Yeah, the weight floor can be hit or miss with regards to striking convos with strangers. Many of the people there want to make friends too, but many just want to focus on their workout.
Two related contexts that I've found to be much more friendly for this:
1. Climbing gyms, for reasons mentioned previously
2. The sauna! Actually very ideal for convos with strangers. Max overlap time is ~15 minutes, people are generally relaxed, no phones to distract and if it doesn't go well either party can always leave.
I remember yanking out the onstar unit in my 2015 silverado to physically disconnect the cell antenna. This was (is?) the only practical way to disable cellular in that vehicle.
Kudos to Rivian for making this a supported user privacy feature.
At Firezone we started with soft-deletes thinking it might be useful for an audit / compliance log and quickly ran into each of the problems described in this article. The real issue for us was migrations - having to maintain structure of deleted data alongside live data just didn't make sense, and undermined the point of an immutable audit trail.
We've switched to CDC using Postgres which emits into another (non-replicated) write-optimized table. The replication connection maintains a 'subject' variable to provide audit context for each INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE. So far, CDC has worked very well for us in this manner (Elixir / Postgrex).
I do think soft-deletes have their place in this world, maybe for user-facing "restore deleted" features. I don't think compliance or audit trails are the right place for them however.
This can essentially be accomplished with ZFS and an SSD as a L2ARC device.
I have three 8 TB Seagate SMR drives in RAID-Z (aka RAID-5) with a 500 GB Samsung 950 Pro M.2 as a L2ARC cache drive on the pool and it works beautifully for my workload.
In my experience, once the scratch area of the SMR drive is full, I get about 4-5 MB/s sustained write speed, which in my pool translates to 10 MB/s for the pool. Since the scratch area is about 25 GB, that means I can do 500 GB + 40-50GB of random writes before things slow to a crawl, and I have to wait (550 GB / 10 MB/s) = 55,000 s ~ 16 hours for the writes to flush.
Two related contexts that I've found to be much more friendly for this:
1. Climbing gyms, for reasons mentioned previously
2. The sauna! Actually very ideal for convos with strangers. Max overlap time is ~15 minutes, people are generally relaxed, no phones to distract and if it doesn't go well either party can always leave.