• 0 Posts
  • 108 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • I believe it, but I’m still debating whether something like Kagi is worth paying for. On principle, I strongly feel like it is, but in practice I’m still evaluating. So far, I’ve played with it a few times and I haven’t observed any notable improvements, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. First impression is that it’s definitely a little quicker and cleaner to get at the information I’m looking for. And taking a step back, I have to say it’s impressive that they can replicate a behemoth like Google’s accuracy already. On the other hand, I’ve felt like Google has gotten so crappy at search recently that maybe I’m simply not going to be satisfied with anyone simply “meeting” them and maybe what I want simply isn’t possible, in which case I’m just paying for disappointment.


  • I’ve moved to an “infrastructure as code” approach, not using any fancy tools in particular, primarily just bash shell scripts. Basically almost everything I setup or do gets documented via shell scripts, I write them as I go when I’m learning to install something new, and before I commit to something to new, I take extra care to make sure the scripts are idempotent so that when I want to do make any changes, all I need to do is add it to the appropriate script and re-run it.

    The idempotent part takes some effort sometimes, but is not actually as hard as it seems, particularly if you don’t mind that it sometimes spends some wasted time doing things that have already been done, and occasionally spits out some harmless error messages because something is already done, but I also try to minimize that when I can. The consequences of doing too much by re-running are rarely serious. Yeah sometimes the scripts can break, but as long as they fail properly (set -euo pipefail) it’s usually pretty obvious how to fix it and it won’t leave too much of a mess.

    Doing this has transformed my homelab from a mess of unknowable higgledy-piggledy spaghetti-services that was always teetering one small failure away from total collapse and frantic rebuilding, into something repeatable and reproducible that I can actually … wait for it … test. Just firing up a Linux ISO in a VM is all I need to test everything I’m doing in a perfect sandbox, and I can throw it away when I’m done with no regrets. Plus it makes rolling out new servers, and more importantly, decommissioning old ones, a breeze, you know exactly what’s on them and how it was set up, because it was all in your scripts. Combined with good data backups (which are also set up in the scripts) and restores (which I also test with scripts) it really takes the drama and stress out of migrations and even hardware failures.

    Yeah there are probably easier ways to accomplish what I’m doing using some of the technologies like terraform, ansible and nix/flake that people have mentioned, and I’ve dabbled with those, but for me, the shell script approach strikes a nice balance of not just documenting but also learning the process myself so that I understand enough of what it’s doing to effectively debug it when something goes wrong, and it works on almost everything and in most cases requires no installation or setup. Bash is everywhere. I even have an infrastructure-as-code setup for my Steam Deck to install stuff and get it set up the way I want.



  • I think you underestimate how strong the masts of a sailing ship are. They are the main propulsion of the ship, they have to take the entire wind load (or in the case of a three-masted ship, depending on sail plan the mainmast might normally take about half the total wind load) and it takes a very significant wind load to haul a ship like that through the water at a dozen knots. The mast is a main structural member and is typically tied into the ship all the way down to the keel, as well as being heavily tensioned in every direction practically possible with rope stays. Granted this is done especially from the rear and sides more than the front, where they would not typically be expected to experience significant direct loads like an impact, but this is still a serious piece of heavily reinforced structure we’re talking about despite its thin appearance.

    Also I can’t tell if they’re wood masts in this case, but if they are, those tend to explode into potentially deadly splinters when they’re broken like that. Sailing injuries used to be pretty horrific and dangerous.


  • Literally any old PC is likely fine. It may be slow, it may struggle or even fail with some of the very complex software (perhaps you will encounter timeouts, or you will spend so much time waiting for memory to swap in or out to disk that it won’t be worth using) but you can run Linux itself on a potato and if your machine isn’t powerful enough, maybe you can get a second one and run different stuff on each, or just scale down your expectations and don’t try to self-host LITERALLY everything just because you can. Certain services are very intense, others will run on a very small piece of a potato.



  • Plenty of streamers game on Linux you’ll just rarely/never see it because it’s all hidden behind the scenes and many keep their stream pretty clean from any technical stuff. Which is fine… but if you can’t tell the difference from Windows then what’s the point of even caring whether the streamer is using Linux or Windows or Mac or whatever else.

    For Linux gaming content, I do like A1RM4X but he doesn’t really stream live gameplay often if at all except to demonstrate certain features. He’s mainly focused on showing off all different kinds of gaming tech in Linux, and it’s very informative, he’s got a thick accent though if that’s a problem for you.



  • It’s aggressively privacy-first in some ways. It doesn’t do any self-updating which could be considered phoning home, so you have to make sure you have a way to keep it updated, through a package manager or otherwise. There’s a separate update monitor if you want that, for Windows at least. I tend to dial back the anti-fingerprinting a bit because it just makes browsing frustrating to me. I understand the risk of fingerprinting, and it’s good that they do everything they can to avoid being fingerprinted, but it doesn’t strike the right balance for me. Particularly forcing light mode, I absolutely fucking loathe getting light blasted unexpected into my eyeballs, I always have. The biggest mistake technology ever made in my opinion was trying to pretend an actively illuminated screen was paper and make it blinding white.

    I’ve so far resisted the urge to enable DRM. If something won’t show me stuff without DRM I’m willing to just say I don’t want to watch it.

    And obviously as per the topic, I turn on sync, which is not on by default, but that’s easy and a sensible default. Honestly it’s mostly sensible defaults.




  • And you can still only take off from a registered airport in most places, because silly laws. So you still have to drive to the airport. Oh also don’t forget they’re hilariously dangerous in a collision at basically any speed because they’re basically made out of paper compared to the rampaging 2 ton behemoths regularly speeding down our roads. So good luck getting to the airport safely!

    And getting back on topic, it’ll also need a license plate for the roads, and a transponder in most airspace, so you can still be tracked whether you’re on the ground or in the air. Flying cars are great at combining the worst of both worlds!


  • I wouldn’t stress about it. People are overly delicate with their hard drives in my experience. They’re surprisingly sturdy and failure tends to be pretty random. There might be a slight statistical correlation in failure rates with minor vibration, but anecdotally I’ve got drives that vibrate the hell out of themselves (probably due to some other manufacturing defect) and have lasted decades with no errors, and plenty that fail completely for no perceptible reason at all. Spinning disks are just inherently unreliable, not that any storage technology is perfectly reliable. This is why backups are never optional.