This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption.
Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.
So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
Don't take my word, here's Matt Ahrens, a, ZFS developer. It's not required but a good idea.
"There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.
I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."
Hanlon's Razor is such an overused meme/trope that it's become meaningless.
It's a fallacy to assume that malice is never a form of stupidity/folly. An evil person fails to understand what is truly good because of some kind of folly, e.g. refusing to internally acknowledge the evil consequences of evil actions. There is no clean evil-vs-stupid dichotomy. E.g. is a drunk driver who kill someone with drunk driving stupid or evil? The dangers of drunk driving are well-known, so what about both?
Additionally, we are talking about a system/organization, not a person with a unified will/agenda. There could indeed be an evil person in an organization that wants the organization to do stupid things (not backup properly) in order to be able to hide his misdeeds.
Hanlon's Razor appears to be a maxim of assuming good-faith;
"They didn't mean to be cause this, they are just inept."
To me, it has no justification. People see malice easily, granted, but others feign ignorance all the time too.
I think a better principle is: Proven and documented testing for competence, making it clear what a persons duties and (liable) responsibilities are, then thereafter treating incompetence and malice the same. Also: any action need to be audited by a second entity who shares blame (to a measured and pre-decided degree) when they fail to do so.
It's fair that Meta does not have to pay the legacy big media racket the protection fee, but unfortunately this hurts the players that were not asking for the protection fee in the first place. Maybe small players will hurt from the reduced exposure, to the advantage of the big players.
Maybe they can develop their own high-tech fabrication technology to catch up, but I wonder how they will manage and accelerate the progress.
The West has IP laws to incentivise R&D by the free market. In China, IP law enforcement is hit-and-miss. Small entities risk having their research getting used by others for free so it would be up to big entities that are well-connected to the centers of power to do the R&D. Research done by a few big entities in a centralized manner may not foster much innovation.
So maybe it boils down to how well they can spy or poach talent or knowledgeable people from Western companies, or maybe reverse-engineer Western products.
> This is less and less the case. IP protection in China has been improving for years.
Not only are there persistent allegations of state-organized economic espionage and theft of intellectual property in violation of international trade agreements, it is not just limited to business. Academia and government also.
Chinese firms have been able to spend more on production, undercutting competitors, by skipping costly R&D because of IP theft.
These anomalous statistics give us a small and partial peek into how much China claims to be spending on R&D vs. actual. There could be multiple interpretations of the anomalous R&D statistics, but it would be consistent with the allegations that China's explicit strategy is to steal IP to bolster local companies so that they can compete on the global scale.
But there is no database keeping score reliably on all the nefarious actions. If a lot of companies already behave this way, then the behavior becomes normalized. None of these companies get ostracized. At worse, they just make a better offer to future candidates to attract them. In the current capitalism, everything has a price, even honor.
because in peering agreements it is convention to only charge for only ingress or egress, whichever one is bigger. Most AWS servers use more egress bandwidth than ingress bandwidth so AWS only charges for egress.
That's a rather strong assumption about other state actors, in terms of their current progress, future progress and their ability to attract researchers who get frustrated by the pause.
After the 6-month pause is over, then what? Another 6 months? What is to be hoped to be achieved in those initial 6 months other than non-participating entities getting a leg up? If there is no guarantee that the 6-month pause will not become one year or a few years, then maybe some researchers will move to non-participating organizations/states in anticipation of an extended pause.
I’d also point out that just the discussion about governments regulating LLM research is likely triggering many to start making contingency plans already. Make sure we have the datasets. make sure we have all the code and research papers.
Even on the individual level as for me the discussion of such ideas has me thinking individually if I should take any defensive steps or not.
