tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on The geography of generative AI’s workforce impacts will likely differ from those of previous technologies 7 hours ago:
It’s an interesting idea. If their thesis is true, it might cause compression the income range.
- The geography of generative AI’s workforce impacts will likely differ from those of previous technologieswww.brookings.edu ↗Submitted 7 hours ago to technology@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on FTC investigates “tech censorship,” says it’s un-American and may be illegal 20 hours ago:
If we wind up in a situation where the EU mandates a form of censorship that the US bans, I assume that the platforms in question would have to separate their EU and US users and sites.
- Comment on AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do Instead. 1 day ago:
You could always just do reverse search on the open dataset to see if it’s an exact copy (or over a threshold).
True, but “exact copy” almost certainly isn’t going to be what gets produced – and you can have a derivative work that isn’t an exact copy of the original, just generate something that looks a lot like part of the original. Like, you’d want to have a pretty good chance of finding a derivative work.
- Comment on Tesla Installing Countermeasures as People Are Hacking the Cables Off Superchargers 1 day ago:
I mean…I agree with you that EVs are relatively-poorly-suited compared to ICEs for long distance trips, and if I had both a gasoline-powered and electricity-powered vehicle, I’d use the gasoline-powered one for a long-distance trip… but not everyone is going to own both. It’s hardly reasonable to say “well, people who own EVs just can’t travel long distances”.
- Comment on Make McKinley Great Again - by Jason Steinhauer 1 day ago:
They are not afraid to manipulate the map in order to expand American influence, including an annexation of Greenland, an assertion of rights to the Panama Canal, and a seizure of Gaza.
These aren’t real moves (well, Gaza, maybe, though if so, I expect it’d be some kind of UN mandate type thing, as has existed in the past). Trump has run a long series of provocative statements in the past that are quite decoupled from what he’s actually done in office. Invading Canada was mentioned early in his first term, and he’s done it again.
The goal is to expand the markets for American industry, whether that be in the Arctic Circle, the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East or even in Outer Space, a new frontier for resource exploitation and commercial enterprise (asteroid mining, space tourism, etc.).
No. Hell, McKinley isn’t even a great example of the US gaining access to new markets – you’d want to roll back from that to something like the Perry Expedition under Filmore. Today, world markets are pretty open. If you wanted to complain about protectionist markets today, you’d complain about something like India.
A lot of the political fighting in the US for a long time was over tariffs on manufactured goods. That was effectively a domestic fight – tariffs drove up the prices of manufactured goods, which benefitted manufacturing states up north at the expense of agricultural states in the south. Those advocating for tariffs weren’t principally aiming to get more access to foreign markets, but to get a larger share of the wealth from agriculture.
What Trump has publicly complained about, which I doubt very much should be taken as a face value representation of his or the administration’s concerns, is balance of trade (and, specifically, on a bilateral basis). Bilateral trade balances aren’t a concern of economists. You expect imbalance on a country-by-country basis. What they are, however, is something that members of the public who don’t have that background are sometimes concerned about. Trump has a history of taking an item of public concern and then engaging in political theater to give a great impression that he is addressing it. That is decoupled from his administration’s actual policy, though.
Like McKinley, Trump also sees tariffs as a means of shifting the burden of revenue collection from taxation of Americans via an Internal Revenue Service to taxation of foreigners via an External Revenue Service. Trump parrots long-held beliefs inside Libertarian and corporate circles about the evils of domestic taxation.
First, that’s small-l “libertarian” unless you mean the Libertarian Party. In general, right-libertarians are more than fine with international trade – they’re one of its stronger advocates in the American political scene. If you take Cato as an example, they currently have an article up complaining bitterly complaining about Trump’s proposed use of tariffs:
cato.org/…/reciprocal-tariffs-are-trumps-worst-tr…
‘Reciprocal Tariffs’ Are Trump’s Worst Trade Idea Yet
Alas, you will be shocked to learn that it is not actually that simple, and that—in the real world—“reciprocal tariffs” would be a catastrophically bad idea for all sorts of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with one’s stance on tariffs, free(ish) trade, or U.S. trade agreements.
Under a reciprocal system, however, these and other customs rules and procedures would matter not for a few products and countries but for every single thing entering the United States—trillions of dollars’ worth of goods each year—no matter their origin or their complexity. Related costs would accordingly skyrocket.
A truly reciprocal system would lower U.S. tariffs to match the tariffs of these and other trading partners, but, given the politics here, there’s effectively zero chance of that ever happening.
Who wants tariffs? People who make whatever is being protected, since that transfers wealth away from other people in the country to them. Trump has gotten himself in the news for being supportive of manufacturing tariffs – steel, aluminum, cars. Those are things that the Rust Belt wants, which are swing states. Here’s aluminum:
That is, it’s good politics, but in general, tariffs aren’t a great way to open access to foreign markets. You can use them as leverage to try to negotiate free trade agreements from other countries that lower their barriers to trade, but that’s the exact opposite of what Trump has tried to do – he has presented himself as someone opposed to free trade agreements. He tried to take credit for TPP and TTIP falling through under Obama, and made a huge deal out of potentially tearing up NAFTA.
He’s aiming to score political points from people who like the idea of a high-paying, low-skill assembly-line industry coming back. That’s an artifact of a globally-different economic situation in the world – it’s not going to happen today, and Trump hasn’t actually done a lot to try to actually push that, but he’s come to a lot of effort to make it look like he’s doing so.
Finally, Trump is a man of grievances, and one of his continual grievances has been that America is taken advantage of by the rest of the world.
I would say that a very substantial part of this should not be taken at face value. That is, that position is one that sells well with a chunk of the public whose support Trump wants, and a large part of the way one gets political support is by saying things that they agree with. More interesting to watch what the administration actually does, and we’ve a good four years of Trump in office to refer to on that point.
- Comment on Make McKinley Great Again - by Jason Steinhauer 1 day ago:
McKinley lived during a period (and, indeed, was an influential figure) when the U.S. became a global superpower.
No.
The US only became a superpower – preeminent among the great powers – during the Cold War, well after McKinley was dead.
The US was becoming a great power in the era back then. There’s a neat Puck political cartoon from the time that shows Columbia, the national personification of the US, trying on a new hat that reads “world power”. That is, the US wasn’t just some bit player way off in the boonies anymore. Two years prior, she had actually fought and won a war with Spain (which was very much not one of the strongest European powers at that point, probably couldn’t be considered a great power any more).
kagis
Title: Columbia’s Easter bonnet
Ehrhart after a sketch by Dalrymple.
Summary: Illustration shows Columbia adjusting her bonnet, which is a battleship labeled “World Power” with two guns labeled “Army” and “Navy”; it is spewing thick black smoke labeled “Expansion.” She is inserting a tiny sword as a hatpin to hold it in place.
But the US still wasn’t a superpower. Militarily, it was much weaker than the other great powers – the US had a small, weak peacetime army, and the US Navy, which was the US’s strong point militarily, was not even close to Germany or the UK’s navies even in World War I.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpower
It did have a strong economy. IIRC, the US bypassed the British Empire’s GDP sometime in the late 1800s.
But the bar to be a superpower is pretty high, and the US didn’t meet it until quite a bit later.
Superpower describes a sovereign state or supranational union that holds a dominant position characterized by the ability to exert influence and project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined means of economic, military, technological, political, and cultural strength as well as diplomatic and soft power influence. Traditionally, superpowers are preeminent among the great powers. While a great power state is capable of exerting its influence globally, superpowers are states so influential that no significant action can be taken by the global community without first considering the positions of the superpowers on the issue.
- Comment on Tesla Installing Countermeasures as People Are Hacking the Cables Off Superchargers 1 day ago:
Just get rid of the charging stations. It’s ridiculous that EV owners should expect to charge their cars anywhere but at home or at work.
Why would it be ridiculous for EV owners to charge cars away from home or work? l’d say that it’s pretty necessary for long-distance trips.
- Comment on AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do Instead. 2 days ago:
So, I agree with the EFF that we should not introduce some kind of new legal right to prohibit training on something just because it’s copyrighted. There’s nothing that keeps a human from training themselves on content, so neither should an AI be prohibited.
However.
It is possible for a human to make a work that will infringe existing copyright rights, by producing a derivative work. Not every work inspired by something else will meet the legal bar for being derived, but some can. And just as a human can do that, so too can AIs.
I have no problem with, say, an AI being able to emulate a style. But it’s possible for AIs today to produce works that do meet the bar for being derivative works. As things stand, I believe that that’d make the user of the AI liable. And yet, there’s not really a very good way for them to avoid that. That’s a legit point of complaint, I think, because it leads to people making derivative works.
The existing generative AI systems don’t have a very good way of trying to hint to a user of the model whether a work is derivative.
However, I’d think that what we could do is operate something like a federal registry of images. For published, copyrighted works, we already have mandatory deposit with the Library of Congress.
If something akin to Tineye were funded by the government, it would be possible to maintain an archive of registered, copyrighted work. It would then be practical for someone who had just generated an image to check whether there was a pre-existing image.
I don’t know whether Tineye works like this, but for it to work, we’d probably have to have a way to recognize an image under a bunch of transformations: scale, rotation, color, etc. I don’t know what Tineye does today, but I’d assume some kind of feature recognition – maybe does line-detection, vectorizes it, breaks an image up into a bunch of chuns, performs some operation to canonicalize the rotation based on the content of the chunk, and then performs some kind of fuzzy hash on the lines.
Then one could place an expectation that if one is to distribute an LLM-generated work, it be fed into such a system, and if not so verified and distributed and the work is derivative of a registered work, the presumption being that the infringement was intentional (which IIRC entitles a rights holder to treble damages under US law). We don’t have a mathematical model today to determine whether one work is “derivative” of another, but we could make one or at least give an approximation and warning.
I think that that’s practical for most cases for for holders of copyrighted images and LLM users. It permits people to use LLMs to generate images for non-distributed use. It doesn’t create a legal minefield for an LLM user. It places no restrictions on model creators. It’s doable using something like existing technology. It permits a viewer of a generated image to verify that the image is not derivative.
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 3 days ago:
Inflation from the period during COVID-19 did go down. That does not mean that prices will return to a pre-COVID-19 point. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices, not prices. The government will actively aim to avoid deflation via adjusting interest rates, because deflation creates problems. What you saw during COVID-19 was the rate of price increases being higher than the rate of wage increases for several years, and what you saw subsequent to that was the rate of wage increases being higher than prices.
- Comment on Trump tariffs result in 10% laptop price hike in U.S. says Acer CEO 3 days ago:
capitalism will use every manufactured crisis to price gouge the fuck out of everyone
The situation here is that the government is imposing a tax and that it’s getting passed on to consumers. I’m not sure why you’re complaining about “capitalism”. If Acer were part of the government, they’d be charging more too.
- Comment on Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down - Phoronix 3 days ago:
I’ve used Epson and Brother printers without issue, though I suppose things could change on a per-model basis or over time.
- Comment on New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code 4 days ago:
That’s a broad brush to paint with.
- Comment on How often do you run backups on your system? 4 days ago:
and uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.
I’m not familiar with that, but if it permits for faster identification of modified data since a given time than scanning a filesystem for modification times, which a filesystem could potentially do, that could also be a useful backup enabler, since now your scan-for-changes time doesn’t need to be linear in the number of files in the filesystem. If you don’t do that, your next best bet on Linux – and this way would be filesystem-agnostic – is gonna require something like having a daemon that runs and uses inotify to build some kind of on-disk index of modifications since the last backup, and a backup system that can understand that.
looks at btrfs-send(1) man page
Ah, yeah, it does do that. Well, the man page doesn’t say what time it runs in, but I assume that it’s better than linear in file count on the filesystem.
- Comment on How often do you run backups on your system? 4 days ago:
You’re correct and probably the person you’re responding to is treating one as an alternative as another.
However, theoretically filesystem snapshotting can be used to enable backups, because they permit for an instantaneous, consistent view of a filesystem. I don’t know if there are backup systems that do this with btrfs today, but this would involve taking a snapshot and then having the backup system backing up the snapshot rather than the live view of the filesystem.
Otherwise, stuff like drive images and database files that are being written to while being backed up can just have a corrupted, inconsistent file in the backup.
- Comment on Portable drone jammer uses a Raspberry Pi tactical Software Defined Radio 5 days ago:
I bet some of 'em live in the 2.4 GHz range to use unregulated spectrum.
d-fendsolutions.com/…/issues-with-jamming-drone-f…
Commercial drones operate on four frequency bands: 2.4GHz, 5.8GHz, 433MHz and 915MHz.
You probably have something like a 2000 watt 2.4 GHz cavity magnetron transmitter. It’s just normally got shielding around it – your microwave oven.
Dunno if they hit a wide enough spectrum to blot out drones, though.
kagis
uavjammer123.com/introduction-to-drone-frequency-…
- 2.4 GHz ISM Band
Frequency Range: 2.400 – 2.4835 GHz
Usage: This band is widely used for remote control and data transmission, including consumer drones.
www.sfu.ca/phys/…/physics_of_microwave_ovens.pdf
The magnetrons in domestic microwave ovens emit microwaves at 2.45 GHz (repeatable, each time the magnetron is switched on, to ±10 MHz) with bandwidths of only a few MHz [6]
So, looks like not, if the frequency range is ~83 MHz wide and the magnetron in use only has bandwidth of a few MHz.
- Comment on Rocks vs. Chips. 5 days ago:
[continued from parent]
Under these conditions, the U.S. will need to accelerate domestic and allied mining efforts while tightening enforcement on chip exports through global cooperation. This will be a challenging task given mounting international resistance to the Trump administration’s potential trade policies
- Comment on Rocks vs. Chips. 5 days ago:
As the United States and China careen toward intensified economic decoupling and geopolitical rivalry, trends in the semiconductor and minerals sectors will define their strategic competition. Both great powers aim to consolidate competitive advantages by hampering the other’s technological development and hammering their trading partners. Both are doing so using increasingly damaging measures—but from opposite ends of tech supply chains. The American position remains strongest in advanced technologies, an edge that the Joe Biden administration sought to preserve and extend through an unprecedented series of export controls. China, meanwhile, is just beginning to implement a parallel export control regime that leverages its dominant market share in critical minerals as well as niche but strategic industries.
Recent tit-for-tat actions mark a troubling new level of severity in this escalating struggle for technological advantage. On December 3, 2024, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) imposed its first outright ban on the export of certain “dual-use” critical minerals to the United States. This export control went into force for germanium, gallium, superhard minerals like synthetic diamonds, and imposed additional licensing restrictions on graphite exports. In adopting this ambitious new measure, China was retaliating against U.S. semiconductor chip and manufacturing equipment export controls unveiled only the day prior. On February 4, 2025, in response to new U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, MOFCOM announced restrictions on additional minerals including tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and products that include molybdenum. In initiating these outright bans, Beijing has aimed to mirror U.S. long-arm jurisdiction by, likewise, seeking to enforce its export controls extraterritorially in third countries, which could re-export the restricted goods to America.
Juxtaposing “chips” and “rocks” reveals a basic asymmetry between each party’s points of strategic leverage. Beijing is building a dam upstream, threatening to choke off the flow of raw materials and intermediate goods required to produce certain advanced technologies—including semiconductor chips, high-capacity batteries, and a range of defense and aerospace products. Washington’s fortress is further downstream and depends heavily on guarding the intellectual property of American and allied firms employing the technical capabilities of a network of allies and industrial partners. This position has enabled U.S. government efforts to restrict Chinese entities’ access to the latest semiconductors and delay, but not halt, their development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
My understanding from past reading is that China’s strength mostly isn’t in access to raw materials, but rather in processing of those raw materials. That is, China is not especially unique in terms of what’s in the ground, but rather in that it has large-scale industry to refine those materials. My guess based on past reading as to why processing has gone to China and without looking into individually-processed substances, is that their advantages lie in (1) low labor costs, (2) restricted environmental regulations, and perhaps (3) scale of domestic market and possibly (4) government subsidies.
The first item, high labor costs, is inevitably going to be a US weak point, but we can find a poor-but-friendly country to trade with, probably one poorer than China is in 2025. It’s also possible to possibly partly make use of automation to partially mitigate that; I doubt that this will wholly offset this, though, or manufacturers would have done so.
The second item, restricted environmental regulations, are also probably going to be hard. Maybe some US ones are going to be unnecessary, could be removed, but there are also probably going to be countries that would rather have the economic activity than reduced pollution, so, again, trade is an answer.
The third item, scale of domestic market, is going to be hard to overcome in the longer term. China has a population over four times larger than the US, and even around 2100, after which point the US is projected to have grown and China will have dropped in size, is expected to be about double. China will tend to develop, converge on a per-capita wealth basis with the US. That’s probably going to involve international trade, and not just with one or two countries.
The fourth item, government subsidies, are doable if the US wants to do it, though doing so will weaken other industries. Probably somewhat-easier for the US than China; the US has a larger GDP in 2025.
It’s also important to note that one critical US advantage regarding chip manufacture is in extreme ultraviolet lithography. I understand that this is not something that the US commercialized or presently control, but rather the Dutch, in the form of ASML – the US government paid to develop the basic technology and a prototype, but the Dutch then finished the work to bring it to market. Something that the Trump administration might keep in mind insofar as it is concerned principally with competition with China and not so much with things that Europe cares about, like Russia; actively antagonizing the Netherlands probably isn’t a good idea.
Rare earth elements (REE) have been a focal point in China’s evolving critical minerals policy. As early as 1992, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, declared, “the Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.
The US has very little active production, last I looked, but does have inactive production, and Congress was looking at subsidies to remedy that fact.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine
As of 2022, work is ongoing to restore processing capabilities for domestic light rare-earth elements (LREEs) and work has been funded by the United States Department of Defense to restore processing capabilities for heavy rare-earth metals (HREEs) to alleviate supply chain risk. [4]
I also seem to vaguely recall that Canada and Australia have rare earth reserves…they just haven’t done extraction, as it hasn’t made financial sense.
yahoo.com/…/canadas-rare-earth-rush-frontier-2000…
As Canada rapidly develops its LNG production and export capabilities and expands its oil industry, the North American country may also be looking to boost its reputation as a rare earth elements producer. Canada has produced rare earth elements (REE) for several decades and is thought to have extensive untapped reserves. It has supported other countries in the development of their REE industries and is now looking to expand its domestic mining activities to help achieve net-zero goals and develop a regional supply chain.
Canada’s 2024 Critical Mineral Strategy Annual Report outlines plans to mine for over 30 critical minerals, with a focus on lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper, and REE. The U.S. government has repeatedly stated concerns about the growing dependence on China for critical minerals and REE, as well as other energy sources and products, as it looks to develop more regional supply chains. The expansion of Canada’s mining industry could help it provide a stable domestic supply of REE as well as support the development of a North American supply chain. James Edmondson, the research director at IDTechEx, said “It is believed Canada has very large quantities of these materials, even if they have not yet begun processing them in significant quantities.”
That’s maybe a short-term issue, but probably not long-term.
Graphite, essential for lithium-ion batteries, represents a critical vulnerability for the United States, which is in the midst of a $70 billion domestic manufacturing boom in the battery sector
Graphite’s just carbon; basically, very high grade coal. Surely it’s manufactured via refinement of readily-available stuff like coal? The US has, IIRC, something like 40% of global reserves of anthracite (the next grade down below graphite) within its borders, which is considerably ahead of China, not to mention substantial lower-grade stuff. Also, unless one needs enormous amounts, which I assume is not the case for lithium-ion batteries. Any fossil fuel power plant, including crude oil or natural gas, is also going to have as an input something containing carbon, and given energy, that can be reduced to carbon. I cannot imagine that this represents any kind of a long-term constraint for the US.
kagis
This sounds like graphite is indeed obtained by processing coke.
And that is derived from coal.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)
Coke is a grey, hard, and porous coal-based fuel with a high carbon content. It is made by heating coal or petroleum in the absence of air.
Ah, yeah, they mention the Netherlands:
For China, U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment have created a chokepoint for China’s technological ambitions—but with notable examples of innovative workarounds beginning to materialize. These restrictions, reinforced by alliances with Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea, have sought to block access to key tools like extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are required to produce high-performance graphic processing units (GPUs), leaving Chinese firms struggling to compete at advanced nodes.
And make the same prediction that I made above, that if the Trump administration truly wants to restrict international trade on a serious and continued basis, rather than conduct political theater to score domestic points, that’s going to make life a lot harder for competing with China:
[continued in child]
- Comment on Xbox Sales Hit Rock Bottom After Historic 2024 Decline 6 days ago:
I didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas, and I walked away a little disappointed after hoping for a new Fallout-like game.
Some of the major elements from Fallout just weren’t there:
-
Fallout provided neat perks/traits that substantially-impacted how one played; that’s a signature part of the series. The great bulk of the perks in The Outer Worlds were things like small percentage increases. They didn’t have a significant impact on how the game played out.
-
The weapons didn’t “feel” very different other than across classes, with the exception of the “science weapons”, so there wasn’t a lot of variety in gunplay over the course of a game.
-
While the world was open in that one could technically always backtrack, there wasn’t much reason to do so.
-
Most of the content was in “cities”. Yeah, sure, there was wilderness, and maybe that added a sense of scale, but it was mostly just filler between cities. If you’re wandering around in Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4, there was interesting content all over to just stumble into. One only really got that in cities.
There were some things that I did like. In particular:
- It was pretty stable and bug-free. The Fallout series has had entrants from a number of teams, but one consistent element has been a lot of bugs at release.
-
- Comment on The hardest working font in Manhattan – Aresluna 6 days ago:
I probably wouldn’t normally have looked at a photo gallery of Manhattan signs, but this made it really interesting.
At one point someone explained to me Gorton must have been a routing font, meant to be carved out by a milling machine rather than painted on top or impressed with an inked press.
Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”).
Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.
Pen plotters need monoline fonts.
I’ve been kind of interested in fountain pen plotters recently, things like these, as I like the look of fountain pen stuff, but would rather use a computer to do stuff (repeatedly, at scale) than train my hand. I don’t think that there’s anything “bad” about monoline fonts. They’re just designed for a specific purpose.
- Comment on I Paid $70 for an AI Boyfriend: Here's Everything I Learned 6 days ago:
I mean, video games aren’t real either. I played a round of Steel Division 2 earlier today. It was fun, but it didn’t really accomplish anything. The tanks and people there weren’t real – they were just renditions of a computer-rendered world. I don’t think that most people are going to go off on video games, though.
I wouldn’t personally use the term “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”. They’re fancy chatbots. But I don’t think that there’s anything intrinsically problematic with them. The big issue, from my standpont, is if it causes people to not go out and have kids because the chatbot is taking the place of a partner, exploiting a useful biological imperative – that’s got broader societal effects.
It sounds like in this case, the author is a woman who is a divorcee who was mostly looking for entertainment, not a spouse. So…shrugs
I mean, if she went out and read some romance novels and fantasized, would that be preferable to a chatbot? That’d be more of a traditional route, maybe.
- Comment on Tumblr to join the fediverse after WordPress migration completes | TechCrunch 1 week ago:
Don’t they support video posts?
kagis
Hmm. Apparently so.
Well, it’s not an open platform, but I guess it may be a platform with the ability to serve some serious video that’s on the Fediverse.
help.tumblr.com/knowledge-base/posting-video/
-
It’ll need to be a MOV or MP4 file.
-
You can post up to 20 videos per day.
-
A single video can be up to 10 minutes in length.
-
The video upload size limit is 500 MB per video.
-
The total video time limit per day is 60 minutes.
We have been having a lot of discussions about what it would take to get video on the Fediverse.
-
- Comment on US and UK refuse to sign AI safety declaration at summit 1 week ago:
From top-to-bottom:
-
Skynet from The Terminator
-
Joshua from Wargames
- Comment on AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds 1 week ago:
They are, however, able to inaccurately summarize it in GLaDOS’s voice, which is a point in their favor.
- Comment on US and UK refuse to sign AI safety declaration at summit 1 week ago:
- Comment on Google officially changes the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on Maps 1 week ago:
If Justin Trudeau gets active on this, you can probably get it to Gulf of Canada (Gulf of Mexico) (Gulf of America).
- Comment on Homelab upgrade - "Modern" alternatives to NFS, SSHFS? 1 week ago:
Wouldnt the sync option also confirm that every write also arrived on the disk?
If you’re mounting with the NFS sync option, that’ll avoid the “wait until close and probably reorder writes at the NFS layer” issue I mentioned, so that’d address one of the two issues, and the one that’s specific to NFS.
- Comment on Homelab upgrade - "Modern" alternatives to NFS, SSHFS? 1 week ago:
NFS doesn’t do snapshotting, which is what I assumed that you meant and I’d guess ShortN0te also assumed.
If you’re talking about qcow2 snapshots, that happens at the qcow2 level. NFS doesn’t have any idea that qemu is doing a snapshot operation.
On a related note: if you are invoking a VM using a filesystem images stored on an NFS mount, I would be careful, unless you are absolutely certain that this is safe for the version of NFS and the specific caching options for both NFS and qemu that you are using.
I’ve tried to take a quick look. There’s a large stack involved, and I’m only looking at it quickly.
To avoid data loss via power loss, filesystems – and thus the filesystem images backing VMs using filesystems – require write ordering to be maintained. That is, they need to have the ability to do a write and have it go to actual, nonvolatile storage prior to any subsequent writes.
At a hard disk protocol level, like for SCSI, there are BARRIER operations. These don’t force something to disk immediately, but they do guarantee that all writes prior to the BARRIER are on nonvolatile storage prior to writes subsequent to it.
I don’t believe that Linux has any userspace way for an process to request a write barrier. There is not an
fwritebarrier()call. This means that the only way to impose write ordering is to call fsync()/sync() or use similar-such operations. These force data to nonvolatile storage, and do not return until it is there. The downside is that this is slow. Programs that are frequently doing such synchronizations cannot issue writes very quickly, and are very sensitive to latency to their nonvolatile storage.From the
qemu(1)man page:By default, the cache.writeback=on mode is used. It will report data writes as completed as soon as the data is present in the host page cache. This is safe as long as your guest OS makes sure to correctly flush disk caches where needed. If your guest OS does not handle volatile disk write caches correctly and your host crashes or loses power, then the guest may experience data corruption. For such guests, you should consider using cache.writeback=off. This means that the host page cache will be used to read and write data, but write notification will be sent to the guest only after QEMU has made sure to flush each write to the disk. Be aware that this has a major impact on performance.
I’m fairly sure that this is a rather larger red flag than it might appear, if one simply assumes that Linux must be doing things “correctly”.
Linux doesn’t guarantee that a write to position A goes to disk prior to a write to position B. That means that if your machine crashes or loses power, with the default settings, even for drive images sorted on a filesystem on a local host, with default you can potentially corrupt a filesystem image.
docs.kernel.org/block/blk-mq.html
Note
Neither the block layer nor the device protocols guarantee the order of completion of requests. This must be handled by higher layers, like the filesystem.
POSIX does not guarantee that write() operations to different locations in a file are ordered.
stackoverflow.com/…/guarantees-of-order-of-the-op…
So by default – which is what you might be doing, wittingly or unwittingly – if you’re using a disk image on a filesystem,
qemusimply doesn’t care about write ordering to nonvolatile storage. It does writes. it does not care about the order in which they hit the disk. It is not callingfsync()or using analogous functionality (likeO_DIRECT).NFS entering the picture complicates this further.
www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/nfs.5.html
The sync mount option The NFS client treats the sync mount option differently than some other file systems (refer to mount(8) for a description of the generic sync and async mount options). If neither sync nor async is specified (or if the async option is specified), the NFS client delays sending application writes to the server until any of these events occur:
Memory pressure forces reclamation of system memory resources. An application flushes file data explicitly with sync(2), msync(2), or fsync(3). An application closes a file with close(2). The file is locked/unlocked via fcntl(2). In other words, under normal circumstances, data written by an application may not immediately appear on the server that hosts the file. If the sync option is specified on a mount point, any system call that writes data to files on that mount point causes that data to be flushed to the server before the system call returns control to user space. This provides greater data cache coherence among clients, but at a significant performance cost. Applications can use the O_SYNC open flag to force application writes to individual files to go to the server immediately without the use of the sync mount option.
So, strictly-speaking, this doesn’t make any guarantees about what NFS does. It says that it’s fine for the NFS client to send nothing to the server at all on write(). The only time a write() to a file makes it to the server, if you’re using the default NFS mount options. If it’s not going to the server, it definitely cannot be flushed to nonvolatile storage.
Now, I don’t know this for a fact – would have to go digging around in the NFS client you’re using. But it would be compatible with the guarantees listed, and I’d guess that probably, the NFS client isn’t keeping a log of all the write()s and then replaying them in order. If it did so, for it to meaningfully affect what’s on nonvolatile storage, the NFS server would have to fsync() the file after each write being flushed to nonvolatile storage. Instead, it’s probably just keeping a list of dirty data in the file, and then flushing it to the NFS server at close().
That is, say you have a program that opens a file filled with all ‘0’ characters, and does:
- write ‘1’ to position 1.
- write ‘1’ to position 5000.
- write ‘2’ to position 1.
- write ‘2’ to position 5000.
At close() time, the NFS client probably doesn’t flush “1” to position 1, then “1” to position 5000, then “2” to position 1, then “2” to position 5000. It’s probably just flushing “2” to position 1, and then “2” to position 5000, because when you close the file, that’s what’s in the list of dirty data in the file.
The thing is that unless the NFS client retains a log of all those write operations, there’s no way to send the writes to the server in a way that avoid putting the file into a corrupt state if power is lost. It doesn’t matter whether it writes the “2” at position 1 or the “2” at position 5000. In either case, it’s creating a situation where, for a moment, one of those two positions has a “0”, and the other has a “2”. If there’s a failure at that point – the server loses power, the network connection is severed – that’s the state in which the file winds up in. That’s a state that is inconsistent, should never have arisen. And if the file is a filesystem image, then the filesystem might be corrupt.
So I’d guess that at both of those two points in the stack – the NFS client writing data to the server, and the server block device scheduler, permit inconsistent state if there’s no fsync()/sync()/etc being issued, which appears to be the default behavior for
qemu. And running on NFS probably creates a larger window for a failure to induce corruption.It’s possible that using qemu’s iSCSI backend avoids this issue, assuming that the iSCSI target avoids reordering. That’d avoid qemu going through the NFS layer.
I’m not going to dig further into this at the moment. I might be incorrect. But I felt that I should at least mention it, since filesystem images on NFS sounded a bit worrying.
- Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? 1 week ago:
Honestly, I’m a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn’t have a familiarity of a concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I’ve always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok…most software packages don’t require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don’t have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.
But…I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don’t, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they’re just the front end to a cloud service.
Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like
scpfrom there. A file manager. Open local video files inmpvor in PDF viewers and such. I’ve a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I’ve got a directory hierarchy that I’ve created, though simpler and I don’t touch it as much as on the PC.But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don’t expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software (though…not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network).
I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn’t permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the
file://URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not…maybe that was the rationale). - Comment on Two AI-powered charter schools could soon open in Pennsylvania 1 week ago:
There was something of an earlier effort to do MOOCs. My impression is that they didn’t take off, because I stopped hearing about them. But I don’t really follow current education, so…
I think that at some point, dramatic improvements to education are probably doable, and that we probably have the technology today.
But I’m kind of skeptical that AI is really the missing link, at least given the state that it’s in today.
