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jasonfarnon commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team   annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze
mk_stjames · 6 days ago
Interesting to see that sci-hub is about 90TB and libgen-non-fiction is 77.5TB. To me, these are the two archives that really need protecting because this is the bulk of scientific knowledge - papers and textbooks.

I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counting any for redundancy). Going the refurbished enterprise SATA drive route that is still going to run you about $180/drive = $2200 in drives.

I'm not quite there as far as disposable income to throw, but, I know many people out there who are; doubling that cost for redundancy and throw in a bit for the server hardware - $5k, to keep a current cache of all our written scientific knowledge - seems reasonable.

The interesting thing is these storage sizes aren't really growing. Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022? At honestly with the advent of slop publications since then, the importance of what is in that 170TB is likely to remain the most important portion of the contrib for a long time.

jasonfarnon · 6 days ago
"Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022"

True but it matters a lot less in many fields because things have been moving to arXiv and other open access options, anyway. The main time I need sci-hub is for older articles. And that's a huge advantage of sci-hub--they have things like old foreign journal articles even the best academic libraries don't have.

As for mirroring it all, $2200 is beyond my budget too, but it would be nothing for a lot of academic departments, if the line item could be "characterized" the right way. To me it has been a bit of a nuisance working with libgen down the last couple months, like the post mentioned, and I would have loved for a local copy. I don't see it happening, but if libgen/sci-hub/annas archive goes the way of napster/scour, many academics would be in a serious fix.

jasonfarnon commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team   annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze
bawolff · 6 days ago
If we take this to the logical extreme - someone had to buy the book in order to upload it to Anna's archive in the first place.
jasonfarnon · 6 days ago
"If we take this to the logical extreme "

I think this is a situation where doing so doesn't make much sense. This is all about compromising, I think that must be the premise.

jasonfarnon commented on ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes   bmj.com/content/390/bmj-2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
enneff · 9 days ago
The science doesn’t support your hypothesis btw.
jasonfarnon · 9 days ago
Meaning what? All those college kids who took a friend's ritalin prescription to complete a term paper could have done just as well without it? I'm skeptical. Some of us wouldn't have even done the term paper without it, or would have mailed it in. I tend to think of it as little different than steroids. Maybe there's a bigger boost for some individuals than others, but the boost is probably across the board.
jasonfarnon commented on ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes   bmj.com/content/390/bmj-2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
Nikolas0 · 9 days ago
My $0.02 as a response to several comments I read in this thread: I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 40s and got Concerta. My belief is that ADHD is not a disease, nor a disability (even though it acts like one very frequently) and in fact there is evidence that ADHD is an important part of our evolution as a species.

The problem(s) mostly relies with the modern way of life and what is expected from the society at large. In that context I try to feel ok when I daydream while I have countless of boring things to take care of as I totally feel ok when I hyperfocus in a creative endeavor.

The meds are just a tool that I use no more than two times per week in order to take better care of myself and others. It is not a therapy and it's not me. I believe that Sensitive Rejection Dysphoria is very real for people like us, but the worst version of it is when you reject yourself because you are different and you try hard to be someone else.

jasonfarnon · 9 days ago
"The problem(s) mostly relies with the modern way of life and what is expected from the society at large."

I assumed not just ADHD but a number of other psychological conditions are more about reconciling some individuals to this particular society. It seems baked into a lot of their diagnostic criteria, like how well one "functions" at school or work. Surely ADHD would not be cognizable where people don't have to spend 8hrs/day through their youth sitting in one place.

jasonfarnon commented on Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations   anthropic.com/research/en... · Posted by u/virgildotcodes
Fade_Dance · 9 days ago
I find it, for lack of a better word, cringe inducing how these tech specialists push into these areas of ethics, often ham-fistedly, and often with an air of superiority.

Some of the AI safety initiatives are well thought out, but most somehow seem like they are caught up in some sort of power fantasy and almost attempting to actualize their own delusions about what they were doing (next gen code auto-complete in this case, to be frank).

These companies should seriously hire some in-house philosophers. They could get doctorate level talent for 1/10 to 100th of the cost of some of these AI engineers. There's actually quite a lot of legitimate work on the topics they are discussing. I'm actually not joking (speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time inside the philosophy department). I think it would be a great partnership. But unfortunately they won't be able to count on having their fantasy further inflated.

jasonfarnon · 9 days ago
"but most somehow seem like they are caught up in some sort of power fantasy and almost attempting to actualize their own delusions about what they were doing"

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think there is a significant component of marketing behind this type of announcement. It's a sort of humble brag. You won't be credible yelling out loud that your LLM is a real thinking thing, but you can pretend to be oh so seriously worried about something that presupposes it's a real thinking thing.

jasonfarnon commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy   theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac
cess11 · 10 days ago
I'm not going to name any names but depending on your budget and jurisdiction you can probably figure out a setup where you either torrent, possibly through a reputable VPN, from an invite based tracker, or you pay to play with one or two Usenet accounts.

If you are willing to spend a bit of money you can get what's called a seedbox in a suitable jurisdiction and do rather innocous seeming tunneling between your home network and there.

Torrenting is a bit messy, usually it's not 'one tracker fits all', instead you'd likely want one for movies and one for music or something like that. Perhaps Limewire is a good fit for your needs, or perhaps you're more of a power user willing to endure weeks or months of research and interviews with tracker admins.

Usenet is a bit more involved, and you pay for access and bandwidth. The network traffic doesn't look as suspicious as torrenting, however, and if something turns up in a search it's yours, you don't have to beg for people to seed and so on.

With a bit of effort and technical savvy you can automate a lot of piracy these days, with tools like Sonarr and Radarr tracking releases and automatically pushing them into your self-hosted streaming service.

jasonfarnon · 10 days ago
Usenet? Is the alt.binaries hierarchy really still around? how active is it?
jasonfarnon commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy   theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac
macNchz · 10 days ago
I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.

Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.

I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.

jasonfarnon · 10 days ago
what's really pointless is how they released the beavis and butthead episodes without the music videos. even the replays on mtv or mtv2 back in the 2000s couldn't play the music videos.

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jasonfarnon commented on One Million Screenshots   onemillionscreenshots.com... · Posted by u/gaws
sandspar · 14 days ago
I have an Android, and use the free Tasker app to automatically take a screenshot of my active phone screen every 19 minutes. It takes only a few minutes to set up the Tasker script.

I have vague plans to do something with these one day. But until then, I hoard!

jasonfarnon · 14 days ago
Did tasker do it for you? I tried about 10 yrs ago but with no success. I'll give it another go, thanks. I don't have any future plans for these but similar to OP I see them on a "pictures screensaver", sometimes on chromecast to a TV. I certainly regret not having done this in the 90s, particularly the BBS era, so that is justification enough for me to continue doing it.
jasonfarnon commented on Fight Chat Control   fightchatcontrol.eu/... · Posted by u/tokai
KennyBlanken · 14 days ago
The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.

Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...

jasonfarnon · 14 days ago
"only about 5% of Catholics in France attend mass regularly, which is roughly 2% of the entire French population"

https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...

In other words, your claims say more about you than France.

u/jasonfarnon

KarmaCake day444March 24, 2021View Original