solrize

u/solrize@lemmy.ml
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Well, it's transformative, though when it's AI that's not automatically good. I think there is no way to win the copyright suits against the AI companies after Google book scanning was ruled transformative. What I don't understand is why they aren't in jail for the unauthorized access and disruption caused by the damn scraping.

Oh lol, I see the press release uses the old projection of 576TB for LTO-14 but that has been scaled back because of the past few capacity misses. If you look at the diagram it now says 365TB.

Tape is great in principle, but the shiny shoes running the LTO consortium prefer to make it super expensive and market it only to big companies. They also are staying with the same cartridge format between generations despite giving up on cross-generation compatibility. They are using super high tech tape formulations to get capacity increases while it apparently hasn't occurred to them to just make the cartridges bigger so they can put more tape in them. Oh well.

Why tape? Because HDD's are complicated machines full of delicate mechanical and electronic stuff and they tend to fail if you don't keep them spinning. The lubricants dry out if you leave the drive sitting on a shelf for too long. So you keep them powered and online, and them a computer virus attacks them and exfiltrates or erases the data. While you can keep tape cartridges in a vault completely offline, using no power and no network.

I wonder if the AI-driven increasing cost of HDD has made tape more attractive. LTO for smaller installations was uneconomical because of the enterprise marketing strategy that made the drives so expensive that tape systems were uncompetitive with HDD's unless you had maybe 1PB of data to archive. But now that crossover has dropped by a lot.

LTO itself has missed its capacity and timeline targets over the past several generations too, so the stuff about LTO-14 should be considered dreaming. LTO-10 was really only 30TB but then they introduced 40TB cartridges with thinner tape. They gave up on backwards compatibility with previous generations quite a few iterations ago, when that was one of LTO's premises from the beginning. They may have also tightened the storage condition requirements (temperature and humidity that you have to maintain for the tapes) so you need continuous climate control for your archived tapes, though I guess you've always needed that. Oh yes the 40TB cartridges are $500+ each, cashing in on the HDD shortage.

LTO has always seemed like a cool product that's never been quite there for any but a niche sector.

Let's say you have a number like 35. This is the product of two prime numbers, and with a bit of calculation you can figure out that the primes are 5 and 7. Factoring is doing that calculation, and 5 and 7 are called the factors.

When the number that you start with is large (RSA-260 is 260 decimal digits) factoring is a difficult computational challenge. RSA-260 (and a bunch of other ones of various sizes) were published a few decades ago and someone just managed to factor RSA-260. One of the factors is 439732... (the number in the post body) and that lets you calculate the other one by long division (no big deal when you use a computer). Without reading the report I'm going to guess that factoring RSA-260 took some months on a cluster of fairly fast computers, i.e. a bit much for a random person with a laptop but within reach of government agencies or tech companies.

Factoring big numbers efficiently is a big important math problem that until recently was the basis of most web security. There is a scheme ("RSA") for using a composite number (like RSA-260) as an encryption key, where decryption requires knowing the factors, which are very hard to find. Typically the numbers encryption keys for web servers were 2048 bits which is around 600 decimal digits, so still out of reach for the methods and hardware that cracked RSA-260. But, for other theoretical reasons, the web has been moving away from the RSA scheme towards one based on elliptic curves (another math thing, don't worry about what it means exactly, it's a more sophisticated version of the same idea).

About 600 bits I think. I'm surprised this one wasn't done sooner. It's about 863 bits per below (260 / log10(2)). I made a miscalculation earlier. Ok this is impressive.

It's a hernia check, completely routine when I was growing up (eastern US), it caught me by surprise the first time but then it was no big deal. They did it every year. IDK about the medical aspects but it's not like some doctor thought it up aimed at particular people. It was an institutional thing, all boys in the school district got it (don't know about girls), same thing at other schools, and I saw the question come up on reddit decades later so it's still being done. There was slight physical discomfort (they press up on your testicles and ask you to cough) but at least for me, pulling down pants in front of a doctor wasn't an issue. Having to shower in front of other kids (idk if that's still done) was way more awkward.

The widely cited figure as of 5 or so years ago was that about 1 in 43 boys were autistic, vs. about 1/4 that rate in girls. More recently I think there was a realization that the real rates were about equal between genders, but the symptoms were different, so girls were massively underdiagnosed. That would explain more diagnoses of girls and women now.