Also, it depends on the problem you are trying to solve and if the good deal lets you buy plenty of spare drives.

I have a 3 server cluster running 9 k8s nodes with persistent storage in Longhorn. While it thrashes the drives a bit more and I lose performance, I opted to use hardware RAID so a drive rebuild would be much easier. (I think with Ceph, it’s a step or two more to kick a drive out of the storage pool before you can swap the drive safely. The fact that I can’t remember much about Ceph already and it’s only been a month or two since I setup a Ceph testing cluster should alone explain my decision.)

Basically, I get volume replication backed by easy to manage and affordable drive replacements. I even get mirrored boot drives too. The setup is fault tolerant to a degree and it gives me enough time to shuffle things around if a server starts to die completely.

All the drives are used and have already had a full life, but yey, the risk is ok because the parts are cheap. I’ll probably buy another refurbished server of the same type just for the spare parts, drives and memory. I could even just use the extra server as a cold standby. Whatevers.

The cluster isn’t critical, to be perfectly honest. It really just holds a massive tool suite of containers that I need at random times and now I at least have solid templates and ansible confogs for all of those containers anyway. Even the data isn’t super critical.

Parts are cheap and my setup allows for disposable drives in a setup where risk tolerance is sky-high.

My NAS is RAID 10 with brand-new drives and read/write cycles are conserved. I care about that data and will probably mirror that storage that to an additional pair of mirrored m.2’s to absorb most of the read a cycles while adding an additional redundancy layer. (The hdds would primarily only see write cycles and probably just function as an incremental backup location for specific folders off of the m.2’s.)

Those are the cliff notes, and only I attempted to explain how I thought about risk in my setup. Volume over quality for my cluster: I think about fast recovery and how I can parch around a problem during a catastrophic failure. Long term: Multiple layers of redundancy for important data with less concern about price but I have less capacity and speed.

Having spent years around lots of equipment, I view a flashy red light on an HDD as a suggestion to do something about it in a couple of days if the server is just a worker node. (I have been desensitized to most hardware faults, TBH.)

It’s got what plants crave.

There isn’t a shred of good will left at Google and their ban hammers operate on algorithmic randomness.

If anything, files should be jammed into as many short-form videos as possible to hopefully trigger a run-away implosion of that that entire ecosystem.

Trash app. If you actually want to see all of your data and have it recorded accurately, just switch to the Garmin ecosystem. Garmin isn’t without their own set of issues and problems, for sure. However, if you actually want data and not AI slop summaries, stay a far away from Google Health.

Simply put, it’s designed for people who think that wearing a fitness tracker will improve their health and want a chat bot that will make them feel better about that.

The music is much more evolved now and there isn’t really one specific genre (ie techno) any more. The four-to-the-floor beat you describe was (and arguably still is) the core of most electronic/dance style music. And yeah, it’s usually the start of most of the stuff I write in Fl Studio (aka Fruity Loops), as a simple and driving core beat is what is the best for the largest possible group of people to dance to. (It’s universal, regardless of genre.)*

Example from NTO here: https://youtu.be/xF0Qx9XQCNI (This is technically in the electronic/techno genre, but really can’t be classified that way anymore. The FttF beat is still driving that song though…)

Probably the pinnacle of where techno and synthesizer music has evolved to is music by Mr. Bill. It’s more of a full sound design thing now, and less legacy Fruity Loops’ish now. (https://youtu.be/WCrgI4ne1Kw) TBH, Mr. Bill isn’t, and probably will never be “my style”, but I respect the hell out of his music though. Fucking genius stuff.

Alas, I could find a million-and-one examples of modern trash-club music and it’s never going to go away. Strongbad summaries that genre the best: https://youtu.be/JwZwkk7q25I

You do you, and making fun of what still is the core rhythm of nearly all electronic music ain’t exactly a hard thing to do. ;)

I just thought it kinda sucked that you sounded like you might not have been exposed to, or were even aware of, how that type of music has evolved. “Techno”, “90s House” or whatever, is actually dead for the most part though. The modern iterations of the scene are still massive and probably 80% of those people don’t realize that the core rhythms have been exactly the same for +30 years or more.

And nah, I ain’t butthurt about you making fun of “my” music and not at all trying to be argumentative. The music is so much better now, even if you can still cleanly overlay an untz-tsh. :)

• note: The “four to the floor” is the underlying beat, but it usually has the “swing” knob pushed hard in dance or club, hence, the recognizably short pattern of untz-tsh. The disco beats themselves have some super cool history, regardless.

Not yet.

I think there is a much higher probability of oil prices being manipulated in the short-term.

Attestation approved. ;) (Legally prescribed Adderall and non-abused for about 16 years or so…)

I saw alcohol mentioned a few times in the comments and I get it, but please be careful with it. Neurodivergence and alcohol is a match made in hell. (For me it was. I have no right to speak for anyone else, TBH.)

Thankfully, it’s just the standard doses of amphetamines and caffeine for me these days.

(Alas, I am stuck in a hell of an anxiety loop right now, and can’t get some super important stuff done and can’t crack out of this, for whatever reason. Booze has crossed my mind a few times, but I am fairly positive my next bender would be my last.)

May 19, 2026 3:00 PM _Meta Employees Are Scrambling to Use Up Benefits Ahead of Ahead of Meta’s latest round of mass layoffs tomorrow, some employees are deserting offices, abandoning their work, and loading up on perks they might soon lose, several people at the company tell WIRED.

Two employees describe a widespread rush to use up an annual $2,000 flexible benefit, which can cover a variety of expenses including health and wellness activities. A separate triennial credit of $200 toward the purchase of audio gear has led to a scramble to purchase Apple AirPods and other headphones. Another source says Meta offices have been largely empty this week, as people prioritize polishing their résumés and gather offsite to commiserate with friends for what may be their final time as colleagues. Employees are variously “paralyzed,” “coasting,” and “panicked,” sources say.

Meta plans to lay off about 10 percent of its nearly 80,000 employees on Wednesday, with notices going out to affected workers’ personal and corporate email addresses at 4 am Singapore, London, or San Francisco time depending on their location, according to a company-wide memo sent on Monday. The cuts are coming at a time when the social media giant behind Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook is enjoying record-high profits.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists that the company must free up cash to invest in AI data centers, and that Meta can perform just as well with fewer employees because of AI technologies that augment human labor.

Are you a current or former Meta employee who wants to talk about what’s happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at peard33.24 and ChaoticGoode.12. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. The company has undergone three previous large rounds of layoffs since 2022, including as part of Meta’s one-time “year of efficiency” drive in 2023. But even though the latest round is smaller than a couple of those, it is drawing widespread scrutiny because it comes at a time of societal anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs.

Inside Meta, the imminent cuts are among several concerns that have sunk morale to unprecedented depths, according to 16 current and former employees who recently spoke to WIRED. Employees also have been frustrated by being “drafted” onto a new AI team without any choice and the rollout of surveillance software that tracks US workers’ laptop use to train AI models.

Meta also plans to internally restructure as it conducts sweeping layoffs, transferring 7,000 remaining staff to “AI initiatives” and converting more managers into individual contributors. That would bring the total number of those affected—either laid off or placed in a new role—to 20 percent of the current workforce, Reuters reported on Monday. WIRED independently confirmed this reporting. Some parts of the company have been told they won’t be affected at all.

But in recent days, employees who are bracing for changes have shared checklists internally about benefits to take advantage of, and are saving documents such as performance reviews and pay stubs, according to one worker. Some teams are meeting up at bars and restaurants near Meta offices in New York and Menlo Park on Tuesday and Wednesday to eat and drink away their sorrows, several employees said. Management has encouraged employees not to come into offices on Wednesday.

Update, May 19, 11:40 PM EDT: WIRED corrected the time zones when layoff notices will be emailed. _

What exact is the goal here? You kinda just rolled right into install instructions without context…

Most of this is just marketing crap from Anthropic.

Finding vulnerabilities in code and generating complex, multistep exploits with publicly available models is possible now. This biggest hurdles now is setting correct context and actually knowing what to look for. Any “guardrails” for this behavior are easily bypassed by framing the detection and exploit generation as a valid dev style question in the most difficult of situations.

They likely just trained a model without guardrails in this case.

What they are doing here is over-hyping a problem and framing it like they are the only ones with a solution. LLM security issues are more in-focus now that companies have dumped a ton of resources into building AI systems they don’t really understand.

Confirmed or not, get better sources. Equipment damaged in a war is completely plausible and even inevitable. Propaganda is also inevitable, from either side of a conflict. In this case, an Indian source has proxied state news meant for Iranians.

Trying to sort out their mix of AI slop posts from legit unbiased news isn’t worth my time, even if the news is proxied by another source. (Indian news is generally shit as well, I just ignore that by default. If you actually want extreme sensationalized trash, then good on you.)

Tehran Times would probably also claim that they lead the world in women’s rights and free speech.

Companies these days do what is right for their shareholders and if Claude makes money, or appears to make money, then the shareholders are happy.

000, 666 and 900-999 are invalid area numbers and any digit group of all zeros is also invalid. Thanks for playing!

I am making a slightly different point and have a bias to this perspective: https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/SD/19230.pdf

I am saying that an SSN can be part of a larger validation scheme, not the only key to the castle. Specifically for government sites, SSNs can be linked to IRS data to verify places of last residence. A person generally needs to verify multiple items that are referenced by the SSN before basic authentication can be established and set by the user. (This is part of the full Authentication, Authorization and Access Control triad.)

An SSN is just a broad level identifier. If you look at many laws around the release of SSNs, the redaction is usually in place to prevent the linking of different documents and other data points.

If I released my SSN in this chat, I could be fully doxxed in a matter of seconds. It’s mainly because there are many legal systems in place that use an SSN as a primary key, of sorts. (It’s a bit more than that, as SSNs can be duplicated in some circumstances.)

So to say, at a high level, an SSN is considered private is absolutely correct. However, it’s so easily referenced and obtainable it really isn’t fully private either.

If I was to generate a full list of every possible SSN in the US (which I have done, multiple times), that list is effectively useless to anyone who obtains a copy of it. So, by itself, an SSN is effectively public.

SSNs are generally considered public information but how the SSN is linked to other information is usually the more difficult bit to find and it’s generally pay-walled. (Any jackass with a business license and a credit card can usually buy background check information for ‘hiring’.)

But no, it shouldn’t be solely used for authentication. That is just dumb. However, it can be used as part of a larger verification and validation scheme while building authentication/authorization profiles. In most systems that I have seen that use full or partial SSNs, it is always linked to several other identifiers that need to match.

69% of developers report losing 8+ hours weekly to inefficiencies—20% of their time (Atlassian, 2024)

Yep. If there is any company that knows what it takes to drive inefficiencies, it’s Atlassian. (Fuck them and their software.)

I just need something that mostly works and doesn’t have a huge learning curve. The web-dev aspect is something I really don’t want to think about, but, is something that I can dive into for hyper-customization if needed.

I was teaching myself assembly language and C when I was in 7th grade, so sure. If a kid is self-motivated enough then the sky is the limit.

Kids are capable of some amazing things if given the right tools, enough time and plenty of positive reinforcement.