Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

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.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

So the irony is

I see what you did there…

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

It is really powerful per watt, and has a built-in UPS. Any homelab type things you could do with that? macOS+homebrew will give you a nice *NIX feel, very familiar if you’re a Linux user.

I’m a fan of having a remote homelab computer+disk for off-site storage. This would be a good candidate in that it wouldn’t use excessive power at a friend/family’s place, but may be overkill (I use a pi3 for that).

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

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Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing

No I’m pretty sure Strictly Ballroom is a completely accurate portrayal of ballroom dancing.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).

Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.

AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.

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.

I think some commercial TVs might do what you want.

In grad school I picked up a an old free HP LaserJet, with an Ethernet NIC card (it was an upgradable printer, maybe from the mid 2000s?).

It was great! Only complaint was no duplexer, but the thing printed great from Linux and the generic toner was cheap.

Today though…the experience is a bit different.

You discounted space dust.

No I didn’t — it would thermalize and radiate.

This is not my paradox, and it’s not really a paradox at all, as the big bang model explains it nicely. There are many nice articles on the topic of you’d like to read more about it.

Yes. But why is there an absence of light?

If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn’t matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)

So, the universe can’t have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.

This may all seem obvious, but it’s neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.