Seconded. My first experience with Tom7 was the "Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel..." I've been hooked ever since.
It’s like when you think of something that will never exist, because it is just too absurd. However, this guy not only has an even more absurd idea, he also brings it into existence and shows why it’s a great idea to build a sustainable future!
I skipped it because it's 40 minutes long and I had lots of things to do.
I used the AI tool because I didn't expect anyone else to take their time to explain it and the 19 page pdf seems to be meandering without a coherent thesis.
So the answer to your question is 0 because that's not what happened.
Some things aren’t purely informational. You can’t summarize experiencing Harder Drive, you can only get a description of what happens in it. Actually watching Harder Drive actually is the point. You spend 30 minutes (lol I wish it was 40) watching something fun/funny and feel good while you’re doing it.
Same here. It's not that I wouldn't have the time. It's about principles. Some exceptions aside, text is just the better medium for actual content (not so much for the big show, though). Put some images or clips into the text if it makes sense, but don't make everything a video.
I'm sure a lot of people here cannot even imagine how we can continue living without having seen that clip. And 10000s of other ones - the barrier for superlatives is quite low nowadays. Also, there are entire generations of people out there today whose default way to retrieve content is by some video clips. Their perspective is different, because texts are hard for them. Sure they can somehow read, but many of them never learned well to actually understand text. That's the point.
I can imagine that there maybe indeed is some value in the clip. But I'm also very sure that it's quite okay to skip that video; and all the other ones. Things will be fine for us. Still. ;)
The value in this clip is in entertaining you. The delivery is a major part of it. I agree that too much information is delivered (poorly) via video these days, but this is not an example of that. It would also be silly (I think) to prefer a condensed summary instead of actually watching your favorite show on Netflix.
This is the first time I encounter a tom7 content. I expected a fun, nerdy video.
I walk away with goosebumps, cathartic feelings. I didn't see it coming how the end switches to a pretty serious topic. The whole composition is award winning in my mind, but then he also put a ton of engineering effort in it, at a level of quality that I could at most wish that I could achieve in a lifetime.
My favourite feature of this video is that he uses the "Network Block Device Kit" to make a kit of 3 drives, each using one of those words as the main point:
"Network" storage, "Block" storage, and "Device" storage.
I remember lcamtuf mentioning very similar concept ca. 2003.
In his version you would partition secret data and send it out to non existing email addresses, just to get them bounced back within a couple of days.
If you want to get your secrets back together you would simply start gathering appropriate parts (you need to keep track of all the chunks somewhere), otherwise you'd simply send them to another non existing email address.
The basic premise of the ping-based drive, taking advantage of ephemeral media i.e. transmission time of a packet, was the idea behind clacks (https://github.com/AlexanderParker/clacks). I got excited to see someone else had a similar idea and explored it.
My approach was more as a p2p system of mutual random packet bouncing rather than using ICMP ping.
The idea of buffering data by transmitting it somewhere far, bouncing it off a moon or whatnot, and using that distance of radio waves as your memory is my favourite thing ever.
In Conway's Game of Life, the first self-constructing machine used this principle. It has two construction arms, and the recipe for them to create new copies of themselves is encoded in gliders and bounced back-and-forth between them. This turned out to be much simpler than building any kind of storage device.
Unfortunately due to free-space path loss limiting the Shannon-Hartley channel capacity, the total amount of information storable using this method asymptotically approaches zero for large distances.
For reference, the combined formulas are C=d×B×log_2(1+(Dc÷4πdf)²×S÷N)÷c. And lim->∞ d×ln(1+1÷d²) unfortunately = 0. (Curiously, attempting to store more information by increasing bandwidth -- and thus center frequency -- suffers the same limitation.)
(Wolfram Alpha isn't forthcoming yet with a closed-form solution for the optimal distance...)
This presumes current antenna, so "currently prevents" would be more accurate.
Yes, things spread over distance. However, building quintillions of tiny sensors and spewing them across immense distances, and using it as a spread-array sensor net would enable capture that might otherwise elude us.
This is why I don't like "prevent" as a term here, even though I 100% get your reason for using it. 300 years ago, some might have cited innumerable reasons why the distance to the moon "prevents" us from ever getting there! After all, it would take a ship+sail centuries to cross the void, everyone would be dead!
Delay-line memory used this concept in a variety of ways, such as by bouncing slow sound waves around a chamber and by transmitting twists along a long coiled wire.
There's a great sci-fi short story (well, two, I guess) that I can recommend based on this - although, knowing what you said is a slight spoiler for them.
Need to praise the inception here - the whole time I was watching it, I was feeling clever, thinking "all of these silly and wasteful methods for storing data are still pretty efficient compared to 'blockchain'".
Then it turns out that that that was secretly the whole point :)
The concept of storing data within the transfer process like that heavily reminded me of a short story that invoked a very similar idea, Valuable Humans in Transit by qntm: https://qntm.org/transi
It'd be nice if there were a topic summary. What is this about? I'm not going to devote part of my day reading/watching something about chainsaws to understand what the topic is
Tom7's relatively small oeuvre of videos are frequently re-posted here and just as frequently re-upvoted, and they deserve to be.
Discovering what the video is about as it discursively unfolds is part of the joy. There comes a moment in every video (multiple moments, even) where you'll suddenly be like, "wait, I can't believe what you appear to be suggesting", only to find out that not only is he suggesting it, he actually implemented it. There are few video creators who are as attuned to the hacker mindset as Tom7; I decline to summarize and instead strongly recommend you watch it and find out for yourself. It's a video about the logistics of juggling a trillion chainsaws, in a manner of speaking.
I don’t think Tom7 videos will ‘nerd snipe’ you. Nobody has watched a Tom7 video and thought ‘wait, I need to implement something like that’.
They will give you some things to think about, some new metaphors to use (you clearly like geeky creators who give you metaphors to employ since you are aware of XKCD’s ‘nerd sniping’), and they will entertain you.
Throwing chainsaws in space is probably a more reasonable "juggle" that for example using blockchains as mass storage. It's also probably cheaper for the environment to boot.
Haha..., storing data volatile, with not good retrieval success, slow speed in thousands of heads... I wonder if you could make a harder drive out of this approach... And how much you could store there. And does it benefit society?
Unfortunately no. With a short attention span, you will just have to miss out on what makes his videos awesome. For this type of thing, making it accessible for you would ruin the magic.
So I sat down and watched the entire thing. I didn't find it awesome or magical. Just annoyed that he stretched a concept that could be explained in 60 to 120 seconds into a whole lot of unentertaining, onanistic nonsense.
Loads of people are being criticised for criticising the video, by people here who are clearly fans of the guy's style of content.
It's okay to express dislike for something for a reason as much as it is to express like for something for a reason, people.
I've never watched one of this guy's videos before either and whilst I appreciate the time that went into it, it's too roundabout for me compared to someone like Breaking Taps (https://www.youtube.com/@BreakingTaps/videos). And that is a perfectly valid criticism, as is all the others here. We should encourage discourse.
The commenter could have ADHD or some other disadvantage outside of their control. Imagine applying what you said to someone in a wheelchair—“making it accessible to you would ruin the magic.” Gross.
