Why would it surprise anyone that out minds are strictly computational, as described by the laws of physics? If you believe a portion of thought is provided by an invisible sky friend, then thinking isn't limited by the laws of physics anyhow. If not, is this the remaining victory for the Copernican assumption - that our minds are not special?
Most human thought could be simulated by very simple state machines anyhow, in my experience.
This isn't OT. Pretentious and smug, yes, but not OT.
It's not even pretentious and smug any more - watching everything on a computer/tablet is pretty mainstream these days, if still a smaller group than TV-watchers.
This year's "pretentious and smug" is "I don't even have a Facebook page". Yeah, we're bad about that one here.
He's still writing a book with many of the same ideas. I'll just be glad if he drops the "second person storytelling" gimmick. That was clever for about one chapter, and most people won't even get the joke.
Good SF is a period piece set in the future. OK SF is about discovering some revolutionary new wonder. TV/Movie "skiffy" is about explosions and effects and depictions of new technology - ick.
The RNG threat is particularly bad, because it looks like only one person would need to be in the know to sabotage the RNG on silicon, and it would bypass any review process, and it would be very hard to detect by observation of the RNG (assuming it still had, say, 32 bits of entropy).
Come now, do explain the process by which GMR media loses its data integrity over time. I'm all ears.
Write errors happen, transient data transfer errors happen, bad sectors (bad from day 1) happen, mechanical failures happen, sure, but none of that is "bitrot".
Eleven vs Ten dimensions is at the heart of the "hologram" thing. The universe as a hologram (nothing at all to do with a simulation) is a metaphor for how the math worked out in a very surprising way from two different directions.
In the study of black holes, a block hole represents the maximum entropy is is possible to have in a given volume. That there is a maximum possible information needed to completely describe a volume of space. Surprisingly that limit grows with surface area, not volume. By analogy, this is like saying you could take a holographic recording of a volume at its surface, and completely reconstruct the volume from that data. But the "holographic universe" is just an analogy for the very odd result that all the information describing a volume of space "fits" in 2 dimensions. It's best not to read too much into that because the limit here is really quite high, the maximum possible information is on the order of the surface area of a sphere measured in plank-lengths - vastly more bits than is likely relevant to anything.
Inspired by this work, but in completely unrelated theory, it was found that the 11-diminsional quantum model can be completely captured in a 10-diminsional model that includes gravity. The presence of gravity in the universe "flattens" the state needed to describe it by one dimension. This was to me a much more interesting result that the black hole result (because the numbers there were so high it wasn't really a limit at all). Qualitatively all this is not that surprising in glorious hindsight, because gravity does limit the possible ways to arrange matter in the universe: black holes mean any arrangement with too much too close together collapses the information needed to describe it into just a few numbers. How that translates into needing 1 less dimension in quantum mechanics is far beyond me.
And being DJB, surely some of that 300 lines is comments insulting all his fellow cryptographers, the users, and generally complaining that the world is full of idiots?
Quake 4 was a great corridor shooter. People weren't much interested in that kind of game by then, but the engine was good, the gameplay was solid, the squadmate AI was actually good instead of annoying, the plot while simple was at least interesting. Really, both Carmack and Ravensoft did a great job with 4, but you had to be in the mood for a shooter.
There are certainly write errors - but that's not bitrot, that data was bad from the beginning (which is the true explanation for almost everything called bitrot). You can always get bus errors and whatnot, but those are transient errors, and the read is quite likely to succeed on the next try.
If you don't trust the judgment of senior engineers, you won't get very far in life. When you need solutions that work in practice, turn to those who have been practicing for a while.
Well, maybe I don't understand what you mean by "bitrot". GMR media doesn't "rot" in the classic sense of bits flipping over time (well, not in human-scale time), the way that happened with floppies and QUIC tape. If you're adding some new meaning to that term, you'll need to explain it.
But if your talking about odd disk failures: as I said at the top of the thread, if you're using disk, archive stuff in RARs (or other checksummed archives), test those checksums from time to time, and don't purge old backups the moment you make new ones. Or just use tape and you're fine, at least until it gets hard to find a drive old enough to accept the tape (10+ years).
That sort of system could work quite well, but you'd need some commonly accepted system whereby you'd know when a paper had been peer reviewed by some reasonable number of reveiwers. arXiv or similar could certainly provide that service easily enough, as well as some way to know that the reviewers were in fact reasonable choices themselves, but it all runs the risk of becoming dependent on a new central authority.
LTO has 30-year media easily available, and there's a lot of basis for tape for judging the real lifetime, since the technology has been around forever. For modern archive-quality tape, the backing will fail before the magnetic media. For normal LTO tape different manufacturers make different claims, but more than 10 years is normal. Insuring you can still read the tape is of course a different challenge, but the drives try to be backwards compatible for a while (and the drives are fairly robust when in limited use). Fortunately, connection interfaces seem to be slowing their rate of change - a PCIe card will likely find a slot in servers for years to come, and SAS will also likely be around for quite some time, though the cards may get pricey if they become legacy-only.
You make a great point about CD-Rs, I guess I should have broadened my statement to "cheap-ass backup solutions from the 90s", not just floppies and tape.
I've investigated hundreds of cases of "bit rot" over the years in my job, and other than very weak magnetic media (or CD-Rs as someone upthread pointed out), corrupt backups were always corrupt when written. Had the poor SOB only verified his backups day 1, he'd not be in a world of shit. Every single time.
Bitrot is a myth in modern times. Floppies and cheap-ass tape drives from the 90s had this problem, but anything reasonably modern (GMR) will read what you wrote until mechanical failure.
The key therefore is to verify as you write. Usually, verifying a sample of a few GB will let you know if everything went OK. DO your backups with checksums of some sort. A modern tape drive and backup software will do that automatically, and let you schedule a verify automatically as part of backups (2 TB? That's 1 tape - might want to consider that), though ideally you should verify a tape on a different drive than the one you wrote it on.
For disk-based backups, local or cloud, I strongly recommend archiving to a format with checksums (RAR etc) over some sort of raw file copy. Especially for anything going over the network: RAR a volume/file set locally first, then upload, then test the archive.
If you have a superstitious fear of bitrot, you can always do some random sampling of archive integrity, and keep multiple historical copies of files just in case (e.g., don't just delete backup N-1 when you do backup N, do a rotation scheme).
Modern mustangs are quite reliable, and get remarkable gas mileage for the power they make. The downside is the econobox ride and interior, but that's the problem with ricers in the first place. I'll stick with my V8 sport/luxury sedan - it won't win on a race track, but it's plenty fast on the street, and it's a vastly superior car for bumper-to-bumper 30MPH traffic in the rain.
Did you read the "get out of a snow drift" part? Once you're stuck and trying to move 3 feet, getting the sand and shovels out of the trunk if you're the prepared sort, the physics are different. Much like the way wide tires are better on the road, but narrow tires are better in deep stuff.
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Why would it surprise anyone that out minds are strictly computational, as described by the laws of physics? If you believe a portion of thought is provided by an invisible sky friend, then thinking isn't limited by the laws of physics anyhow. If not, is this the remaining victory for the Copernican assumption - that our minds are not special?
Most human thought could be simulated by very simple state machines anyhow, in my experience.
This isn't OT. Pretentious and smug, yes, but not OT.
It's not even pretentious and smug any more - watching everything on a computer/tablet is pretty mainstream these days, if still a smaller group than TV-watchers.
This year's "pretentious and smug" is "I don't even have a Facebook page". Yeah, we're bad about that one here.
He's still writing a book with many of the same ideas. I'll just be glad if he drops the "second person storytelling" gimmick. That was clever for about one chapter, and most people won't even get the joke.
Good SF is a period piece set in the future. OK SF is about discovering some revolutionary new wonder. TV/Movie "skiffy" is about explosions and effects and depictions of new technology - ick.
Ah, well, that explains the missing rant then. :)
The RNG threat is particularly bad, because it looks like only one person would need to be in the know to sabotage the RNG on silicon, and it would bypass any review process, and it would be very hard to detect by observation of the RNG (assuming it still had, say, 32 bits of entropy).
Come now, do explain the process by which GMR media loses its data integrity over time. I'm all ears.
Write errors happen, transient data transfer errors happen, bad sectors (bad from day 1) happen, mechanical failures happen, sure, but none of that is "bitrot".
Eleven vs Ten dimensions is at the heart of the "hologram" thing. The universe as a hologram (nothing at all to do with a simulation) is a metaphor for how the math worked out in a very surprising way from two different directions.
In the study of black holes, a block hole represents the maximum entropy is is possible to have in a given volume. That there is a maximum possible information needed to completely describe a volume of space. Surprisingly that limit grows with surface area, not volume. By analogy, this is like saying you could take a holographic recording of a volume at its surface, and completely reconstruct the volume from that data. But the "holographic universe" is just an analogy for the very odd result that all the information describing a volume of space "fits" in 2 dimensions. It's best not to read too much into that because the limit here is really quite high, the maximum possible information is on the order of the surface area of a sphere measured in plank-lengths - vastly more bits than is likely relevant to anything.
Inspired by this work, but in completely unrelated theory, it was found that the 11-diminsional quantum model can be completely captured in a 10-diminsional model that includes gravity. The presence of gravity in the universe "flattens" the state needed to describe it by one dimension. This was to me a much more interesting result that the black hole result (because the numbers there were so high it wasn't really a limit at all). Qualitatively all this is not that surprising in glorious hindsight, because gravity does limit the possible ways to arrange matter in the universe: black holes mean any arrangement with too much too close together collapses the information needed to describe it into just a few numbers. How that translates into needing 1 less dimension in quantum mechanics is far beyond me.
And being DJB, surely some of that 300 lines is comments insulting all his fellow cryptographers, the users, and generally complaining that the world is full of idiots?
Nice Christmas nostalgia.
Quake 4 was a great corridor shooter. People weren't much interested in that kind of game by then, but the engine was good, the gameplay was solid, the squadmate AI was actually good instead of annoying, the plot while simple was at least interesting. Really, both Carmack and Ravensoft did a great job with 4, but you had to be in the mood for a shooter.
There are certainly write errors - but that's not bitrot, that data was bad from the beginning (which is the true explanation for almost everything called bitrot). You can always get bus errors and whatnot, but those are transient errors, and the read is quite likely to succeed on the next try.
Why so? Do you have contrary experience you'd like to share? Care to join in a discussion?
If you don't trust the judgment of senior engineers, you won't get very far in life. When you need solutions that work in practice, turn to those who have been practicing for a while.
Well, maybe I don't understand what you mean by "bitrot". GMR media doesn't "rot" in the classic sense of bits flipping over time (well, not in human-scale time), the way that happened with floppies and QUIC tape. If you're adding some new meaning to that term, you'll need to explain it.
But if your talking about odd disk failures: as I said at the top of the thread, if you're using disk, archive stuff in RARs (or other checksummed archives), test those checksums from time to time, and don't purge old backups the moment you make new ones. Or just use tape and you're fine, at least until it gets hard to find a drive old enough to accept the tape (10+ years).
That sort of system could work quite well, but you'd need some commonly accepted system whereby you'd know when a paper had been peer reviewed by some reasonable number of reveiwers. arXiv or similar could certainly provide that service easily enough, as well as some way to know that the reviewers were in fact reasonable choices themselves, but it all runs the risk of becoming dependent on a new central authority.
LTO has 30-year media easily available, and there's a lot of basis for tape for judging the real lifetime, since the technology has been around forever. For modern archive-quality tape, the backing will fail before the magnetic media. For normal LTO tape different manufacturers make different claims, but more than 10 years is normal. Insuring you can still read the tape is of course a different challenge, but the drives try to be backwards compatible for a while (and the drives are fairly robust when in limited use). Fortunately, connection interfaces seem to be slowing their rate of change - a PCIe card will likely find a slot in servers for years to come, and SAS will also likely be around for quite some time, though the cards may get pricey if they become legacy-only.
Sounds right to me - and there are sadly still people who need to be told "RAID is not backup".
You make a great point about CD-Rs, I guess I should have broadened my statement to "cheap-ass backup solutions from the 90s", not just floppies and tape.
The error rate from other sources (e.g. on the network copy) is far higher. If your backups are corrupt, it's almost certain they were corrupt day 1.
Test your backups after you make them: it's a cheap and easy 99% solution.
I've investigated hundreds of cases of "bit rot" over the years in my job, and other than very weak magnetic media (or CD-Rs as someone upthread pointed out), corrupt backups were always corrupt when written. Had the poor SOB only verified his backups day 1, he'd not be in a world of shit. Every single time.
Well, I did backup software and hardware for nearly 20 years. But I can't substantiate that with a link.
Bitrot is a myth in modern times. Floppies and cheap-ass tape drives from the 90s had this problem, but anything reasonably modern (GMR) will read what you wrote until mechanical failure.
The key therefore is to verify as you write. Usually, verifying a sample of a few GB will let you know if everything went OK. DO your backups with checksums of some sort. A modern tape drive and backup software will do that automatically, and let you schedule a verify automatically as part of backups (2 TB? That's 1 tape - might want to consider that), though ideally you should verify a tape on a different drive than the one you wrote it on.
For disk-based backups, local or cloud, I strongly recommend archiving to a format with checksums (RAR etc) over some sort of raw file copy. Especially for anything going over the network: RAR a volume/file set locally first, then upload, then test the archive.
If you have a superstitious fear of bitrot, you can always do some random sampling of archive integrity, and keep multiple historical copies of files just in case (e.g., don't just delete backup N-1 when you do backup N, do a rotation scheme).
Modern mustangs are quite reliable, and get remarkable gas mileage for the power they make. The downside is the econobox ride and interior, but that's the problem with ricers in the first place. I'll stick with my V8 sport/luxury sedan - it won't win on a race track, but it's plenty fast on the street, and it's a vastly superior car for bumper-to-bumper 30MPH traffic in the rain.
Did you read the "get out of a snow drift" part? Once you're stuck and trying to move 3 feet, getting the sand and shovels out of the trunk if you're the prepared sort, the physics are different. Much like the way wide tires are better on the road, but narrow tires are better in deep stuff.