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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Did you not find an answer yourself; i.e. ‘asshole’? Most other anatomical inserts also apply, at least the non-gendered ones.

    • Does not offend any particular group, except perhaps those with a colostomy.

    • Still an insult.

    The remainder are generally insulting because they imply you’re so X that you must be a member of group X. I.e. calling someone brain-dead, an idiot, a moron, slow, the French word for slow etc. You can’t call someone stupid without calling them stupid, even in an indirect way.

    Edit: Neanderthal and troglodyte might work on the grounds that you’re comparing them to extinct species, and of course you could go for inanimate objects e.g. thick as pigshit, as smart as a bag of rocks etc.











  • Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

    Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

    Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

    Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

    For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.


  • When you download a torrent, you’re downloading it from someone else’s computer. That ‘someone else’ is usually an individual, not some file sharing site with redundant servers.

    When you download a torrent, someone had to send it. It’s a small cost for individual torrents, but they had to pay for energy, internet connection, hard drives etc. If more people seed the torrent, you get a small bit of it from each seed, spreading the burden.

    If no-one with the torrent has their computer on and seeding it, you cannot download the file, because there is no-one to download it from. If there are several seeds with the torrent, then you can still download it even if one or more seeds turn the computer off at night, delete the file, or are overloaded.






  • It was a few years back, but after it hit ChromeOS EOL I’m pretty sure it just got some KDE distro; I don’t think I even used LXDE. Didn’t need to do much.

    I was mostly using it for web browsing, forums, spreadsheets, documentation etc. Nothing particularly strenuous.

    I did have one really fun time of modifying PDF engineering drawings by opening them in Libre Office Draw which it handled kinda OK.

    It did get a 240GB SSD but everything else was soldered.