Yeah, I don’t think there are many benefits when keeping the key on the same drive. Other than a bit of obfuscation. It does still help with erasing, as you can wipe the keyslots (rendering the key useless) but with modern storage media deletion is fairly hard to ensure. But still better than unencrypted.

Only if they gain possession when the device is running with the drive decrypted and they keep it running the whole time. That is a lot higher bar then being able to turn the machine on at any time and then recover the key. For example if this is a laptop that you are flying with. Without auto-decryption you can simply turn it off and be very secure. With auto-decryption they can turn it on then extract the key from memory (not easy, but definitely possible and with auto-decryption they have as long as they need, including sending the device to whatever forensics lab is best equipped to extract the key).

1. Wiping the drive is a lot easier, just overwrite the root key a few times.
2. If you store the key on a different drive you can safely dispose of the drive just by separating the two. (I do on my home server, keeping the decryption key on a USB drive. If I need to ship the server or discard old hardware I can just hold onto the thumb drive and not worry about the data being read.)

Security is always about tradeoffs. On my home server unattended reboots are necessary so it needs to auto-decrypt. But using encryption means I don’t need to worry about discarding broken hardware or if I need to travel with the server were it may be inspected. For my laptop, desktop and phone where I don’t need unattended reboots I require the encryption key on bootup.

Depending on the attacker of course. If they can read your RAM after auto-decrypt they can just take the encryption key.

It’s really nice of them to collect the best piracy sites into an easy to navigate list! They even have proper linking between the index and PDF pages, that is some quality work.

Pacific Mall, Toronto

You know, they aren’t wrong. (Well at least this was well known when I was younger. IDK I thought it was cleaned up a bit in the last decade.)

Yes, that is why I said “Sounds great”.

Sounds great. I think it is super valuable to have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe in all sorts of ways. Having ActivityPub is also nice.

Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t great a cleaning, but they are very effective at keeping the dust down. You will still want to clean occasionally but with a robot vacuum running regularly you can do it much less often and the house feels cleaner in the meantime.

I’m also lucky enough to be able to afford house cleaners now. It is such a nice gift to our family to not have to worry about doing these things. We can spend that time doing stuff together rather than cleaning and we don’t think about how dirty the house is and dread cleaning it nearly as often. If you can afford it I would highly recommend it. It definitely isn’t cheap but many people have more expensive habits that bring less joy IMHO.

there will be scaling with all of its negative consequences on perceived quality

In theory this is true. If you had a nice high-bitrate 1080p video it may look better on a 1080 display than any quality of 1440p video would due to loss while scaling. But in almost all cases selecting higher resolutions will provide better perceived quality due to the higher bitrate, even if they aren’t integer multiples of the displayed size.

It will also be more bandwidth efficient to target the output size directly. But streaming services want to keep the number of different versions small. Often this will already be >4 resolutions and 2-3 codecs. If they wanted to also have low/medium/high for each resolution that would be a significant cost (encoding itself, storage and reduction in cache hits). So they sort of squish the resolution and quality together into one scale, so 1080p isn’t just 1080p it also serves as a general “medium” quality. If you want “high” you need to go to 1440p or 2160p even if your output is only 1080.

For me the biggest benefit is the ease of applying patches. For example in Nix I can easily take a patch that is either unreleased, or that I wrote myself, and apply it to my systems immediately. I don’t need to wait for it to be released upstream then packaged in my distro. This allows me to fix problems and get new features quickly without needing to mess with my system in any other way (no packages in other directories that need to be cleaned up, no extra steps after updates to remember, no cases where some packages are using different versions and no breaking due to library ABI breaks).

Another benefit that you are pointing at is changing build flags. Often times I want to enable an optional feature that my distro doesn’t enable by default.

Lastly building packages with different micro-architecture optimizations can be beneficial. I don’t do this often but occasionally if I want to run some compute-heavy work it can be nice to get a small performance boost.

the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.

But they post resolutions, which are arguably less interesting. The “general public” has been taught to use resolution as a proxy of quality. For TVs and other screens this is mostly true, but for video it isn’t the best metric (lossless video aside).

Bitrate is probably a better metric but even then it isn’t great. Different codes and encoding settings can result in much better quality at the same bitrate. But I think in most cases it correlates better with quality than resolution does.

The ideal metric would probably be some sort of actual quality metric, but none of these are perfect either. Maybe we should just go back to Low/Med/High for quality descriptions.

The circuit power doesn’t matter for the example. I was just picking easy numbers. You can have the same problem as long as the rating of the extension cord is less than the circuit breaker. (And as you pointed that out this is a very common case due to the frequently low rating of extension cords.)

100% vibes based. I’ve been noticing very atrocious artifacts. It could also be things like different encoding settings that are producing a worse result. Or I could be making up the whole thing up and confirmed it in my mind for 1080p when the launched the higher bitrate and then was primed to see the higher resolutions drop in quality after.

Yeah, there are two components here

1. Adding extra length.
2. Adding more outlets.

2 is the main problem, but you need a little of 1 to have it fail in an unsafe way (ie. not just tripping the circuit breaker).

If you just add a lot of extra outlets and plug lots of stuff in then you will simply trip the circuit breaker. (Assuming that everything is properly set up according to code.) In order to create a problem you need some extra wiring that is rated for less load than the wall wiring. (Now in practice every splitter has some amount of wiring, so these can be the same device, but most power bars are rated to be “fully used” or have a fuse internally). So the problem looks something like this:

1. Have a 20A wall circuit.
2. Plug a 10A extension cord into it.
3. Plug a power bar or other splitter into the extension cord.
4. Put enough devices into the splitter to generate 15A of current.

Now you are overloading the extension cord and risking fire.

Yes, you will have double heat output due to twice the resistance which causes twice the voltage drop and more or less the same current. But this heat output is spread across twice as much wire, so unless the extension cables are coiled together on the ground each will heat up the same amount as a single one would.

To clarify a bit, the benefit of the UK system isn’t the end device having a fuse, but the cable itself having a fuse.

In the US the setup would be something like

1. Wall has 20A wiring.
2. Electrical panel has 20A fuse to avoid the wire in the wall from overheating.
3. Extension cord is designed for 10A
4. You plug in 2 10A devices to the extension cord.
5. The wall wiring is fine, it can take 20A.
6. The circuit breaker doesn’t trip as it is also 20A.
7. The extension cord overheats and starts a fire.

In the UK the 10A extension cord will have its own 10A fuse in the plug. So when you turn on the two 10A devices the fuse in the extension cord will blow and prevent the extension cord from overheating.

But unless coiled up on the ground the longer cable also has more area to dissipate heat, so the longer cable doesn’t change anything here. The heat output will be consistent for any section of the cable no matter how much more cable there is on easier side of it.

The only think that the different resistance would affect is the voltage drop to the end device. But voltage drop varies wildly so you are unlikely to have a meaningful difference caused by a few extension cords (unless maybe you are already a bad case like an apartment building to start).

You could also just plug in the 10 amp cord and plug the device into it. The chaining doesn’t change anything here.

The worst part is that this doesn’t seem to be some sort of better quality. All of the other qualities seem to have tanked in the past year, so at best this just restores the previous 1080p bitrate.