ZFS is a filesystem developed at Sun Microsystems for their Solaris operating system. This is an experience report from recently setting it up as the filesystem for my secondary storage drives on macOS.

Last week, one of the drives in my desktop was having an unrecoverable read error, so I wanted to swap it out with another disk. I had a Samsung 4TB external USB drive lying around, so I popped it out of its case to put in the machine, and put the old drive (which still had some accessible data on it) in the USB enclosure. After plugging it into my laptop, the partitions appeared to be corrupted:

In Part 1 I framed solitaire Yahtzee as a dynamic program, and in Part 2 I built the Go service that computes and serves the optimal policy. A policy table is only half a player, though. The other half has to see the screen, wait for the dice animation, and press the right tiny buttons at the right time.

Part 1 turned solitaire Yahtzee into a dynamic program: work backwards from completed score sheets, take expectations over rolls, and choose the best available action. This post is about making that idea run fast enough to be useful.

I didn’t have a Game Boy growing up, but I did have an electronic handheld Yahtzee. It does exactly one thing, and it does it with an admirable lack of distractions.