The lifetimes have improved, but according to your link, the currently measured average age of a drive at failure is 2 years, 10 months. They expect that to increase as they roll over to newer, more reliable drives. These drives are under heavy use, unlike drives used for offline storage, but still it’s not really the kind of lifespan you’d ideally want in an archival medium.

That’s technically promising, but I can’t see it being a mass-market item since most people don’t care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.

I guess home users will be without any viable long-term backup media soon. The only ones I can think of are those special blu-ray discs that promise to last for archival. After that we have spinning disks, but those only last a few years and will eventually be phased out, and then all we’ll have is flash memory that degrades rapidly. Oh, and paying through the nose for someone’s cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI, and delete it as soon as we miss a bill payment.

Are there any actual controlled comparative studies of filesystems, rather than just anecdotes from the internet?

The article doesn’t mention or recommend Tumbleweed as far as I can see.

Self-hosting makes more sense every day.

I know you don’t want to pay for their sync service and this is the self-hosted community, but I just wanted to note that they service does work well and gives you access to note history. I decided to pay because Obsidian is excellent and I wanted to support it. I just wish it were open source.

Yesterday, alongside the release of the full o1, OpenAI announced a new premium tier of subscription to ChatGPT that enables users, for $200 a month (10 times the price of the current paid tier), to access a version of o1 that consumes even more computing power—money buys intelligence.

We poors are going to have to organize and make best use of our human intelligence to form an effective resistance against corporate rule. Or we can see where this is going.

I like Qobuz and am winding down my Spotify usage. Although it doesn’t have as many automatic playlists as Spotify, Qobuz does better at recommending music that’s unfamiliar and interesting, whereas Spotify seems to have been circling me around the same drain of 10 songs for months. Qobuz sounds noticably better than Spotify too, on my good headphones. And it has so much information about each album, including CD booklets for many of them. In particular for classical music Qobuz gives you the composer, the players, the conductor, the piece and the movement, whereas Spotify doesn’t know what to do.

Yes, it does. It’s ambitious and a real stretch for Intel. But some are doubting this story of the yields being so low:

https://hothardware.com/news/intel-downplays-18a-woes

It’s hard to tell. It looks deep like a cello, but the bridge doesn’t look quite high enough. Maybe at the tardigrade scale stringed instruments are made a little differently.

Threnody to the Victims of Health Insurance Companies.

Thanks! I hadn’t heard of Zrythm. Good to know someone’s doing that; I’ll check it out. And I did try Bitwig but didn’t really have time to get into it during the trial period. Maybe I can install it on another machine and have another go.

Silly tardigrade’s playing on the wrong side of the bridge. Do they teach nothing at tardigrade music school?

It’s a little frustrating that Ableton must have a Linux build of Live, since the Push 3 runs Linux, but they don’t release a Linux version we can install. Not that it would fix those plugin issues. When I have a bit of time I’ll see how far I get with it.

I look forward to flying in electric planes that scamper amusingly down the runway.

Thanks for the advice. I haven’t tried Ableton with Wine, but I’ll have to give it a go. I’ll be very happy if that works.

As for the .NET IDE, I can do most things in Linux quite happily using JetBrains Rider and VS Code. There are just a couple of problematic legacy .NET 4 projects with dependencies on old libraries that are only available in Windows, and some old T4 templates that will only run in Visual Studio. We’re on the way to retiring those but not quite there yet.

People have been theming Linux to look like Windows for decades. The problem is, theming it doesn’t overcome the main sticking point, which is that Linux doesn’t run the software many people use for work. I use Linux for my main OS, but then I use Ableton Live, Capture One, the Affinity suite, Adobe Acrobat, Fusion 360, Visual Studio (for legacy .NET) and many people depend on other Adobe software and other professional software, none of which runs well on Linux. So I end up running both Linux and Windows. Theming just isn’t the main issue here.

Yes, if someone used one of these against you, you could be in trouble. The company that makes it also makes a detector that can spot it:

https://shop.hak5.org/products/malicious-cable-detector-by-o-mg

Industrial CT scanner manufacturer Lumafield imaged an O.MG USB-C cable revealing sophisticated electronic components secreted within the connector.

The headline is clickbait I think. The whole point of the O.MG cable is to hide electronics in the connector. It’s advertised as a hacking tool. The analysis of what can be seen in there may be interesting, but it’s not like this is secret knowledge.

https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable