corroded @ corroded @lemmy.world

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409

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2 yr. ago

What business does a school have telling students how to cut their hair? When I was in school (over 20 years ago), I had my hair long, short, colored, and everything in-between. Nobody gave a fuck.

I've always had a fan theory that navigating the mycellial network requires that the navigator be a conscious entity for one reason or another. It explains why there was so much trouble with development in the first place. If that's true, you could argue that no matter how advanced 32nd century computers are, they still won't be able to calculate a spore jump. Starfleet seems opposed to the idea of a sentient AI in any era, so that leaves Zora as the only "computer" that could operate the spore drive without a flesh-and-blood navigator. That would explain some of why the Discovery is still in service.

Also, we've seen on screen that the navigator must have some kind of connection to nature and/or the fabric of the universe itself. Stamets had the tardegrade DNA, and Booker had his species' unique abilities. I'm not sure anyone else fits this role, excepting the obvious like Q or the Travellers, who would have no use for it in the first place.

I see it as similar to what would happen if a viking longboat suddenly appeared in modern times with a crew that decided they'd like to become part of their country's navy. Assume for sake of argument that this viking longboat is endowed with a magical stave that allows it to instantaneously transport itself to whatever point on the globe the captain chooses. This magical stave is imprinted on the hull of the boat itself and cannot be removed or transferred.

We would re-enforce the wooden hull of the boat with steel. No doubt a nuclear reactor would be far too massive and complex, so we would likely install gas turbine engines, or perhaps maybe even an electrical propulsion system, space permitting. Radar systems would be installed, but we couldn't use a phased-array radar system; it's dependent on the geometry of the ship's superstructure. There wouldn't be room for a vertically-launched missile system, but an older deck-mounted missile launch system would certainly be possible. A 20mm deck gun would work just fine, but sea-based artillery is out of the question. A 5-inch gun requires far too much supporting equipment below decks. Communications would be no problem; install a mast on the newly steel-reinforced deck and place a small-ish transceiver somewhere, and the boat now has the same high-bandwidth comms afforded to modern ships.

Computing power would be somewhat of a problem. Modern ships rely on large spaces full specialized military-grade purpose-built computing systems. We could likely fit a server rack with a few high-powered Xeon servers somewhere on the ship, but it wouldn't have the same total-ship integration that something like an Aegis cruiser or destroyer has. Processing power might be the same (if not better), but the overall topology of the system would be vastly different, and likely more limited in what sort of inputs the ship's "main computer" is able to receive and process.

I would suspect that a 23rd century starship in the 32nd century would be in a very similar scenario. As long as the ship is still considered spaceworthy, many modern advancements could be installed or easily modified to fit the 900-year-old ship. Because the unique capabilities of the USS Discovery are inextricably tied to the ship itself and it's crew, however, there will always be limitations on what technology can be installed without altering the structure of the ship to the point that the spore drive no longer functions. That's part of the reason why I think the spore drive in the Discovery and a magical stave on a viking longboat are a good comparison. Both have "magical" elements and may or may not rely on the ship itself being set up in such a way to allow these magical elements to function. Change the ship too much, and it's no longer the same ship.

That does bring up an interesting argument regarding the Mk2 spore drive that was used on Booker's ship. If there is a way to create a spore drive that can be operated on any modern starship, is there really any reason for the 900-year-old Discovery to still be in active service? Seems to me that a 32nd-century starship with Stamets onboard would serve the same function, only better.

I've been doing a combination of working from home and working from the office since the start of COVID. I generally only go into work when there is something broken that needs me to physically repair it. I can honestly say that the times I'm working from home, my productivity is exceptionally higher than it would be otherwise. No distractions from coworkers, a more comfortable environment, better computers and desk ergonomics, no commute.

Employers need to realize that good employees work better from home, and the ones that don't are not worth keeping on the payroll.

If it makes it out of the lab and can be manufactured at scale, it could revolutionize every industry that uses electricity at all, and that is essentially every industry. I look forward to the day I can replace the copper wiring in my house with superconducting NM wire.

People often regard C++ as one of the harder languages to learn, but once you understand the fundamentals, I feel like it's much easier to use than some of the alternatives. I've focused on C++ almost exclusively for well over a decade, and any time I'm forced to use C#, Java, Python (especially Python), or any other modern language, it just seems harder. They abstract away so much that it makes it more difficult to make the language do what you want.

It HAS to be on purpose. Nobody can get to billionaire levels of wealth and be completely inept, right? RIGHT?

I absolutely refuse to use a service with ads unless I can block them. I'm very strongly opposed to any kind of advertising, and I absolutely despise the fact that everything on the internet is ad or sponsor-driven these days.

Paying for an ad-free service, however, is fine with me.

Thats a good point, although we do know from ST2 and SNW that the Eugenics War originally happened in the 1990s. Based on what you're saying, that would indicate that the timeline change happened some time between the events of ST2 and TNG.

Oops. Yeah, I meant ZFS. Fixed.

That's a very valid point, and certainly a reason to obfuscate the calendar event. I would argue that in general, if the concern is the government forcing you to decrypt the data, there's really no good solution. If they have a warrant, they will get the encrypted data; the only barrier is how willing you are to refuse to give the encryption key. I think some jurisdictions prevent this on 5th amendment grounds, but I'm not not a lawyer.

I have a full-height server rack with large, loud, noisy, power-inefficient servers, so I can't provide much of a good suggestion there. I did want to say that you might want to seriously reconsider using a single 10Tb hard drive.

Hard drives fail, and with a single drive, in the event of a failure, your data is gone. Using several smaller drives in an array provides redundancy, so that in the event of a drive failure, parity information exists on the other drives. As long as you replace the failed drive before anything else fails, you don't lose any data. There are multiple different ways to do this, but I'll use RAID as an example. In RAID5, one drive stores parity information. If any one drive fails, the array will continue running (albeit slower); you just need to replace the failed drive and allow your controller to rebuild the array. In a RAID5 configuration, you lose the space of one drive to parity. So if you have 4 4TB drives in a RAID5 configuration, you would have a total of 12TB of usable space. RAID6 lets you lose two drives, but you also lose two drives worth of space to parity, meaning your array would be more fault-tolerant, but you'd only have 8TB of space.

There are many different RAID configurations; far too many for me to go into them all here. You also have something called ZFS, which is a file system with many similarities to RAID (and a LOT of extra features... like snapshots). As an example, I have 12 10TB hard drives in my NAS. Two groups of 6 drives are configued as RAIDZ2 (similar to RAID6), for a total of 40TB usable space in each array. Those two arrays are then striped (like RAID0, so that data is written across both arrays with no redundancy at the striped level). In total, that means I have 80TB of usable space, and in a worst-case scenario, I could have 4 drives (two on each array) fail without losing data.

I'm not suggesting you need a setup like mine, but you could probably fit 3 4TB drives in a small case, use RAID5 or ZFS-RAIDZ1, and still have some redundancy. To be clear, RAID is not a substitution for a backup, but it can go a long way toward ensuring you don't need to use your backup.

As someone who uses Nextcloud, why do you suggest obfuscating the name of the calendar event? My nextcloud instance is only accessible from outside my LAN via HTTPS, so no concern about someone using a packet sniffer on public WiFi or something of that sort. The server is located on my property, so physical security isn't a real concern unless someone breaks in with a USB drive or physically removes the server from the rack and steals it. If someone was to gain access to my network remotely, they'd still need login credentials for Nextcloud or for Proxmox in order to clone the VM drive.

To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with you; I'm wondering if I may be over-estimating data security on my home network. Considering you're posting from infosec.pub, I'm assuming you know more about this than I do.

Also, I feel like I need to say that the fact that OP even needs to consider data security for something like really makes me wonder how parts of our society have gone so wrong.

I guess my point is that with work, personal obligations, family, etc, there aren't enough hours in the day to so what needs to be done and still just sleep and wake up when you're no longer tired.

It's great that it works for you, but it just never has for me. Also, to be fair, it's been 20 years since I worked a job with a regular 9-5 schedule, so I'm admittedly biased.

I'd be okay without excess sugar, but I'm a firm believer that it is virtually impossible (for me) to function in modern society without caffeine. Our bodies want to sleep when we're tired, but I have never had a job where I could say "I'm tired. I'm going to nap and come back in 8 hours."

I agree with you, but wouldn't a flat percentage fix this? Something like everyone pays 20% tax on all earned and unearned income, no exceptions.

This really should be the default behavior, IMO.

Linux ISOs are copies of installers for various Linux distributions. They're totally free and legal to distribute, and a very above-board and legitimate thing to store on a server with more space than a normal person could reasonably need. They are very much not copyrighted content.

I would strongly disagree. In terms of setting up OPNSense (I use pfSense, but same concept), it's easier to just do a PCI passthrough. The alternative is to create a virtual network adapter on your hypervisor, bridge it to a physical NIC, and bind the virtual adapter to the VM. The only advantage to be gained from that is being able to switch between physical NICs without reconfiguring the OPNSense installation. For someone with a homelab, when would you ever need to do that?

My Proxmox server uses a 10Gb PCIe adapter for its primary network interface. The onboard NICs are all passed through to pfSense; I've never had any need to change that, and it's been that way for years.

I don't mean this to sound overly critical, and I'm happy to be proven wrong. I just don't see a "plethora of reasons" why doing PCI passthrough on a NIC is a bad idea.

What kind of issues do you have with your ISP? I live in a rural area, so my options for ISP are limited; I have a VDSL connection supplemented by Starlink. Starlink uses CGNAT, so I can't really host anything there unless I use something like Zerotier to Tailscale, but my VDSL connection works pretty well as long as I make sure to drop the bitrate to something that fits in my 4MBit upload. I have anything that accepts incoming connections behind an Nginx reverse proxy, and my routing policy is set up so that Nginx is forced onto the DSL connection.

Not really related to my original post, but I've spent way too much time tinkering with my network, so I was curious.