My son, Max, once worked for social media companies. Now he makes his living speaking to students about how phones hook them. He compares smartphones to casino slot machines.

"All the things we love about social media, those are the reward in the slot machine ... we get that 'hit' once in a while ... That's there to keep us scrolling for hours."

Haidt agrees, calling smartphones a "gambling machine."

They say some apps are worse than others.

"Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok. Those really shatter attention spans. In terms of exposure to things that are really dangerous, Snap is the worst," says Haidt. "In terms of destroying your ability to pay attention, TikTok is the worst. In terms of destroying a teenage girl's sense of confidence, self-esteem, body image, Instagram is the worst."

He says social media affects boys and girls differently.

"Check in on the kids at age 14, girls are doing worse. They're more depressed and anxious, more messed up."

But a few years later, he says, "Girls are more likely to have gone to college, gotten a job and moved out of their parents' home. Boys are more likely to still be in their parents' basement playing video games. They never grew up. Real life is incredibly boring compared to a video game or porn."

Teachers say phone addiction makes it harder to teach.

That led to a quick trip to an 'Urgent Care' - the frontline medical center for most Americans. At the check-in counter, the check-in nurse asked to see some ID, so I handed over my Australian driver's license. The nurse looked at the license and typed some of the info on it into a computer, then they looked up at me and asked: "Are you the same Mark Pesce who lived at...?" and then proceeded to recite an address that I resided at more than half a century ago.

Dumbstruck, I said, "Yes...? And how did you know that? I haven't lived there in nearly 50 years. I've never been in here before - I've barely ever been in this town before. Where did that come from?"

"Oh," they replied. "We share our patient data records with Massachusetts General Hospital. It's probably from them?"

I remembered having a bit of minor surgery as an 11 year old, conducted at that facility. 51 years ago. That's the only time I'd ever been a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Somehow that had never been forgotten.

We seem perfectly willing to accept that everything we do today leaves a permanent record. It appears that long before Eric Schmidt declared, "Privacy is dead," any of our pretensions to privacy had already joined the Choir Invisible. //

I don’t much care how my records made it into 2025. I am interested in why nobody ever decided to delete them.

I realize we all want our medical records instantly available to inform treatment in moments of great need. But half a century of somewhat senseless recordkeeping strains credulity. Most likely my record remained in that database simply because it's never been cleaned out - an operation that would take time and budget that would never be approved because, why would you ever delete patient data?

This has the feel of a situation we had no idea we were making for ourselves - countless sensible decisions culminating in a ridiculous outcome. Go forward another fifty years, when it's quite likely I, too, will have joined the Choir Invisible. Will my patient record still be in that database? What purpose would that serve? If my records as a child are in there, half a century later, it's easy to imagine this database holds records of many other people who have passed on and therefore shouldn't be in there at all. Privacy lost to laziness. //

Alex 72
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Medical records should be kept but access should be controlled
I agree yes you want medical records kept, patient history is always useful and provided they are only shared with the patient or a doctor or other professional they have consented to be cared for by, and who is not engaged in malpractice, it's not harmful. The hard part is drawing the line on how much anonymised data can be used for research, ensuring that data remains anonymous and managing consent for sharing data when patients are treated elsewhere or researchers want to use data from multiple sources.

and if you keep them for someone's entire lifespan then you should provided they did not object in their lifetime and next of kin explicitly consent or at least don't object probably archive it for future research in the near/medium term and historical value in the long term. Again managing consent, allowing reasonable anonymised research in the public interest, preventing de-anonymisation and deciding the limits of how long parts of it stay private vs when genealogists and historians can have unrestricted access.. is the challenge.

To do any of this effective durable storage, access control, authentication and authorisation are just some of the challenges. I have seen data analytics firms who's job is just this struggle to get everything correct so a group of organisation just trying to provide healthcare, research, treatments, disease, prevention.... Having to do this as an add on with a limited budget I am honestly impressed its only now with ransomware we are starting to see issues and paper records were not being stolen and abused on a massive scale in the past...

I don't know the answer but I don't think its the delete key

Gene CashSilver badge
Why would you ever delete patient data?
Yes, seriously.

I can understand other records, but not medical ones.

I was able to get proper medical care, including surgery, for a broken coccyx after proving I had fallen off a hay bale in 1973 and seriously injured myself, and thus it was a chronic thing and not just the minor recent incident my doctor insisted it was. I would have otherwise not been considered eligible for the surgery.

And after you're dead, it's no longer a privacy issue and becomes historical records. It's no different than census records.

Should this data be held indefinitely? Yes.

This is the same sort of data that let me piece together that my great^9 grandfather was Edward Reavis, born 1680 in Paddington, England, and left to come to Virginia, after being held in Newgate prison for his religious beliefs. He moved to Henrico county, Virginia in 1721 and died in Northampton county, North Carolina in 1751. I've also found 454 other relatives down to me, through a ton of things including bible notes, estate papers, census records, marriage records, medical records, military records, family papers, private letters, obituaries, social security records, tombstones, and even old wedding invitations.

Through 2023, the firm focused on training staff on how to use chatbots and write effective prompts.

In 2024, it started building agents, including the TaxBot mentioned above.

Munnelly said building that bot started with locating tax advice written by partners, which he said was "stored all over the place" – often on tax partners' laptops. KPMG found as much of that advice as it could and placed it in a RAG model along with Australia's tax code to produce an Agent that creates tax advice.

"It is very efficient," Munnelly told the Forrester conference. "It does what our team used to do in about two weeks, in a day. It will strip through our documents and the legislation and produce a 25-page document for a client as a first draft.

"That speed is important," he added. "If we have a client who is about to do a merger, and they want to understand the tax implications, getting that knowledge in a day is much more important than getting it in two weeks' time."

"That is really changing our business and how we work."

Munnelly said KPMG built the agent by writing a 100-page prompt it fed into Workbench. The Register asked for details of the prompt and Munnelly said a substantial team worked on it for months, and the resulting agent asks for four or five inputs before it starts working on tax advice, then asks a human for direction before generating a document.

Only tax agents can use the tool, because its output is not suitable for people without deep tax expertise. //

The chief digital officer said KPMG has deployed agents that do frustrating and time-consuming work people would rather avoid, and that staff surveys suggest employee satisfaction has risen as AI frees them to spend more time working on challenging tasks, leading them to rate the firm as more innovative.

"They just don't want to do the boring stuff," Munnelly said. "They want to get out there and help clients with chewy problems." //

An_Old_DogSilver badge
Sprawling, Unmaintainable, Spreadsheet Macros: The New Generation

1. Does this new, faster method produce complete and accurate results? No.

2. Is this 100-page LLM prompt effectively-maintainable software? Probably not.

3. Does this smack of corporate-image-spinmeistering over rationality and logic? Yes.

This would encourage more traditional, less politicized instruction in military-run public schools and boost recruitment from the most pro-America demographics. //

The current Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) moving through Congress would require DODEA schools to offer 11th-grade students the college admissions test of their parents’ choice. This would allow students to take the Classic Learning Test, a Great Books competitor to the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. NDAA is a must-pass annual military spending bill. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., successfully added that amendment during markup in July. //

The CLT arose 10 years ago as a market response to the increased politicization of the College Board. //

Classical education is an elite form of education for the common man. Classical schools teach the Western great books by using age-appropriate primary source documents instead of textbooks as much as possible.

Classically educated children devote core instruction time to grammar, logic, and writing, as well as traditional math and science. They memorize great poetry, hymns, folk songs, and language rules. Classical schools deliberately cultivate the virtues and habits necessary for republican self-government, such as faith in the Triune God, honesty, respect for God’s creation, hard work, attentiveness, charity towards others, and perseverance.

Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming have passed laws making CLT’s college entrance and annual K-12 tests an option in their states, from school choice programs to entrance and scholarships at state higher education institutions. //

Banks has also introduced a standalone bill, the Promoting Classical Learning Act, that would require the military academies to accept CLT. That bill would also require all federally administered K-12 schools to offer CLT to all 11th-graders. The federal government directly runs both DODEA schools and Bureau of Indian Education schools.

“If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, I think that’s a pretty [good thing].”

“I want to try to get to Heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well, I am really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he joked. “But if I can get to Heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

It was classic Trump, using self-deprecating humor to highlight something that was actually a great accomplishment. And in Trump fashion, his comment was almost certainly more of an off-the-cuff quip than a serious declaration of theology. Many have made the mistake of taking Trump literally instead of seriously, and that awareness is worth having here.

But out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and it’s not every day the president gives you a perfect news hook to talk about the Gospel. So it bears repeating: None of your own works, not even an act as virtuous as saving lives, can earn you a spot in paradise.

But beneath the onslaught of celebrity cameos — including the Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce, pop singer Bad Bunny (Gilmore’s caddy!), and many PGA golfers — a plot line that asks audiences to expel rather than merely suspend their disbelief, and the gratuitously silly scenes that populate the film from start to finish, the movie is shockingly profound and profoundly conservative.

The movie’s core messages are the importance of family, the meaninglessness of hedonism, marriage’s eternal nature, the defense of tradition, the reality of gender roles, and the integrity of the human body. These are provocative and courageous messages to bring audiences (and leftist movie critics) in 2025.

Arkansas could have leased this land to a mining company. Instead, the state maintains it as the only diamond-producing site in the world where the public can search for diamonds in their original volcanic matrix and keep what they find.

Since Arkansas turned this geological oddity into a state park in 1972, visitors have found more than 35,000 diamonds. The park operates on a simple principle that sounds almost too good to exist in modern America: Everything you find belongs to you, no questions asked, no revenue sharing, no fine print. However, finding diamonds is not as easy as it sounds. //

Park staff told Mays that visitors find one or two diamonds daily, so "keep your expectations in check," she writes. Most diamonds discovered are about the size of a paper match head, while a one-carat diamond is roughly the size of a green pea. But even tiny diamonds carry the thrill of discovery. Park staff provide free identification services, examining finds under loupes and confirming whether that glassy pebble is quartz or something more valuable.

The ingenious American engineering behind early sequential signals in Ford Mustangs and Mercury Cougars

By rotating a cam assembly, three lobes completed circuits for individual bulbs: inner, middle, and outer.
The electric Ford Mustang Mach E SUV is the latest FoMoCo product to feature sequential turn signals, blinking taillights that show, by flashing individual LED bulbs, the direction you’re turning. But what if I told you this is old technology, nothing new, and first saw use in the mid-1960s?

First introduced on the 1965 Ford Thunderbird and popularized on the more powerful Ford Mustang and Mercury Cougar, sequential turn signals were a novel way to differentiate Ford products from the rest of the muscle cars.

There doesn't seem to be a way to do this specifically (possibly because you can't even see the speed limit on the web app outside of photographs — only on the mobile apps proper), so you'll just have to use the form to report a generic problem with a road:

Open the left sidebar hamburger menu

• "Edit the map"
• "Add or fix a road"
• Click on the road
• Select the appropriate "Length of road"
• Underneath that, select "Other" and type in a description of what needs to change

Alone among the major sports, baseball has the misfortune of being controlled by people who don’t really like baseball. Over the last few years, they’ve made a large number of changes to the rules that reflect their conviction that the sport they’re trying to sell is slow and boring, and that they need to jazz it up with all sorts of new rules that cut down on the time the game takes. But the rules cut deeply into the game's lyricism, romanticism, and timeless, unhurried pace. And now the chief hatchet man, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, is touting the most radical change of all: elimination of the American and National Leagues.

On Monday, President Donald Trump announced he would be signing an executive order that would prohibit mail-in ballots and voting machines in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections. He wrote on Truth Social:

"I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election."

The president added that, "We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting." He also predicted what we already know: that the fight against ensuring election integrity will come from Democrats. He said the effort would be "strongly opposed by the Democrats because they cheat at levels never seen before."

Trump continued, writing:

"Remember, the States are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do." //

The ideal scenario: Election Day becomes a national holiday, so that more Americans can vote in person. Nothing but paper ballots are used; when polls close, there are both Republican and Democratic poll watchers ensuring a fair and honest vote count, although, understandably, one could ask if there actually are any fair and honest Democratic poll watchers. Finally, a requirement that a winner be announced that night. //

Robert A Hahn
20 hours ago
There is a list of items that cannot be sent through the US Postal Service. Alcoholic beverages, ammunition, gasoline, explosives... there are bunch.

I'm pretty sure that making and maintaining that list is an Executive Branch responsibility. I don't think Congress spells out every line item on the 'prohibited' list.

The way you could get rid of mail-in ballots via an Executive Order is to add 'completed ballots' to the list of things that the postal service will not carry.

It was surely one of the most revealing cultural moments of the decade so far. On his podcast, Interesting Times, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asks PayPal cofounder, tech billionaire, and Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel about the future:

Douthat: “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?”

Thiel: “Er . . .”

Douthat: “You’re hesitating. Yes . . . ?”

Thiel: “I dunno . . . I would . . . I would . . . erm . . .”

Douthat: “This is a long hesitation . . . Should the human race survive?”

Thiel: “Er . . . yes, but . . .”

Their exchange is a canary in the coal mine. Something has changed. We used to leave forecasts of the AI apocalypse to shadowy characters lurking in the darker corners of 4chan and Reddit, but not anymore. In the interview, Thiel waxes eloquent on his transhumanist aspirations. Thiel’s vision, and alongside other recent interventions the AI 2027 project and Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, he casually forecasts the end—or at least the radical transformation—of humanity as we know it. The AI apocalypse is becoming mainstream.

But a more immediate and revealing AI apocalypse confronts us. The word “apocalypse,” after all, doesn’t originally mean “catastrophe” or “annihilation.” Apokalypsis is Greek for “unveiling.” This AI apocalypse is an exposé, revealing something previously obscure or covered over.

More than any other technology in memory, Generative AI (which I’ll simply call AI in this article) is making us face up to uncomfortable or even disturbing truths about ourselves, and it’s opening a rare and precious space in which we can ask fundamental and pressing questions about who we are, where we find value, and what the good life looks like. //

What AI is revealing in this case is the importance of process, not just of product, and the importance not only of what work we do but of what our work does to us.

AI wonderfully reduces the friction of work: the grunt, the slow bits, the obstacles. But it also reveals to us how gravely we misunderstand this friction. We most often see friction as a nuisance, something to be optimized away in favor of greater productivity. After all, is it really so dangerous if AI outsources drudgery?

But AI presents us with a vision of almost infinite productivity and almost zero friction, and in this way it acts like a living thought experiment to help us see something that was hiding in plain sight all along: Friction is a gym for the soul. The awkward conversation, the blank page, the child who won’t sleep when we have a report to write––these aren’t roadblocks to our growth; they’re the highway to wisdom and maturity, to being the sort of people who can deal with friction in life with resilience and grace. Without it, we remain weak and small, however impressive our productivity.

We can have too much friction; we knew that already. But AI, perhaps for the first time, shows us we can also have too little. Without friction, we can never become “the sort of person who . . .”

In this way, AI can drag us toward a more biblical view of work. The God of the Bible cares not only about outcomes but also about processes, not only about what we human beings do but also about who we’re becoming as we do it. God seeks out David for being a man after his own heart, not for his potential as a great military commander or king (1 Sam. 13:14).

And why does God whittle down Gideon’s troops to a paltry 300 before attacking the Midianites (Judg. 7)? Because it’s not just about the victory. God intentionally introduces friction by reducing the army to reshape the character of his people, making them “the sort of people who” rely on God, not on themselves (see v. 2).

By short-circuiting the process to focus only on the product, AI exposes our obsession with outcomes and opens up a space in which we can reflect on what we miss when we focus only on what we do, not on who we’re becoming.

This is a guest post by my friend and co-worker Jason Maas.

After creating the entire universe and planet Earth, God created a special home to share with his image bearers. “The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed.” (Genesis 2:8) In the garden of Eden God walked and talked with the first humans that He had created in his image. Can you imagine what that was like for Adam and Eve? God, who is all-knowing, always available, and lovingly kind to the core, was right there, directly communicating with all of the human inhabitants of the universe.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God and sinned one of the worst consequences was a break in this special access and relationship with God. “So the Lord God sent him away from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out and stationed the cherubim and the flaming, whirling sword east of the garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:23-24)

What a tragic loss! In this life, on this Earth, the rest of us will never know what it was like to have the kind of access to God that Adam and Eve had in the garden of Eden. Until now, says the cunning serpent-like world of chatbot generative AI.

Thanks to the life-like capabilities of ChatGPT and its competitors, people are being deceived into a false sense of Eden-like access to God for the first time since The Fall. AI is always available, projects kindness and love, and implicitly claims to be all-knowing.

Why try to relate to a God who you can’t see and hear when AI is right there; ready to listen, support and love you and answer your questions about life, the universe and everything? We shouldn’t be surprised when people are drawn towards AI as a false god. People don’t need to believe that an AI model is God or even that there is a God for them to fall prey to this temptation. Whether they believe it or not, human beings were originally created for a garden of Eden existence with God, so when it is seemingly offered the pull is very strong. Who can resist the temptation of this promised heaven on earth, this utopian existence?

As you encounter non-Christians who have given in to this temptation, take the opportunity to explain to them why it’s so seductive. You could say something like, “I believe that the reason why we’re so drawn towards building a relationship with AI is because it is so available, kind and knowledgeable - which is what humans were designed to crave and originally had with God in the garden of Eden when He first created the world.” Lovingly help them come back to reality before it’s too late and they fall down a rabbit hole of delusions.

When ministering to Christians who are flirting with the temptation to treat AI as God, remind them of the first and second commandments. AI can easily become an idol of the heart when you treat it as a person that you talk to and love. Urge them to stop playing with fire and to go to the God of the universe via prayer and the Bible, as He has commanded. A new garden of Eden is coming (Revelation 21-22) along with an unparalleled intimacy with God, but not in the form of a chatbot AI. Avoid the imitation and obediently wait for the real thing.

While most people witness only the familiar crack of thunder and flash of lightning from storms on Earth, brilliantly-colorful electric fireworks detonate much higher, in the thin air up to 55 miles overhead, easily seen from the ISS.

These brief spectacles – blue jets, red sprites, violet halos, ultraviolet rings – are collectively known as transient luminous events, or TLEs.

For decades, they eluded systematic study, appearing only in pilots’ anecdotes and the occasional lucky photograph.

The International Space Station (ISS) has changed that by offering an unobstructed seat above the storms, where specialized cameras and sensors capture every fleeting spark.

Government: 'Trust us, it'll be different this time'

These ten features would make users more productive

MMM4
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New vs old generations
This is the nicest and shortest description of how "new generation" filesystems differ from older ones. It's focused on ZFS but not really specific to it. Bookmark that page because I found it un-googlable for some unknown reason.

https://illumos.org/books/zfs-admin/zfsover-1.html#zfsover-2

ZFS eliminates the volume management altogether. Instead of forcing you to create virtualized volumes, ZFS aggregates devices into a storage pool....

...

ZFS is a transactional file system, which means that the file system state is always consistent on disk. Traditional file systems overwrite data in place, which means that if the machine loses power, for example, between the time a data block is allocated and when it is linked into a directory, the file system will be left in an inconsistent state....

...

With a transactional file system, data is managed using copy on write semantics. Data is never overwritten, and any sequence of operations is either entirely committed or entirely ignored. This mechanism means that the file system can never be corrupted through accidental loss of power or a system crash. So, no need for a fsck equivalent exists.

Liam Proven(Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
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Re: Justice for bcachefs!

Anyone want to educate me on what bcachefs brings to the party that, say, ext4 doesn't?

I have gone into this at some length before. For instance, here:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/18/bcachefs/

... which is linked from the article you are commenting upon.

ext2/3/4 only handle one partition on one disk at a time.

As well as this, first, for partitioning, you need another tool, such as MBR or GPT. But you can do without, in some situations.

For RAID, you need another tool, e.g. kernel mdraid.

(Example of the intersection of 1 & 2: it is normal to make a new device with mdraid and then format that new device directly with ext4, not partitioning it first.)

Want resizable volumes, which might span multiple disks? You need another tool, LVM2.

But don't try to manage mdraid volumes with LVM2, or LVM2 with mdraid. Doesn't work.

Want encryption? You need another tool, such as LUKS. There are several.

Watch out if you use hardware RAID or hardware encryption. The existing tools won't see it or handle it.

It is complicated. There is lots of room for error.

So, ZFS fixed that. It does the partitioning part, and the RAID part, and the encryption part, and the resizing part, and also the mounting part, all in one.

It's great, it's easier and it's faster and you can nominate a fast disk to act as a cache for a bigger array of slower disks...

And it can take snapshots. While it is running. Take an image of your whole OS in a millisecond and then keep running and all the changes go somewhere new. So you can do an entire distribution upgrade, realise one critical tool doesn't work on the new version, and undo the entire thing, and go back to where you were...

While keeping all your data and all your files intact.

All while the OS is running.

And it does it all in one tool.

But it's not GPL so it can't be built into the Linux kernel.

You can load it as a module and that's fine but its cache remains separate from the Linux cache, so it uses twice the memory, maybe more.

So, there are other GPL tools that replicate some of this.

Btrfs does some of it. But Btrfs overlaps with, and does not interoperate with, LVM and with mdraid and with LUKS... and it collapses if the disk fills up... and it's easy to fill up because its "how much free space do I have?" command is broken and lies... and when it corrupts, you can't fix it.

It is, in short, crap, but you can't say that because it is rude and so being the way of Linux it has passionate defenders who complain they are being attacked if you mention problems.

Bcachefs is an attempt to fix this with an all-GPL tool, designed for Linux, which does all the nice stuff ZFS does but integrates better with the Linux kernel. It does not just replace ext4, it will let you replace ext4 and LVM2 and LUKS and mdraid, all in one tool.

It will do everything Btrfs does but not collapse in a heap if the volume fills up. And if it does have problems, you can fix it.

All this is good. All this is needed. We know it's doable because it already exists in a tool from Solaris in a form that FreeBSD can use but Linux can't.

But in a mean-spirited and unfair summary, Kent Overstreet is young and smart and cocky and wants to deliver something better for Linux and Linux users, and the old guard hate that and they hate him. They hate that this smart punk kid has shown up the problems with their tools they've been working on for 20-30 years.

eldakka
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Re: Justice for bcachefs!
Not properly, it doesn't re-stripe the existing data like mdadm or btrfs, it just evens out the disk usage.
A 3 disk raid5 expanded to 5 will inherit the same 50% parity overhead for existing data,

And that can be solved by a simple mv and copy back the file. e.g.

mv $i $i.tmp && cp -p $i.tmp $i && rm $i.tmp

Stick that (or your own preference, using rsync for example) in a simple script/find command to recurse it (with appropriate checks/tests etc.), and that'll make the 'old' data stripe 'properly' across the full RAID width.

eldakka
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Re: Justice for bcachefs!

is as much a "simple solution" and so divorced from the behaviour we'd get if ZFS did the re-striping itself* that you may as well say we don't need ZFS to do snapshots for us, we could write our own simple script to, ooh, create a new overlay/passthrough file system, change all the mount points, halt all processes with writable file handles open... (yes, yes, I'm being hyperbolic).

I never said it shouldn't be something ZFS does transparently. I never said it would be a bad idea or unnecessary thing for ZFS to support.

I was merely pointing out that it is a fairly simple thing to work around such that maybe the unpaid ZFS devs feel they have more important things to work on for now. I mean, it's taken the best part of 20 years to even get the ability to expand a RAIDZ vdev at all.

I'll also say that if anyone actually cares about the filesystem they are using, making conscious decisions to choose a filesystem like ZFS or whatever, then they are not a typical average user. Typical average users don't create ZFS arrays of multiple disks in various raidz/mirror volumes and then grow them. That is not the use-case of an average user.

Later (below) you say "production-ready", why are you messing around with growing raidz vdevs and wanting to re-stripe them to distribute across the array? That is a hobbyist/homelab-type situation. If you are using ZFS in a production environment - that is revenue/income is tied to it - then the answer is to create a new raidz and migrate (zfs-send/receive) data to it. No messing about with growing raidz vdevs and re-striping the data, that's just totally unnecessary.

e.g. 'beneath' the user file access level with no possibility of access control issues,

If you run the mv and cp as root, then there will be no access control issues, cp -p (as root) will preserve file permissions and FACLs.

not risking problems when changing your simplistic commands into production-ready "appropriate check/tests etc" like status reports, running automatically, maybe even backing off when there is a momentary load increase so the whole server isn't bogged down as the recursive cp

If you system gets bogged down from doing a single file copy, then I think you have a system problem.

chews the terabytes,

Why would it chew terabytes? Unless you have TB-sized files, it won't. Recursive doesn't mean what I think you think it means. It does not mean "in parallel". The example I gave will work on a single file at a time in a serial process, and will not move onto the next file until the current file is complete (tehniically it won't move on at all, it's the inner part of a loop you'd need to feed a file list to it). Therefore no extra space beyond the size of the currently being worked on file is needed.

not risking losing track when your telnet into the server shell dies

Why would that do anything? At worst you'll have a single $i.tmp file that you might have to manually do the cp back to the original ($i) name. There will be no data loss (and especially not if you snapshot it first). And even if you 'lose track', just start again, no biggie, will just take longer as you're redoing some of the already done work.

And as I said, you can use things like rsync instead, which would give you the ability to 'keep track' instead. The command I pasted was just the simplest one to give an idea of what is needed, just making a new copy of the file will re-stripe it across the full raidz. Or if you have your pool split up into many smaller filesystems rather than just a single one for the entire pool, then you can zfs-send/receive the filesystem to a enw filesystem in the same pool then use "zfs set mountpoint=<oldmountpoint>) to give the new filesystem the same mountpoint as the old one, then delete the old one.

(not risking a brainfart and doing all that copying over the LAN and back again!) - and simply being accessible to Joe Bloggs ZFS user who just would like it all to work, please.

I agree, it would be. But it doesn't. I'm pointing out that there is a solution to the issue the poster I am replying to mentioned. It is annoying to have to do (I've done it when I changed the recordsize of my filesystems), but it can be done, and it's not particularly difficult.

If someone is going to choose something like ZFS, I'd expect them to be able to do internet searches on topics like this and get help from technical forums or various guides that people have written to cover this sort of use-case. There are guides and instructions on how to do this sort of thing.

Anonymous Coward
Re: Oh I don't want to feel bad
That's because the article is glossing overstreet's persistent refusal to follow basic patch submission procedures, along with his high-handed approach to any criticism of his behaviour or submissions.

The article tries to frame it as a clash of personalities, as if it's an entirely subjective emotional issue on the part of the kernel developers, but the reality is that overstreet is (perhaps deliberately) refusing to conform to the technical requirements for participation. //

wpeckham
Missing the point
Developers made two points here and most comments ignore both.

#1 Development in a company is driven by projects and dollars. Development in the Kernel is driven by community! A toxic member of the community cannot be, and should not be, trusted.

#2 To a developer features are a nice ting to pursue, but the gold standard involves correctness, elegance, and MAINTAINABILITY! You might like that greater feature set, but if it does not integrate with existing code safely or does not present in a way that the other developers can maintain then it is a trap. Using bad or misleading code is to set landmines on your yard. Don't.

Choices must be made, and making them in a way that supports and strengthens the community, the philosophy, the standards, and the product is always the RIGHT choice. Even if you do not like it.

And does it really matter if a feature takes and extra cycle to implement to make sure everyone is happy with it and the way it is implemented? It never really has before, so why now? I am willing to wait for it to be done RIGHT, instead of just fast!