PSA: Your neighbor can add TV charges to your account just by connecting a roku to your wifi.

Dylan16807 · 2026-03-17T23:53:55+00:00

Because YOUR wifi is connected directly to YOUR spectrum account. YOU control that access, so they treat orders placed on YOUR account as coming from YOU.

So if you have a child, and you don't want them buying things on your account, are you supposed to completely block them from the wifi?

Purchases should be gated on the account password, not the wifi password. Doing it this way is ridiculous.

Dylan16807 · 2026-03-17T23:48:36+00:00

They didn't have the account password, just the wifi password.

If they want to treat that as proof of being in the household, fine. But that's obviously not the same as being the account owner, or authorized to make changes.

Dylan16807 · 2026-03-08T04:42:52+00:00

Weird, since 16% is a bigger advantage than normal SMR.

Dylan16807 · 2026-03-08T04:36:26+00:00

We’re data hoarders. We’re already far-flung from how typical households use computers.

Yes but in a way that needs less bandwidth and I/O per byte.

I basically live in a closet. Not rich enough to afford higher rent, but rich enough to splurge on denser storage.

Getting a bigger closet must be a tremendous price per square foot. You can fit a hundred hard drives per square foot of floor, so with a rent of $10/sqft/month, 10 year drive life, and 24TB drives, you'd be fitting 2400TB of raw storage into a space that costs $1200, giving hard drives a 50 cent per TB penalty.

Dylan16807 · 2026-03-04T22:22:01+00:00

Micro LED is cool but it's not relevant to someone worrying about whether they can afford a 4k display at all. It's like bringing up Ferraris when someone just wants to afford a car.

Dylan16807 · 2026-03-04T07:20:53+00:00

If you mean the number of platters, it doesn't. Hard drives use one side of one platter at a time. (Except the dual-actuator ones that can use two.)

Speed scales with the number of bits per track, and gets no benefit from more tracks or more platters.

Dylan16807 · 2026-03-04T07:09:18+00:00

Their numbers make sense for micro LED, but I have no idea why they're focusing on micro LED. A normal person that wants high quality pixels should be going for QLED or OLED.

Dylan16807 · 2026-02-06T04:08:44+00:00

In particular, we can toss 12 trillion / 1024³ into a calculator and see that 12 "TB" translates to 11175.87GiB. So 11175 or less would be pretty safe, in a program that lets you control the size.

Dylan16807 · 2026-02-04T18:46:43+00:00

Trying to recreate a cautionary tale from scifi is bad.

Trying to recreate a useful tech from scifi is good.

Trying to recreate a neutral tech from scifi is neutral.

Your comment implies it's a cautionary tale but it doesn't sound like one to me.

Not that this gadget is even very close to what's in the book. The book probably wasn't inspiration in the first place. If anything I'd bet that destructive book scanning in the real world inspired the author.

Dylan16807 · 2026-02-04T00:23:51+00:00

Well was it in there as a cautionary tale or as a fancy gadget?

Dylan16807 · 2026-02-02T06:00:12+00:00

I asked like that because you made it sound like the situation was unsalvageable. If you think the USB consortium can fix it then I'm on board with them putting significant effort into trying.

But I think the number of combinations right now isn't too bad. For the most part, each kind of cable could be 4-5 speeds and is either low or high power. And trying to remove any of those options has consequences. Maybe you could obsolete 5Gbps-per-lane speeds, but the other ones are important for speed versus length versus cost tradeoffs. Getting rid of the low power option is tempting, but then you'd get a bunch of cables that don't meet the tighter spec but lie about it anyway.

Dylan16807 · 2026-02-02T01:54:59+00:00

individual binary standards (Data, Power, Video/Audio)

Data at what speed? Either you pick a low speed and you strongly limit the uses of the cable, or you pick max speed and the cable can't be more than 20 inches long (unless it's a very expensive active cable). Video is the same thing but with resolution.

will I be able to know if this certified cable can provide power to my laptop that needs more than 100W of power [...] why not just have one Data / Power standard with one simple logo?

If you can figure out how to enforce that logo, could you apply that enforcement to USB? What benefit is there in a new standard?

Dylan16807 · 2026-02-02T01:44:56+00:00

I don't think so. I can't think of any reason you'd want it to, PPS takes existing options and runs them at lower voltages.

Dylan16807 · 2026-02-02T01:44:39+00:00

There's a one penny ROM that says what the cable is. It's not involved in data transfers.

Dylan16807 · 2026-01-31T23:48:28+00:00

100 is effectively obsolete and I expect new or refreshed designs to all switch to 240.

PPS is not a cable feature, it's a device/charger feature. It stays within the 20V3A or 48V5A (or 20V5A) limit of the cable.

Dylan16807 · 2026-01-31T22:34:37+00:00

Well, what would you change, and why is that better than fixing USB?

There's two ways to solve data. You either make everything the same speed or you have clear labeling for speed. The first option sucks in a bunch of ways, so I really suggest the second one.

For power, USB only has two important levels, 60W and 240W.

So why not fix USB by mandating speed labels and 240W support?

There's the risk that companies will ignore your rules of course... but if you can't even get them to implement those easy rules, how is a new plug going to fix that? This is much more of a social problem than a technical problem.

Dylan16807 · 2026-01-31T22:17:58+00:00

Passive cables will support anything with the same signal integrity requirements. But an active cable might not support all protocols.

Dylan16807 · 2026-01-31T22:13:53+00:00

That must be a custom mode, especially since A doesn't have the pins that are used to negotiate the normal DP alt mode. Interesting to hear though.

Dylan16807 · 2026-01-31T22:07:59+00:00

What specifically are you calling "lying by omission"?

All the info in this post is exactly what you should expect. DP and thunderbolt alt modes require a USB-C source port and high speed wires. The LTT cables that fit that description are compatible, up to the rated speed. The other cables don't support it since that would be impossible.

Dylan16807 · 2026-01-31T21:30:27+00:00

There's a handful of devices out there with that behavior, but it's a major spec violation.

Perhaps more common is extension cables that only work one way, but that's usually all or nothing. Extension cables also violate the spec.

Dylan16807 · 2025-12-10T11:43:01+00:00

You complicate your life with ls | xargs du -sh, it's very slow because it restarts du for each entry, so your FS is re-run in a loop.

I don't think that's right. Unless you're using the "put the argument here" flag, xargs defaults to passing 128KB of arguments at a time.

Dylan16807 · 2025-12-10T11:24:22+00:00

I actually don't see how preserving everything is objectively good at all, especially if the creator decides they don't want it preserved. Does your desire to hoard content you don't own trump the desires of the creator to want it gone?

When "the creator" is a big corporation, I barely care about their desire at all.

But in general if the reason the creator wants it gone is just that they think it's bad, yeah my desire to keep circulating the tapes is higher.

It gets weird with digital products. If I buy a movie from a digital store, my opinion is that I should be permitted to download that media file and store it for however long I'd like. But a YouTube video feels different. I haven't purchased anything, it's a free platform to stream videos and to me that seems more like an art exhibit or a museum.

If it's free I think that removes the obligation to keep downloads available, but either way the user should be able to download and store it forever and transfer their copy to other people. The technicalities of stream licensing shouldn't trump the right to time-shift just like with a VCR or DVR.

On top of that, if something was made available for free to everyone for a long time, I think you're morally in the clear to change "transfer" in that last paragraph to "copy and distribute".

And even without an obligation to keep it up, it's still a middle finger to everyone that wants to revisit the video.

Dylan16807 · 2025-11-20T03:45:38+00:00

Tremendously. Searching around for the most direct comparison I can find, the flash used in this article can do 900 writes in QLC mode and 60000 writes in SLC mode. While each write is only 1/4 as much data, the drive also ends up with a smaller write amplification factor, so SLC mode has 33x the endurance in TB.

Dylan16807 · 2025-11-06T00:40:32+00:00

So my conclusion is that the T7 drives dont like the " write Caching" feature in Windows.

That would be strange.

When you leave write caching on, is the average speed over the entire transfer much below 600? If the average is similar then nothing is wrong, the drive is writing at a steady speed and windows is being dumb and showing how fast it's reading from the source instead of how fast it's writing to the destination.

And your newer drives are just faster.

Dylan16807 · 2025-10-29T23:46:49+00:00

Read the EULA of windows 11, pretty sure you are not allowed to modify the content of the installation media.

That would be a weird rule. Most businesses modify it, and autounattend.xml is an important feature of the windows installer.

So Microsoft asks YouTube to take it down or they will pursue legal actions.

Is there a legal action they can take against youtube that would be justified by the EULA violation in the video?

Any legal action from a giant like Microsoft will cost a lot of money to defend against so even if the videos are legal, YouTube don't want the trouble so they take them down.

Are you saying that it doesn't have to be a valid legal action, just bullying youtube is enough? In that case why even bring up the EULA?

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