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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Hard drives are so variable and failures so unpredictable, I bet you can’t find that information. Most of the actual data about hard drive failures, like Backblaze’s reports, are for drives that don’t spin down.

    That said, spin-down has always been used for saving power, not drive lifetime. I would generally assume spinning down never extends lifetime. Even in the case of an external hard drive you plug in once a month - it is very likely going to fail earlier than the drive spinning 24x7.

    Also, I wouldn’t shy from keeping the database on the same, fast storage as the OS, even if that’s flash. Move to an external SSD when you can. HDDs have such long seek times.





  • I agree that it is certainly debatable. However, my experience has been that information extracted about, say what may cause a strange error message from some R output, has been at least as reliable as random stack overflow posts - however, I get that answer instantly rather than after significant effort with a search engine. It can often find actual links better than a search engine for esoteric problems as well. This, however is merely a relative improvement, and not some world-changing event like AI boosters will claim, and it’s one of the only use-cases where AI provides a clear advantage. Generating broken code isn’t useful to me.




  • If it wasn’t for all the AI hype that it’s going to do everyone’s job, LLMs would be widely considered an amazing advancement in computer-human interaction and human assistance. They are so much better than using a search engine to parse web forums and stack overflow, but that’s not going to pay for investing hundreds of billions into building them out. My experience is like yours - I use AI chat as a huge information index mainly, and helpful sounding board occasionally, but it isn’t much good beyond that.