So, product idea: A powered "cold storage box" for M.2 SSDs. 2 to 8 M.2 slots. Periodically, an internal computer connects one of the slots, reads every byte, waits for some period of time, then powers off. Maybe shows a little green light next to each drive when the last read was successful. Could be battery-powered.
Readit NewsDeleted Comment
m0dest commented on Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data xda-developers.com/your-u... · Posted by u/amichail
m0dest commented on How to fix subsystem request failed on channel 0 blog.x-way.org/Linux/2025... · Posted by u/speckx
Make Error Messages Great Again
(Sorry, I hate that it has a political reference, but it's really how I feel about this. How the heck is that error message supposed to mean anything to anyone?)
Yeah, regardless of how one feels about the design decision to fail without fallback, the messaging seems like an oversight.
m0dest commented on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous immich.app/blog/google-fl... · Posted by u/janpio
> Since there was and remains no algorithmic method of finding the highest level at which a domain may be registered for a particular top-level domain
A centralized list like this not just for domains as a whole (e.g. co.uk) but also specific sites (e.g. s3-object-lambda.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com) is both kind of crazy in that the list will bloat a lot over the years, as well as a security risk for any platform that needs this functionality but would prefer not to leak any details publicly.
We already have the concept of a .well-known directory that you can use, when talking to a specific site. Similarly, we know how you can nest subdomains, like c.b.a.x, and it's more or less certain that you can't create a subdomain b without the involvement of a, so it should be possible to walk the chain.
Example:
c --> https://b.a.x/.well-known/public-suffix
b --> https://a.x/.well-known/public-suffix
a --> https://x/.well-known/public-suffix
It looks like Mozilla does use DNS to verify requests to join the list, at least.
$ dig +short txt _psl.website.one @1.1.1.1
"https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/pull/2625"
m0dest commented on Why Apple's Severance gets edited over remote desktop software tedium.co/2025/03/29/seve... · Posted by u/shortformblog
You can, and people do.
There are a slew of HDMI extension systems, some that even use ethernet with hardware encoding/decoding. Grandparent commenter hasn't worked in the industry in at least a decade if they're talking about DVI.
These days, if you're just wiring to a single workstation in a nearby next room, 50 meter active optical Thunderbolt 3/4 cables can carry 5K+ DisplayPort video passthrough and data from your USB peripherals.
(It's "passthrough" and not "uncompressed" because DisplayPort may use DSC depending on the resolution and frame rate.)
US$500 for an optical cable can be a lot cheaper than paying for HDMI extender sender and receiver boxes.
m0dest commented on M4 Mac mini's efficiency jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/marinesebastian
m0dest commented on FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect abcnews.go.com/US/wireSto... · Posted by u/indus
Unfortunately an annoying app will out compete a non-annoying app in terms of reviews. Even if a few people like GP 1-star it, it's still worth it since most will 5 star it.
Yes. Most of the major apps play this review game, and there's no way to compete if you don't play it too.
The major apps typically exploit selection bias to solicit 5-star reviews. They will wait until the user meets some criteria for "having a good experience" and show an app review prompt at that moment.
Then, having amassed thousands of 5-star reviews, they will turn up the threshold so that only a trickle of the most likely 5-star reviews keep on trickling in to negate any negative organic reviews.
There's a related practice of "pre-prompting" where the app first asks the user whether they are satisfied and only solicits a real app review from those who pass the screening question.
It's all quite shady and makes it hard to trust app reviews. But until the app stores solve this, app developers need to play the game.
m0dest commented on Show HN: 1-FPS encrypted screen sharing for introverts 1fps.video/... · Posted by u/RomanPushkin
Are you suggesting that HEVC can adapt its compression for different regions of the same frame similar to JPEG-XL? I don't think this is possible but I would love to be proven wrong.
Yep, this is achieved using slices, which can be arbitrary regions of the frame. Each slice can have its own quantization parameters (ranging from highly lossy to perceptually lossless). Each slice can also switch between intraframe prediction (more like still image encoding) and interframe prediction (relative to prior frames).
So, with this, you can have high-quality static text in one region of the frame while there is lossy motion encoding (e.g. for an animating UI element) in another region of the frame.
m0dest commented on Show HN: 1-FPS encrypted screen sharing for introverts 1fps.video/... · Posted by u/RomanPushkin
Completely agree. JPEG-only is insufficient. PNG-only is insufficient. An adaptive codec would apply a right algorithm to an area depending on its properties.
I suppose than the more modern video compression algorithms apply such image analysis already, to an extent. I don't know how e.g. VNC or RDP work, but it would be naural for them to have provisions like that co save bandwidth / latency, which is often in a shorter supply than computing power.
Of existing still image codecs, JPEG XL seems to have the right properties[1]: the ability to split image to areas and / or layers, and the ability to encode different areas either with DCT or losslessly. But these are capabilities of the format; I don't know how well existing encoder implementations can use them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL#Technical_details
The state of the art here is really Parsec, Moonlight, and Apple's "High Performance Screen Sharing" [0]. All three of these use hardware-accelerated HEVC in some UDP encapsulation. Under the right network conditions, they achieve very crisp text, 4K60 4:4:4 with low latency.
[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/screen-sharing-type...
If this is the hidden master server that only the mirrors talk to, then it's redundancy is largely irrelevant. Yes, if it's down, new packages can't be uploaded, but that doesn't affect downloads at all. We also know nothing about the backup setup they have.
A lot depends on the threat model they're operating under. If state-level actors and supply chain attacks are the primary threats, they may be better off having their system under the control of a few trusted contributors versus a large corporation that they have little to no influence over.
The build server going down means that no one's app can be updated, even for critical security updates.
For something that important, they should aspire to 99.999% ("five nines of") reliability. With a single physical server, achieving five nines over a long period of time usually means that you were both lucky (no hardware failures other than redundant storage) and probably irresponsible (applied kernel updates infrequently - even if only on the hypervisor level).
Now... 2 servers in 2 different basements? That could achieve five nines ;)