BTRFS can work across multiple disks much like ZFS. It supports RAID 0/1/10 but I can’t tell you about performance relative to ZFS.

Just be sure you do NOT use BTRFS’s RAID5/6. It’s notoriously buggy and even the official docs warn that it is only for testing/development purposes. See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices

Edit: Another interesting thing to note between the two file systems is deduplication. ZFS supports automatic deduplication (although it requires a lot of memory). BTRFS supports deduplication but does not have built-in automatic dedup. You can use external tools to perform either file-level or block-level deduplication on BTRFS volumes: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deduplication.html

Good advice!

This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.

This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.

I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(

If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again

Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).

For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.

They have a big IRL ad campaign in major US cities. See https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyone

These ads certainly aren’t the worst, but they’re still a bit misleading. Using a VPN is not going to prevent tracking in general. Your phone apps will still send GPS data to all the same places. Web sites will still use all the same cookies. Facebook is still gonna be Facebook. 🤷

That said, Mullvad does include domain-based ad and tracker blocking with their DNS server (which is free and available to the public, btw), and that’s also optional on the VPN, so it does help to a point.

(Pinging @countrypunk@slrpnk.net to avoid double-replying. )

Sure. I’m referring to the ones that run big ad campaigns, like Nord and Mullvad. They tend to overstate how a VPN can protect you, sometimes in ways that barely make sense. There is no epidemic of criminals stealing personal credit card information over insecure wi-fi, for example. The ads play into ignorance and fear.

That said, yeah, I’d rather be on a VPN when on a public wi-fi network. But I’m not really worried about someone sniffing my encrypted HTTPS traffic (which is pretty much everything nowadays; Firefox by default won’t even load unencrypted web sites).

Some VPNs allow multi-hopping, similar to Tor. I couldn’t give you an exhaustive list but most popular ones support this. Mullvad and Proton do, for example. There are also strategies to add noise into VPN traffic.

This is not a silver bullet, of course. Tor has similar problems as you describe if an adversary has visibility into enough nodes. As always, this comes down to your threat model.

On the one hand, I find the advertising of VPNs outright dishonest. On the other hand, I would trust any reputable VPN provider much more than I trust my ISP or cell carrier.

Is this legit? This is the first time I’ve heard of human neurons used for such a purpose. Kind of surprised that’s legal. Instinctively, I feel like a “human brain organoid” is close enough to a human that you cannot wave away the potential for consciousness so easily. At what point does something like this deserve human rights?

I notice that the paper is published in Frontiers, the same journal that let the notorious AI-generated giant-rat-testicles image get published. They are not highly regarded in general.