> AI on autopilot creating code, text, images or video is nothing more than a curiosity.

I wouldn’t say it’s lacking value. Maybe digital plastic is the perfect metaphor. Plastic is disposable and probably bad for the environment. But useful for all sorts of weird little tasks. Plastic is everywhere despite its weaknesses because sometimes you just want a thing shaped like this.

I’ve got a little personal data archive going back 20 years. But unfortunately it’s suffering bit rot. Last night I discovered the main hard drive storing it is suffering read failures - the zfs checksums aren’t matching. I pulled out Claude and told it to make a program that could make, maintain and verify a sidecar database of file hashes and reed-Solomon parity data so I can fix some small percent of bit rot that the drive experiences. A 10% increase in file size is worth it for the peace of mind of knowing that footage of my late grandma will still exist when I’m her age. (I have backups, but the backups might also suffer bit rot and I might not even know).

Claude’s program isn’t art. I’m not putting it on my resume. If I had infinite time I’d love to make something like this lovingly by hand. But I’m busy. And Claude can make something in an hour or two which solves my problem. Nice.

Is it slop? Yes. Is it useful? Absolutely.

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ozlikethewizard a day ago | parent [-]

Hate to be that guy but wasnt the solution here to buy a new drive instead of trust claudes slop is long term maintaining your drive and not just looking like its doing a good job?

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josephg a day ago | parent [-]

It's definitely an option. Though I'd really need 2 drives - one replacement, and a mirror. And then I could set up weekly sweeps which check zfs checksums to guard against bit rot. And just hope that bitrot never affects the same file on both drives at the same time.

I also don't want all my backups to be in the same physical location. If I copy some files with zfs to another drive, I'd also like to check that there wasn't an error in the copying process. Maybe I can use zfs to make mirror images - which probably copies the hashes?

Yeah, I could use zfs to do some of this. But having a sidecar checksum database is easier to work with across filesystems. And Reed-Solomon error correction is able to correct bit rot much more cheaply than using physically duplicated drives. I wouldn't mind buying a mirror set a year or two ago, but storage is so expensive now.

Filesystems in general aren't very good at protecting against silent bitrot, since it doesn't happen that much on spinning copper. But it happens a lot more than we'd all like to admit on modern SSDs. And zfs doesn't support Reed-Solomon error correction.

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0points 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> Though I'd really need 2 drives - one replacement, and a mirror.

Yea, with just a single drive it's not really a backup is it?

> If I copy some files with zfs to another drive, I'd also like to check that there wasn't an error in the copying process.

That's what rsync is for.

> I wouldn't mind buying a mirror set a year or two ago, but storage is so expensive now.

Prices went up, yes but not that much to be fair. And I think it mostly affected M2 disks.

Here's my very limited notes on HDD prices.

In 21 october 2023, a 22 TB disk cost me 0.37 SEK per gigabyte.

In 28 may 2026, a 26 TB disk cost me 0.36 SEK per gigabyte.

Both were WD red disks.

	▲	josephg 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> In 28 may 2026, a 26 TB disk cost me 0.36 SEK per gigabyte. The best price I can find for a 24gb+ hard drive is $1250 AUD for a 24gb Seagate Barracuda drive, at my local computer store. They're a similar price on amazon. Amazon US has refurbed drives too, which are a little cheaper but not much. $1250 for 24gb is $52AUD per gigabyte, or 353 Swedish Krona per gigabyte.