Tim Cash came on with the look every sysadmin knows well, his 14TB drive had gone silent with no warning. That kicked off a lively discussion. People talked through TestDisk for pulling back partition tables and PhotoRec for the brute force approach of grabbing files and sorting names later. Someone reminded the group, as always, never to write to a failing drive again, image it first and work from the copy. The real problem was money. Tim doesn’t have the funds for a new 14TB or even 30TB drive right now, and nobody on the call had a spare of that size to lend either. Drive prices have crept up enough lately that even borrowing one isn’t the easy ask it used to be. So the group brainstormed workarounds, from combining smaller drives to checking around for decommissioned enterprise disks from work. Tim took notes on everything to try.
Brad had just gotten back from Southeast Linux Fest 2026, where he gave a talk called “So Why Haven’t You Switched Over to Linux Full Time Yet???” He walked the group through it, and one point hit close to home since it happened to someone right there on the call. Dual boot setups are fragile, and Windows updates have a well earned reputation for treating a Linux partition like unclaimed land, sometimes overwriting the bootloader or worse. That’s exactly what happened to Tim Cash, and it’s part of how his whole drive saga started in the first place. A few people typed some version of the same grimace into the chat.
Additionally, retired Dick Seabrook a rock star of the LUG users showed up. We had former students in the meeting that were in his bash scripting or Python classes.
Tim brought up the AI conversation that closed out the night. He mentioned a sentiment floating around online, that if there were a single button to shut off all AI everywhere, a lot of people would push it without a second thought.
I pushed back on that. My view is that AI isn’t something to fear into a box, but more like the next evolutionary step of intelligence itself. If humanity ever causes an environmental catastrophe severe enough to wipe itself out, AI might be the thing that lets intelligence, not necessarily us specifically but the pattern of thinking and reasoning, keep going on Earth anyway.
Not everyone agreed, and that’s kind of the point of nights like this. Nobody logged off thinking exactly what they logged on thinking, and that’s usually a sign of a good meeting.
]]>Date: Monday,Sept 7, 2026
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: remote
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