labawi (u/labawi) - Readit News

labawi commented on The Most Disturbing Places We've Found Microplastics So Far gizmodo.com/microplastics... · Posted by u/nehagup

franckl · 2 years ago

Fyi you can get a stainless steel under sink RO system for less than 200usd on amazon, no plastic piping either.

labawi · 2 years ago

I would be wary of using a stainless steel RO system. Extremely pure water tends to leach more. You may avoid a bit of plastic in exchange for heavy metals. Stainless steel tends to be 10% Nickel, 10% Chromium, which are bad and worse for you. If you do so, I would recommend getting the water tested.

Otherwise I would recommend a good plastic RO system. One where the plastic doesn't leach loads of harmful plasticizers.

labawi commented on Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years thegazette.com/crime-cour... · Posted by u/Georgelemental

RecycledEle · 2 years ago

>A sane smart person given the options of: persisting on a trivial truth OR not being sent to a psychiatric ward, must always pick the second one.

> Smart people know what a psychiatric ward is, a sane perso recognizes a serious threat when confronted with one.

Lying is a mortal sin. I try to avoid sin, even if doing so seriously harms me.

Plato said something like: "All sin is a form of mental illness that seems to make one or a few people better off in the short term but makes all humans poorer in the long run."

labawi · 2 years ago

Is lying always a sin? A mortal one?

I very much dislike lies, do not want to lie and would rather tell the truth even if it may harm me, but I'm not sure about the absoluteness of such an approach. A few days ago I was reading a book about a christian family helping Jews during WW II (Corrie ten Boom) and I was quite lost when Corrie marveled at the realization she doesn't have to do what the authorities say, or when she lied to the police. I would like to believe telling the truth would be better, but .. it seems suspect. Telling Nazi Jews are hiding in my house .. very much not sure what to think about that.

Note for casual readers: We are not here to live a comfy life, so, even if saying the truth leads to bodily mortal consequences for another, I can't with 100% certainty say lying would be the right thing to do.

It seems to me, there are cases when even God used / instructed Jews to use deception or something very close to it, to scare off attackers or make them kill eachother in a frenzy (different times), so I am dumbfounded on what is right.

Even God puts Himself behind a veil, for our benefit, so going around pushing truth for the sake of truth can not be correct. That would be one extreme. But I'm not sure what the criteria is.

Do you have any thoughts, or basis on criteria, when is volunteering truth / answering truthfully if asked / refusing to answer / deceiving / lying good or not. Or maybe even what is to be considered lying?

labawi commented on Comparing dd and cp when writing a file to a thumb drive distrowatch.com/weekly-mo... · Posted by u/vector_spaces

codetrotter · 2 years ago

rsync is a strange beast to me

First thing that makes it so weird is how it assigns different meaning between paths including vs not including trailing slash. Completely different from how most command line tools I am used to behave in Linux and FreeBSD.

That alone is enough to remind me every time I try to use rsync why I don’t like and generally don’t use rsync.

labawi · 2 years ago

While rsync is different than cp and mv, I dislike the cp and mv destination-state-dependent behaviour.

With rsync, destination paths are defined by the command itself and the command is idempotent. I don't usually need to know what the destination is like to form a proper command (though oopsies happen, so verify before using --delete).

With cp/mv - the result depends on the presence and type of the destination. E.g. try running cp or mv, canceling then restarting. Do you need to change the arguments? Why?

  mkdir s1 s2 d1
  touch s1/s1.txt s2/s2.txt
  # this seems inconsistent
  cp -r s1 d1  # generates d1/s1/s1.txt
  cp -r s2 d2  # generates d2/s2.txt

  mkdir s1 s2 d1
  touch s1/s1.txt s2/s2.txt
  # I don't use this form, but it is consitent
  rsync -r s1 d1  # generates d1/s1/s1.txt
  rsync -r s2 d2  # generates d2/s2/s2.txt
  # Same as above but more explicit
  rsync -r s1 d1/  # generates d1/s1/s1.txt
  rsync -r s2 d2/  # generates d2/s1/s2.txt
  # I prefer this form most of the time:
  rsync -r s1/ d1/  # generates d1/s1.txt
  rsync -r s2/ d2/  # generates d2/s2.txt

I simply try to use trailing slashes wherever permitted and the result is amply clear.

labawi commented on Becoming a contractor ochagavia.nl/blog/becomin... · Posted by u/wofo

blitz_skull · 3 years ago

Just because you don’t find a particular set of evidence convincing doesn’t mean it fails to meet the criteria for evidence.

Many an atheist has found God after honestly and earnestly investigating the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. However, most people don’t have the emotional fortitude to actually investigate the facts with rigor and end up hiding behind the “implausibility” of the resurrection and/or just end up perpetuating pop-atheism with unfounded critiques of the Bible because they’ve never done a proper study of their own.

If you’ve got specific critiques, feel free to field those, but otherwise your comment reads as a rather arrogant write-off of one of the oldest, and most logically-consistent systems of human belief.

labawi · 3 years ago

TLDR: feel free to skip

When I was little, my mother tried to teach me how to tie my shoelaces, but she had shown me a method I did not understand and did not like, so I invented my own way. I was proud of it for 20 years or so. A friend I trusted more than anyone, tried to tell me in a kind way, that many people tie their shoelaces in a bad knot. When one knows, it's easy to see even from a glance and such a knots gets untied, but I wouldn't listen. Thought of not knowing how to tie shoelaces seemed absurd.

I was the only one I know that would stop randomly to re-tie his shoelaces, occasionally with people piling up behind me. It may be considered incontrovertible evidence in truth, yet at the time, it didn't bare much relevance to me. It was obvious that bad shoelaces were always at fault, or I didn't apply enough force. In my mind it would be too humiliating to even consider bad technique a possibility.

It wasn't until I had the grace to look at a knot-tying website alone, try it, accept I was tying a granny knot, learn how to tie a standard knot, in a recommended fast way, then proceed to one-up it in my own point of view. I didn't get much humbler, but at 23 years old, at least I knew how to tie my shoelaces and they didn't get untied anymore.

If it wasn't for the love of the one who had grace and has given up his grace so we would have his grace, acting through those who follow him, Himself and His Spirit, I would not have seen and felt the loving self-sacrifice, which paled my self-righteousness in an humbling and emotionally painful experience of the pain I've caused, setting me off in a search to do better, so that after nearly a decade I would once and then many times again in humility accept what I cannot deny, that Lord is better than anything I could imagine and Jesus Christ is our (our = all those who accept Him) Lord and Savior.

This is enough evidence (for me, for others it's just word of mouth) to love and worship Jesus. I've seen much more, and for that I accept what is written. It seems I may understand and see more than many, yet still, easily and often, I forget what I know, ignore and blank my mind, to doubt and void the uncomfortable. Only hours ago I've yet again given in to what I know to be bad, to lull and dull the mind, close my eyes and ears so I would not see what I had a longing to avoid.

I write this as an admission and hoping it will be useful to someone. To perhaps understand, that one cannot just see and one cannot just be explained, if it affects him dearly and he does not wish to know.

Speaking of others, but showing the principle:

“Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. ...<<specific judgement of specific people>>... Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’...”

Matthew 13:13-15

labawi commented on An excruciatingly detailed guide to SSH (but only the things I find useful) grahamhelton.com/blog/ssh... · Posted by u/weeha

cholmon · 3 years ago

If you have a lot of hosts listed in your ~/.ssh/config file, you can keep the file from getting too cluttered by using the Include directive, which supports wildcards...

    # in ~/.ssh/config
    Include config.d/*.conf

    # in ~/.ssh/config.d/work.conf
    host work
        hostname myoffice.example.com
        user myuser

    # in ~/.ssh/config.d/client1.conf
    host client1.dev
        hostname dev.client.example.net
        user someuser
    
    host client1.prod
        hostname prod.client.example.net
        user someuser

labawi · 3 years ago

There an additional trick - you can put include inside a Host/Match directive.

  # in ~/.ssh/config
  Host proj1.*.corp
    Include ~/.ssh/proj1.conf

  # in ~/.ssh/proj1.conf
  ...

This way, I can put project-specific matches at or near the top, while being sure I don't have to wade through numerous of individual files during review.

labawi commented on OpenZFS – add disks to existing RAIDZ github.com/openzfs/zfs/pu... · Posted by u/shrubble

ErneX · 3 years ago

I believe this is the article I read when I started:

https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs...

labawi · 3 years ago

Note that the listed probabilities of surviving N-disk failures are not correct, though after calculation, though the differences may not be that important.

Listed survival probability of N-disk failure in 8-drive/4-vdev mirror.

1: 1; 2: 0.857; 3: 0.667; 4: 0.400; 5: 0; 6: N/A; 7: N/A; 8: N/A

Proper survival probability:

1: 1; 2: 0.857; 3: 0.571; 4: 0.229; 5: 0; 6: 0; 7: 0; 8: 0

Comparatively, survival probability for 8-drive RAIDz4 with equal amount of usable space:

1: 1; 2: 1; 3: 1; 4: 1; 5: 0; 6: 0; 7: 0; 8: 0

Personally, I'd use multi-vdev mirror pools only for data that is either backed-up or data I can afford to lose completely.

labawi commented on OpenZFS – add disks to existing RAIDZ github.com/openzfs/zfs/pu... · Posted by u/shrubble

didntcheck · 3 years ago

However RAIDZ2 can survive up to one of those stressed disks failing, while a 2-mirror has everything riding on that single survivor. It seems intuitive that mirrors would be safer, yeah, but if you run the binomial distribution numbers there are some realistic combinations of array size and individual drive failure probabilities where RAIDZ2 really does appear to be safer

Imagine a gambler telling you "you can either throw one k-faced die and you lose if it comes up on 1, or throw n k-faced dice and you lose if two come up on 1". Depending on k and n, the second really can be the better choice

Often people cite the faster rebuild of mirrors as a safety advantage, but the same amount of rebuild IO will occur regardless of how long it takes. Yes, there will be more non-rebuild IO in a larger time window, but unless that routine load was causing disks to fail weekly then I doubt it will change the numbers non-negligibly. It will of course affect array performance though, so mirrors for performance is a good argument

labawi · 3 years ago

If we were to only compare survival after a fixed number of drives failed vs. storage efficiency, RAIDzN should always come out ahead in any configuration - with mirrors you can get unlucky drives choice fail, with RAIDzN any choice is a good choice. Only way to have RAIDz fail sooner than mirror is to have a comparatively less redundant setup (your choice of N and K).

Realistically though, RAIDz recovery is longer and more stressful, so more of your drives can fail in the critical period, and, assuming you have backups, your storage is there for for usability - mirroring gives you a performant usable system during a fast recovery for the price of a small chance of complete data loss (but you have backups?) vs RAIDz that gives you long recovery pains on a degraded system, but I expect a smaller chance of data loss on a lightly loaded system.

labawi commented on Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/dddddaviddddd

anthk · 3 years ago

You can always use a gpsd(4) compatible USB dongle as the time source.

labawi · 3 years ago

GPS doesn't send full time. It wraps every 1024 weeks, or about 20 years, hence you need a (very) rough basis in case the system is over 20 years old.

labawi commented on 3M heads to trial in ‘existential’ $143B forever-chemicals litigation bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/batmenace

Sytten · 3 years ago

They are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. And the replacements are not better, they just dont have studies yet that prove they are toxic...

labawi · 3 years ago

I'm not sure why people keep talking about teflon pans and dental floss. There are PFAS in products that necessarily release them into human bodies and the environment, in dispersed form rather than flakes that would usually pass the digestive system.

A few examples:

- food containers coated with PFAS (usually single use, often cardboard) - water-repellent PFAS spray for clothes, shoes, cars/whatever - surface PFAS treatment of clothes/shoes/whatever (better but still rubs off) - PFAS bike-chain lube

Why are any of these things legal? They cause much more exposure, by design cannot be contained and spread PFAS everywhere you go. They are the reason there are PFAS in snow on Mt. Everest.

Pans, medical tubes and maybe even inner layers in clothes can at least theoretically be responsibly disposed of, e.g. by reasonably contained incineration. I don't want to support unneeded PFAS, but pans seem a whole different category than spray-on PFAS for "weather-proofing" that people use because shrug "it helps I get less wet".

labawi commented on Debian 12 “Bookworm” debian.org/News/2023/2023... · Posted by u/Chatting

troad · 3 years ago

Congratulations to the Debian team!

An important change appears to be the inclusion of non-free firmware by default in the official install image for the first time, as a result of this vote: https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003

Intriguing. I feel a little torn on this. One the one hand, I appreciate being able to install Debian from an official image onto a bothersome device. On the other, I can't help but feel we're losing something when even a purist distribution like Debian is forced to concede in the fight against proprietary blobs.

Edit: dropped the word 'kernel' from 'proprietary blobs', as rightly picked up by kind commenters below.

labawi · 3 years ago

While I don't like proprietary firmware, I'm not sure if the line is drawn at a useful place.

If you have firmware/software/whatever in a device, which is updateable (as opposed to mask-rom or hard logic), I'd much rather have it transparently managed by an OS I can control, than some EEPROM with often proprietary, inscrutable, I-ask-you-nicely-please-update-your-firmware update mechanism.

IMO, the difference is:

- with OS provided firmware (and preferably no writable storage), I can be sure my device is running the same SW as the rest of the world

- with dozens of EEPROMs in my device, I can never be sure what is running on it.

Firmware that is legally not redistributable is a non-trivial, though perhaps less bothersome issue. Firmware that requires manufaturer's signature is bothersome but I would still prefer it over inscrutable hidden firmware.