Sorry for posting a third-hand report of the research.

Even if their plastic doesn’t work for foodstuffs, it is still significant if it could replace conventional plastic packaging for other goods.

Most of them, in fact.

The same way these capitalists evaluate human beings.

Qobuz is refreshingly good.

Insulting the artists too. Just like when Daniel Ek said that the “content” on Spotify was “basically free” to make.

If you don’t disable it in the BIOS it will just come back on next boot.

From the article:

Even worse, the malware-looking Christmas wreath is linked to a process called “Christmas.exe.”

So the process was actually called that. It popped up on my machine this morning and I immediately started scanning the whole system for malware and searching to see if anyone else had this problem.

Yes, but politicians and police keep fantasizing about a magical crypto-backdoor that only they can use, no matter how many times people explain this to them or how many times they get burned.

FBI Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran said, “The FBI has been really, really consistent about our stance on lawful access encryption. We’re actually big, big supporters of it, but it has to be reasonably responsibly managed so that we can get what we need on the other side.”

So they want to keep the backdoors but have the Chinese government stop naughtily using them when they’re only for American use. Good plan! A quick call to Xi Jinping should sort the whole thing out.

Accounts differ but most reports say a low number of years. Older flash memory is more stable than the newer stuff, because it only stored one value per tiny capacitor, so the charge had to drop by 50% for the bit to be lost. In newer flash memory they use each cell to store more than one bit, which means they need to make finer discriminations between charge levels, so there’s less tolerance for weakening charge levels. Many people report losing data after only a couple of years unpowered with modern devices. Some older devices can go for more than a decade. I don’t have any studies to hand but if you search for information about bit rot in flash memory you will find plenty of discussions online.

If you power up the device and read all the data, this will refresh the charges.

The device itself degrades from writes, but the data degrades anyway as long as it is not powered. The bits are stored as charges in tiny capacitors, and if you leave it unpowered this charge gradually leaks away, leading to data loss over the long term. The device needs to be powered up to be able to refresh the charges and preserve the data.

My understanding was that flash memory, especially modern flash memory with tiny gates and multiple bits per cell, degrades the fastest of all storage media (possibly apart from badly made plastic discs). Especially if it isn’t regularly powered up, the memory cells will just use their charge after a while. If you used three it would reduce the risk, but if they’re all degrading untouched at the same speed they might still all lose data around the same time.

They’re pretty expensive.

The lifetimes have improved, but according to your link, the currently measured average age of a drive at failure is 2 years, 10 months. They expect that to increase as they roll over to newer, more reliable drives. These drives are under heavy use, unlike drives used for offline storage, but still it’s not really the kind of lifespan you’d ideally want in an archival medium.

That’s technically promising, but I can’t see it being a mass-market item since most people don’t care about backups, so it will likely be prohibitively expensive for most home users.

I guess home users will be without any viable long-term backup media soon. The only ones I can think of are those special blu-ray discs that promise to last for archival. After that we have spinning disks, but those only last a few years and will eventually be phased out, and then all we’ll have is flash memory that degrades rapidly. Oh, and paying through the nose for someone’s cloud service so they can hold our data to ransom while mining it for AI, and delete it as soon as we miss a bill payment.

Self-hosting makes more sense every day.

I know you don’t want to pay for their sync service and this is the self-hosted community, but I just wanted to note that they service does work well and gives you access to note history. I decided to pay because Obsidian is excellent and I wanted to support it. I just wish it were open source.

The headline is misleading clickbait, unfortunately.

Yes, the headline sucks.