To my knowledge, encoding avoids runs to avoid desynchronization in a way that isn’t encrypted.

This is line coding, often used on wired connections. But reading a hard drive trace isn't quite a wired connection, so the trade-offs are different.

Most notably with line coding when using positive and negative voltages it is quite important for the average voltage to be zero to avoid building up a charge difference. Whitening can often be used if the downside to an imbalance or long runs is much lower. Notably in RF this is often about avoid harmonics with a little bit of symbol timing advantage thrown in.

Whitening doesn't really require encryption though. Weak cypher streams xored into the data work fine. Even a repeated 256 bit string is quite alright.

Whitening using any non trivial encryption key seems weird to me. AES with a key equal to the current offset in ECB mode already feels over-engineerd.

> Whitening using any non trivial encryption key seems weird to me.

It's because there was an era when drives were expected to be able to do 'hardware' encryption with a user provided key, so reusing that hardware to also do whitening even if the user didn't provide a key was very convenient.

Plus you get all the other benefits - ie. a single scsi command can 'secure erase' the whole disk in milliseconds by simply changing the stored key.

This used to be done, but since ~2000, disks were expected to support on-device encryption, and by making encryption always-on no encoding is needed.

War seems like an unlikely possibility for Switzerland, they are surrounded by the European Union and every nuclear power depends on their free ports to store artworks.

> every nuclear power depends on their free ports to store artworks

Am I misunderstanding this? Why would artwork stop a war? If I’m fighting a war, I would not flinch at destroying eg the Mona Lisa, and I’m fairly certain heads of state wouldn’t either.

Not neutral?

Sorry, I'm genuinely really trying to understand what you're saying here. Can you elaborate a bit? Are you asking if I personally am neutral? Are you meaning to say that your comment should have said "neutral power" instead of "nuclear power"? Are you trying to say something else? I just cannot understand this thread. Do you genuinely believe that art can stop war? how?

Yes, nations go to war against neutral banking nations all the time, but not without withdrawing their artwork first. /s

I could elaborate the entire context of my past comments, but that wouldn’t be communicating, that would be writing a dictionary.

Germany seriously considered invading Switzerland in 1940 and plans were drawn up. Operation Tannenbaum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenbaum

Ports in Switzerland?

Geneva Freeport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport

Big part of Tenet (Nolan movie) plot line

"The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war"

I think AVX is actually power gated when unused.

Polyfills are standard for websites to be compatible with older browsers.

It will all break in time.

These things that look like institutions, that look like bricks carved from granite, are just spinning plates that have been spinning for a few years.

When I fight glibc dependency hell across Ubuntu 22 and Ubuntu 24, I sympathize with Firefox choosing to spin the 64-bit plates and not the 32-bit plates.

Not applicable, though javascript is a programming language not a standard library.

Empiricism in the face of a totalitarian regime is difficult.

I recommend using tor over snowflake relays to connect. It is meant to be censorship proof.