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Empty space is good for wear-leveling but enforcing a few percent extra helps.

> And most importantly 10% of the drive in ~2010 were 6-12GB, nowadays it's 50-100GB at least.

Back then you were paying about $2 per gigabyte. Right now SSDs are 1/15th as expensive. If we use the prices from last year they're 1/30th, and if we also factor in inflation it's around 1/50th.

So while I would say to use a lower percentage as space increases, 50-100GB is no problem at all.


> but enforcing a few percent extra helps.

Only if you fill the drive up to 95-99% and do this often. Otherwise it's just a cargo-cult.

> So while I would say to use a lower percentage as space increases

If your drive is over-provisioned (eg 960GB instead of 1024GB) then it's not needed. If not and you fill your drive to the full and just want to be sure then you need the size of the biggest write you would do plus some leeway, eg if you often write 20GB video files for whatever reason then 30-40GB would be more than enough. Leaving 100GB of 1TB drive is like buying a sneakers but not wearing them because they would wear.


My drive gets almost full relatively often.

> If your drive is over-provisioned (eg 960GB instead of 1024GB) then it's not needed.

I disagree. That much space isn't a ton when it comes to absorbing the wear of background writes. And normal use ends up with garbage sectors sprinkled around inflating your data size, which makes write amplification get really bad as you approach 100% utilization and have to GC more and more. 6% extra is in the range where more will meaningfully help.

> Leaving 100GB of 1TB drive is like buying a sneakers but not wearing them because they would wear.

50GB is like $4 of space the last time most people bought an SSD. Babying the drive with $4 is very far from refusing to use it at all. The same for 100GB on a 4TB drive.


Nah, we used some consumer SSD for write heavy but not all that precious data, and time to live was basically directly dependant on the space left free on device.

Of course, doesn't matter for desktop use as the spare on drive is enough, but still, if you have 24/7 write heavy loads, making sure it's all trimmed will noticably extend lifetime


But you still need a bunch of extra space to download and unpack the new version, and there are so many apps that need to share space, and a banking app should only need about 0.1% of a phone's storage...

Whoever gave them that idea was doing a bad deed.


I know and I agree with you. It doesn't seem that smart.

And you can tell by the fact that the filler data is called "burp.mp3" and things like that.


> I am a bit surprised that inflation halved buying power since 2000.

It's a bit more than I expected but a 2% drop 26 times gets pretty close to halving.

The number on the page suggests 2.5% average inflation.


No it's not. Our nuclear standards are so high that they have caused more radiation to be released because of demand shifting to coal.

That was then. Now we have other options, and they are good.

We're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).

Building nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel. Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.

> We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.

According to what?

We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.

> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.

The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.

I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.


Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?

Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.


> Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?

They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.

Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.

> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.

We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.

And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.


If that's the point then it was a dumb point to begin with because there were a whole two top level comments mentioning censorship at the time. Technically it was a majority, but only because so few people had commented.

> maybe we should stop acting like corporate sourced software is anything but an attempt to get free labor from the commons

The point of this discussion is that you can self-host, and you have a good chance of migrating the code away entirely. That's a big benefit that isn't "an attempt to get free labor". For that use, not only does it not matter if it's meaningfully open source, it doesn't matter if it's open source at all.


That's dysfunctional enough to qualify as "obsolete" in my book.

Your impression is pretty far off, I think. Just naming a program setup.exe makes it escalate by default. Many installers can be used without escalation but going the traditional path isn't suspicious.

How do you configure things without something basically equivalent to writing to /etc?

And whatever you do use to configure things, what if photoshop accessed it directly? I'm sure you'd be upset with that even if it didn't touch /etc.


If something is system wide i want a commit based workflow (with minor exceptions like dhcp / ip)

Everything else should be in its own folder without the ability to change anything outside of that folder.


Well my point is that switching to a commit-based workflow with no runtime changes doesn't solve the problem of adobe setup including a malicious commit.

Isolating things to a specific folder is what actually gives any security here, and you can do that on a writable /etc too.


yes and you need shared read-only global state. like resolv.conf

Phone-style isolation is more like giving each app a separate user account. With that level of isolation and robust permissions, apps can do very little "on your behalf".

How do you do anything on a computer that’s not via an app of some description? Do you make arbitrary exceptions for the likes of zsh and chmod? How does the OS know that chmod was knowingly run by the user, and not by some “sudo wget” exploit?

> How do you do anything on a computer that’s not via an app of some description? Do you make arbitrary exceptions for the likes of zsh and chmod? How does the OS know that chmod was knowingly run by the user, and not by some “sudo wget” exploit?

I'm not sure what the purpose of the question is, because a unixy command line doesn't use phone-style permissions. I didn't say everything works this way.

If I installed photoshop with phone-style permissions, it wouldn't be able to invoke chmod and wouldn't even be able to access my downloads folder.

(Trying to tighten down a command line shell ends up being a tangent, but the short answer is that zsh itself would need to be trusted and hardened, and wget would not be allowed to run chmod. When it comes to downloading a script and then running that script on purpose, you probably just have to accept that doing so bypasses the permission system. Thankfully I very rarely need to do something like that.)


So you installed a text editor and wanted to edit /etc/hosts. Should the OS permit you to save your changes or not?

Now what should happen if the text editor decides to modify /etc/hosts without your knowledge?


The secure answer is that the OS gives you a trusted file picker and it grants access to that specific file to the text editor.

This works better with a GUI, but you can adapt it to a console too.


> Now what should happen if the text editor decides to modify /etc/hosts without your knowledge?

Pop up a UAC prompt of course. It worked so well for Vista.


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