Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran

The “Unhook” addon (increasingly required for Youtube now, in my opinion) will still completely block this as it blocks all shorts. Fuck shorts anyway. Also as TechnologyConnections pointed out in a recent video, the subscription feed still and always has completely bypasses Youtube’s recommended brainrot anyway and allows you to subscribe to and follow the creators and topics you actually care about. Until we have a viable alternative to Youtube (and hopefully stuff like this will drive that to happen sooner rather than later) the other option is to stick to subscriptions as much as possible and only subscribe to creators that don’t abuse this or use shorts at all, preferably.

For RAID that’s pretty much it as far as I know, but I’m pretty sure it can be a lot simpler and more flexible using some of these newfangled filesystems that are out nowadays like LVM and ZFS and maybe BTRFS? I can’t pretend I’m super up to date on all the latest technologies, I know they can do some really incredible stuff though. I’m not familiar enough to recommend it, but it might be worth looking into what they can do for you if your NAS supports it. From what I understand they don’t use RAID at all, although they might be able to simulate it, instead they treat disks as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and use their own strategies to spread whole filesystems and partition structures across them in various safe and redundant ways that are way more flexible, that don’t care about disk size or anything like that, they’ll handle any shapes and sizes and I think they can be expanded and contracted pretty freely. I think ZFS in particular is really heavily used for this and supports some crazy complicated structures.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter so much if they’re in 2x 2 bays or 1x 4 bay that’s backing itself up. It might give a little extra redundancy and safety to have them on separate NAS but the backup software is what’s going to be doing the heavy lifting here and it shouldn’t really matter whether it’s talking to two different disks/arrays on the same machine/NAS (as long as the NAS allows you to split the 4 drives into 2 different arrays which from my experience they do)

I don’t know what kind of data this is but when you say the whole household’s data is going to be on it, I want to take a moment to point out that while RAID1 is redundant, it is NOT a backup. Both drives will happily delete, overwrite, corrupt, or encrypt all your data as quickly as you can blink the moment they believe something has told them to, and will both do it simultaneously to both “redundant” copies of your data. It also won’t help if your powersupply blows up and nukes both drives at once. It only guards against individual hardware failure of a single disk, nothing else. While that failure mode is quite common (and using RAID actually increases the risk of it) it’s important to remember that it’s also not the only cause of data loss.

If any of this data is important and irreplaceable, consider whether you’d be better off spending your additional future budget setting up another pair of drives to maintain continuous backups. There are a variety of simple tools that can create incremental, time-machine-like backups from hard-drive based storage to other hard-drive based storage while using a minimal amount of additional space (I use this rock-solid script based on rsync but literally there are dozens of backup tools that do almost exactly the same thing, often using rsync under the hood themselves). This still won’t help you if say, your house burns down with both drive arrays inside it, but it’s an improvement over a single huge RAID NAS and gives you the option to roll back from a known-good snapshot or restore a file that was deleted or corrupted long ago and you never noticed.

To answer your original question, it generally isn’t possible to do what you’re asking. You might be able to get away with starting the RAID array as RAID1+0 and pretending that half the drives (the RAID1 mirror side) have failed, but that will mean your two existing disks are running in RAID0 striping mode with no RAID1 mirrors, and a failure of EITHER one will lose all your data until you get the second two drives installed. And that’s super sketchy and would be tricky to even set up. You cannot run a RAID1+0 with only two drives in mirror mode because they’ll both be missing their striped RAID0 volume. In fact, if this happens on a live array, you lose the whole array in that case too. Despite having 4 drives, RAID1+0 is technically still only singly-redundant. Any single failure can be tolerated, but two failures can make the whole array unrecoverable if they happen to be the wrong two failures (both failures from the same stripe, leaving only two working RAID1 mirrors of the other stripe), and due to striping it really is unrecoverable. Only small chunks of each file will be available on the surviving RAID1 mirrors.

In almost all cases, changing the geometry of the array means rebuilding it from scratch, and you usually need some form of temporary storage to be able to do that. The good news is, if you decide to add 2 drives to an existing 2 drive RAID1 setup, you have 4 drives, each 4TB. and you cannot possibly have more than 4TB of data because your existing two drives are RAID1 and only have 4TB capacity between them. You can probably use 3 of those drives to set up a 4-drive RAID 1+0 with a missing drive, after copying all the data from your RAID1 array onto drive #4 temporarily. Then once the 3-drive array is up, copy it back onto the NAS array. Finally, you can slot drive #4 into the NAS as well, treating it as a “new” drive to replace the “failed” one, and the array should sync over all the stripes it needs and bring it into the array properly. This is all definitely possible with Linux’s built-in software RAID tools (I’ve done stupider things) however whether your specific NAS box will let you to do this successfully is something I can’t promise.

It’s important to keep in mind this is all sketchy as hell (remember what I said about backups and asking whether this data was irreplaceable? yeah. don’t stop thinking about that), but technically it should work.

Edit to add: Another perspective is, once you get your 2 additional drives, you can turn your NAS drive + backup drive into two RAID0s to extend them. A pair of 4 TB RAID0 drives gives you the 8 TB of storage you ultimately want. A second pair of RAID0 drives gives you 8 TB that you can use to make regular backups of the primary RAID0. Again you need to do some array rebuilding, but this time you have an already-existing backup so you don’t even have to worry about dancing around creating initially-broken arrays. Yes the risk of a RAID0 failure taking down one of the arrays is much higher, but that’s what your backups are for. If a single drive fails, you either lose the primary array (sucks, but you still have all your backups on the other RAID0 safe and sound) or you lose the backup (not a big deal because the primary’s still happy and healthy, and once you fix the backup array you can start making new backups again). Either way, you’re now relying on an actual backup strategy to ensure your data is safe instead of relying on RAID1, which is not a backup. The only thing you lose is the the continuous uptime if you do have a failure in the primary array, and the ability of RAID1 to read from both arrays at once and theoretically increase the read speed. But the advantages of gaining a proper scheduled backup outweigh that in my opinion.

It is, but it’s also necessary sometimes. If governments didn’t have any power and could just be ignored or openly defied without consequences, we wouldn’t have to care about what they want to censor. But they do have power, despite all our wishing that they didn’t, and we can’t organize a resistance to them without careful maneuvering and sometimes at least making an appearance of playing by their rules. Government censorship you can unsubscribe from is objectively better than censorship you can’t. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

“But first, we need to discuss the white genocide in South Africa!”

It’s not Peertube, but as at least a step away from Youtube I’ve found a lot of my favourite creators immediately cross-post all their videos to Odysee (including electronics guys like Louis, Bigclive, GreatScott, etc) and I’ve also found some new channels to watch there. It’s not a great site, it’s marginally better than Youtube, which is not a high bar. For obvious reasons, I’m looking forward to finding recommendations in Peertube too though so I’ll be watching this thread.

“remove any thing that they might be able to do” is a hilariously broad brush to apply to three letter agencies in this day and age that were doing things like this 50 years ago.

I’m not saying it’s realistic that OP is being targeted for such surveillance. But if they are, good fucking luck! Flashing your firmware ain’t going to do shit when they’ve just gone ahead and replaced the chips on your board with their own that act exactly like a normal chip but have extra code that doesn’t get flashed when they don’t want it to.

I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB, but an awful lot of them clearly are, and maybe even an overwhelming majority. And I appreciate finding and documenting as much evidence as we can find of that, so that we can have an honest and accurate accounting of how many cops are actually, indeed, “bad”.

Sounds like it’s time for France, Germany, Norway, South Korea, UK, Australia, Canada, and anyone else who wants in to join forces and build our own modern nuclear sub class. We are not helpless subsistence farmers, we are some of the largest economies in the world, I will not be gaslit into believing we are not capable of matching or exceeding, if not US technology itself, then at least the level of technology that the US would be willing to sell to us. Where there is a collective will, there is a way. We must put as much collective effort into this as we put into the industrial revolution itself, or WW2’s economic transformations. If we did it in a matter of years under fire from Germany’s bombs and guns and U-boats we can do it under fire from Trump’s tariffs. Let’s get to work.

Fascism has always been the great enemy. Not a leader, not a country, not a people, not a religion. Fascism is part of being human, approximately 30% of the population has been found in studies to have fascist tendencies. They are not the majority, but they are common, they are powerful, they are malicious, and they always will be. And right now, a lot of them are also very, very rich.

As long as fascism is part of being human, it will always be the responsibility of the other 70% to fight it. And it is a terrible responsibility, but it will never go away. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Only when we all get lazy and apathetic and divided and decadent and distracted can the fascist 30% actually take control. So that’s what they aim to make happen. Consider that only around 25% of the US population (not registered voters – the actual human beings who live in the country) actually voted for Trump. Voter apathy, disinformation, disillusionment, disenfranchisement, demographics, gerrymandering and more have been weaponized against the actual majority to turn 25% into a slim margin of absolute victory. Trump does not have majority support, and he never did, and he never will. Remember that.

We’ll have to call it the ROUS garden, especially if Muskrat keeps lurking around.

If the educational system is not working, if AI has destroyed our educational system, and I think it’s fair to say it has, if teachers feel there’s nothing they can do to fix it, then throw it away and don’t waste our tears on it. We must find other ways to educate. This is imperative, education is non-negotiable. I am not giving up in defeat, I am saying we must retreat from battles that are simply not viable anymore. Use them as a delaying action if you can, but if kids are learning from LLMs and Video games and Netflix and Youtube and Tiktok now, we need to find ways to get as much good educational content as we can onto those platforms. We need to find ways to manipulate their algorithms. We need alternative platforms that aren’t corporate-controlled cesspools, where we can make the rules. Governments and institutions will be too slow to react. The only advantage we have is that we can act and react fast, even faster than the corporate interests that are burning down the Internet of Alexandria and blowing up the world into the next dark age. We can, and should, and must organize an educational resistance.

Literally nobody wants their kids to grow up like this. Not even the billionaires exploiting and profiting from this garbage. We have the advantage that everybody in the world will soon understand the scale of this problem as they are confronted with it themselves. Will it be too late? Maybe, but we have to assume it will be better if we at least try. Even if we have to rescue people one mind at a time, every effort is worthwhile and every victory is worth celebrating.

I know we all really like “freeway speeds” just the way they are, but saying we need them is a bit of a stretch.

Newsom’s not even the Han Solo he’s trying to imply he is here, it’s obvious he’s Lando Calrissian. He’s not your friend, and he’s not going to help you. He’s going to help himself, and that might briefly help you, but don’t count on it. We’ve gotta be our own heroes in this story.

What are electrolytes? Do you even know?

You absolutely can slap a Lambo body on anything (provided it fits) and there is a literal cottage industry that exists around doing so. It’s not popular because, let’s be honest, it’s pretty silly, and everyone involved acknowledges its pretty much just for fun and entertainment. The status symbol of “owning a Lamborghini” goes away forever the second you start the engine.

There is a lot of psychology that goes into designing the appearance of cars. Like, an extreme amount. Car companies spend millions designing and refining body shapes and styles, and building brand images, and pushing commercials that seed these ideas into your head about their brand looking a certain way and that look therefore implying quality, they’re connecting all those dots in your head, one marketing campaign at a time, and it works because we’re honestly pretty gullible creatures at least when somebody wants to spend millions upon millions of dollars researching exactly how they can weasel their way into your brain.

And this might surprise you, but the same “looks incredible but the worst piece of shit ever” can certainly apply to luxury vehicles. Aside from notorious reliability and repairability issues, Lamborghinis don’t usually win any races either. They won’t win a drag race, they won’t win an oval track race, they won’t win a rally race. They’re fast, certainly, but they’re not the fastest and for what you pay for a Lamborghini you could build a much, MUCH better purpose-built race car. You could probably build 10 purpose-built race cars. Hell, people build race cars out of junkyard parts that can beat Lamborghinis. They’re not the end-all-be-all of cars, nor are any of the other luxury brands. They have some nice features but they also have a lot of dumb features and yes, a lot of cut corners too. They’re designed to be desirable and profitable, not to be the best.

So to answer your question, it absolutely IS the case for cars, in fact it’s probably even moreso the case than it is with computer parts. Unless you really need to roar down the highway towing a 10,000 pound trailer at 80 mph and still get up to that speed in 5 seconds flat, you really only need like probably 30-50 horsepower max for most of the daily driving that people do, but people’s driving habits and attitudes would have to change and they would hate the feel of gradual acceleration, so they would simply never buy such a car. I think we really underestimate how incredible even the cheapest “crappiest” cars are. We’re talking about machines cheap enough for almost everybody in our society to own, that can drive at high speeds, in perfectly dry, climate-controlled comfort, carrying many passengers and cargo, in almost any weather short of a tornado or flood, with excellent reliability for hundreds of thousands of miles, that provide constant lighting and electricity and entertainment, all while maintaining a high degree of safety for the occupants.

If you’d rather putter around on a riding lawnmower with a Lamborghini body kit on it, you absolutely can do that, but you have to understand that once you start comparing the limited features and abilities it provides you will quickly find what you’ve constructed is the real “piece of shit” in comparison. Just don’t forget your slow-moving vehicle sign!

Maybe we could generate those with AI… oh wait, I think I see the problem…

Maybe having a competent government would help. Can we try that?