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Sure, but it’s still really interesting from a historic point of view.
Sure, but it’s still really interesting from a historic point of view.
Easiest? More like… The only way.
Is this what burnout looks like?
Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don’t seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We’ve also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives… Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.
Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn’t ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.
If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn’t bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.
Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.
Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).
PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.
Fuck up #1: no backups
Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.
Fuck up #3: no backups.
The honestly prefer the bottom one than the modern 50 step wizards that take 10 seconds for each page to load, and load an ungodly amount of JS scripts.
A company I worked for was using an ancient bug tracking tool (called Pivotal) that looked like a 90s site. It was so fast and responsive. Later, we moved to something modern. It was 10 times worse, significantly slower and overly complex.
CS 1 hasn’t disappeared yet, you can still play it.
I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.
Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.
The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.
It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.
And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.
You can find a password checking utility on haveibeenpwned.com (the tool doesn’t send your password to the server, but only the first 5 characters of the hashed password, which is very safe). There are CLI tools on GitHub you can use to bulk test passwords. They also provide a downloadable list of hashes.
Alternatively, check if your password manager has a built-in tool for checking for passwords in known databases.
Google isn’t any better. And there aren’t a lot phone operating system options you can choose from.
Android is not privacy respecting by design. Your best option is to use a normal PC running Linux. However that has its own drawbacks, like lack of HDR support, no Dolby Vision or TrueHD, incompatibility with streaming services DRM.
And the bad part is that it is being forced upon us. You can’t even find non-smart TVs to buy anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised if appliances come with their own data plan, because the data they collect is valuable.
While in this particular case I agree with you, I’ve noticed a frustrating trend that just keeps getting worse. On one hand, search engines are failing to adapt to content farms. On pretty much any topic, you will find these generic sites that have poorly written articles that are hard to distinguish from AI. Try searching for “best linux distro” to see what I mean. Even on programming topics, you will find many sites that simply copy the content from stackoverflow and github.
On the other hand, people aren’t making websites and blogs anymore. More and more people are only using social media platforms, which aren’t being indexed by search engines. I hate seeing that so many discussions are now on Discord instead of forums. How many Twitter threads have you seen that should have been blog posts?
I wouldn’t recommend Optiplexes… HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts use proprietary parts making them a pain in the rear to work with. I recommend getting a PC made with standard parts.
Personally I prefer older PCs in standard formfactors. I avoid HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts because they use proprietary power supplies and motherboards, making them difficult to upgrade. Laptops aren’t really upgradable, they don’t have enough SATA ports, and USB isn’t reliable enough for storage. Raspberry Pies, while power efficient, are too underpowered. Old server hardware is also an option, but they are generally too noisy.
The only downside is that they don’t support zfs properly, and the package selection is more limited. The community repos aren’t always maintained.
One of those tiny low power PCs with OpenSense is a good alternative, but a bit more work. The only downside is that you need a separate switch and wifi access point.