Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need

I love this guy's channel. Two of my other favorite things he's done are: Uppest Case / Lowest Case, and that time he Reverse Emulated a NES.

I love this video. The escalating insanity is wonderful. I once got the Harder Drives music stuck in my head for about 2 days straight.

This may be one of the nerdiest fucking things I have ever watched.

Comments as I watch through:

I want more information on the ionosphere-storage calculations. 175kB bandwidth is hella illegal (in my jurisdiction at least) for an amateur station, but if you're ignoring laws you could get way more. 1MB seems entirely reasonable if you can use anything open enough on the whole shortwave spectrum.

Yes, buddy, your ISP is totally throttling you. I think over a thousand individual recipients per second for hours is the definition of suspicious traffic. I guess it could be a hardware limitation too, either way they have no reason to let you do this as a member of the general public.

Ah, there's a technical report!

"So the first step is going to be to reverse the random number generator of the game..." Yep that's harder lol. Aaand it's right around as hard as I would expect assuming a really shitty RNG. How much time did this guy spend on the video?

I guess the polymino-placement algorithm must be in the technical report? Oh wait, pre-computed brute force search for each byte.

Well, this next one sounds biohazerdous. Jesus Christ that test is far dumber than this harder drive could ever be. Oh man, he's designing and printing a circuit board? And building physical things? He really does go all-out.

Also, still gross. And yes, Bitcoin is also gross, especially because it's a persistent bad implementation of a non-terrible idea.

Not since the video about aluminum can manufacturing have I sat inexplicably spellbound for the entire thing.

I maybe did not understand 95% of this, but it is cool to see people understanding the math behind computing.