Execs where I work seem to think we will just keep writing stuff, LLMs will scrape it and that will influence what people see in their version of Google/ChatGPT/etc. So nothing changes in their mind, just that the audience is a bot, not a human. As a writer, this sucks.
They don't give a fuck. They take away and give back NOTHING. They don't offer you ways to make your own money with your own thing. The money is flowing in one way, not both ways. The same pattern repeats itself.
Pretend to be nice. People will elevate you and give their money. When you have ample money and lobbying power you start to put people into a gargantuan hydraulic press an squeeze everything out of them. Repeat until more money can be made, and in the end toss their withered bodies away.
You mentioned in the post that you "received a stack of 4 Pi marketing brochures and articles". Do you plan to scan these and place them on your website or the Internet Archive? I'd love to read them!
ZFS doesn't really need huge amounts of RAM. Most of the memory usage people see is the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), which will happily use as much memory as you throw at it, but will also shrink very quickly under memory pressure. ZFS really works fine with very little RAM (even less than the recommended 2GB), just with a smaller cache and thus lower performance. The only exception is if you enable deduplication, which will try to keep the entire Deduplication Table (DDT) in memory. But for most workloads, it doesn't make sense to enable that feature anyways.
That + full-disk encryption is why I went with BTRFS inside LUKS for my NAS.
They recommend 1GB RAM per 1TB storage for ZFS. Maybe they mean redundant storage, so even 2x16TB should use 16GB RAM? But it's painful enough building a NAS server when HDD prices have gone up so much lately.
The total price tag already feels like you're about to build another gaming PC rather than just a place to back up your machines and serve some videos. -_-
That said, you sure need to be educated on BTRFS to use it in fail scenarios like degraded mode. If ZFS has a better UX around that, maybe it's a better choice for most people.
1GB RAM per 1TB storage is really only required if you enable deduplication, which rarely makes sense.
Otherwise, the only benefit more RAM gets you is better performance. But it's not like ZFS performs terribly with little RAM. It's just going to more closely reflect raw disk speed, similar to other filesystems that don't do much caching.
I've run ZFS on almost all my machines for years, some with only 512MiB of RAM. It's always been rock-solid. Is more RAM better? Sure. But it's absolutely not required. Don't choose a different file system just because you think it'll perform better with little RAM. It probably won't, except under very extreme circumstances.
That explains the cheap DDR4 DIMMs on AliExpress. Can get 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 DIMMs for A$252 delivered to Australia. A local PC store has same spec “name brand” RAM for around $380-$400.
Oh don’t worry I know. If I can pat myself on the back a bit, I was super vindicated at work last week when someone shared a WD drive shortage article - I had pushed us to grab 7x 14TB refurbished enterprise drives in December (6 bay raid, 7th is a spare). The 12TB seagate EXOS currently cost $110 more than we paid for those 14’s.
My experience is that bosses read my blog, then when they or a fellow manager need to hire someone, have reached out to me asking me to apply. So it cuts both ways - maybe your shitty boss sees you blogging and sharing your experience, but a good boss will see that and go "I want this passionate and curious person to work for me".
There was some anecdotal stuff floating around some years ago that smaller studios stopped doing custom Linux builds because Proton+Windows ran faster than their native build =)
