[HN Gopher] Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2...
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Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2022) [video]
Author : pabs3
Score : 401 points
Date : 2024-08-31 15:21 UTC (1 days 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.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I've never heard of this guy but that was fantastic.
| Subscribed!
| 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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's one of the ones I was thinking of!
|
| Another one is "The Hundred Light Year Diary", by Greg
| Egan.
| 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
| geonaut wrote:
| +1 this is discussed in the Andrew Hodges Turing biography
| (and no doubt many other books)
| 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.
| compiler-devel wrote:
| The commenter could have ADHD or some other disadvantage
| outside of their control. Imagine applying what you said to
| someone in a wheelchair--"making it accessible to you would
| ruin the magic." Gross.
| oefnak wrote:
| Huh? Making many things wheelchair accessible would ruin
| them. Stad for wheelchair people, but not a bad thing to
| acknowledge... Right?
| compiler-devel wrote:
| Why are you asking me again when I've already stated my
| position?
| fnord77 wrote:
| So I sat down and watched the entire thing. I didn't find it
| awesome or magical. Just annoyed that he stretched a concept
| that could be explained in 60 to 120 seconds into a whole lot
| of unentertaining, onanistic nonsense.
| 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
| starry_dynamo wrote:
| Seconded. My first experience with Tom7 was the "Super Mario
| Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel..."
| I've been hooked ever since.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| 100% agree. This guy is next level.
| 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.
| labrador wrote:
| Your comment makes it sound even less appealing since I avoid
| getting nerd sniped by my hacker mindset and go on to topics
| that actually interest me
| jameshart wrote:
| I don't think Tom7 videos will 'nerd snipe' you. Nobody has
| watched a Tom7 video and thought 'wait, I need to implement
| something like that'.
|
| They will give you some things to think about, some new
| metaphors to use (you clearly like geeky creators who give
| you metaphors to employ since you are aware of XKCD's 'nerd
| sniping'), and they will entertain you.
| 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.
| agusv wrote:
| 126egv
| valid_aq wrote:
| The concept of storing data within the transfer process like that
| heavily reminded me of a short story that invoked a very similar
| idea, Valuable Humans in Transit by qntm: https://qntm.org/transi
| arendtio wrote:
| Finally, I understand what the Dark Net is :D
| kmarc wrote:
| This is the first time I encounter a tom7 content. I expected a
| fun, nerdy video.
|
| I walk away with goosebumps, cathartic feelings. I didn't see it
| coming how the end switches to a pretty serious topic. The whole
| composition is award winning in my mind, but then he also put a
| ton of engineering effort in it, at a level of quality that I
| could at most wish that I could achieve in a lifetime.
|
| Wow.
| kroltan wrote:
| My favourite feature of this video is that he uses the "Network
| Block Device Kit" to make a kit of 3 drives, each using one of
| those words as the main point:
|
| "Network" storage, "Block" storage, and "Device" storage.
| parkerside wrote:
| The basic premise of the ping-based drive, taking advantage of
| ephemeral media i.e. transmission time of a packet, was the idea
| behind clacks (https://github.com/AlexanderParker/clacks). I got
| excited to see someone else had a similar idea and explored it.
|
| My approach was more as a p2p system of mutual random packet
| bouncing rather than using ICMP ping.
|
| Edit to add: I simulated a network of peers and rendered some
| videos of a single message propagating through the network:
| https://github.com/AlexanderParker/clacks-tests/blob/main/pr...
|
| Recovering your file in this way would take some time...
| "Eventually" you'll get it back...
| llimos wrote:
| GNU Terry Pratchett
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Need to praise the inception here - the whole time I was watching
| it, I was feeling clever, thinking "all of these silly and
| wasteful methods for storing data are still pretty efficient
| compared to 'blockchain'".
|
| Then it turns out that that that was secretly the whole point :)
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(page generated 2024-09-01 23:01 UTC)