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A book length version of content of this quality would be an awesome coffee table book!

Very interesting perspective, thanks. One of the other comments mentioned that in Tokyo they heavily use concrete blocks. Not sure how accurate that is but how does their approach differ to the US?

Not concrete blocks, reinforced concrete. There is a major difference. Tokyo is mostly high rises.

It’s also quite expensive.

Normal Japanese construction has always been wood frame.


It’s mostly about economics and the construction industry. You can make reinforced concrete houses to California standards but >95% of the industry is geared towards stick frame construction and it’ll be quite a bit more expensive. Commercial and large apartment buildings are often made using concrete, because they can amortize the extra costs (and except for 1x4s, the only other option is steel frame).

Once you start moving out of the dense parts of Tokyo, wood construction becomes a lot more prevalent for the same reason: it’s cheaper to build a stick house to code than it is to hire RC specialists.


Not concrete blocks but steel-reinforced concrete. Just about anything will survive an earthquake with enough steel in it. This becomes expensive when building to an extreme seismic standard due to the amount of materials and labor involved.

Some recent skyscrapers in severe seismic zones don't use conventional reinforced concrete. Their cores are built from welded steel plates, between which they pour concrete. It is much less labor-intensive and purportedly has excellent seismic properties.


I think you are deluded if you think the latter does not happen with hosted models.

Oh it absolutely does, never said otherwise. Hosted models produce plenty of insecure code too - the Moltbook thing from like a week ago was Claude Opus and it still shipped with wide open auth.

My point was narrower than it came across: when you swap from a bigger model to a smaller local one mid-session, you lose whatever safety checks the bigger one happened to catch. Not that the bigger one catches everything - clearly it doesn't.


What about some kind of mass underwater drone attack? Feels like it might be feasible in the not too distant future...

Is that especially simpler than e.g. an attack on the above ground cabling systems by firing carbon fibre conducting wires over them, as the US is said to have done in the Iraq war? Not that I don't think underwater drones are a future risk, but the belief its a risk which can't be mitigated, or a worse risk than ones which exist onshore, seems a bit weak.

But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields?


Aluminized Mylar streamers is what was used to take down the grid in Balkans back in the 90’s

Say that it is .. it's still hard to near simultaneously take out all wind generators than to mass swarm (with a smaller number) a single platform, well head grouping, or onshore processing facility.

Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid.

Ropes are strong because of many strands.


That would seem like either an excellent way to start a new war, or a galactically stupid way to try to end one.

'some sort of security' - oh great, security as an afterthought.


You're forgetting about the supply chain. Who manufactures all the solar panels and wind turbines? Honest question - are we increasing the risks of becoming energy dependent on China? Or does Europe have the ability to manufacture its own?


AFAIK all the raw materials (maybe not all top-notch, especially from the get go, but usable) and all the know-how exist in Europe (at worst currently working abroad), where many nations want to reindustrialize and gain autonomy.

In France numerous projects appear. Some may be too ambitious, some with a Chinese partner. In any case we will re-learn, and it will be less difficult than creating usable uranium without any adequate ore here!


I mean this is just dumb. Why would anyone respect intellectual property anymore in this scenario for example. And governments will invest everything they have to steal or copy the knowledge required to compete.


Why would this matter if you're just using the database?


It doesn’t, you are free to use ZeroFS for commercial and closed source products.


This clarification is helpful, thanks! The README currently implies a slightly different take, perhaps it could be made more clear that it's suitable for use unmodified in closed source products:

> The AGPL license is suitable for open source projects, while commercial licenses are available for organizations requiring different terms.

I was a bit unclear on where the AGPL's network-interaction clause draws its boundaries- so the commercial license would only be needed for closed-source modifications/forks, or if statically linking ZeroFS crate into a larger proprietary Rust program, is that roughly it?


Also worth noting (as a sibling comment pointed out) that despite these assurances the untested legal risks of AGPL-licensed code may still cause difficulties for larger, risk-averse companies. Google notably has a blanket policy [1] banning all AGPL code entirely as "the risks outweigh the benefits", so large organizations are probably another area where the commercial license comes into play.

[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...


> so the commercial license would only be needed for closed-source modifications/forks

Indeed.


Is there any implicit understanding in the community that byte types will inevitably be added to LLVM? I see that there has been a recent GSOC effort (https://blog.llvm.org/posts/2025-08-29-gsoc-byte-type/ ) but it's unclear whether this has resolved most of the issues or is still an open research problem.


> Is there any implicit understanding in the community that byte types will inevitably be added to LLVM?

Among the people who are familiar with such things, yes. An RFC on the topic will be posted in the near future.


How do you check the hardware is compatible in practice? Is there some reliable resource for doing this?


I've found generally that business-grade hardware has better Linux support. So for laptops, for instance, Lenovo Thinkpad and Dell Latitude laptops work better than some bargain-basement consumer-grade laptop.


As a rule AMD stuff is pretty safe, but to answer your question, I generally go look at kernel sources, or sometimes I go and see if I can find the model in the NixOS Github and see how many workarounds that they have to do to get it working.


https://linux-hardware.org/ is useful for this.


I bought a cheap laptop with preinstalled linux, it happened to be compatible with linux.


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