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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • The EU is now talking about doing what the US was already doing more than a decade ago when Snowden Revelations came out.

    And don’t get me started on things like the relative ratios of “death by police” and percentage of people in prision (to mention just the things related to the use of force in policing) between America and Europe.

    The EU is at least a decade behind the US in creeping autoritarianism and a lot of that shit has been imported from the US (including the new style far right, which amongst other things was set-up with money from American billionaires which Steve Bannon brought to Europe years ago very openly to “create far right parties” and is ideologically fed by American money using social media which for example paid Cambridge Analitica to use Facebook to fuel Brexit).

    In this turn of the Wheel of History, the equivalent of Nazism is spreading out from America.


  • Personally I’ve been boycotting travel to the US or even just with a transfer in the US since the PATRIOT act.

    Already over a decade ago I very purposefully chose Canada (highly recommended, by the way) for a month vacationing in North America rather than the US.

    The writting has been on the wall for this shit ever since they allowed the TSA to start confiscating traveller’s mobile phones and computers way back in Bush’s day - the main difference with the current administration compared to the previous ones is that they’re open about what they’re looking for.



  • Also all lots of “may” and “[unnamed] American official claimed” in the article.

    The whole thing reads as Propaganda, which makes sense given that we’re talking about the pro-Zionist New York Times (which also has a long history of backing American warmongering in, for example Iraq) - morally a little propagandizing to whitewash American Administration’s piracy on the high-seas is nothing compared to relentlessly providing cover and support for the active mass murdering of Palestinian children in Gaza for more than a year.

    The Pravda in the days of the Soviet Union had more truth than this Propaganda Outlet.





  • Mate, I’m not the person who answered your original comment.

    I just saw you making claims about somebody else making fallacious statements when in fact it was you who started with a big fat fallacy and then bitched and moaned about how they were the ones being fallacious when somebody else countered it by pointing out that at least one of the points of “evidence” that you yourself presented for Mr. Krugman’s “pretty good track record” (whatever the fuck such vague and ill-defined expression means) was in fact a Swedish Central Bank Prize For Economics In Honor Of Alfred Nobel, which is commonly misportrayed as a genuine Nobel Prize - even by Krugman himself - when it is no such thing.

    Of all the things to use to claim somebody has a “pretty good track record”, him having something he himself calls a Nobel Prize which is not in fact a Nobel Prize actually weakens that point rather than strengthens it, as it casts suspicion on his honesty.

    As it so happens for a while I had a lot of exposure to Mr. Krugman’s opinions - on and after the 2008 Crash, when I in fact worked in the same Industry as he did - and in my opinion he was often full of shit and all over the place, at least back then, and a pretty good illustration of the caricatural Economist “who has predicted 10 of the last 2 downturns”. One could say that he likes to throw shit at the wall, wait to see what sticks and then claim he was a genius for spotting it.

    I’ll repeat myself: had you not started with an Appeal To Authority in your original post and absent all those words of praise for the person making that point, just let the logic of the point speak for itself, you would have been better off.






  • The way one designs hardware in is to optimize for the most common usage scenario with enough capacity to account for the peak use scenario (and with some safety margin on top).

    (In the case of silent power sources they would also include lower power leakage in the common usage scenario so as to reduce the need for fans, plus in the actual physical circuit design would also include things like airflow and having space for a large slower fan since those are more silent)

    However specifically for power sources, if you want to handle more power you have to for example use larger capacitors and switching MOSFETs so that it can handle more current, and those have more leakage hence more baseline losses. Mind you, using more expensive components one can get higher power stuff with less leakage, but that’s not going to happen outside specialist power supplies which are specifically designed for high-peak use AND low baseline power consumption, and I’m not even sure if there’s a genuine use case for such a design that justifies paying the extra cost for high-power low-leakage components.

    In summary, whilst theoretically one can design a high-power low-leakage power source, it’s going to cost a lot more because you need better components, and that’s not going to be a generic desktop PC power source.

    That said, I since silent PC power sources are designed to produce less heat, which means have less leakage (as power leakage is literally the power turning to heat), even if the with the design having been targetted for the most common usage scenario of that power source (which is not going to be 15W) that would still probably mean better components hence lower baseline leakage, hence they should waste less power if that desktop is repurposed as a NAS. Still won’t beat a dedicated ARM SBC (not even close), but it might end up cheap enough to be worth it if you already have that PC with a silent power source.


  • When I had my setup with an ASUS EEE PC I had mobile external HDDs plugged to it via USB.

    Since my use case was long-term storage and feeding video files to a Media TV Box, the bandwidth limit of USB 2.0 and using HDDs rather than SDDs was fine. Also back then I had 100Mbps ethernet so that too limited bandwidth.

    Even in my current setup where I use a Mini-PC to do the same, I still have the storage be external mobile HDDs and now badwidth limits are 1Gbps ethernet and USB 3.0, which is still fine for my use case.

    Because my use case now is long term storage, home file sharing and torrenting, my home network is using the same principles as distributed systems and modern microprocessor architectures: smaller faster data stores with often used data close to were its used (for example fast smaller SDDs with the OS and game executables inside my gaming machine, plus a torrent server inside that same Mini-PC using its internal SDD) and then layered outwards with decreasing speed and increasing size (that same desktop machine has an internal “storage” HDD filled with low use files, and one network hop from it there’s the Mini-PC NAS sharing its external HDDs containing longer term storage files).

    The whole thing tries to balance storage costs and with usage needs.

    I suppose I could improve performance a bit more by setting up some of the space in the internal SDD in the Mini-PC as a read/write cache for the external HDDs, but so far I haven’t had the patience to do it.

    I used to design high performance distributed computing systems and funnilly enough my home setup follows the same design principles (which I had not noticed until thinking about it now as I wrote this).


  • Yeah, different hardware is designed for different use cases and generally won’t work as well for other use cases, which is also why desktops seldom make for great NAS servers (their fans will also fail from constant use, plus their design spec is for much higher power usage so they have a lot more power waste even if trottled down).

    That said my ASUS EEE PC lasted a few years on top of a cabinet in my kitchen (which is were the Internet came into my house so the router was also there) with a couple of external HDDs plugged in, and that’s a bit of a hostile environment (because some of the particulates from cooking, including fat, don’t get pulled out and end up accumulating there).

    At the moment I just have a Mini-PC on my living room with a couple of external HDDs plugged in that works as NAS, TV Media Box and home server (including wireguard VPN on top of a 1Gbps connection, which at peak is somewhat processor intensive). It’s an N100 and the whole thing has a TDP of 15W so the fan seldom activates. So far that seems to be the best long term solution, plus it’s multiple use unlike a proprietary NAS. It’s the some of the best €140 (not including the HDDs) I’ve ever spent.


  • Stuff designed for much higher peek usage tend to have a lot more waste.

    For example, a 400W power source (which is what’s probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on (unless it’s a very expensive one), so in that example of yours it should be replaced by something much smaller.

    Even beyond that, everything in there - another example, the motherboard - will have a lot more power leakage than something designed for a low power system (say, an ARM SBC).

    Unless it’s a notebook, that old PC will always consume more power than, say, an N100 Mini-PC, much less an ARM based one.