shahed. So I guess there would be a convergence between APKWS and interceptor drones.

APKWS launching from air is a stop-gap measure in any case. The detection range for Shahed-type drones is tenths of kilometers, not hundreds, like with fighter jets or big missiles. One cannot have that many fighter jets in the air all the time even without the threat of manpads.

But ground-based platforms work just fine and cheap enough to scale up the deployment to cover the big area.

The big advantage of APKWS over interceptor drones is the rocket engine, they are much faster and can catch Shaheds within much bigger radius or within much smaller timeframe than interceptor drones.

Ukraine tried to come up with drones that can fly over 1000 miles. But drones the size of Shaheds just cannot fly that distance without significantly reducing the warhead. To attack things beyond that range Ukraine have used essentially Cessna. Which is much more expensive and visible on radars.

Instead Ukraine came up with an idea of mass producing extremely simple cruise missiles that could fly 2000 miles and deliver up to a ton of explosives with a cost of 100K and make 1000 of them per month. But then it seems Russia was able to discover the production sites and destroy them.

APKWS interceptor is about 35K USD and works much better than drone-based interceptors. The problem is to scale the production, training and deployment. Another problem is detection. One needs wast multilayered system that US military missed to build as big stationary radars are very hard to defend.

With Bayraktar it was a software update for radar that allowed for Russian to destroy them. The radar signature of Bayraktar was way off from a typical target that radars were looking for at the beginning of the war.

It is vastly more complicated to find targets at 1500 miles than at 20. So drones are effective at destroying big stationary civilian infrastructure and much less at long distance strikes at military targets. Russia's inability to destroy Ukrainian aviation is a good example.

But then with solar and batteries civilian infrastructure becomes much more resilient against drone strikes.

The same analysts predicted that it would take years for Russia to recover from the strikes. And Russia is no longer a powerhouse. They gets most of their equipment from China including the oil and gas industries.

As for Iran just count the number of drones it uses per day. They started from hundreds but now it is below 50.

Average age of cars in Norway is higher than in many other countries due to high taxes on cars.

And then in China number of cars per capita is much less then in West. As more and more people there can afford a car and that car will be EV, transitioning to mostly EV should happen faster than in Norway.

Russia has been recovering from Ukrainian drone strikes again oil industries within months. And Ukraine inflicted much serious damage than Iran on Gulf states.

Drones with 100-150kg just not capable of inflicting hard to recover damage. What they are good is striking repeatedly. But judging by numbers Iran is not capable any longer of sustained stacks with hundreds of drones per day.

Toyota hybrids are very reliable and probably the reason taxi drivers around Europe prefer those. And with the proper PHEV the wear is even less.

With this prices it is cheaper to make fuel from coal, the break even price was about 80-90 USD/barrel. And if this continues for months this will pushes wind and solar and electrical cars making natural gas and oil much less relevant. Maybe that was the plan.

For Toyota a spare tyre became on optional extra in Europe even on ICE models. They charge 200-300 Euro for having it.

Toyota Yaris, a small budget car has physical buttons for everything.

Latest FPV drones in Ukraine became much more resistant to electronic countermeasures. Plus other drones are used as retranslators.

FPV drones cannot have powerful GPU yet to enable truly autonomous flight. And the issue is not only weight/energy restrictions, but also cost.

One non-trivial problem with async in Rust is that it leads to code that allocates on one CPU and free memory on another. That kills a lot of optimizations that system allocators try to do with CPU local caching and harms performance badly especially on fat servers with a lot of CPUs. When one hits this problem, there is no easy solution.

Ideally using an allocator per request would solve this issue, but Rust has no real support for it.

A workaround that works is to stop using async and just use a native thread per request. But then most crates and frameworks these days use async. So indeed async abstraction us very leaky regarding the cost.

There is absolutely enough coal to make liquid fuel for the current civilization. But if oil/gas would not exist, then electrical cars would be on the road much earlier as burning coal to produce electricity is much more efficient then converting it into liquid fuel to burn in a car engine. As electrical cars produces roughly the same amount of CO2 when using electricity from coal as ICE car running on gasoline, the climate impact would be roughly the same.

Then in a hypothetical scenario of 20th century without oil/natural gas nuclear energy would be much more widespread at this point and CO2 impact would be lower.

Soviet Union built one in Crimea. It worked. And nothing special was used that could not be built 200 years ago. But it was rather inefficient and in presence of cheap coal there were no point to continue with it after the collapse of Soviet Union.

Thermal solar can be built 200 years ago. Although coal is very useful for production of steel, it is not essential as wood can be used instead.

Casualties from Mongol invasion are very likely much less than what was given in Wikipedia. There are good arguments that in fact probability of being killed has not changed throughout the history. It just in modern times wars are less frequent but are more devastating.

Mills using water as a source of energy are known for thousands of years. If oil, natural gas or even coal would not exist, that and wind energy would be used on much bigger scale. Then a solar power station using thermal solar could be built like 200 years ago. And nuclear energy would be eventually discovered.

One does need carbohydrates for industrial bootstrap. Germans during WWII produced liquid fuel from coal. Modern version of this process becomes competitive with oil-base fuel around 80 USD/barrel.

Yes, this process is very energy intensive and generates like twice CO2 per energy used. But in a hypothetical world without oil and natural gas it may lead to earlier start with electric cars and renewables so the total amount of CO2 put into atmosphere would probably be the same. Plus, as coal is much more evenly distributed, there would be much less reasons for wars.

They use the datasenter for model training, not to serve online users. Presumably even if it will be offline for a week or even a month it will not be a total disaster as long as they have, for example, offsite tape backups.

With that setup on boot or after a long sleep one first must log in into an account with longer password. Then one logs out of that and switches to the primary account with a short password.