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Cake day: August 7th, 2025

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  • While this article makes a good point overall, the focus on just the death rates doesn’t really tell a complete or cohesive story.

    The rates that these deaths are discussed needs to be analyzed from the perspective of what percentages are they of the overall news stories. And, there is a need for a deeper analysis of the context of the stories. For example, a story that is really about a war may mention gun violence or terrorist deaths - and it is likely to be repeated several times throughout the story. However, that story is about war, and not really about the type of death.

    The reason for the skew in representation is quite simple: metrics / telemetry data. These outlets have developed very sophisticated systems that track the engagement with the articles they publish. The amount of information they are able to gather allows them to build profiles of their audience, and from there be able to predict the engagement that each article will get. IOW – they are serving their audience, and the audience has shown that this is the information that they want to engage with.

    One additional thing: in building these profiles, they are taking into account revenue streams, everything from subscription levels, advertising engagement, etc. They are living on thin margins financially and have to absolutely everything they can to make a profit.






  • Moore’s law was about the technology – but I am talking about the application of the technology. It was unusual for most businesses to base their purchasing / refreshing decisions around the idea that the technology would be good for 2-3 Moore’s law cycles. This was especially true back in the days of Mainframes and later “Mini” computers (shrunk down versions of Mainframes – not Mini PC’s) where companies like DEC and IBM went to great lengths to ensure that upgrading to a newer system didn’t impact other operations in a business.

    Most of this carried on with Vax and Unix Systems (like Sun workstations, SGI, etc.) in the same lifecycle.

    When PC’s started coming into the business world, the thought was that they would fit that same lifecycle – and many of them did. This set the mark for early PC’s when IBM brought them to the consumer market. The IBM PC was, after all, the consumer version of a business computer.

    Apple, Commodore, TI, Atari, et al. were a bit different – coming at things more from the entertainment, education, and hobby side of things.

    I see what Steve is doing here is attempting to push things back towards the business lifecycle, and with good reason: it’s better for the planet if fewer machines are abandoned due to the arbitrary whims of some marketer’s concept of profitability.




  • Meant to comment on this earlier… I’m implementing an LVM cache – which is filesystem / device level caching. Having a failure with something at this level could mean corrupting a 42TB storage device. This would be a far cry from losing an application level set of cache files…

    That’s why I am being a lot more cautious about this drive. A failure here could be non-recoverable.


  • Yeah, I’m quite aware of a lot of the junk on Amazon – and I normally would stick to a well known brand like Samsung, WD, or Crucial… But there were no listings for m.2 SSD’s in the 32-64G range. At first I ordered a “Kingdata” drive (an obvious play on Kingston), but later I saw a listing for a drive from Transcend – which I recalled from my IT days, and a quick check of their website confirmed they were the company I was thinking of.

    So, this is why I am fairly certain that this is some kind of labeling / packaging mistake. Transcend is reasonably well-known, and afaik aren’t scammers.

    And, to top it off, I ran some additional tests on the drive… And for what it is, it is performing exactly how I would have expected: 420MB/s read/write, with 0.1msec access times – with extreme consistency. (Given that this is installed on a PCIE adapter that only has 1 lane available.)


  • Okay - wild… The results of f3probe:

    Good news: The device `/dev/sda’ is the real thing

    Device geometry: Usable size: 931.51 GB (1953525168 blocks) Announced size: 931.51 GB (1953525168 blocks) Module: 1.00 TB (2^40 Bytes) Approximate cache size: 0.00 Byte (0 blocks), need-reset=no Physical block size: 512.00 Byte (2^9 Bytes)

    Probe time: 16.12s

    Oops - misstated something before. This is an MLC NAND drive, the cache is supposed to be DDR4 DRAM. I suspect, however, this is a mis-labeled drive…


  • I agree - I wouldn’t trust it either…and, surprisingly, this one came from Amazon, and not some fly-by-night AliExpress store. (I rarely purchase something there without seeing reviews first…

    But the other thing about this is that I checked out the website for the product. They are a company that specializes in enterprise and embedded products. I was pretty certain I had heard of them before in the enterprise world, which is why I purchased the drive.

    The reason I bought this drive was because it specifies having a NAND cache on it (MLC, but beggars can’t be choosers with drives like this), whereas the others I looked at didn’t have (or at list didn’t have specs which listed having) any form of NAND caching.

    @nao@sh.itjust.works - thanks f or the pointer to f3 – I’ll grab it and check the drive before I return it.