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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • That’s…not really a cogent argument.

    Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

    Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

    If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

    Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.










  • Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

    I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

    Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.









  • It’s an interesting (predictable?) look into the psyche here.

    I work for a big company, and while yeah it’s a big faceless company, the people treat us ICs as assets, not liabilities; the company makes money because of its employees, not in spite of them, and they — colleagues, manager, director, SVP — acknowledge that.

    My partner’s company OTOH seems to treat employees more as a liability — the kind of attitude of “we’d be more profitable if we didn’t have to pay you,” which is really aggravating (different industry than mine, so this is more the norm mindset unfortunately).

    It’s really clear how this whole farce of a government agency views the world.