[HN Gopher] Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need [v...
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       Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need [video] (2022)
        
       Author : pabs3
       Score  : 237 points
       Date   : 2024-08-31 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tom7.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tom7.org)
        
       | mathgradthrow wrote:
       | I wonder how many people here are discovering tom7 for the first
       | time beacuse of this video.
        
         | _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
         | Me!
        
         | drewcoo wrote:
         | Does he always have so much vocal fry?
        
         | uvesten wrote:
         | #metoo
         | 
         | It's like when you think of something that will never exist,
         | because it is just too absurd. However, this guy not only has
         | an even more absurd idea, he also brings it into existence and
         | shows why it's a great idea to build a sustainable future!
         | 
         | #nohate
        
           | timClicks wrote:
           | Wait until you encounter his executable research paper about
           | executable research papers.
           | 
           | The NAND gates video is probably the closest humanity will
           | ever get to perfection though.
        
       | alexwasserman wrote:
       | The PDF a couple of weeks ago -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159075 Not sure if that
       | counts as a dupe.
       | 
       | Also, it needs [2002] tagging.
        
         | rogerrogerr wrote:
         | *2022
        
         | a022311 wrote:
         | Yeah I submitted that. Why is it #1? Should I flag it?
        
       | kencausey wrote:
       | http://tom7.org/papers/murphy2022harder.pdf
        
         | loeg wrote:
         | Fair, but Tom7's video presentations are always really fun too.
        
           | btown wrote:
           | That said, if Tom7 wasn't meticulous about typesetting all
           | his results, we would never have been blessed with
           | https://youtu.be/Y65FRxE7uMc
        
       | Waterluvian wrote:
       | The idea of buffering data by transmitting it somewhere far,
       | bouncing it off a moon or whatnot, and using that distance of
       | radio waves as your memory is my favourite thing ever.
        
         | pavel_lishin wrote:
         | There's a great sci-fi short story (well, two, I guess) that I
         | can recommend based on this - although, knowing what you said
         | is a _slight_ spoiler for them.
        
           | Waterluvian wrote:
           | Please do!!
        
             | wizzwizz4 wrote:
             | One of them is https://qntm.org/transi. I don't know about
             | the other.
        
         | OscarCunningham wrote:
         | In Conway's Game of Life, the first self-constructing machine
         | used this principle. It has two construction arms, and the
         | recipe for them to create new copies of themselves is encoded
         | in gliders and bounced back-and-forth between them. This turned
         | out to be much simpler than building any kind of storage
         | device.
         | 
         | https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Gemini
        
         | NortySpock wrote:
         | Sort of like a really, really long delay-line memory tube, it's
         | just mostly-vacuum instead of mostly-mercury...
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
        
           | rbanffy wrote:
           | OTOH, you'd be building one of the largest computers in the
           | solar system. Count me in.
        
         | calaphos wrote:
         | Used to be a common thing for storing analog signals in the
         | past :)
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
        
         | causality0 wrote:
         | Delay-line memory used this concept in a variety of ways, such
         | as by bouncing slow sound waves around a chamber and by
         | transmitting twists along a long coiled wire.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | Except access times are not so good, generally.
        
         | colanderman wrote:
         | Unfortunately due to free-space path loss limiting the Shannon-
         | Hartley channel capacity, the total amount of information
         | storable using this method asymptotically approaches zero for
         | large distances.
         | 
         | For reference, the combined formulas are
         | C=dxBxlog_2(1+(Dc/4pdf)2xS/N)/c. And lim->[?] dxln(1+1/d2)
         | unfortunately = 0. (Curiously, attempting to store more
         | information by increasing bandwidth -- and thus center
         | frequency -- suffers the same limitation.)
         | 
         | (Wolfram Alpha isn't forthcoming yet with a closed-form
         | solution for the optimal distance...)
        
           | trhway wrote:
           | One of the things preventing us from seeing dinosaur images
           | reflected back to us from the objects at 33Mly+
        
           | justsomehnguy wrote:
           | The soft limit is the size of a solar system, a practical one
           | is the furthest and the biggest body in it, so...
           | Jupiter/Saturn?
        
       | K0IN wrote:
       | this lives in my head rent free for the rest of my life
        
         | tomfreemax wrote:
         | Haha..., storing data volatile, with not good retrieval
         | success, slow speed in thousands of heads... I wonder if you
         | could make a harder drive out of this approach... And how much
         | you could store there. And does it benefit society?
         | 
         | Like automatic phone calls..., texts... :-D
        
       | fnord77 wrote:
       | is there a TL;DW on this? I don't have the patience for these
       | long drawn out videos with bad audio.
        
         | ComputerGuru wrote:
         | Yes, previously submitted:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159075
        
         | brokensegue wrote:
         | It's very hard to summarize
        
         | kzrdude wrote:
         | Try it, or work towards it as a goal
        
         | ChrisClark wrote:
         | Unfortunately no. With a short attention span, you will just
         | have to miss out on what makes his videos awesome. For this
         | type of thing, making it accessible for you would ruin the
         | magic.
        
       | zeroq wrote:
       | I remember lcamtuf mentioning very similar concept ca. 2003.
       | 
       | In his version you would partition secret data and send it out to
       | non existing email addresses, just to get them bounced back
       | within a couple of days.
       | 
       | If you want to get your secrets back together you would simply
       | start gathering appropriate parts (you need to keep track of all
       | the chunks somewhere), otherwise you'd simply send them to
       | another non existing email address.
        
       | rwmj wrote:
       | I really need to add Tom's plugin to nbdkit upstream ...
        
       | wkirby wrote:
       | Do yourself a favor and watch the entire back catalog. Not sure
       | there's anyone more creative than tom7 working right now.
        
         | StableAlkyne wrote:
         | SIGBOVIK is always fantastic, and Tom7 is consistently the star
         | of the show
        
       | YZF wrote:
       | Some of these ideas are as old as time but the comic seriousness
       | is great.
       | 
       | Reminds me of older analog delay circuits where the signal was
       | sent as a sound wave in glass IIRC ... with multiple taps for
       | different delays.
       | 
       | EDIT: Here's a cool example that maybe warrants its own
       | submission: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/glass-
       | ultrasonic-dela...
        
       | lupire wrote:
       | 41 comments, 2 years ago:
       | 
       | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
        
       | labrador wrote:
       | It'd be nice if there were a topic summary. What is this about?
       | I'm not going to devote part of my day reading/watching something
       | about chainsaws to understand what the topic is
        
         | kibwen wrote:
         | Tom7's relatively small oeuvre of videos are frequently re-
         | posted here and just as frequently re-upvoted, and they deserve
         | to be.
         | 
         | Discovering what the video is about as it discursively unfolds
         | is part of the joy. There comes a moment in every video
         | (multiple moments, even) where you'll suddenly be like, "wait,
         | I can't believe what you appear to be suggesting", only to find
         | out that not only is he suggesting it, he actually implemented
         | it. There are few video creators who are as attuned to the
         | hacker mindset as Tom7; I decline to summarize and instead
         | strongly recommend you watch it and find out for yourself. It's
         | a video about the logistics of juggling a trillion chainsaws,
         | in a manner of speaking.
        
         | ElectricalUnion wrote:
         | Throwing chainsaws in space is probably a more reasonable
         | "juggle" that for example using blockchains as mass storage.
         | It's also probably cheaper for the environment to boot.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-31 23:00 UTC)