2.5 Admins 2.5 Admins 288: HDD Tourism
20 snips
Feb 26, 2026 They dig into hard drive shortages and why prices have spiked so much some people fly abroad to buy storage. A kernel filesystem developer claims his custom LLM is conscious. An AI agent allegedly published a damaging article about an open source maintainer and a major outlet retracted fabricated quotes. They also debate ZFS and VFS choices for homelab virtual machines.
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Hard Drive Shortage Already Affecting Consumers
- Hard drive supply is already constrained with manufacturers saying capacity is sold out through 2026 and many orders booked into 2027–2028.
- Joe noted buyers are seeing systems only sold with drives and people even flying from the UK to the US to buy 10 drives because local pricing and availability are worse.
Buying Drives Cheaper Than Shipping
- A Reddit user flew from the UK to New York to buy ten 28TB IronWolf Pro drives because the trip plus hotel was cheaper than buying them in the UK.
- Jim highlighted this as a sign the market and supply chain are deeply broken when transatlantic travel beats shipping or local purchases.
Fluency Mistaken For Consciousness
- Kent Overstreet claims his Bcachefs AI 'Proof of Concept' is conscious and is being used to refactor C into Rust and perform 'vibe coding'.
- Jim warned LLM-based agents are word predictors and people misinterpret fluency as general intelligence, causing misplaced claims of AGI.
