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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • A modern OS running with low RAM (e.g. an RPi with 2G) is going to fill the RAM pretty quickly just in normal operation, so a larger swap space will allow it to run more efficiently as it regularly moves things in and out of swap. You still want to have some overhead to allow for storing the live RAM for hibernation, which with a small amount of RAM is likely to be near 100%. Therefore, running with 3x RAM for swap space is recommended.

    it only needs to be at least the size of RAM

    Yes, technically it only needs to be the size of the RAM, but no matter how much RAM you have some of the swap space will be used at any given time for the swap file during system operarion. If you only have exactly as much swap space as RAM, there won’t be enough available swap space to store the entire live RAM for hibernation.

    The size of the swap file and the size of the live RAM image at any point is unpredictable, therefore 1.5x RAM is the lowest recommended value that is probably safe for hibernation, assuming the swap file is not being used heavily enough to be 50% of the RAM. If you can’t provide at least that much disk space for swap, you should disable hibernation.


  • This is the best simple guideline: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/10/html/managing_storage_devices/getting-started-with-swap#recommended-system-swap-space

    Basically, if you want your system to be able to hibernate then you need enough swap space to sustain both the active swap file and a full image of the live system RAM (hibernate = suspend-to-disk, and uses the swap space). The swap file could be as large as the RAM, so a safe value is 2x the RAM. If you don’t want to dedicate that much disk space to swap, the safe option is to disable hibernation but note that suspend-to-disk is safer for system recovery in the event of power failure.

    If you’ve ever had a Linux system go into hibernate and fail to awake, lack of swap space was probably the reason.

    In Red Hat’s chart where they recommend 1.5x RAM for 8-64 GiB, basically you’re hoping that your system is never completely using all of the RAM. If you do cap out the RAM such that the swap file plus the in-use memory is greater than 1.5x RAM, and the system goes into hibernate, it will not recover because there isn’t enough free swap space to store the in-use memory. You have to make a judgment call when you set up your system about how you’re going to use it - whether you expect to be using 100% of the RAM at any point, whether you’ll remember to close some running applications to free up memory every time you leave the system idle long enough to go into hibernate, whether other users will be using the system (if they’re logged in then they are partially using the RAM and the swap), etc.

    Deciding how much swap space you need is a risk management decision based on your tolerance for data loss, application stability, and whether or not you need hibernation.












  • Uyghurs in China are being rounded up and forced into labor camps

    I think this set of photos of one of the camps in Xinjiang is particularly illustrative:

    This isn’t some short-term persecution for the sake of political influence, it’s not the whim of a few local officials, and it’s not just basic racism. This is a systemic problem, not just with the government but with Chinese culture broadly. Uyghurs are seen as inferior, and therefore it is acceptable to use them as labor or worse. What’s being done to these people is akin to the African slave trade of the 1800s, it’s just being done mostly within China’s borders. It is exploitation at an industrial scale plotted by the highest levels of political power and executed ruthlessly.

    To change this would require forcing large portions of the Chinese population to see the Uyghurs as equals, as fellow humans with a right to self-determination, and then act on that conviction to change the government.


  • With China being a nuclear country, military intervention is out of the question.

    Yeah, pretty much. Even a non-nuclear conflict at any level that would affect regime change would be devastating.

    So the only option left is political

    Even if the entirety of the UN got together and unanimously condemned the PRC for the treatment of Uyghurs, I doubt they would care. China is about as likely to change domestic policy based on external political pressure as they are to collectively tap-dance to the moon.

    and economical pressure and sanctions.

    Effective economic pressure requires a position of economic superiority. China is the second largest economy in the world, which means they are inextricably intertwined with the largest economy (the US) and so nobody has that position.


  • Long term, I believe we can get our balls out of their death grip, and then sanction them properly.

    I doubt it. The situation is not just a death grip… China is the second largest economy in the world. In order to effectively sanction another nation you have to be in a position of economic superiority, such that you can affect the trading decisions of other nations. Even if western nations could extricate their manufacturing needs from China, they would still be dependent on raw materials trade. There just isn’t a way to cut trading ties with China, short of a broad collapse of international trade… and then, well, a lot of people die.

    If there are still any Uyghurs left by then…

    This is the part that feels so wrong. Choosing to not do anything about this terrible thing that we know is happening seems self-interested. I feel that at some point in the future the descendants of the Uyghurs will look at the world and ask, “Why didn’t you do anything to help us?”, and what could be our answer then?

    But… doing something in practice would mean so many deaths, and so much suffering before the conflict was resolved, and more suffering after while trying to pick up the pieces.


  • I disagree… beyond just saying shit, the actual biggest problem is that no one (west, east, whatever) can do shit because that would basically require direct military intervention… which would probably have a much higher human cost.

    At what point is the cost of negligence too high? At what point is it ethically valid to commit the lives of troops from your country to change the behavior of a government of another country within its own borders?

    Historically, the answer is never. No country will commit its own military in this way without an initial military provocation, except when using the human rights abuses as a pretext for territorial acquisition.

    It’s still important to talk about the truth of these atrocities, to not let their perpetrators pretend they’re not happening. But… the reality of this will not change without regime change in the PRC.



  • It’s not just about location, you can figure out usage habits this way:

    These response times vary depending on whether a phone is active, idle, offline, connected to WiFi, or using mobile data.

    Stable and fast responses can suggest that a device is actively used at home, while slower or inconsistent timings may indicate movement or weaker connectivity.

    Over extended periods, these patterns can reveal daily routines, sleep schedules, and travel behavior without accessing message content or contact lists.

    With a baseline of your normal usage behavior, I can start to build prediction patterns for what you’ll do and when, and then start analyzing deviations from your normal usage. If I do this for an entire service network I can then start to link up people with similar behavior patterns and build relationship webs.

    That kind of information would be relatively easy to sell to advertising businesses. For example, if I’m pushing ad notifications on personal devices (Amazon) then I might want to know what times of day a user is most likely to view and interact with my ad notification. That might be information I’d be willing to buy from a service provider.

    The potential uses for such information get darker from there - things like government agencies tracking the behavior of critics and progressives and building relationship profiles for them.

    Given the usage patterns and location tracking and credit card and banking records for a given individual, I can pretty much understand their entire life.