This is absolutely right. We are getting to the point where the circuit pathway is hundreds or even dozens of electrons wide. The fact that we can even make circuits that small in quantity is fucking amazing. But we are rapidly approaching laws-of-physics type limits in how much smaller we can go.

Plus let’s not forget an awful lot of the super high-end production is being gobbled up by AI training farms and GPU clusters. Companies that will buy 10,000 chips at a time are absolutely the preferred customers.

Yeah I actually hadn’t seen that at all. There’s not many of those toaster style NAS cases, that one is fairly big as it needs a full size power supply. What I have in mind though is basically same size and form factor as a Synology DS9xx, 4-6 3.5" bays, main board under or off to the side, 1-2 NVMe slots, low power CPU. Basically clone a Synology DS9xx but put a standard UEFI BIOS on it as well as a video output. I think that would sell pretty well. Especially if you gave it 10 gig ethernet and a CPU that had an AI accelerator.

Could of course build the thing yourself, but it ends up bigger.

Yeah exactly. And from what I understand of this thing, it has a fairly easy to use auto update system. So every couple months just plug it into your router and hit the update button. I don’t think it’s a ripoff.

If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.

Oh absolutely. Without a doubt. Broadcom / VMware have lost trust for good

Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.

Oh tons of alternatives for sure. Where I’m at, at this point if I go somewhere else I’m going to want open source most likely.

Yeah exactly. I’m on vacation, if I wanted to do chores I would have stayed home. Plenty of choice to do right here.

Broadcom released a free VMware again, Synology is locking down their products,… Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?

This is seriously ‘how to kill your brand and customer good will in one easy step’ type nonsense.
Synology does not have the respect in Enterprise that someone like Dell or HPE does. They exist in Enterprise because of admins who use it at home and then bring the knowledge to work.

All this does is make sure nobody will buy one for the home anymore. There are too many other good options. And various open source NAS OS choices becoming more mature by the day.

If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They’d sell a ton of them.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if a Synology ‘jailbreak’ to load a third party OS comes out.

This 100%.
AirBnB used to be cheaper than a hotel. Then it got so easy to tack on fees and ridiculous requirements that you’re basically paying more than a hotel to housekeep your own room. Mix in lots of shady hosts and most of the time I’d rather just stay at the Hilton for the same price.

It can still be useful as a novelty, like book a party house somewhere or as easily cheaper way to house an awful lot of people. But for the most part, I’ll pass.

It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.

If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.

If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).

But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.

As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.

Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.

Uranium reactors are for the most part very safe, and I personally think we should consider building more of them. The problem with them is when something goes wrong, it can go very very wrong contaminating a huge area. Now granted more modern reactor designs make that sort of issue much less likely, but the worst case scenario of a uranium reactor, no matter how unlikely, is still a lot worse than the worst case scenario of a thorium reactor.

For anyone not familiar with thorium…

Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.

There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there’s plenty more to dig up.

There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.

The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can’t use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.

China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don’t expect this to power anybody’s house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.

Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.

The problem is conceptual.

There are two types of tracker devices.

AirTags, and similar devices in the Google ecosystem, are short-range Bluetooth beacons. They don’t actually have GPS receivers of their own. They rely on the swarm of other Apple / Android phones in the world that have their Bluetooth radios active. One of those phones picks up the beacon, and sends a report up to Apple / Google with its current location and the beacon signal strength. That is how you can find your stuff, because some random person’s phone called in a sighting. Because these things are very simple, just a very low power Bluetooth transmitter and nothing else, they can run for a year on a coin cell battery.

The other is an actual GPS tracker. This device has a GPS receiver to determine its own location, and a cellular radio to transmit that location elsewhere, often just by sending a text message with its ID and location to some server. This however is physically larger because you need a battery, GPS antenna, cellular antenna, and a cell phone style radio chip. That all uses a lot more power. Most of the ones designed to last for months have a power brick holding 4-8 D-cell batteries, or a large lithium pack. Obviously that is not some tiny thing you lose in a pocket. Those are usually magnetically attached to the bottom of cars. Or, in the case of fleet telemetry, it will be hardwired into the vehicle. But this sort of thing necessarily requires a subscription fee because it has a cellular radio. That cellular thing needs an account with a carrier.

That’s really too bad. This sort of effort should be directed at something specific rather than just being performant :(

Unfortunately that seems to be the Democrat playbook these days. Make a lot of noise, but don’t suit up for the actual battles that would win the war.

Sad but true. And they are taking some good stuff with them.

Squeeze box back in the day was the biggest competitor to Sonos. All open source. Logitech bought them, then just shut it down for no apparent reason. Same thing happened with Harmony. Best user programmable remote on the market, Logitech buys them, then shuts them down for no apparent reason.

I wish someone would scrape together a few million bucks or whatever Logitech would want to sell both brands, buy them, and resurrect them.

Yes it can.

The fob has no idea what it has access to, in most systems it just has a serial number. When you tap it on the reader, the reader scans its serial number. The system has a list of which key numbers are allowed to open which doors at which times, if your key matches it opens the door. These almost always have some kind of log of which key opened which door when. Whether the building management knows how to access that is anyone’s guess.

If he loves in a building with fobs there’s probably cameras also.

So if he’s worried about after the fact investigation into his movements, he should live somewhere else.

The problem isn’t capitalism. US has always had capitalism and once we put good protections in it worked great, like post WWII up until like 1990ish. That golden arrow was mainly because there were strong protections for workers that were relevant to the time. A man working minimum wage could live decently and feed his family.

The three factors of production are land, labor, and capital. All three are supposed to have equal seats at the table. But starting somewhere between the Reagan years and 1990s, we started to let capital run the table. Labor took a back seat. And what we have now is the result.

Housing and health care became investments rather than services. Minimum wage didn’t track inflation, didn’t track CPI, and sure as hell didn’t track worker productivity. The federal minimum wage has less buying power today than at any point since the minimum wage was implemented. And there is a very real trickle down effect, in that if the lowest worker is making $7.25, all other wages adjust based on that. IE, the slightly higher end worker makes $15 or $20 because that’s double or triple the minimum wage. If the lowest worker was making $20, the slightly higher end worker would be making $40 or $60.

The result is that the American people have less buying power at their disposal than they have in a very long time. Significantly less than during those golden years of the latter 1900s. And that is why shit sucks.

Capitalism is not the problem. Unchecked unregulated capitalism is the problem. Regulatory capture is part of that problem. And that’s what we have now in many industries.

Fix that, raise the minimum wage, and stop letting corporations exploit not just workers but the nation as a whole. Then you have some capitalism that works for everybody.

Yeah this is why I don’t use Plex.

At one point I installed it on my NAS. It goes through the setup, and then says I need to make a cloud account. Wtf? I am running locally hosted software on locally hosted hardware to access locally hosted files. Why do I need any cloud for this?

I don’t. I uninstalled it.

Sadly Japan may be a culture in decline.
Their culture is basically work yourself to the bone even more than the US. Young people study their ass off and get a job working long hours while still living at home because they still can’t afford their own place. And you have stuff like if the subway is a minute late they hand out apology slips to workers so they don’t get in trouble with their bosses for being 30 seconds late. Meanwhile there is a very strong ‘defer to elder authority’ note in their culture. And in many industries people are expected to work a 10-hour day and then go drinking with the bus until 2:00 a.m. only to be back at work the next day at 8:00 a.m.
The end result is young people have neither the time nor the money to have kids. So they don’t.

Their population is literally aging and shrinking. They are facing a very serious problem in wondering who is going to take care of their elderly. Their birth to death ratio is 0.44, meaning that for every baby born in a year more than two people die. In a nation of about 125 million, the population is shrinking by just under a million every year. That’s not good.

And while the Japanese people are highly educated and very capable, the ‘defer to authority’ culture prevents the sort of entrepreneurship you see in the US. An example of this, Japanese companies have a stamp called the hanko, when a paper memo is circulated around the office each employee stamps it with their personal hanko stamp to signify that they have read it. Many Japanese companies stayed in person during COVID simply because there was no digital equivalent to the hanko and managers refused to give it up.

If you wants an example, look at Toyota Motors. It’s been obvious to everyone with eyes that electric vehicles are the future, and it has been obvious for probably 8 or 10 years. Every major automaker is investing in EV technology. Except Toyota, which up until recently was still betting the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. But that’s because the good Mr Toyoda didn’t like EVs, and unlike in an American company no one would dare challenge him on that.

It is really too bad. Japan is a wonderful place with an amazing culture and rich history. But if they are going to survive they need to make very serious changes to their society and they need to do it soon. That is going to involve dumping most of what currently qualifies as Japanese business culture, an instituting some real work-life balance laws with teeth. I don’t know if they’re going to do it.