It is really powerful per watt, and has a built-in UPS. Any homelab type things you could do with that? macOS+homebrew will give you a nice *NIX feel, very familiar if you’re a Linux user.

I’m a fan of having a remote homelab computer+disk for off-site storage. This would be a good candidate in that it wouldn’t use excessive power at a friend/family’s place, but may be overkill (I use a pi3 for that).

I hope I’m wrong! I’d definitely consider buying some — hopefully you can report back with results. If they’re slower than advertised but have the actual capacity that’d still be awesome!

This looks like it might be it:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/buyer-beware-fake-samsung-1080-pro-4tb-ssd-promising-unbelievable-158-gbs-speeds-for-dollar43-is-too-good-to-be-true

The drive doesn’t provide 4TB of storage either, considering the single NAND chip. That means if you were to attempt to write that much data to the SSD, at some point it would either fail or start overwriting existing data.

I’d say it gets a little different with command line utilities — maybe “utility” is the appropriate term here, but I’d call something like grep a program, not an application (again — “utility” also works).

To be sure, grep is extremely powerful, but its scope is limited.

This type of thing is the nominal purpose of credit scores, I believe. (Whether they’re implemented effectively is another story…)

Note re: mustard. It is not just an “other flavor,” it is also an emulsifier!

It took me a while before I learned this. Even if you’re not going for a mustardy flavor, a little mustard goes a long way in keeping the oil and vinegar from separating. Definitely recommend using some with basically every dressing you make.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

That’s what I heard about Chevy’s, too.

What strings are you referencing here? Is the financial counseling mandatory?

Not everyone is eligible for this, but that’s kind of a different issue.

Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing

No I’m pretty sure Strictly Ballroom is a completely accurate portrayal of ballroom dancing.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).

I don’t know how compensation works in academic administration, but if there’s any vesting going on then you could “take a pay cut” but end up making more due to previous compensation vesting.

Certainly possible for public companies, but again, unsure if that could be the case for a university president…

from stdlib.h import cout

Wait this looks wrong, shit…

Anything can use it, but I think by convention it’s used for http on a non-privileged port.

Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.

AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).

There was an old Top Gear episode with a race in a Nordic country with an interesting take on a price cap — the price enforcement was that anybody could buy your car (for no more than the price cap) after the race.

So I think you technically could enter the race with a brand new tricked out rally car…but anyone could buy it for $500/$1000/whatever.