I'm having to deal with increasingly pushy ads from Apple. Banner notifications with ads for their tv, news, game and music services, as well as fake alerts in the settings app that say some bullshit like "Setup required - signup for some icloud storage now!" I work at an outfit that uses RHEL, they absolutely inject ads for their services whenever you use a shell. Microsoft is the most distasteful, but it's matter of degrees for most OS vendors.
Not nearly everyone can properly conduct an investigation. And if a loner, without family or close friends, is murdered, noone will even attempt investigating. If there's a feared gang in your town commiting crimes, everyone would be too afraid to try to convict them. We would quickly get crime-run cities and local warlords.
We need professionals who can properly investigate and who are willing to risk going up against a group of dangerous criminals.
I'm not sure I understand your argument: you're saying that, in order to conduct an investigation, we need to have a special class of society that has different powers, and different access to weaponry?
Investigations have been happening for thousands of years in the western common-law tradition via constabularies and courts. These have been in the hands of police for only the past 200 or so.
So, just so I understand: you think that the police experiment is still going to be going on in 10,000 years?
> Investigations have been happening for thousands of years in the western common-law tradition via constabularies and courts.
English is not my first language; is a constabulary not a police?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but I consider any armed unit that works for the government and is paid to enforce law by arresting people (and other things), to be "police".
Such units have existed for much longer than 200 years. But perhaps you use a different definition for the term?
Anyway, my point is that if there is a building with 10 armed gang members, no normal person would go in there to arrest them. That'd be suicide.
You need some organized group with special training (and ideally superior weapons) to do anything about this gang.
And that group is the police.
If you were relying on random individuals voluntarily (and without pay) doing the enforcement, a gang would only need to be sufficiently feared, so that noone ever dares touch them.
You'd have gangs killing people as brutally as possible, to make others afraid to go against them.
You can see this exact thing happening in some countries today, and it's horrible.
Yes, I do think the police "experiment" will continue.
(For the next 10000 years? Probably not. I don't think real AGI will happen in our lifetime, but I do think it will hapen within the next 10000 years. And it will change society in ways I cannot predict.)
> English is not my first language; is a constabulary not a police?
Totally understandable - English _is_ my first language, and the terminology is a clusterfuck to the point where nobody can clearly talk about it (which at times has seemed intentional, with terminology used in legislation on this topic, etc).
But I think when most people describe the different modalities of law enforcement, in terms of western common-law they mean:
* Watch is unranked, unarmed, discretionary, no special arrest power, volunteer, reporting to a public house or meeting of some kind
* Constabulary is unranked, sometimes armed, non-discretionary, no special arrest power, professional, reporting to the executive branch
* Police are ranked, discretionary, professional, armed, have special arrest power, reporting to the executive <=- in the USA, these began as, and were for a time called, "slave patrols"
* Sheriff are unranked, non-discretionary, professional, armed, have special arrest power (but relating only to court matters such as arresting a fugitive), directly elected but reporting to the judiciary
(when I saw "unarmed", I include what is sometimes called "privately armed", meaning that participants may carry privately-owned arms)
These terms have became all muddled, though. Particularly, police and sheriff have become nearly indistinguishable in terms of the function in US society.
> If you were relying on random individuals voluntarily (and without pay) doing the enforcement, a gang would only need to be sufficiently feared, so that noone ever dares touch them.
It seems to me that every place in the world where this configuration exists, there _are_ police. And the police are either paid off, or they are themselves the gang that is universally feared.
And again, it's possible to have a constabulary that is paid, but which does not have special powers (ie, can only arrest people using ordinary citizens arrests) and which is privately armed.
> Such units have existed for much longer than 200 years. But perhaps you use a different definition for the term?
For the vast majority of documented history of common-law, law enforcement in the general civilian public has been the purview of private groups and not the state.
Police, as they are today, meaning:
* Ranked and compelled to follow orders from superior officers
* Armed by the state
* Paid by the state
* Given lawful authority to make arrests in situations where other citizens aren't
* Given protections or exemptions from criminal and/or civil laws for activities during the course of their duties
* Staffed by civilians (eg, not subject to a code of military justice or to judgment by a court marshal)
...is not a long-standing institution in the western-common law tradition. Nor is the use of the word "politic" or "police" to describe such a force. The earliest police forces in the US today were slave patrols, which adopted different terminology after the 13th amendment, but whose mission and powers remained fairly consistent (be reminded that slavery did not end with the 13th amendment, as it was - and is - still a legal criminal sentence).
Many places in the world still don't have forces that meet all of these criteria, even though they may borrow the word "police".
> when it isn't impacting somebody else on an individual and direct level
But it is. Children using social media put active pressure on other children to use social media too. Not using social media today is very difficult for children, since it can make social integration a lot more difficult. Children using social media are actively pushing other children into addiction. Children using social media are actively harming others.
Your body, your choice. But if you regularly run over people, I will take away your drivers license.
I don't want to turn off the camera in the video calls; I wish to have normal audio-only calls like in any other app like Whatsapp where there's a "Phone" button that starts a call.
It can pull images from a domain.
That would be difficult (since for client-side rendered sites it would require loading the site in a sandboxed environment) or impossible (if the site actively prevents that using CORS or similar, or if it happens to include scripts which expect to be run in a normal environment).
There is also the ability to run things like Playwright on the edge a la Cloudflare Workers. You can fallback to rendering JS required sites through that and do clientside imagemagick WASM shenanigans on the client once the worker returns direct links to all the images.
Yup totally fair - would likely require you upload the images manually for pure client-side.
You might still be able to offset a portion of the compute by just figuring out the URLs of the images on the back-end, sending that list to the client, which would then download and do the optimization / resizing.
I've read multiple comments on using dedup for VMs here. Wouldn't it be a lot more efficient for this to be implemented by the hypervisor rather than the filesystem?
I'm a former VMware certified admin. How do you envision this to work? All the data written to the VM's virtual disk will cause blocks to change and the storage array is the best place to keep track of that.
You do it at the file system layer. Clone the template which creates only metadata referencing the original blocks then you perform copy-on-write as needed.
> When dedup is enabled [...] every single write and free operation requires a lookup and a then a write to the dedup table, regardless of whether or not the write or free proper was actually done by the pool.
Linked clones shouldn’t need that. They likely start out with only references to the original blocks, and then replace them when they change. If so, it’s a different concept (as it would mean that any new duplicate blocks are not shared), but for the use case of “spin up a hundred identical VMs that only change comparably little” it sounds more efficient performance-wise, with a negligible loss in space efficiency.
Am I certain of this? No, this is just what I quickly pieced together based on some assumptions (albeit reasonable ones). Happy to be told otherwise.
Linked clones aren't used in ESXi, instant clones and they ARE pretty nifty and heavily used in VDI where you need to spin up many thousands of desktop VMs. But they have to keep track of what blocks change and so ever clone has a delta disk. At the end of the day you are just moving around where this bookkeeping happens. And it is best to happen on a enterprise grade array with ultra optimized inline dedupe like a Pure array.
I’m not sure that’s true, because the hypervisor can know which blocks are related to begin with? From what I quoted above it seems that the file system instead does a lookup based on the block content to determine if a block is a dupe (I don’t know if it uses a hash, necessitating processing the whole block, or something like an RB tree, which avoids having to read the whole block if it already differs early from candidates). Unless there is a way to explicitly tell the file system that you are copying blocks for that purpose, and that VMware is actually doing that. If not, then leaving it to the file system or even the storage layer should have a definite impact on performance, albeit in exchange for higher space efficiency because a lookup can deduplicate blocks that are identical but not directly related. This would give a space benefit if you do things like installing the same applications across many VMs after the cloning, but assuming that this isn’t commonly done (I think you should clone after establishing all common state like app installations if possible), then my gut feeling is very much that the performance benefit of more semantic-level hypervisor bookkeeping outweighs the space gains from “dumb” block-oriented fs/storage bookkeeping.
Your phrasing sounds like you're unaware that filesystems can also do the same kind of cloning that a hypervisor does, where the initial data takes no storage space and only changes get written.
In fact, it's a much more common feature than active deduplication.
VM drives are just files, and it's weird that you imply a filesystem wouldn't know about the semantics of a file getting copied and altered, and would only understand blocks.
Uh, thanks for the personal attack? I am aware that cloning exists, and I very explicitly allowed for the use of such a mechanism to change the conclusion in both of my comments. My trouble was that I wasn't sure how much filesystem-cloning is actually in use in relevant contexts. Does POSIX have some sort of "copyfile()" system call nowadays? Last I knew (outdated, I'm sure), the cp command for example seemed to just read() blocks into a buffer and write() them out again. I'm not sure how the filesystem layer would detect this as a clone without a lookup. I was quoting and basing my assumptions on the article:
> The downside is that every single write and free operation requires a lookup and a then a write to the dedup table, regardless of whether or not the write or free proper was actually done by the pool.
Which, if universally true, is very much different from what a hypervisor could do instead, and I've detailed the potential differences. But if a hypervisor does use some sort of clone system call instead, that can indeed shift the same approach into the fs layer, and my genuine question is whether it does.
I said "your phrasing sounds like" specifically to make it not personal. Clearly some information was missing but I wasn't sure exactly what. I'll try to phrase that better in the future.
It sounds like the information you need is that cp has a flag to make cloning happen. I think it even became default behavior recently.
Also that the article quote is strictly talking about dedup. That downside does not generalize to the clone/reflink features. They use a much more lightweight method.
Huh? What do you mean? They absolutely are. I've made extensive use of them in ESXi/vsphere clusters in situations where I'm spinning up and down many temporary VMs.
Linked clones do not exist in ESXi. Horizon Composer is what is/was used to create them, and that requires a vCenter Server and a bit of infrastructure, including a database.
No, you can create them if you only have vCenter via its API. No extra infrastructure beyond that, though. The pyVmomi library has example code of how to do it. IIRC it is true that standalone ESXi does not offer the option to create a linked clone by itself, but if I wanted to be a pendant I'd argue that linked clones do exist in ESXi, as that is where vCenter deploys them.
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