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?

It sounds like you’ve been browsing some pretty sketchy websites. I have yet to find malware bundled in torrents from trustworthy trackers. And I’ve been pirating for many years.

Yes, I recommend checking the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)

Afaik, it’s 315k casualties, not deaths, which basically means “unable to serve”. This includes dead, injured, captured, deserted etc. Also keep in mind that this is an Ukrainian estimate which might be inflated.

The Omen laptops are pretty good as well. Even the fan blades are made of aluminum. But I would avoid their desktop PCs because they use proprietary components.

Like any other company, some products they make are junk but others are decent.

While not all ARMs are the same, I’m pretty sure there are certain configurations that are more common. Why not just provide binaries for those?

Give it time. It took 3 years of war for the 1917 revolution to start.

The internet is incredibly important to the modern society. Letting private companies only motivated by filling the pockets of the old farts shareholders run it is a bad idea. It’s time we consider Internet infrastructure like any other type of infrastructure.

Too expensive and hard to maintain. You can get pretty good speeds with traditional rail, in western Europe there are trains reaching 200-250km/h.

So they will just create local shell companies. Didn’t solve any problem.

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.

We should add another E… Embrace, extend, extinguish and enshittify.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don’t work in FF are very rare. If it’s something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there’s an easy way to work around it.

I use the smell test. If it smells weird in any way, it goes to the wash.

Guess who doesn’t have to login to a Rockstar account? That’s right, pirates.

Containers are very useful because they isolate the application from the rest of your server.

This solves a lot of problems: no dependency conflicts with your operating system, you can upgrade/downgrade any time you want, no state gets stored on your main system which makes resetting the application when it misbehaves as easy as deleting and recreating the container.

Before containers, changing my host OS (e.g. because ZFS wasn’t properly supported on the distro I was using) meant reinstalling and configuring a lot of shit, which could take days. With docker, I can migrate in 1-2 hours… Just install docker on the new OS, copy over the files, docker compose up a few times and done. The only things left to setup are samba, ssh and a few cron jobs.

My experience wasn’t as bad, but after the third time the database got corrupted during an upgrade I stopped using it.

Just build a database of ads. Then use some kind of image hash to compare against the displayed content.