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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I cannot recommend any USB-connected drive for long-term use. (Only for portable devices that get plugged in for a little while at a time.) In the long term, any USB drive will randomly reset during periods of heavy use – including heavy writes, meaning some data will get lost.

    USB enclosures tend to just crap out completely after a year or two, if used continuously on a server. I know because I twice used 1TB external drives with OpenWRT (home router) devices. The data will be safe on the drive, but you’ll have to replace the enclosure.

    1. My first recommendation would be to look very carefully at the chassis and see if there’s any way at all to fit another SSD inside it. 2.5" SSD’s are usually thinner than 2.5" hard drives, so it may be possible, and most motherboards have more SATA ports than they need.

    Is there possibly an NVMe slot on the motherboard? Or an open PCIe slot where you could put an NVMe adapter?

    1. My second recommendation would be using a 2.5" hard drive. Newegg has a 5TB one for $135, but unfortunately that’s as large as they seem to go. It will be a bit slower than an SSD, but still probably around 150MB/s for sequential access.

    2. My third recommendation, if money is really tight, would be an additional server, with a large 3.5" hard drive. This will be a lot cheaper than an 8TB SSD, but adds complexity, electricity use, space use, and possibly fan noise.



  • Cloudflare seems to incorrectly classify my Internet connection, which is a residential Internet connection going to my house, as a datacenter connection or VPN or something.

    Many websites that use Cloudflare give me endless captcha forms. As soon as I solve one, it demands another, and never lets me access the website.

    Sometimes I solve one captcha, and then it says I’m blocked forever for sending automated queries, even though I filled it out correctly. The error message is: “You are blocked.”

    Sometimes it lets me in after one captcha, but I still resent having to enable Javascript for these assholes just to access a site that doesn’t otherwise require Javascript.

    Sometimes Cloudflare adds extra security to certain pages, just for me. The developers of the website didn’t program it to handle this extra security, so the site fails for just me, and the site developers don’t believe me, telling me I have a browser problem (in three different browsers, which I can fix by using a proxy). For example, when the site’s javascript has my browser to do a CORS operation, the first step is the browser sending an OPTIONS request. However, the extra security of the proxy introduced by Cloudflare responds slightly differently from the actual website, so the site breaks.

    Cloudflare uses a holistic approach to deciding whether you are a legitimate user or a bot. In other words, they use every single possible piece of data they can get on you, including tracking your visits across other Cloudflare sites. They do discriminate against certain user-agent strings.

    Cloudflare completely blocks many Tor users, even from having read-only access to a site.

    When you ask Cloudflare why your IP address is blocked, they falsely claim that it’s a setting created by the website admins. I strongly suspect that this setting is something like “use Cloudflare™ Adaptive Security™” and probably doesn’t explain to the site admin that they’re blocking large quantities of innocent users.

    Cloudflare has previously used Google Recaptcha, which has a ton of problems (tracking, accessibility, training AIs that will make my life worse).


  • It’s because the wavelength and frequency are inversely related. When the wavelength is low and the frequency is high, the wavelength is also moving very slowly, compared to the frequency which is moving very quickly. Since the frequency is changing so quickly, the power-per-unit-frequency is lower at higher frequencies, and higher at lower frequencies (at least relative to the power-per-unit-wavelength).

    Let me try and use a car analogy:

    You’re driving home through Wisconsin, and you live on the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. The mile markers on the road decrease as you go, reaching 0 at the state border, where you happen to live.

    The cows along the highway are evenly distributed, so if you count the cows as you drive, but restart your count every mile when you see the mile marker, you will reach the same number of cows every mile.

    Now, the frequency is inversely related to the mile number. The frequency in this case refers to your children in the back seat asking, “Are we there yet?” They know damn well how far it is to home, because they can just look at the mile markers. Regardless, their rate of asking increases as the mile markers go down. When you’re at mile marker 100, they ask once every 10 minutes. When you’re at mile marker 1, they ask 10 times per minute.

    If you instead look at the number of cows between “Are we there yet?” asks, then you will find that the cows-per-ask is much different from the cows-per-mile. At high distances (low frequencies), the cows-per-ask is very high, while at low distances (high frequencies), the cows-per-ask is very low.

    Now, the article is looking at power-per-unit-frequency, so you’d actually have to measure the rate in change of how often the kids ask “Are we there yet?” And that would give you a little different result. You might need calculus to correctly calculate the derivative of the number of asks. But hopefully this illustrates that you can get different results, by using a different per-thing to measure your value.


  • There are 2 reasons:

    1. Those two graphs have different scales on the y-axis. One is Irradiance per nanometer of wavelength, and one is Irradiance per terahertz of frequency. Both graph’s y-axis are called “spectral irradiance”, despite being different things. This causes most of the distortion between the two graphs, and can even change the location of the absolute maximum.

    2. The graphs’ x-axis have different units. This causes some distortion too, but wouldn’t change the absolute maximum. It would help if they used a log scale in both cases, because wavelength and frequency are inversely related, so then the graphs could just be horizontally flipped.

    So, look at the top graph (by wavelength), and see how much power is in that 1000-2000nm area. It’s still a lot, just spread out over a large area. It’s the same amount of power in the lower graph (by frequency) shoved into the much smaller area from 150THz to 300THz. Since it’s in a smaller area on the lower graph, it has more power-per-unit-of-x-axis.


  • The Catholics are going to be in a difficult place as gayness becomes more normal. It’s quickly becoming self-evident that homosexual relationships are not immoral at all. That’s probably going to accelerate over the next few decades.

    So the church should probably do more than just this to accept gay people, but they can’t. Catholic rulings set by ecumenical councils or by the pope (in such a way as to invoke papal infallibility) can’t be changed. It’s like if the US constitution could only be amended if the amendments didn’t contradict or repeal any existing text.

    So if the church says “no homo, and that’s final,” then they can’t go back and change it to “just a little homo, as a treat.” It’s hard to find an exact citation, but I’m pretty sure they’ve already said “no homo” enough to make it official, so there’s no going back from that. Unless they also retract infallibility.