The ability to mix and match drives in the main Unraid Array is of course the original feature and draw. Adding a few TB at a time for whatever leftover money I had after taxes each year is really appealing.
But they've added SSD write caching, VMs, Docker containers, a Docker "app store", and recently ZFS drive clusters (mostly for SSD storage).
It's pretty great and incredibly easy to admin. I presently have well over 125TB of mixed Unraid and ZFS cluster storage in a Fractal 7 XL. It's running around 30 containers, a handful of VMs, Tailscale and literally requires less than 20 minutes a week of system level administration (probably more like 5-10 minutes). Of course I'm spending far more than that messing with the actual apps, but that's a personal problem ;)
It gets regular updates, and I'm sure my uptime would exceed a couple of years except for reboots needed to handle the updates and the occasional power outage. You can ignore the updates of course to min-max your uptime. ZFS has been rock solid on my SSD array.
You can recreate the core array bits with a bit of effort and MergeFS and SnapRAID, add Docker, some VM host system, ZFS and a few other things and you can get Unraid "for free" with a fairly normal Linux distro, but the administrative overhead will be a bit more.
One tradeoff is that Unraid exposes a core set of features for each of these, but you could get to quite a bit more specific of a configuration if you go the regular Linux route. The Unraid devs are slowly adding more ZFS features (for example) to the regular interface, but it takes time. Some more expeditionary Unraid user attempt to use those features more or less at their risk with results reported in various forums.
My understanding is that Poland is also seeking smart win-win arrangements with some of these foreign sources. For example, Poland has initiated several big equipment buys from South Korean military suppliers on the condition that most of the manufacturing is done in Poland and that there is technical sharing for future self-sustainment.
It's basically importing expensive R&D for "free" while helping establish a heavy industrial base (which has also proven very fruitful for South Koreans). I'm sure there are other examples like this. You also get a better trained workforce, and then the import of the technical knowledge later where it is slower to digest but with the ability now to turn that knowledge into working production.
Question for those making Splats...how do you get such large environments? I've been playing around with them a bit and I'm finding I'm running out of memory with surprisingly little built even on an RTX6000. Any tips or ideas would be awesome!
The demoscene, while not unknown, is still quite niche amongst technologists and digital artists in the most of the world. It has a pretty thriving scene with dozens of get togethers worldwide (mostly in Europe) each year, is creative, communal, artistic, competitive, multidisciplinary, highly influential, and has a near infinite number of ways to engage with it. It has a long running internal culture, but is welcoming of outsiders willing to learn, and is kind of a "third way" to think about software and technology that can often radically change how you think about computing.
It's also a recognized UNESCO recognized intangible cultural heritage in at least half a dozen countries.
There's a mistake I see in the comments here that "non-profit" = "charity". There are a large collection of non/not for-profits that are not even remotely in the charity business. Some of these companies have long legacies that stretch back to academic labs spun out of major U.S. educational institutions.
I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive.
At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff.
I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers.
All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit.
The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay.
It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.
It captured a bit the feeling of being at the start of the computer boom in 60s-70s. The partnernship between the 2 male protagonists was central till the end of show (evolving through different phases). The show was great, it went in very unexpected directions later on.
The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.
- My wife is Korean, and a lot of Korean food is fermented, preserved, or otherwise kept using a traditional pre-refrigeration method. There are a number of really beautiful traditions that come from the logistics of keeping stuff around for months, or even years. The idea of things being diverted off at various stages of fermentation for different uses was a massive revelation to my American mind.
- That being said, my Korean relatives are completely blown away by some old Western methods of fermentation especially around land mammal meats -- various sausages, smoked meats, salted meats -- and fermented milk products like cheeses.
- The best restaurant in the world, I think in Norway, featured a dedicated fermentation R&D lab as part of their core restaurant menu development process.
- The global trade in alcoholic drinks in based on truly beautiful and sophisticated battles between various micro-organisms.
- My friends in the bio-world recently (in the last few years) have taken an interest in fermentation as part of the thinking on long-term food sources for space habitability. Nothing produces the incredible complexity in microbiology, specifically ones good for food sources for humans, creates anything close to the complexity of fermentation. The thought it using stages of fermentation to produce all of the feed material needed for complete human nutrition. But it's perpetual.
Bonus - you might also divert some parts of the process into fuel, air, and other required processes. It's incredibly compelling, highly technical (informed by modern AI models) research.
Vanilla beans are also fermented before use. They start green, before they are processed and ultimately fermented, giving rise to the delicious aroma and flavor we're all familiar with.
Examples, other than kimchi and probably some fish sauces? Don't know much about Korean food, but I liked what I tried, the few times I ate at a Korean restaurant.
The fermentation traditions around soybeans are particularly interesting. The starting point is called meju [1] which are blocks of open air fermented soybeans in blocks.
From there you can continue to process and ferment them to produce a variety of sauces, pastes, soup bases, and so on - soy sauce is the most famous in the west, but the rest of the products have honestly mind-blowing, highly complex, tastes.
There's also a broad tradition of preserving and fermenting various seafoods, from the corvina to fermented skate (hongeo) [2].
Something I learned on HN years ago was the principle that often something that is riding to the top of the hyper curve is usually not a good product, but a good feature in another product.
At CES this year, one of the things that was noted was that "AI" was not being pushed so much as the product, but "things with AI" or "things powered by AI".
This change in messaging seems to be aligning with other macro movements around AI in the public zeitgeist (as AI continues to later phases of the hyper curve) that the companies' who've gone all-in on AI are struggling to adapt to.
The end-state is to be seen, but it's clear that the present technology around AI has utility, but doesn't seem to have enough utility to lift off the hype curve on an continuously upward slope.
Dell is figuring this out, Microsoft is seeing it in their own metrics, Apple and AWS has more or less dipped toes in the pool...I'd wager that we'll see some wild things in the next few years as these big bets unravel into more prosaic approaches that are more realistically aligned with the utility AI is actually providing.
The ability to mix and match drives in the main Unraid Array is of course the original feature and draw. Adding a few TB at a time for whatever leftover money I had after taxes each year is really appealing.
But they've added SSD write caching, VMs, Docker containers, a Docker "app store", and recently ZFS drive clusters (mostly for SSD storage).
It's pretty great and incredibly easy to admin. I presently have well over 125TB of mixed Unraid and ZFS cluster storage in a Fractal 7 XL. It's running around 30 containers, a handful of VMs, Tailscale and literally requires less than 20 minutes a week of system level administration (probably more like 5-10 minutes). Of course I'm spending far more than that messing with the actual apps, but that's a personal problem ;)
It gets regular updates, and I'm sure my uptime would exceed a couple of years except for reboots needed to handle the updates and the occasional power outage. You can ignore the updates of course to min-max your uptime. ZFS has been rock solid on my SSD array.
You can recreate the core array bits with a bit of effort and MergeFS and SnapRAID, add Docker, some VM host system, ZFS and a few other things and you can get Unraid "for free" with a fairly normal Linux distro, but the administrative overhead will be a bit more.
One tradeoff is that Unraid exposes a core set of features for each of these, but you could get to quite a bit more specific of a configuration if you go the regular Linux route. The Unraid devs are slowly adding more ZFS features (for example) to the regular interface, but it takes time. Some more expeditionary Unraid user attempt to use those features more or less at their risk with results reported in various forums.
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