Jim Salter

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2.5 Admins 272: NVMe Surprise

Why you should seriously consider buying refurbished hard drives, why drives might be lasting longer than they once did, Jim’s M.2 NVMe drive died at an inopportune moment, using multiple partitions on disks with ZFS.

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Even if you don't need me to tell you "stop trusting email," you might find it handy to have the reasons why not to trust email written out and easy to refer *other* folks to, instead of having to make the argument from scratch every damn time.

jrs-s.net/2025/10/30/p...

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2.5 Admins 271: Dead Internet

Why you should keep your Baseboard Management Controller off the network, ZFS is hard to defeat with a zip bomb, how bad the Internet bot problem probably is, and building a small home server cluster.

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2.5 Admins 270: Storage Shortage

It looks like the storage companies aren’t betting on the AI bubble lasting much longer, the arguments against self-hosting, and setting up a server for virtualization and containers.

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2.5 Admins 269: End of 10?

Windows 10 is officially end of life but Microsoft extends free updates for Windows 10 in Europe, it gets even harder to use a local account in Windows 11, and whether repurposing old server hardware is worth it.

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I agree with you that 4chan did a lot to incubate the kind of shit we're talking about. My point is that it certainly didn't *originate* with 4chan, and that quite a lot of the original community were shocked as the gestalt slid inexorably away from "tongue in cheek brainrot" to straight fascism.

What if I told you those beliefs were already "everywhere" in the 90s

And 80s

And 70s

And...

But I didn't personally know that until the 90s, because that's when I was in the Navy and both getting deployed away from the SE USA (eg Philly) and working closely with people from all over.

4chan didn't exist in 1980s Alabama, and guess what these fuckers sound like?

Every damn time I think I'm done being surprised by these bastards, I swear to fucking God...

POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

@politico.com
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

My laptop grenaded itself on slide 17 of 27. I delivered the rest of the talk blind, with no notes, infinitely repeating ext4 journal recovery errors parading majestically across the big screen.

Alex got one!

That was one to remember. I'm still hoping somebody comes forward with a picture! 😅

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2.5 Admins 268: The Salter Philosophy

A Red Hat breach leads to a leak of lots of sensitive customer data, Synology backs down on allowing third-party drives but they are removing features, and managing ZFS properties during replication.

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2.5 Admins 267: Hoarding Cache

The weird errors you see when your root partition is full, TikTok uses a lot of bandwidth by preloading videos, and dealing with a ZFS pool that won’t import.

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2.5 Admins 266: Jiggawatts of Hallucinations

Intel and Nvidia are teaming up for multiple reasons, Open AI are planning to use a ludicrous amount of power, LLM hallucinations aren’t going away, and how long we keep servers and hard drives in production.

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I'm much more active on Mastodon these days.

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2.5 Admins 264: A Question of Trust

Matrix shows how painful DBs can be to restore, the TLS cert system doesn’t make sense in 2025, using S3 object storage outside of the cloud, and more. With guest host Gary from Linux After Dark and Hybrid Cloud Show.

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2.5 Admins 262: It’s About Control

Google is planning to assert even more control over which Android apps can be installed, the US government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and minimum networking speeds in homes and offices.

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2.5 Admins 261: Worms and Baskets

Why you can’t rely on a single cloud provider, Jim discovers AI that spreads itself like a worm, and configuring all-flash arrays.

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2.5 Admins 260: Watery Email

AMD’s recent mobile-class processors impress us with their power to performance ratio, the UK government suggests a preposterous way to save water, setting up verified boot with snapshots, and the best way to configure ZFS to run VMs.

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2.5 Admins 259: New Web?

The Web is a mess of tracking and AI scraping so do we need a new one, would it even be possible, or is this the wrong question? Plus setting up servers in a garage where dusty woodworking is happening.

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Hey Zuckerberg! You know how if you examine the insanely detailed metadata you keep on every account, it's blindingly obvious that I went from a content creator who spent many hours a day on this platform, every day, to somebody who mostly just checks his notifications and memories first thing in the morning and then logs out? Well, back then, *I* got to control what showed up in my timeline, I cared about all of it, and it kept me engaged. But now, my timeline has five AI bullshit story posts, five Reddit screenshots from bots I never followed and don't care about, five "reels", five (usually scammy) ads, and another grab bag of random bullshit for every single one of my actual friends' posts that you're willing to show me. All too often, you refuse to show me my closest friends' posts for WEEKS--or just as frequently, ever--while you continue to rotate the all singing, all dancing crap of the world past me, presumably wondering all the while why my engagement numbers keep DECREASING. In short, you've utterly fucked up and destroyed what real value there used to be in a website that you started as a way to creep on college girls you had no chance with. Bravo, motherfucker. Yes, you'll die fabulously wealthy--but you will die an abject failure, with literal billions of people glad that you're finally gone. Hope it's worth it.

An open letter to a billionaire:

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2.5 Admins 258: Artificial Dirtbag

Jim is concerned that although over-anthropomorphising LLMs is a mistake, we should be cautious about some of their human-like behaviour. Plus how to maintain old ZFS pools, and accessibility in the BSDs.

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2.5 Admins 257: Outage365

Two recent outages were handled very differently but show the dangers of centralisation, Let’s Encrypt is introducing certificates for IP addresses, and the differences between backup and production systems.

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2.5 Admins 256: Why ZFS

To celebrate the 256 milestone we devote the whole episode to explaining why we use ZFS. We explain about data safety, data retention, data portability, and ease of administration.

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2.5 Admins 255: Copyright Your Face

Microsoft offers Windows 10 updates in return for your settings data, Denmark wants to protect against deepfakes using copyright, someone is wrong on the Internet about RAID, and getting a sysadmin job in your late 40s.

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2.5 Admins 254: chrudo

A vulnerability in sudo brings up concerns about feature-creep, and makes us consider alternatives. Plus Broadcom starts auditing VMware customers, and how to decide which outbound ports to open on a large network’s firewall.

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I feel that.

I've been self-hosting mine since the late 1990s, and all I can offer you is my condolences.

Books and Other Projects by John Scalzi You may have heard: I write books. Here’s what I’ve published. The Old Man’s War Novels This series of books is what I’m currently best known for. Old Man’s War (2005)…

Came across an obviously "AI"-made article of "Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels of 2025" where every one of the books doesn't actually exist, including one purported to be by me. The internet's filling up with slop, y'all.

Here's a canonical list of my work, btw:

whatever.scalzi.com/about/books-...