Because nobody who opens a public library does so intending, nor consenting, for random companies to jam the entrance trying to cart off thousands of books solely to use for their own enrichment.
Years and years ago I shared a cubicle with a woman named Tracy. A couple times a month Tracy would get lunch at the Mongolian BBQ place down the road (all you can eat stir fry that has nothing to do with Mongolian food for anyone unfamiliar).
Anyhow, Tracy would put a gallon sized ziplock bag into her purse, and at the restaurant shovel half a dozen plates worth of food into it. Then she'd work the afternoon eating out of her purse like it's a bowl, just sitting there on the desk.
Requests to physical servers over physical media are not free. Someone needs to pay for providing and maintaining the infrastructure etc etc. Finite resources are still getting used up by people not paying for them. That's what this thread and the analogy are about.
It's simultaneously worth vastly more to the community as a whole than the cost of producing it, and yet, to any single individual, the marginal benefit of having it is not enough to justify paying for it.
The naïve solution might be to collectively subsidize it, but then that creates its own moral hazards and perverse incentives.
...It's a bit scary how much of democracy relies on institutions that were only able to form because we lucked into social conditions making them sustainable.
IMO Dilbert was always at its best when it focused more on absurdity, and less on rage, cynicism, or ego. I still occasionally think about Dogbert's airliners that can't handle direct sunlight, the RNG troll that kept repeating "Nine", Wally's minty-fresh toothpaste-saturated shirt, and Asok's misadventures.
I do think there was another formula he gravitated towards, though. Maybe one in every four strips, it seemed to me like he would have a canonically "stupid" character present a popular belief or a common behavior, and then have his author self-insert character dunk on them... And that was it, that was the entire comic. Those strips weren't very witty or funny to me, they just felt like contrived fantasies about putting down an opponent.
Once I noticed that, it became harder to enjoy the rest of his comics. And easier to imagine how he might have fallen down the grievance politics rabbit hole.
My youth experiences left me with zero desire to ever work anywhere near a tech company. But when I was still in grade school, I once flipped through a Scott Adams book that my father had borrowed from the local library. There's one line that I remember particularly clearly, directed at any woman who felt uncomfortable or ignored in the workplace:
"WE'RE THINKING ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH YOU!"
Google tells me this is from "The Dilbert Future", 1997, pg. 146 under "Prediction 38". It's presented as the explanation for when a woman speaks in a meeting, and male coworkers don't listen to, quote, "the woman who is generating all that noise".
Adams more or less tells female readers to just deal with it, while also telling male readers that they're broken/lying if they're not engaged in a constant sexual fantasy about their female coworkers.
To be honest, this did real damage to how I felt about sexuality and gender. Not a huge amount on its own, but it's just such a distorted take from a respected author, whose books my father kept checking out, that I read at a young age.
Scott Adams clearly lived an atypical life. Most people don't quit their jobs to write comics about corporate culture. If I had to guess why he took such a hard turn later on, I think, maybe it's something that happens when a humorist can't compartmentalize their penchant for absurdity and need for attention from real life, they can tell jokes that resonate with a lot of people, but at the same time their serious views also end up becoming ungrounded...
He has ... very problematic ... perspectives on females. "If you take away my ability to hug, I will kill people. I'm deadly serious and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than killing, but I will become a suicide bomber."
and "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick to sleep with more women".
You have to remember, it is theorized that Scott Adams is the 'Cartoonist' from the Pick Up Artist book "The Game".
If you aren't familiar with it, well I was once given a copy by a friend who said they used it to 'get their partner'.
I tried reading it, found it despicable (its basically everything we hate about manipulation in the attention economy,) also the person who loaned it to me had bad narcissistic tendencies; the only time I saw them cry was when someone died that they didnt get to bang.
I mean, no doubt people cry. I just can't remember the last time a friend was crying in my presence. It was honestly probably middle school. Maybe a handful of times since then, across all of my friends (men and women). I imagine women cry around women more than women cry around men, and certainly more than men cry around men.
My point was that judging someone for not crying around them much seemed weird to me. Granted, it was a strange thing to cry/get upset about, but the rarity of crying doesn't seem like reason to judge someone as narcissistic.
Subtracting gravity losses, the largest effect of your 45 degree thrust vector would be sideways acceleration. Which is generally what you want, to get up to speed as quickly as possible, instead of wasting energy ascending vertically.
We just don't do it on Earth because we need to get out of the atmosphere first for efficiency and structural reasons. But on the moon or another vacuum body, "diagonal kick followed by minor circularization burns at apogee" is pretty close to the optimal strategy. Even on Earth, it's similar to the trajectories proposed by SpinLaunch and other "space cannon" concepts.
> As I'm sure the author is aware, Restic will do hash-based chunking so that similar files can be efficiently be backed up.
> Even if the order of the mbox's messages are ~random, Restic's delta updates will forego large attachments.
I forget the exact number, but the rolling hashes for Restic and Borg are tuned to produce chunks sizes on the order of an entire megabyte.
Which means attachment file sizes need to be many megabytes in order for Restic to be much use, since the full chunk has to fall within the attachment. — You'd lose 0.5MB at both ends of each attachment on average, so a 5MB file would only be 80% deduped.
Nothing against Restic, but it's tuned for file-level backup, and I'm sure it wouldn't be as performant if it used chunks that were small enough to pick apart individual e-mails.
I suggested the author check out ZPAQ, which has a user-tunable average fragment size, and is arguably even simpler than Restic.
The ZPAQ file can then itself be efficiently backed up by Restic.
`zpaq add archive.zpaq new.mbox -fragment 0 -method 3` is great for this. It splits the input into fragments averaging 1024 bytes in size [0], which catches up to ~90% of redundancy. The remaining ~10% is packed and compressed into 64MB (max) blocks that are added to the .zpaq.
The resulting artifact is a single .zpaq file on disk. This file is only ever appended to, never overwritten, so it plays nice with Restic's own chunked deduplication. Plus it won't flood the filesystem with inodes and it suffers less small files overhead than TFA's solution.
Granted I suspect TFA splitting on the e-mail headers may be chunking more efficiently. Though, unless I skimmed the linked GitHub too fast, it looks like TFA's solution also doesn't use any solid compression to exploit redundancy across chunks. And I trust zpaq as a general purpose tool more than a one-off just for a single use case. The code does look clean, though, nice work.
[0] Average fragment size is 1024*2^N. If the most of the data is attachments that don't change, you can probably use a higher `-fragment N` to have less overhead keeping track of hashes. `-method 3` is a good middle ground for backups. `-m5` gets crazy high compression ratios, but also crazy slow speed. Old versions of ingested files are shadowed by default; use `-all` when you want to list/extract them.
QNX is the backbone of the auto industry, and powers over 200 million cars on the road. For the target demographic, I don't imagine they need to "build trust" any more than IBM or Microsoft need to build trust.
That said, like IBM and Microsoft, they've also been on and off over the years about whether tinkerers, desktop, and other uses are welcome. So they probably could benefit from showing that this time they're opening the ecosystem for the long haul.
That'd mean we have a different compiler in CI than what the developers use on their workstations - which is not a good thing. And wouldn't be tolerated there anyway - people already had some doubts when we were wrapping IAR with wine and a bit of shell to look like a standard UNIX toolchain.
(Shout-out to IAR, though. I still think they're overpriced and you don't really need them - but if you're stuck with them their support is excellent. When an update broke license handling in our setup they didn't tell us to go away like any other vendor would've done for that kind of wildly unsupported use case, but actually made it work again in the next release. They also got us access to native Linux binaries way before they even were talking in public about working on that to play around with for our CI)
https://xkcd.com/1499/
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