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Cake day: 2024年7月25日

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  • I was plenty good at maths up to the point where I couldn’t study more (as in, my other subject choices locked me out of taking the next stage, A-level). However in general I found the more complex stuff abstract and characterless.

    For example statistics bored me. We’re working out the upper quartile something something? To what end?

    I’ve used maths for accounts, programming, carpentry, and so forth, but that’s always been fairly basic stuff. The more advanced stuff has never been of the slightest value to me (I still don’t know why I, a layman, should give a shit about factorisation, prime numbers, happy numbers, etc…). I am not saying that it has no value - simply that to me personally it might as well be memorising the principles behind a naming scheme for shades of grey paint. I can learn the principles and they make sense, but so what?

    I pretty much felt the same way about the higher levels of chemistry. Oh these are ionic bonds? Okay…?

    My teachers were excellent and enthusiastic (my entire maths class got the highest grade possible, myself included) but I don’t really see what there is to like. I didn’t dislike it, I was just indifferent. The easier stuff could be like a basic puzzle game, the more complex stuff I could apply the system I learned and provide the correct, if pointless, answer.

    It felt like being taught someone else’s complex system for sorting different sizes of white paper, I suppose I could say.







  • Similarly I find it very useful for if I’ve written a tool script and really don’t want to write the command line interface for it.

    “Here’s a well-documented function - write an argparser for it”

    …then I fix its rubbish assumptions and mistakes. It’s probably not drastically quicker but it doesn’t require as much effort from me, meaning I can go harder on the actual function (rather than keeping some effort in reserve to get over the final hump).





  • I was told a tool was a resilient approach to drive management. It wasn’t, outside of a very specific set of circumstances.

    Your analogy not only makes no sense but is exactly why I’m hostile about this. I’m not an expert at the specific limitations of a niche hard disk technology is, I must be a fucking moron or something, and ridicule is a clearly an appropriate reaction.

    My idea of a useful tool for dealing with hard disks is not one that loses its shit when a hard disk is temporarily disconnected. That is not a ridiculous assumption. If that’s an issue then that should be made abundantly clear.

    I assigned drives based on serial number and passed them through to TrueNAS and it couldn’t handle that reliably. I do not think I was asking for the moon on a stick.

    The USB interface is a temporary measure, I was going to move the disks to an internal setup after testing but if it can’t handle something that basic then like fuck am I trusting it with something like migrating from USB SATA to internal SATA.

    If I need both disks to access mirrored data then it’s as useful as a chocolate teapot.


  • I was trying to use it for a mirrored setup with TrueNAS and found it to be flakey to the point of uselessness. I was essentially told that I was using it wrong because I had USB disks. It allowed me to set it up and provided no warnings but after losing my test data for the fifth time (brand new disks - that wasn’t the issue) I gave up and setup a simple rsync job to mirror data between the two ext4 disks.

    If losing power effectively wipes my data then it’s no damn use to me. I’m sure it’s great in a hermetically sealed data centre or something but if I can’t pull one of the mirrored disks and plug it into another machine for data recovery then it’s no damn good to me.