Great send up of Swap!

Swap is great though. And to point out again that there are ratings on quality SSDs for the lifetime writes. Pull up the data sheet and look for “DWPD”, which is “Disk Writes Per Day”. Typical numbers for good swap drives are 1 and 3. If DWPD is not listed, then plan for frequent drive failures if using heavy, heavy swap (like for ZFS swap drives (Yes, these are different from a OS swap partition)).

Anyway, I just wanted to point out the DWPD statistic.

Yes. I see two obvious ones of Switch 3 and Switch 5. Did an AI make this? If so, it wasn’t a good one.

that didn’t last for very long.

It started in 1979 and ended in 1993.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mush-vroom-pizza/

What? Like their computer keyboard autocompletes with Grok? Or something else?

Clearly you know of lot about this. Here are some comments for the next human.

Deny all modules seems more possible than a whitelist approach. To deny all, the command is likely “sysctl kernel.modules_disabled=1”.

Whitelisting is harder. One could store a list of all loaded modules on a working system. Store a list of all kernel modules currently installed on the system. Compare the lists and remove from the “all” list the “running” list (grep will do this) and write it to the blacklist file.

The problem with the Whitelisting approach is that it needs to run after every kernel module install (which is doable).

If the above is the case, then someone must have automated this already, but I cannot find it quickly. (I checked Debian’s package repository.)

Sometimes it is just a really intense garden.

I am disappointed. A few servers have been moved via train and stayed online. Codeberg should do better.

There are more options than the two you mentioned. Listing a few as more people should remember them. I did get a bit off topic…

1. Use huge company to provide service.
2. Provide service oneself (, likely with Open Source. )
3. Use small or medium company to provide service (, likely with Open Source. )
4. Use huge company for things huge company is great with, but keep “crown jewels” of company on internal self provided systems.
5. Use a small or medium company to provide a service, and another series of small or medium companies to check on the first company.
6. Use a huge company based in a country that is very serious about laws and putting CEOs in prison for wrongful acts.
7. Do not do the thing. (Included for completeness.)
8. Do the thing not on a computer. (Violation of privacy could result in violation of more serious laws.)
9. Use an older technology on a computer.
10. Use the huge company to provide service, but ensure the data includes insane things.

business with a contract

I always wonder at this and have cautioned my managers repeatedly. Yes, we have a contract, but they have a literal army of lawyers and we have less (one lawyer one retainer for hourly work or a small grouping focused on taxes and employment law). As if our ownership won’t bend over backwards to avoid suing a large company like Google, AWS, Microsoft, or Oracle. (Maybe OpenAI and Anthropic are sue-able by a $100 million corp?)

As proof I offer the lawsuits between businesses that have proceeded far enough the general public has heard about them. Not a specific one, just all of them.

I agree with you regarding availability, and I find your comment interesting. I often find phone models of interest that are only available in Europe or the East. Phone selection in the USA is often terrible.

I want to push back on this part:

Only if Microsoft acquires a major CPU chipmaker.

In the USA, and other parts of the world, a small number of Billionaires are buying up everything. A small number of wealthy people could each own a part of the supply chain and for it on the vast majority.

For extra enforcement, add in a legal or cultural push for reporting or shunning violators through the media companies owned by that same group.

Just adding links for the lazy…

Clipper Chip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/clipper.htm

The computers in the store, yes. I expect all computers in the store to be phones and the cell company will verify.

Open Source computers will be more important. Might need to brush up on wire wrapping… (Implication being that chip supplies might become dedicated to only those manufacturers that lock the product down.)

For those wondering, yes, that was a real issue submitted. There are other issues, and they are great.

Yeah… Maybe expand it a bit and include mandatory therapy and a beer league softball club (they don’t need to drink, but it is very okay to be terrible at the game).

Edit: My anonymity and brevity edits may have gone too far. This is not just about filesystem developers, but several kernel module developers I have interacted with.

Yeah, at they approach 9999 surely they will start using larger variables to store the year, and all of the 2000’s code will have moved out of production (2000’s and not 1970’s because we may have fixed the 1970’s code by now.)

Insurance companies in Des Moines, Iowa, USA tended to be heavy users of COBOL near the year 2000. If you want a job writing COBOL, I suggest looking there. I am sure at this point they will do some training.

Um, the lesson was available, but not everyone is doing to reading.

Paraphrasing something a human said: With data and instructions mixed, there is no way to prevent an AI from following directions found in data. #Fuck if I know. Also, I am a real human, and this fits with my understanding of cybersecurity and why we don’t mix data with directions.

From “the monitor goes dark”, it would be helpful to split monitor issues from computer issues. When the computer becomes unresponsive, do any “non-monitor” functions still work? Does the DVD-drive tray eject or does audio continue to play? Any other details? Do any other lights on the computer stay on, like keyboard and mouse lights?

If the issue is primarily the monitor, then splitting between the physical monitor and the video card would also be helpful.

How old is the hardware?

When you say “nothing is logged”, is the hard shutdown logged or anything after the time of the event? Or does “nothing is logged” mean the normal items are logged, but nothing of interest is logged? Some issues, especially hardware ones, stop the computer from logging.

Story: I once had a 15+ year old computer do something similar. The screen would go dark, but the lights on the keyboard stayed on. I had to hard power the system off and sometimes on boot the monitor wouldn’t work. A monitor swap didn’t fix the issue, but a USB video card did. The video card had failed. (Looking up what I think the interconnect was, the system may be 20 years old at this point.) NOTE: The system was not functional long term with a USB video card due to how the BIOS in the system handled the two video cards.