This option is horrendously inefficient on most modern drives. For many SSDs, issuing a secure erase request is an almost instantaneous process as it only requires the drive to generate a replacement encryption key, and need not even entail bulk writing or erasing physical flash pages
Writing 1 GB of zeros is also almost instantaneous. Even though it's overkill, writing 1 GB is hardly worth worrying about. Though I'd recommend also wiping the backup GPT at the end of the drive.
It is still bad advice, zero filling an SSD is not nearly the same as erasing it due to the presence of large (up to 10% or more of the drive) overprovisioning areas present in all devices, ignoring the permanent wear zero-filling the drive also causes, and the fact the controller believes real data remains stored, placing restrictions on its ability to perform internal maintenance
It's fine advice. The wear of writing 1GB of zeros can and should be ignored. It's insignificant. And the drive's spare area is only relevant if you're trying to thoroughly wipe sensitive information from a device before disposing of it. But right now we're just trying to make a device appear functionally empty so that we can re-install an OS without remnants of any previous installation getting in the way. This does not require the (sometimes dubious) security assurances of a secure erase command.
> But right now we're just trying to make a device appear functionally empty so that we can re-install an OS without remnants of any previous installation getting in the way
The only portable, reliable, robust way to accomplish this is wiping the drive. If the original author had issued a secure erase, they would not have encountered any subsequent difficulties, all of which were due to partially erasing the device.
> The only portable, reliable, robust way to accomplish this
That's setting the bar too high. If we're comfortable with solutions that will work on all mainstream PC platforms including Macs, then it is sufficient to overwrite partition tables with zeros. I have never heard of an OS installer that scans for deleted partitions, and worrying about the possibility of such a thing causing problems is unreasonable.
GPT along with most filesystems store a bunch of stuff at random places around the disk, for many filesystems it's even configurable.
The most usual problem with your approach is recreating a set of partition tables exactly matching the old tables, while failing to wipe out a filesystem signature buried halfway into the disk. One reboot later, and magic header bytes start to be recognized as valid filesystems by whatever OS installer or BIOS utility you happen to be using. Even worse if you're been taking some hacky shotgun approach to blowing holes in the drive by zeroing out random sectors that belong to one of those recognized filesystems.
So once again,
> The only portable, reliable, robust way to accomplish this is wiping the drive
> GPT along with most filesystems store a bunch of stuff at random places around the disk, for many filesystems it's even configurable.
This is not remotely accurate. GPT is at the beginning of the disk, with a backup copy at the end of the disk. Wiping the GPT makes the layout of filesystem structures within partitions completely irrelevant. Wiping the primary GPT at the beginning of the disk is usually (possibly always) sufficient to make an OS installer believe the disk to be empty. The backup GPT at the end of the disk is something I've only seen used by manual partitioning tools that are more powerful and complex than the automatic partitioning tools that are part of OS installers.
> The most usual problem with your approach is recreating a set of partition tables exactly matching the old tables, while failing to wipe out a filesystem signature buried halfway into the disk. One reboot later, and magic header bytes start to be recognized as valid filesystems by whatever OS installer or BIOS utility you happen to be using.
Rebooting and re-detecting everything between partitioning and mkfs is not part of any ordinary OS installation procedure. Do you have any evidence that this failure mode can actually occur in practice with real shipping operating systems?
Remember, for the purposes of this hypothetical, we have to assume that at least one of the user or the OS installler is actually trying to make the process work. You can't assume that they're both trying to interfere with the process and are both going out of their way to cause problems.
At least Ext4 repeats the complete superblock at the beginning of every block group, so yes, it is not only remotely accurate, but entirely accurate. In the case of GPT, Linux requires explicit command line options to enable alternative GPT use, but do you know this is true for all systems in existence and all versions of Linux?
> Rebooting and re-detecting everything between partitioning and mkfs is not part of any ordinary OS installation procedure
Yes, I've personally bumped into this on desktop and unattended server installs - numerous times.
But you're externalizing the onus to prove cases where some hacky approach won't ever break when there is a vastly simpler way to avoid this entire class of problem. This is exactly the reverse of sound logic -- I'm offering you concrete real world examples of why you should avoid the hack and you're simply ignoring them
At this point I'm considering this not only to be offering up worst-practice advice, but actively trolling. Possibly the worst case of "a little knowledge is dangerous" I've seen recently. Regards
> Yes, I've personally bumped into this on desktop and unattended server installs - numerous times.
Name and shame, please. Because your spurious complaints about SSD write endurance haven't exactly established your credibility, and you do otherwise seem to be postulating that non-standard nonsensical actions will somehow insert themselves into the process under discussion.
> I'm offering you concrete real world examples of why you should avoid the hack and you're simply ignoring them
No, you're not offering any concrete real-world examples. You're offering hypothetical examples of how a malicious user might be able to trip up a non-specific hypothetical automated OS installer.
> At this point I'm considering this not only to be offering up worst-practice advice, but actively trolling. Possibly the worst case of "a little knowledge is dangerous" I've seen recently. Regards
You are the one who called something "bad advice" but three comments later have yet to prove that it could ever fail in practice. I'm not trolling, and I'm not saying that a dd to the first 1GB of a drive is the best way to clean a drive. I'm just taking exception to your unfounded claims about what "could" go wrong.
Look, I get that you don't like the advice to overwrite the first 1GB of a drive, probably because it strikes you as inelegant and suboptimal. But you've done a horrible job of identifying any real problems with that method, and it's certainly simpler and more reliable than the procedures in the blog post that didn't work. And your proposed "portable, reliable, robust" method is by any measure less portable, and not available at all on macOS.
The worst experience I had with this involved 4 customer service representatives simply hanging up (after a 30+ minute wait) after exhausting their script. I simply recorded the final call, stopping paying the bill, and sent the documentation I had to the credit reference agency when the contract went into default
At some point they sent a debt collection agency, that was much less stressful than it sounds. They called me up, "you owe $telco money", "No I don't", "oh?", "Yes, I have complete documentation of cancelling it, but their CS reps kept hanging up. Sorry, you've been had.", "Oh, this again. Sorry to have bothered you.", never heard from the debt collection agency again.
I had a funny episode with TD when I was closing the bank account when I was leaving Canada for good.
Very hard to close the account, even in person. My point was to make sure that there is no recurring payments left on the account.
Similar bullshit. You ask to close the account, and they keep asking you back with a square face.
In the end, a year after I left Canada, I get a call from collectors saying that they have $600+ debt+penalties+interest on my allegedly closed credit card from a service the bank added itself, and that they set my credit score to zero.
Then I found that TD subscribed me on some bullshit "credit alert" right in the month when I asked for account closure.
An immediate WTF was how in the world my credit card was still active. In than latter came out that TD does not let people really close their CC accounts, only "stop them," which only amounts to just hiding you CC from web UI, and that you need specifically say that you want to "really close" the account, which I did. So, next time, if will ever set my foot in the country, I will need to ask them to "really, really, really close my account"
I had, surprisingly, the opposite experience when I exasperatedly wanted to cancel my BofA account. I had had it with their awful customer service and simply wanted to never do business with them again. I went into a branch expecting a difficult process. The teller had me all sorted and done in 5 minutes. I was impressed.
Does this sort of thing still end up hurting your credit score though? I don't know how this actually works, but I feel like I've heard scary things about it.
When you remove an invalid debt, make sure that the bank doesn't sneak it back in. The banks "push" to the credit scoring companies on regular intervals, so although the credit scoring company-ies may remove it, unless the bank/source removes it from THEIR systems, it will be re-pushed 1-3-6 months later.
(source: Dave Ramsey's mentioned that in many of his radio shows/podcast episodes)
6 months seems like a long latency. I've been nervously eyeing mine due to a credit payment mishap in nov/dec (of under 2 dollars) that lead to what I expected was a 30 day late payment, but as of today it hasn't shown up on the credit reports (I check two bureaus). After reading your comment my paranoia is starting to resurface.
I don't see how the distinction matters to the individual consumer. It's interesting as an insight into how the credit scoring system is organized i guess
It's very difficult as a consumer to get things off your credit report. You may be able to do.it, but expect it to take months of effort. For many small debts, it's just not worth it (and I believe this is by design).
I like the idea of flipping DIMMs to get capacity and processing improvements, and also the thought that mass-produced memory with this tech could potentially significantly reduce the cost of AI hardware through commoditization
Another recent primer on in-memory / near-memory computing in [1]. Upmem [2] is also selling memory with on-board compute. A space that is slowly hotting up!
[1] O. Mutlu, S. Ghose, J. Gomez-Luna, R. Ausavarungnirun, A Modern Primer on Processing in Memory.https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03112
Tip: if you contact the author(s) of a paper that is of interest to you and ask for a version of it, there's a good chance that they'll gladly accommodate. I think generally authors don't even have any financial benefit if you pay for the paper (it all goes to the publisher).
We can conveniently nitpick whether or not we treat Apple products as an integrated hardware-software product, the reality is thousands of these units have shipped and from those screenshots, many have already racked up 2-4 years wear in a matter of weeks, for a component that cannot be replaced without replacing the entire motherboard.
The product configuration as shipped inflicts permanent damage on itself, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a manufacturing defect.
>he reality is thousands of these units have shipped and from those screenshots, many have already racked up 2-4 years wear in a matter of weeks
What "2-4 years wear"?
It's 1% of usage in 2 months. That's par for the course for any SSD in any laptop with regular usage, and it should last long before the laptop is updated in 6 or so years...
Heck, 50% "percentage used" would take 8 years with this rate...
These are my stats from 2 identical sticks of 250 GB Samsung SSD bought in the summer of 2018. So yea, Apple probably want to tweak some settings. I use my computer a lot, Linux more than the Windows install which is mostly for gaming.
Windows 10:
Data Units Read: 11 332 875 [5,80 TB]
Data Units Written: 8 173 369 [4,18 TB]
Linux:
Data Units Read: 5 837 296 [2,98 TB]
Data Units Written: 4 891 744 [2,50 TB]
Love this! Please make landing screen a teeny bit prettier and you could definitely start recommending this to regular 'retail' folk. I'd consider putting the about text below the main 'create room' panel for example
It looks like a nerd app, just needs a tiny bit of swish to make it a mom and pop app too
Thank you, now that basic calls are working we will definitely put more effort in the look and feel.
We also plan to allow some basic customization like adding a logo and selecting 1-2 colors so you can make the Jam better fit the identity of your community (a bit like on reddit).
Appreciate the suggestion of switching the "about" and "create room" segments, great idea!
As usual the times is great at telling a story, but in this case one built entirely on a cropped screenshot. See https://i.imgur.com/KZGwIw9.png for the reality of the naked profiteering the mods were planning.
I think it's more interesting how Reddit responded to it. Their willingness to quickly roll the heads of folk pouring months of their lives into moderation suggests perhaps they capitalize on these dramas to shore up control of their own communities. It makes a lot of sense from Reddit's perspective to not have any superstar moderators be seen to 'own' or have excessive user loyalty from the group they're responsible for. Such things could easily lead to exoduses or public spats with the admins that could be overall bad for the site.
Also consider the public rationale ("we don't care why, disruptive folk will always be removed") applied to moderators when in both of these uproars, it was actually a single user ("SpeaksInbooleans") responsible for lighting the fires. AFAIK he is still a member of the group
As usual the times is great at telling a story, but in this case one built entirely on a cropped screenshot
The article makes it clear, this is not based on a single cropped screenshot. It's based on many screenshots, a Discord discussion, a discussion in a moderators-only group, and interviews with six confirmed moderators.
I got that much, and I only read half of the article.
They did mention it. Did you read the article? From the article:
> When reached on their new Twitter account, the top moderators said they wanted to strike a movie deal, but were planning to give any proceeds to charity.
“Them trying to make it look like we are cash grabbing is so dishonest,” the moderators wrote.
In paragraph 27, after spending paragraphs 3-26 documenting the public reaction to a dramatic half-truth revealed in paragraph 2. This is called storytelling. You're likely aware article order is deeply important, but if not, consider reading https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-... . The bottom line is most visitors likely only read the half-truth.
Having worked with writers in these very fields, I can assure you they write with the intention that you read the entire article and anything but reading the entire article is an unintended incomplete communication. A protocol broken, if you will. Not a conspiracy to hide the truth. Them potentially maybe donating to charity is not the lede.
That's perhaps unsurprising.. it certainly would be far from the first industry to suffer from institutional blindness to any inconvenient metric that might challenge a self-stated purpose
You could say that about anyone or anything at any time and to any end including wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. I don't think it's very constructive.
Wow, where did you find that screenshot? It completely changes the narrative of what happened. Why isn't this well known on the subreddit? The current mods (after the admins stepped in) keep saying they're the "good ones" and u/zjz is endorsing that.
I got the screenshot from one of the deposed mods, who has been around since 2012 (I'm one of the earliest sub members FWIW, but never a mod), he was part of the last cohort of "good ones" following the deposing of the sub founder. This person certainly is not a friend, I'd generally struggle to befriend the kind of personality attracted to Reddit's system of moderation, and especially not after already witnessing the many concealed knives.
Hopefully this also answers the question of why you haven't seen it before.
Is any of this unexpected? Not at all, it's Reddit, this is structural. That's why I find the actions and encouragement from the admins far more interesting.
This first-google-result analysis[0] from a couple years ago puts the global banking system at around 100 TWh a year which is pretty close to the currently estimated "121.36TWh" for bitcoin[1].
Incidentally, that 2nd article mentions that this is equivalent to the power used by inactive-but-on electronic devices in US households alone.
I guess PC gaming was at 75TWh 5 years ago [2], so I'm not going to worry too much yet.
Total power consumption is the wrong metric; we should talk about the average consumption per transaction. If the totals are close, it means Bitcoin is an extremely inefficient system, since it only processes a fraction of the number of transaction per year that the mainstream financial system processes.
I agree, and I don't think bitcoin will ever be efficient. But I don't think any of us can stop it at this point and it still seems less frivolous than many of the things we spend energy on.
Since energy consumption has historically always increased and since it drives all of human progress and innovation I'm not convinced that the demand side is where we should focus on solving our problems.
This is a dangerous stereotype that is equally harmful to people of any sexuality, I'd encourage you to correct it. Most of the gay folk I know personally tend towards the athletic end of the spectrum
Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out?
Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?
The inverse of effeminate by definition is butch, I purposefully avoided using it as it invokes yet more popular and inaccurate gay stereotypes that in no way capture the folk I was describing
>Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?
Agreed, the terminology used by the parent comment was a bit strange, but I got the idea of what they meant.
They were talking about an effeminate skinny type of a male compared to a very masculine athletic "macho man"-looking type. In terms of celebrities and purely their appearances, think of young David Bowie vs. Arnold Swarzenegger.
I guess the parent comment simply conflated athleticism with masculinity, but that's just an aspect of it, and not all kinds of athleticism are inherently "masculine" (think yoga or acrobatics or figure skating).
You're really swinging to the opposite end of credibility, bending over backwards to put on blinders and assert that gayness has absolutely no relation to some effeminate qualities. It goes against people's own ability to observe facts and undermines your position. Maybe it's not true for every gay male, but it is certainly an observable phenomenon.
Definitely. I'm straight and I love watching Jane Austen, Anne of Green Gables, Musicals, Hallmark, Downton Abbey, Romcom, etc. movies with my wife. But I'd never let any of my male friends know.
One would think that standing by your choices and not trying to hide then away, would be the assertive and self-confident approach. If your friends are really so fickle as to think less of you based on the TV shows you watch and the love you show for your wife, are they really worth keeping around?
My best friend died in his 20's. So, I have a cynical view on friendship.
It's very time intensive to find new friends and filter out the one's that don't make the cut. Not to mention the awkwardness that comes with breaking up with the one's that don't make the cut.
I know the struggle, I've completely abandoned three separate circles of friends due to moving cross-country and interpersonal drama, over a period of 10 years.
Building up a new circle of friends where I live now took some time, and was initially kicked off by reconnecting with a childhood friend. A huge positive is that we're all mid-30s to mid-40s and more mature, less concerned about outward appearances, so it feels more real and down to earth.
Just being able to be yourself in the company of others is refreshing, because you can relax and lower your guard.
Round of beers, one friend asks for a diet soda? Sure thing. Heck, I have a standing agreement with another friend that I'll bring him a soda even if he asked for a beer and I think he's had one or two too many, because he knows he has a tendency to drink a bit too much. He'll grumble about it, but because we've talked it through, he knows I'm looking out for him.
My best friend is a huge metalhead, but also loves sugary J-pop with a burning passion. And nobody thinks less of him for it. We don't believe in guilty pleasures, you like what you like.
Honestly, and I know this doesn't apply to everyone, I would rather have no friends at all if I couldn't be 100% myself around my friends :-)
Go up to a group of supposedly all straight men and ask who is interested in watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice (ideally they will ask “which one?” and you can respond “the one with Colin Firth”). Then do the same thing with a group of women. Maybe you live somewhere unusual, but in my experience you will have no takers from the men but many takers from the women.
While on the subject, is liking Downton Abbey or Anne of Green Gables effeminate? That's news to me. Huge fan of "Anne with an E" here -- still can't get over the fact they canceled it.
I'm really masculine. I'm tall, reasonably heavily muscled, assertive, hyper competitive, dominant, etc. I've still had some friends tell me that they wouldn't have been surprised if I was gay/bi. The only explanation I have is that they struggle to understand my refusal to conform to norms and I'm interpreted as "different".
Isn’t “being attracted to males” a predominantly female characteristic in animals that reproduce sexually? On the “sexuality” dimension, do not gay men fall closer to the female cluster than the male cluster?
I assume you mean more in that direction than a typical male?
Because I’m pretty sure that homosexual men aren’t overall more like heterosexual women than they are like heterosexual men, at least in terms of appearance.
By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men. In N-dimensional space, they are biased slightly away from dead center of the male cluster towards the female cluster because of the female bias of the attracted-to-men trait.
You could say the same thing about long-haired men. It doesn’t mean you’re implying that any other traits are more feminine, because the one trait in question is already biased female.
I suppose this is true along the dimension labelled "attracted to dudes". There are probably many many more dimensions where homosexual men are not biased towards the female cluster, while many heterosexual men are.
> By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men
In some ways, homosexual men might very well cluster away from females, even more so than heterosexual men.
> In some ways, homosexual men might very well cluster away from females, even more so than heterosexual men.
Aren't we back to what the person I was originally replying to would describe as "dangerous stereotypes"?
The point I was trying to make is that the only thing you can say about homosexual men without invoking stereotypes is that they are attracted to men. And in a statistical sense, that is a feminine characteristic.
I think your initial premise is flawed - that males and females form neat clusters with perfect Gaussian distributions, on any reasonable number of dimensions. Yes, on the axis for attraction to men, gay men are shifted towards the female group. On the majority of dimensions, males and female are probably hard to distinguish. On some dimensions, gay men may indeed cluster away from women.
You're overstating my premise. I was not saying very much, and you're implying I was saying a lot. Who said the clusters were neat? Or that characteristic distributions were Gaussian?
"Women" and "Men" are words that we associate with observable characteristics. They are extremely messy, so much so that there isn't even one characteristic in all of the many dimensions that we would all agree evenly cleaves the "Men" set from the "Women" set. And yes, most observable characteristics are far more shared than not; that's why it's easier to tell a human from a cat than it is a man from a woman.
Please, stop trying to enlarge my claims. The idea that males and females form clusters that could be described as "neat", or that the distribution of any human characteristic is Guassian, are extremely large claims that should be backed up with evidence. I don't know how they even made their way into this discussion.
To restate: Male homosexuality can be described as a trait that male homosexuals share with women. If we assume the default about all other characteristics, i.e. that they are distributed in the same manner as they are in other males, then that would mean homosexual men are ever so slightly skewed female in distribution. That's it. Note that the "if" clause isn't a claim I am making, it is simply a proposition on which the argument is predicated. If it is false, the argument no longer stands. I am not making any judgement about that claim, I am only building on it in the hypothetical universe where it is true.
You're right: you didn't make claims about the nature of the distribution, or that how neat those clusters would be. I did, with the hope that it clarifies the very narrow set of conditions in which your premise holds - which I don't think it really does. It was not my intent to put words in your mouth.
I do agree with the very narrow premise of your original claim:
> Isn’t “being attracted to males” a predominantly female characteristic in animals that reproduce sexually? On the “sexuality” dimension, do not gay men fall closer to the female cluster than the male cluster?
I don't, however, agree with your later claim:
> By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men. In N-dimensional space, they are biased slightly away from dead center of the male cluster towards the female cluster because of the female bias of the attracted-to-men trait.
I would hold that this isn't true, because I would suggest that N here is extremely large, and in many of those dimensions, homosexual men are skewed away from women, even more so than heterosexual men. I do not know what those dimensions could be - perhaps something as esoteric as
"Testosterone Levels", "Median Household Income", "Toxic Fathers", "Suicidal Ideation", "Substance Abuse", or "Gut Microbial Diversity". In some dimensions, homosexual men are probably hypermasculine. In N-dimensional space, humans as a whole are probably indistinguishable, let alone homosexual or heterosexual men.
I do not agree either with the claim:
> The point I was trying to make is that the only thing you can say about homosexual men without invoking stereotypes is that they are attracted to men. And in a statistical sense, that is a feminine characteristic.
[...]
> To restate: Male homosexuality can be described as a trait that male homosexuals share with women. If we assume the default about all other characteristics, i.e. that they are distributed in the same manner as they are in other males, then that would mean homosexual men are ever so slightly skewed female in distribution. That's it. Note that the "if" clause isn't a claim I am making, it is simply a proposition on which the argument is predicated. If it is false, the argument no longer stands. I am not making any judgement about that claim, I am only building on it in the hypothetical universe where it is true.
Yes, the only thing we can say about gay men with certainty that distinguishes them from straight men without invoking sterotypes is that they are attracted to men. It does not follow, however, that they are alike in every other way. On this singular dimension, yes, male homosexuals are shifted towards females. However, the original top level comment that we're responding to had used terminology suggesting gay men == effeminate men. Your initial premise is right, but only if we regard attraction as the defining characteristic and discard everything else. If we expand that definition to N-dimensional space as you did, then no, it's very likely not true, because of all the many ways in which gay men are probably shifted away from women.
I'll be gone from Reddit completely the day they turn off old.reddit.com, which surely must be fast approaching.
Meanwhile, limited to subreddits of only a few K users still captures something of that original feel, but smart conversation has long since moved elsewhere.
