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Would you say the same thing about Apple?

The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice.

Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it.

The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).


Synology has equivalent competition. Apple doesn’t.


Because if you say something bad about Apple you get downvoted to oblivion.


Which is more likely, your barista collecting this data for nefarious purposes, or your ISP?


Or that dude in the black hoodie in the corner who always seems to be camped at whatever cafe you and your cow orkers are using as your startup "office"?


> I definitely want to know if they are involved with any tech I'm using so I can avoid it

Are you going to stop using Linux because the NSA is a major code contributor?

Huawei is too, and they were founded by a guy from the PLA.


Linux is not operated by NSA and is open for inspection. Can you say the same about VPN services in question?

It would be naive to think Huawei is isn’t influenced by CCP, specially if it is found, by presumably someone from PLA intelligence unit by your suggestion.


this is not a helpful argument. this isn't about not using Israeli OSS software but services that feed data into the surveillance grid of quasi rogue state.


The author theorizes that games are an ideal malware delivery vehicle but... aren't games typically connected to a user's headset/mic regardless?

I'm a bit puzzled how "secure environment" has a direct connection to "data collection" and "adversary".


Everyone is so preoccupied with losing their minds every time Trump trolls the media with some new nonsense on the socials that they're ignoring the completely insane things going on in the UK right now. Like arresting people for using naughty language online.

20 years ago this would have been daily outrage on Slashdot's YRO section but I get the feeling no one cares enough anymore.


I love that many of the scripts in the OpenBSD base system are written in Perl.


I'm in awe at the number of people that will go to bat for things like artificial dyes in food, only because the policy is coming from the present administration. It's just common sense. We don't need to be ingesting this shit. It's cosmetic and not needed for nutrition. Why are you feeding your child Fruit Loops and not Cheerios?

I personally have known people who develop migraines after eating food with artificial dyes. We can sit here and snipe and play semantics and argue over pointless details but why bother? Just get rid of them all.


I want these decisions to be bases on scientific and medical data, not on gut feeling or unfounded personal belief. I have no issue with regulating specific dyes or additives in food, or groups of related chemicals.

And your anecdote is not scientific data. You cannot draw any conclusions from that.


There is no scientific framework that can tell you the correct amount of non-food material to intentionally add to your otherwise fine food.


https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/qualified-presump...

Its a risk assessment not a measure of absolute certainty.


Again with this, you are simply proving my point further. I don't need a panel of credentialed scientists to tell me if this stuff is okay or not. It's unnecessary to sustain life and provides no nutrition whatsoever. There is literally zero reason to add it to food. Your kid can eat white or chocolate icing on birthday cakes. Get rid of it. The end.


I know this feels cut and dry to you, but what you're kicking is a fundamental pillar of the industrial food system. Many food products emerge from processing a dull or unappetizing color. Food needs to last as long as possible and still look like food. It's tempting to say that food should all be made with love in home kitchens, but that's untenable for feeding 8 billion people.

My favorite example of this is orange juice. OJ is kept in long term storage to stretch a seasonal crop into year-round availability. What comes out is brown and flavorless! This brown mush is restored to something a person would drink with the addition of "flavor packs" made by the perfume industry. This has the added benefit of giving brands a consistent and repeatable flavor. Regulatory bodies in their wisdom allow this product to be called "100% juice".

You might say well get rid of that too. I'm not arguing this is the ideal food system. But it has to be said, this goes a lot deeper than the easy ones like frosting and fruit loops.


Calling it "the perfume industry" is a half truth. It's the flavoring industry, but it so happens that there's a lot of overlap between perfume and flavoring in terms of raw materials.

However, flavoring is a distinct profession. Besides that, very few novel compounds are allowed in food compared to fragrance. If any flavoring is synthetic in origin (which is not the same thing as novel, to be clear) then the product must be labeled as artificially flavored. If they call the product 100% juice and added flavoring is used, then that flavoring in turn has to have been sourced from the fruit.

In other words, they're using extracts from real oranges to reconstitute the flavor lost during pasteurization. They can further adjust which parts of the extract they use (called fractions and isolates) to dial in a particular flavor.


I appreciate the nuance! My intention was to show that there's a surprising amount of correction for flavor and taste necessary even for one-ingredient "natural" foods.


Primarily in bulk operations, none of that bullshit is needed if you just juice some fresh oranges into a glass and drink it…


But there is a clear public health trade-off there, because far fewer people will drink O.J. if that work is required (vs. just pouring it out of a carton).


Is it? OJ isn’t particularly healthy.


Fair. It's better than orange soda!


Food presentation has an effect on taste. This is why the dyes are used. Frankly, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only food we're allowed to eat has to demonstrate that it's only made of ingredients necessary to sustain life and be nutritional.


We don’t make decisions to ban foodstuffs based on whether they are “necessary to sustain life.”


Maybe we should. Ideally we should ban ingredients that are not on a whitelist instead of banning ingredients on a blacklist.

Why are we as a society allowing these paperclip maximizing companies to experiment on hundreds of millions of people for their own profits..


Bingo; should have to prove something is safe rather than the opposite


> scientific and medical data,

which has never been been manipulated by funding.


> I personally have known people who develop migraines after eating food with artificial dyes

Yeah, my mom was the same way when she had food with MSG in it. But only when she knew there was MSG in it.


When your mom eats something that is bad for her and her brain can tell it is bad for her, then if that experience is repeated a lot, then every time it encounters that thing or even thinks about that thing, her brain will tend to cause a defensive reaction, which itself is unpleasant and can affect your mom's behavior. None of this need be conscious or deliberate.


I don't think gp is trying to imply that she's explicitly making it up, just that the phenomena is in her head. To take an absurd example, it's probably safe to say that electromagentic sensitivity doesn't actually exist (ie. radio waves aren't actually causing people pain/distress), even if sufferers aren't lying to others about their experiences.


Not wanting multi-billion dollar conglomerates putting poison in everyone's food is a far-right position now, didn't you get the memo?


It's weird being a 90s/2000s anti-war, anti-globalization, and pro-labor Democrat in a 2025 world.


+1. G.R.A.S. (generally recognized as safe) is long overdue for reform


You can live your life how you want. What the rest of us eat isn't your business.


Fluoride in communal drinking water is another thing I notice strange ingroup outgroup thinking in ...


If I want to eat fruit loops, why are you getting involved?

We have options and can make our own decisions about what to eat.


Your unhealthy habits should not be normalized but unfortunately it is via mass advertising.


You don't know anything about me what kind of comment is this?

Assumptions like this is why I don't want other people making decisions for me


I don’t need to know anything about you to know that eating fruit loops is an unhealthy habit.


1. Because you'll feed them to your kids who do not make their own decisions, other than if they'll pay to remove cancers off their anus or die at home at 25.

2. Because a massive food industry would gladly lie about how unsafe their product is just like tobacco companies and they have far more money than you to befuddle the research.


This is a little dramatic

Tobacco still isn't illegal. We're all free to smoke.

Were given information and we're free to do what we want with it.


All... give your kids some cigs and see what happens.


>1. Because you'll feed them to your kids who do not make their own decisions, other than if they'll pay to remove cancers off their anus or die at home at 25.

How about we mandate physical activity for kids as well, given all the known harms of being inactive? Maybe refer kids to CPS if they're too fat too?


It's extremely presumptuous of you to assume that everyone who shops at Walmart are uneducated simpletons.

Maybe they're smarter than you with money. The same box of cereal that costs less than $2 at Walmart is almost $6 at Whole Foods.


I meant overweight not dumb. Fat people (like my dad) don't drink a lot of water, they drink soda and sugar water. And every time I grocery shop at Walmart is pretty noticeable demographic of people buying crates of coke.


Because every time btrfs is mentioned, 5 more people come out of the woodwork saying that it irreparably lost all their data. Sorry but there's just too many stories for it to be mere coincidences.

Your statement is misleading. No one is using btrfs on servers. Debian and Ubuntu use ext4 by default. RHEL removed support for btrfs long ago, and it's not coming back:

> Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature. It was fully removed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.


AFAIK, Facebook uses BTRFS on their servers.


They do, but this is misleading due to a number of caveats

First one is that they don't use btrfs own RAID (aka btrfs-raid/volume management). They actually use hardware RAID so they don't experience any of the stability/data integrity issues people experience with btrfs-raid. Ontop of this, facebooks servers run in data centers that have 100% electricity uptime (these places have diesel generators for backup electricity)

Synology likewise offers btrfs on their NAS, but its underneath mdadm (software RAID)

The main benefit that Facebook gets from btrfs is transparent compression and snapshots and thats about it.


In my experience, btrfs just doesn't seem to be very resilient to hardware faults. Everything works great as long as you stay on the golden path, but when you fall off that path, it gets into a confused state and things start going very wrong and there is no way to recover (short of wiping the whole filesystem, because fsck doesn't fix the faults).

So yes, if you are Facebook, and put it on a rock-solid block layer, then it will probably work fine.

But outside of the world of hyperscalers, we don't have rock solid block layers. [1] Consumer drives occasionally do weird things and silently corrupt data. And on top of drives, nobody uses ECC memory and occasionally weird bit flips will corrupt data/metadata before it's even written to the disk.

At this point, I don't even trust btrfs on a single device. But the more disks you add to a btrfs array, the more likely you are to encounter a drive that's a little flaky.

And Btrfs's "best feature" really doesn't help it here, because it encourages users to throw a large number of smaller cheap/old spinning drives at it. Which is just going to increase the chance of btrfs encountering a flaky drive. The people who are willing to spend more money on a matched set of big drives are more likely to choose zfs.

The other paradox is that btrfs ends up in a weird spot where it's good enough to actually detect silent data corruption errors (unlike ext4/xfs and friends where you never find out your data was corrupted), but then it's metadata is complex and large enough that it seems to be extra vulnerable to those issues.

---------------

[1] No, mdadm doesn't count as a rock-solid block layer, it still depends on the drives to report a data error. If there is silent corruption, madam just forwards it. I did look into using a synology style btrfs on mdadm setup, but I searched and found more than a few stories from people who's synology filesystem borked itself.

In fact, you might actually be worse off with btrfs+mdadm, because now data integrity is done at a completely different layer to data redundancy, and they don't talk to each other.


In a scenario where they don't have to worry about data going poof because it's used to run stateless containers (taking advantage of CoW to reduce startup time etc)


For a long time they were running MySQL on it iirc (outsider, just asked at meetups etc )


Ex-Meta employee here, and yup — this is true.


And they almost always 'forget' to mention "that was in 2010" or "I was using the BTRFS feature marked 'do not use, unstable'".

It's really difficult to get a real feel for BTRFS when people deliberately omit critical information about their experiences. Certainly I haven't had any problems (unless you count the time it detected some bitrot on a hard drive and I had to restore some files from a backup - obviously this was in "single" mode).


My fairly recent experience with some timelines, posted 20d ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45210911

Some of the most catastrophic ones were 3 years ago or earlier, but the latest kernel bug (point 5) was with 6.16.3, ~1 month ago. It did recover, but I already mentally prepared to a night of restores from backups...


One of the PostgreSQL devs managed to corrupt Btrfs about 2 years ago when working on async IO. Is that recent enough?


Synology exclusively uses BTRFS afaik, and there aren't widespread stories of data loss with their products.


Took 10 seconds to find:

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/02/29/why-is-the-btrf...

> We had a few seconds of power loss the other day. Everything in the house, including a Windows machine using NTFS, came back to life without any issues. A Synology DS720+, however, became a useless brick, claiming to have suffered unrecoverable file system damage while the underlying two hard drives and two SSDs are in perfect condition. It’s two mirrored drives using the Btrfs file system


Synology does not use vanilla btrfs, they use a modified btrfs that runs over mdraid mirror, which somehow communicates with btrfs layer to supposedly fix errors, when they occur. It's not clear how far behind that fork is.


Synology are still shipping kernel 5.10 on their latest model. And 4.4 only a few years prior.

I am hoping we will get ZFS from Ubnt NAS via update.


Thats because they use mdadm for the RAID, the btrfs sits underneath a virtual mdadm volume ;)


And also, I've read plenty enough about how hard it has been to maintain btrfs over the years. It's never really felt like the future.

Plus I needed zvols for various applications. I've used ZFS on BSD for even longer so when OpenZFS reached a decent level of maturity the choice between that and btrfs was obvious for me.


The argument of zvols doesn't really fit in here Unless bcachefs supports them?


Not really data loss per se, but let me add my own story to the pile: just last week, I had a btrfs filesystem error out and go permanently read-only simply due to the disk becoming full. Hours of searching and no solution to be found, had to be reformatted.

I don't understand how btrfs is considered by some people to be stable enough for production use.


I know somebody is going to say otherwise, but BTRFS seems genuinely rock solid in single-disk setups. OpenSUSE defaults to it so I've been using it for years. No problems, it's not even something I worry about.


Allowing btrfs to run out of space is well known to do irreparable damage.

Keeping it healthy means paying close attention to "btrfs fi df" and/or "fi usage" for best results.

ZFS also does not react well to running out of space.


I've been running Btrfs on Fedora for a decade now (and it's been the default since 2020). I have basically never done any of those things and it's been fine. I've had to do more babysitting with my ZFS systems than I did my Btrfs ones.


This is DOA not because there is anything wrong with the app, but because iDevices make objectively poor baby monitors.

Babies sleep a lot. A LOT. Any halfway decent baby monitor needs the ability to see in the dark (IR illumination) which iDevices don't have, so unless it's relegated to monitoring play areas during the day, its usefulness is limited. That doesn't mean the software isn't well designed, the hardware is simply not fit for purpose.


I think video is not really required in a baby monitor. A nice to have, perhaps.

As I said in another thread, I used a audio-only baby monitor with 3 kids and didn't feel the need for video.

We just wanted to know if the baby started crying or woke up. And in our case, if it stopped breathing (we were afraid of SIDS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIDS).


Being able to use the microphone only is more than enough


LiDAR could be an option


For a couple of years, we used a baby monitor on an iPad in the baby room. We never used IR illumination, instead we just waited until we got a notification on our phone, then watched the video. It was never utterly dark in the baby's room, but you can also remotely turn on the iPad LED light.


Thats really interesting, yeah I think that audio alone can be helpful. The notification though is actually really important now that you mention it I will see if I can add that in the next update!


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