It’s technically possible, if the drives were binned. Not likely, but possible.

Binning is a process where manufacturers take large drives and artificially reduce their size. Let’s say a company makes 1TB drives, but their manufacturing process only reliably works for 2/10 drives. They test each drive, and 8 have a bad sector. Rather than just throwing those drives out, they disable that bad sector. Now you have two 1TB drives, and eight drives that are a lower capacity. Maybe they test the remaining sectors, and another 2 test fine. So now they have two 1TB drives, two 512GB drives, and six lower capacity. They disable another sector on the remaining 6, and try again. They have three test good, and the rest test fine after disabling another sector.

So by trying to manufacture ten 1TB drives, they actually got two 1TB, two 512GB, three 256GB, and three 128GB drives. They’ll sell the 128GB drives at (or even slightly below) cost, just to recoup some of their expenses. They simply don’t want to write them off as a total loss. The 256GB drives get sold slightly above cost, to make a slight profit. The 512GB’s have more markup,!and the 1TB drives will have a high amount of markup to cover future R&D costs. So the 1TB drives are more expensive, not only because the company wants to cover future R&D, but also because they can’t be made reliably.

But then tech improves, and 1TB drives become easier to make. Reliability improves. Now the company is able to reliably make 9/10 functioning drives, and only 1/10 have a bad sector. But this introduces a new problem for the company… Their market research has found that 512GB drives sell the best, while 1TB drives tend to sit on shelves for a while. So if they just ship 9/10 drives as 1TB, the company will actually lose money as stores end up overstocked.

Instead, they bin the drives according to what will sell the best. They know 512GB’s sell the best, so they take 6 of those perfectly functional 1TB drives, and disable a sector to turn them into 512’s instead. Now they’re selling three 1TB drives, and seven (six of the functional 1TB drives, plus the one from earlier that had a bad sector) 512GB drives. To be clear, those six drives would be perfectly functional as 1TB drives, but they have been artificially limited by the manufacturer to boost sales.

So maybe a generic company buys those 512’s, re-enables the disabled sectors, and resells them as 1TB. It’s a gamble, because 1 of those drives for sure has a bad sector and will fail as soon as the user crosses past the 512GB mark. But the scammer doesn’t care about that, because they’re still making a profit on the remaining six. That’s likely what is happening here, with the seller buying binned drives and re-enabling disabled sectors. But the issue is that the 4TB drives are still likely difficult to make. They’re still in that 2/10 range, not the 9/10 range. So there’s a very good chance that all of the drives will fail before the 4TB mark. It’s not 100% certain… It’s possible you get extremely lucky and actually get a good drive that was artificially binned for sales. But the chances are much much better that you just bought a drive that will fail at 2TB, or 1TB, or even 512GB.

Stealth camping is a real thing, where people try to scout spots to stay overnight without getting caught.

But unless it’s coming from a specific part of France, it’s just sparkling homelessness. It’s really just a bunch of rich dudes who like to cosplay as homeless.

I used to be of the “just sleep on the ground, it feels fine” mindset. Then I turned 30. My back doesn’t like sleeping on the hard ground anymore, but a cot is perfectly comfortable.

If you’re in a hammock, a tarp overhead (and maybe a bug net around the hammock) is often all you need. You’re off the ground, so you don’t need to worry about water runoff. And sleeping in the open means there’s always a breeze to keep you cool, even on a warm rainy night. All the tarp does is keep the wet from hitting you in the face, and gravity keeps it off of everywhere else.

Why not hang your pack to keep it off the ground? I’m assuming you have the ability to do so, since you’re already setting up a hanging hammock. Paracord is cheap and easy to stow in your pack, and you can just tie it around a rock to toss over a tree branch.

Yeah, I have a wonderful time camping, but it’s because I’m experienced enough to know what to pack. If it’s cold, a small cot (to get you off of the cold hard ground) and foam sleeping pad (to insulate your underside) will do wonders. Or if it’s hot, just string a bug net over a hammock, and you’ll sleep cool and breezy.

Also, don’t underestimate the value of a good solid meal. Some of my best meals have been made in the middle of fucking nowhere, with nothing but a Dutch oven, my pocket knife, and a campfire. It’s hard to feel upset about camping when you’re noshing on the best bowl of soup you’ve ever had.

You got “cynical tween” and “misread Nietzsche” from a four word joke about Arch users? Okay, sure buddy…

Lots of instances defederated because of the tendency to brigade. Since Hexbear was already a fairly large instance before federating, it meant it tended to dominate a lot of conversations on other instances. People have similar complaints about .world these days too. But fairly early in the first Reddit exodus, there were a few cases of Hexbear brigading smaller instances, and the Hexbear mods/admins clearly didn’t have any interest in stopping it. So not all of the defederation is purely politically based. Politics may have helped swing the decision, but it certainly wasn’t the only reason.

Hexbear is an interesting beast. It tends to be really insular because it is defederated by a lot of the bigger instances. But it does have a strong sense of community, and a lot of its own in-jokes. From the outside looking in, it often looks like a dumpster fire. But the reality is that it’s more like old 4chan, where it always looks like a dumpster fire on the surface… Then when you dig deeper and start understanding some of the memes, you realize it’s actually a really interesting community ^{surrounded by a dumpster fire}

Found the Arch user.

Skip 1, play 2. The second game opens with the main character having amnesia, so basically everything important from the first game is explained to you. The first game is rough by modern standards, and will almost certainly put you off of playing the rest of the series.

2 is starting to show its age, for what it’s worth. It’s still a great game, but go into it with tempered expectations; It’s missing a lot of the quality of life things you have probably come to expect. Though you can also mod the game, so that may be worth looking into if you enjoy modding.

3 is a great game, but get through the intro area before you actually judge it. The tutorial is a massive slog. The game picks up around the time you reach the Bloody Baron, so at least get to that point before you write it off as boring. The DLC is 100% worth playing. Play the Hearts of Stone DLC before finishing the main story, then the Blood and Wine story after beating the game. And again, there are a few mods that I would install, like an auto-loot mod. The “apply oils when you draw your sword” mod used to be necessary too, but the devs actually ended up adding that into the base game.

The first game is rough by modern standards. Most people (even the most diehard fans) will tell you to just skip it. The second is worth playing, but with the mindset of “this game was made in the 2000’s”. Because it is definitely showing its age too.

For the third one, just know that the intro is a slog. Get to the Bloody Baron before you write it off, because that’s when the game actually starts to get interesting.

Technically there could be. After all, the GM has final say. But players will want to search for a reason, because they expect consistency. Spells don’t typically fail without reason. That reason can be a low die roll if the spell description calls for it, but many spells (like Prestidigitation) don’t require a roll.

So having the spell fail “because the plot says no” is inconsistent. It would immediately throw up a giant red flag in the players’ minds, and make them think the item is much more important than they initially realized. After all, if the plot says the spell doesn’t work, then that means something in the world is preventing it from working.

It makes more sense to have the item be cursed, or haunted, or protected by a god, or any other number of things that would give the players some sort of explanation to latch onto. If you keep it vague, the players will inevitably spend a lot of time trying to figure out why it can’t be cleaned. Because they expect consistency, and will keep throwing things at it until they find a reason. So it’s better to just give them a reason (even if you just came up with it in a panic) because that at least gives them some resolution, and they can file it away in their quest list for later.

But the point is that it’s not truly an expiration date. In most cases, the food is perfectly safe to eat after the date. It may taste stale, but it’s still safe. Many people treat expiration dates as a food safety thing, when it is not.

They’re not a myth; they’re a scam. They’re set by the brands, by determining when the food is the “freshest”. But that determination is made entirely by the brand, and they have a direct financial incentive to encourage food waste. Because if consumers throw more food away, they buy more food. So they set the expiration dates extremely short, so people will throw food away, well before it actually goes bad.

It’s the best app for Lemmy, honestly. It feels like a spiritual successor to Apollo, which was a successor to AlienBlue. There are certain gripes I have about it, but those are small nitpicks that I rarely encounter, and would be true for virtually any Lemmy app.

I actually recommend against dual booting, because Windows is not a friendly neighbor. It has a bad habit of fucking with boot loaders and insisting that it be the first priority every time it updates.

And here’s a reminder to go seed the Anna’s Archive backups, if you have the space for it. Even if you aren’t able to seed the entire thing, you can always grab one or two parts of the torrent and seed just those. Just grab whichever parts have the lowest availability rating.

That’s the biggest reason I use Plex. I bought my lifetime pass over a decade ago, because the cost at the time was only slightly higher than an annual subscription. But luckily, you can run Jellyfin right alongside Plex, so it’s not an either/or situation, and I have Jellyfin ready to go in case Plex makes (more) anti-user moves.