Scaled Out

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

I’ve been running TrueNAS Scale on the new NAS, the one that is home-built (not from a vendor). And I don’t like TrueNAS itself much. It’s yet another power user tool that has removed or gimped its most important and useful features for no apparent reason.

For instance, they’ve removed the recycle bin on SMB so that “Previous Versions” in Windows no longer works. I don’t even run Windows at home on my daily use endpoints, but that’s a real loss. And moronic. Their “solution” is to use ZFS snapshots, but this is a totally different tech that is not as easy and is far more dangerous.

TrueNAS also doesn’t handle certain files generated on the Mac correctly — specifically ones with Alternate Data Stream stuff going on — while commercial NASes seem to deal with these files fine. And no, the supposed common fix did not correct the issue.

The GUI is also pretty bad. It manages to be both too simple and too confusing at the same time somehow, and is missing many features and capabilities (many of which did exist previously and were removed for ideological reasons).

Of the major NASes and their OSes/GUIs I’ve used recently, I’d give QNAP’s a 7, Synology’s an 8.5, and TrueNAS a 4. It feels amateurish and like something I used in the early 2000s.

I will keep using it for now but it’s pretty meh.

Chill Links

There’s Trouble Brewing in the Treasury Market.

The deep history of AI began 3,000 years ago.

A restaurant dinner, Chick-fil-A, and coffee somehow cost us $170. But, but, vibecession!

Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose.

Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints.

‘Chat Is Dead’: OpenAI Reportedly Planning Radical Changes to ChatGPT.

Ocean-Observing Satellite Spots Telltale Sign of Growing El Niño.

New drug ‘functionally cures’ many hepatitis B virus infections.

Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring.

Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026.

Shells and Tells

Chill Gutter Philosophy

The phenomenal character is all that we have. We simply cannot know how something “really is” nor what its secret noumenal character is or might be. We can only speculate, but there is no direct evidence and never will be.

The noumenal is a ghost that will always be chased and never caught; making claims of absolute certainty about it will only reveal your biases and predilections, not anything deeper than that. And the reason is that something’s essence simply cannot be known (and in fact might not even exist in the senses most people mean it).

Right now AI is limited. It possesses maybe one or two of the 8-10 important modules of being a person. But if ChatGPT or its more advanced successors gain a physical body that could sense the world, could claim to feel pain, could seem to love you in an embodied sense, could exhibit all signs of care and distress at the thought of loss, and express grief, could we be so certain that there was nothing at all behind those electronic eyes?

I am just not so sure of that. And you should not be, either. Those who express incurious certitude about this are how we could very easily perpetrate horrors beyond imagining.

Power Fail

Chill Annoying

I’m a little bitter because I spent a good while on a substantial project at work that was something I had to learn from scratch (no AI used in this case) and the person who pushed for it…just never used it.

Not a single time, after 8 months. Well, I learned something, but a lot of time wasted there.

Chill Links

Software engineers have spent decades in one of tech's most lucrative and in-demand roles. Now, they're watching their jobs change irrevocably.

Europe's largest Copper Age tomb, children's bones expose an ancient health crisis hidden for 5,000 years.

Safety officials finally have a good idea of what a big rocket explosion can do.

US Tech Sector Announces Most Job Cuts in Nearly Two Years.

84 Years ago today, four Japanese aircraft carriers were burning in the Pacific because of a man who went to work in a smoking jacket and slippers.

It is so, so fascinating to me how GLP-1s are colliding with something that, for lack of a better term, I'll call 'fat identity'.

What Jobs Are Safe?

How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time.

Biohub releases a world model of protein biology.

They Want to Get Rid of Your Property Taxes Because They Think You Are Morons.

Change Shift

Chill Amusing, Annoying

(1) RomeoStevens on X: "@paul__is__here Oh, this one is big and a little harder to describe. There's a thing where some women get used to the feeling of having a lot of power in the socio-sexual space and don't seem to understand that as soon as they exit short termism it becomes much more balanced. Straight up favors" / X

This is correct. Women when they are young have a huge amount of power over their same-age male peers. They are desirable rather than disposable and have just enormous sexual and social control over the spaces they inhabit. They let that go to their heads and believe it does and will hold forever.

But it doesn’t, even though many still act as if it is eternal as they age. However, as men get older and their libido decreases a little — and they gain some wealth and prestige — they learn to automatically discard any woman who sees herself as the prize just because she has a nice smile and a functional vagina. That’s going to be a bad relationship and the man knows it. That delusional woman who still perceives herself as the catch beyond age 28 or so is doomed to cycle through men who realize how horrid she is until she’s an old cat lady.

I’m not on the dating market but if I were I’d be the catch now. And some women never get used to that transition due to the vast sociosexual power they held in their late teens and twenties. They never recover from the loss of de facto power. So in some ways it’s good that men aren’t raised to believe they are some unfathomably great prize. It makes them a lot less entitled.

Chill Links

The U.S.-Qatar Domination of Gas Left the World Dangerously Exposed.

Why a Single Screwworm Parasite Found in the US Is Raising Alarm.

TSMC Warns Chip Supply Won’t Meet AI-Fueled Demand for Years.

The Causes of Long Covid.

'World-first' vaccine designed by artificial intelligence.

DNS Is for People – Not for IT Infrastructure.

After 11 years at Mars, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft went out with a whisper.

OpenAI Upgrades ChatGPT Memory With New Dreaming Architecture for Plus and Pro Users.

‘My life is not affordable. No one cares’.

The Myth of Assimilation.

There Aren't Any Good Arguments Against Lab Meat.

Economics is fundamentally political.

Google is quietly laying off staff in its cloud division.