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The readme explains how to set this up, but it doesn’t really explain what it does. What does this do? I’m guessing it pretends to be a flash drive containing infinite books and then somehow fetches them on the fly from the Internet when the operating system attempts to access them?

There's an associated video on youtube somewhere, but no it doesn't do that. you're close, though.

if you drill down into the right folders, it contains every possible text file up to a certain size. He uses a weird 70 character encoding scheme in order to optimize folder depth and width (he didn't want more than 5k objects in any folder) and to stay within maximum path length limitations.

it generates the text files on demand based on the path you're following and in each folder (along with other folders) is the text file represented by that path so far.


Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6rkhvdAqHU - This Flash Drive has Literally Every File

The contents of the file are based on the path used to access it, correct. It uses MTP rather than emulating a normal flash drive though, which makes this kind of project much easier.

They also suggest that you can do other things using the same technique, like hiding a folder unless you know its exact name, only showing files if you navigate to certain other folders first, or because the esp32 stick being used contains a screen it could run a copy of doom controlled by navigating through folders.


So in theory you could have War and Peace somewhere.

Each folder represents the file content so far. So how to find a specific file without knowing its contents - by its title for example?


plain .txt files don't have titles, so these files don't have titles, either. unless it's in the text of the file.

you get to any file by following the filesystem path whose bytes match the content you are looking for. There's no searching for the content you want.

if you're crawling the filesystem it will probably take you until the heat death of the universe to complete that crawl.


So you get a file. Any file. Not necessarily the file you want, unless you already know its contents and how to traverse the folder hierarchy to get to that specific point.

Yes. Have you read The Library of Babel? This is sort of the whole point.

Yeah this seems like an obvious thing that would make it a lot more useful. Sad that Apple is barely scratching the surface of what’s possible, and it’s too closed for third-party developers to attempt to do anything like that.


I’m surprised the search function in the start menu doesn’t do anything. Seems like that would be super useful. But I did enjoy this, nice job with the polish.


Sorry for being off topic, but why can’t I open this without being logged into GitHub? I thought gists are either completely private or publicly accessible. Are they no longer publicly accessible?


In case anyone’s wondering, I tried it again and it worked this time, even without logging in. Maybe because this was my first visit to GitHub in a new country (I’m currently on vacation), I triggered some sort of anti-scraping measure or something.


Is that better or worse?


Depends.

MLX is faster because it has better integration with Apple hardware. On the other hand GGUF is a far more popular format so there will be more programs and model variety.

So its kinda like having a very specific diet that you swear is better for you but you can only order food from a few restaurants.


But you can always fall back to GGUF while waiting for the world to build a few more MLX restaurants. Or something like that; the analogy is a bit stretched.


Yeah I'm terrible with analogies.


Presumably professional hardware uses ECC memory, which automatically corrects these kinds of errors.


I’ve been plenty of graveyards where the old gravestones are completely unreadable. Did they use different/worse stone in the past or is this the most likely outcome of new gravestones after a couple hundred years? Several people have mentioned engraving into stone in this discussion but in this one example I can think of engraved stone, it doesn’t leave me feeling confident about the medium. What am I missing?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary%27s_Church,_Whitby

There are many headstones here that are completely destroyed by salty sea spray. Erosion of rock is something that is often told as a million-year process but it is very visible within your lifetime depending on the conditions


What city requires you to register your pet and get a license? I’ve never heard of that before. Sounds kind of crazy. I’m assuming this is very regional.


At least in the US, all states have some or the other ordinances and regulations around pets. Not only are you required to register your pets, but there’s limits to what you can keep as a pet and how many. Otherwise it’s not hard to see at least one person in the neighborhood hoarding 20 dogs.


Ok. Where can I get a licence for my fish, Eric ?



Out of interest, why does it sound kind of crazy?

Here, pets have always had to be identifiable: historically with a collar, but microchips have been required for some years now as a more effective method.

(That applies nationally, not some city thing)


All 50 states have dog licensing in some form, but it seems that it's more a case of the state allowing municipalities to do so or not. Some states also require veterinarians to report unlicensed dogs. Larger cities almost certainly require it (NYC and Chicago definitely do).

https://www.rover.com/blog/dog-license/

Usually it's an animal welfare and control thing: you pay a lot more if you don't spay/neuter, rabies vaccination is required, etc.. Otherwise it's too easy for a city to be overrun by strays.

Also, if your pet gets lost and ends up being picked up by animal control, it's considered a stray if it's not registered.


If I remember correctly, EU will make chip tracking for pets mandatory by 2030 to unify laws that are currently made by individual states. France had this mandatory for over a decade.

If you want to travel within EU with your pet, you'll need a certificate for that as well.

No idea about how it is is the US but that doesn't sound crazy to register pets as they are at risk of being lost, abandonned, lacking vaccination or vets visits.


You know, I regularly lose or forget my baseball caps (at least once per Summer, and usually I go through 2 or 3). I wish there was a nationally-mandated register of headwear, with obligatory chipping at the points of sale. Not even entirely joking.

On a more serious note, it's interesting to note that some property never gets any ownership marks on it, some gets it customarily but only out of convenience, there is no legal obligation to do so, and for some property it is legally-mandated by the state but owners largely find it cumbersome.


For maybe 100 years, we’ve lived in an era of diminished hat importance. I, for one, don’t want to be caught hatless around any sharp-tongued re-enactors.


I’ve seen gift cards work around this by charging a “monthly maintenance fee” after a year of inactivity.


I had the exact same thing happen to me at a hotel in China. I could not get the person at the checkin desk to understand the problem so I ended up having to just eat the extra cost. Very frustrating, it was not a small amount of money.


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