Torx are superior to all other types. I’ve been a carpenter for roughly three decades, and have suffered through all manner of fastening methods that have come and gone. None of them can hold a candle to Torx. I’ve never seen another type that can resist stripping out so well and for so long.
Torx should be the default over Phillips for sure. Phillips is fine for shit like access panels or screw terminals. Slotted is useless for anything but the adjustment on pots and thermostats. Robertson is just a proto-torx. Everything else either exists to make someone money or is a bolt
How do you feel about square drive? I’m no carpenter, just someone that’s done enough work around the house, but I’ve found that Torx are the best option but square is a close second (but I don’t think I’ve used them in any especially high torque situations, and they may fall short there).
So square is a close second in terms of quality, while being vastly simpler and cheaper to manufacture. Seems to me like i’d prefer square.
Also i’d be terrified of getting dirt in a torx screw, good luck cleaning it to make it usable again. Though i haven’t actually had this problem personally so it’s just a hunch
I have torx all over my mountain bike that gets caked in dirt, a little bit of water and a pick gets them usable in seconds. I could argue that hex is superior to square but they’re both worse than torx so who really cares.
Torx, hex, and square/Robertson all require broaching, generally with a rotary broach. The manufacturing process is basically identical, though the manufacturing of the machine tools varies slightly.
robertsons are tapered, so unless you get a proper positive lock, or they have dirt in them or something, they’re more liable to stripping out. But other than that, they’re great.
Oh yeah they definitely have uses, but there’s a real tendency for people to go a bit crazy with them. Complex regexen aren’t exactly readable, there’s all kinds of fun performance gotchas, there’s sometimes other tools/algorithms that are more suitable for the task, and sometimes people try to use them to eg. parse HTML because they don’t know that it is literally impossible to use regular expressions to parse languages that aren’t regular
It’s entirely possible to parse HTML in PCRE. You shouldn’t, but it is possible. The language stopped being strictly regular a long time ago and is entirely capable of doing it.
Oh yeah, extensions which make them non-regular definitely can make it possible, but just because it’s now somewhat possible with some regex engines doesn’t mean it’s a good idea
I learned Regex once and now it just works. Only problem for me is using MacOS so the Regex flavors aren’t consistent. But once I sort that, it’s smooth sailing.
It’s amazing how many linux problems stem from ‘Redhat, however, found this solution too simple and instead devised their own scheme’. Just about every over complex, bloated bit of nonsense we have to fight with has the same genesis.
What I really don’t understand is why distro maintainers feel the need to actually go along with these changes. Like, sure, if this predictable interface naming thing worked as intended, I can definitely see how it can be useful for server administrators. You could just hardcode the automatic interface names instead of assigning them manually in /etc/mactab. But why would the rest of us ever need this? Most personal machines have at most one wifi card and one ethernet device, so wlan0 and eth0 are perfectly predictable. And even if you have multiple wifi or ethernet adapters, your networking is probably handled by network-manager, so you never actually have to put interface names into config files. Why force enterprise-grade bloat on users who just want a simple desktop experience?
As to why distro maintainers go along, if you had to vet every time the network stack updated and make sure it doesn’t break your custom solution to predictable naming, you’d probably just go along with it and let anyone that needed it devise and maintain their own solution. 99% of users won’t worry about it.
No need for a custom solution, we already had ways to make predictable names that worked better than this. Giving each interface a name that represents it’s job makes life so much easier when you have several, naming them after which PCI bus they’re on does not.
Personally I’d do away with NetworkManager too and just configure the interfaces directly, but that might just be me being old and grumpy!
I think most distros go along because their upstream did. There are comparatively few ‘top level’ distributions, the main ones (by usage) being Redhat and Debian. Most everything else branches from those. Redhat’s got enough clout on the market that there’s a sort of pull towards complying with it just to not be left put.
I use Debian, but I think they’re crazy for swallowing everything Redhat pushes, they could easily stick to the cleaner options and have a better system for it. At least they let you opt out of systemd, so life is a little more tolerable.
I’d do away with network-manager on a stationary system too, but I’m on a laptop, and unless there’s some trick I don’t know about, configuring wifi by hand for every new network I come across sounds like a bit of a pain. Especially for corporate/institution network that use fancy things like PEAP
That’s fair, it does make sense to use it on a laptop, but it really should be the sort of thing you add when needed rather than having it jammed in whether it’s useful or not.
Every time I need to do something even slightly different to a basic setup I find myself inventing new curses for those who screwed things up with these overblown, over complex, minimally functional abominations. Just give me vi and the basic configuration files and let me get on with it!
I find myself inventing new curses for those who screwed things up with these overblown, over complex, minimally functional abominations
Gosh, tell me about it. I once tried writing a custom wifi signal strength indicator app that got its information from network-manager. Apparently the only way to programmatically communicate with network-manager is through dbus, which is just terrible. Scarce to no documentation, poor support for any language other than C/C++, and once you do get it working, it’s the most disgusting and overly verbose code you’ve ever seen, just to query the status of the wifi card. Could’ve exposed the API through raw unix sockets or something, but nope, they had to reinvent the wheel on that one as well.
Just give me vi and the basic configuration files and let me get on with it!
I’ll take this opportunity to shill for Void Linux, it sounds like exactly what you’re describing. I’ve been a happy user for like 5 years now. I particularly like how nothing ever breaks, because there’s not much to break on such a minimal system.
…well, actually, a few things did break over the years, but most of those were due to user error haha.
In news that will shock no-one, dbus was, of course, initially created by a Redhat engineer. I get the idea of having a general purpose bus that everything can communicate on, but they somehow managed to even make that complex.
You make a compelling case for Void Linux. I use Debian or a RHEL derivative for work, primarily so there’s at least a chance to hand systems off to someone else to maintain, the less known distros seem to meet with blank looks.
I want to give NixOS a try sometime, as I like the idea of declaritively defining the system
I think the difference is the level it’s happening at. As I said, I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like a simple, unfussy and minimal distribution that you then add functionality to via configuration. Having that declarative configuration means it’s easy to test new setups, roll back changes and even easily create modified configuration for other servers.
I use nixos on my homeserver, but I’m looking to switch it to Void as well. For me personally I just realized that it’s easier to set everything up with shell scripts and docker-compose. But that’s just my personal experience, by all means go ahead and try out nixos if you have the time. It has lots of unique features that you can’t replicate with “just a bunch of shell scripts”. This video does a great job of selling nixos. Maybe my favourite part of nixos is how they make “shortcuts” for a lot of common tasks. For example, setting up a letsencrypt ssl certificate for your webserver with autorenewal can be done in just two lines of config.
If by “configuring wifi by hand” you mean writing config files by hand, that’s actually not necessary with plain wpa_supplicant too. There is wpa-gui (or wpa-cute if you prefer Qt over GTK), which is basically a GUI frontend to wpa_supplicant, which makes adding new networks nearly as easy as with NetworkManager. But it’s a far less modern looking UI than the NM frontends.
Personally I’d do away with NetworkManager too and just configure the interfaces directly
Connman and iwd have nice graphical interfaces btw. I got that route after nm disbehaved and i couldn’t figure out why (same for systemd and s6/dinit after systemd-dnsd threw a fit).
The only thing that’s slow is dnf’s repository check and some migration scripts in certain fedora packages. If that’s the price I need to pay to get seamless updates and upgrades across major versions for nearly a decade, then I can live with that.
I’m with our binary friend; the systems they try to replace tend to be time tested, reliable and simple (if not necessarily immediately obvious) to manage. I can think of a single instance where a Redhat-ism is better, or even equivalent, to what we already have. In eavh case it’s been a pretty transparent attempt to move from Embrace to Extend, and that never ends well for the users.
I can think of a single instance where a Redhat-ism is better
I don’t know if it would be accurate to call it a redhat-ism, but btrfs is pretty amazing. Transparent compression? Copy-on-write? Yes please! I’ve been using it for so long now that it’s spoiled me lol. Whenever I’m on an ext4 system I have to keep reminding myself that copying a huge file or directory will… you know… actually copy it instead of just making reflinks
I’ve never actually tried BTRFS, there were a few too many “it loses all your data” bugs in the early days, and I was already using ZFS by then anyway. ZFS has more than it’s fair share of problems, but I’m pretty confident my data is safe, and it has the same upsides as BTRFS. I’m looking forward to seeing how BCachefs works now it’s in kernel, and I really want to compare all three under real workloads.
Ooh, I’ve never heard of bcachefs, sounds exciting! I see it supports encryption natively, which btrfs doesn’t. Pretty cool!
Personally I’ve never had any issues with btrfs, but I did start using it only a couple years ago, when it was already stable. Makes sense that you’d stick with zfs tho, if that’s what you’re used to.
Yeah, I know there was one a while back, and if you don’t use ECC RAM, given enough time, it will eat your data as it tries to correct checksum errors due to memory corruption. That’s why we keep backups, right. Right?
I tend to assume that every storage system will eventually lose data, so having multiple copies is vital.
It’s amazing how many linux problems stem from ‘Redhat, however, found this solution too simple and instead devised their own scheme’. Just about every over complex, bloated bit of nonsense we have to fight with has the same genesis.
Ansible can be heard mumbling incoherently and so, so slowly, from the basement.
Remember who saw apt4rpm and said “too fast, too immune from python fuckage, so let’s do something slower and more frail”. twice.
I won’t hear any sass about Ansible. It doesn’t scale up to infinity but it’s the best there is at what it’s good at (modular, small scale declarative orchestration)
You can totally can scale Ansible and especially Ansible pull. It will work with thousands of VMs and can be used with other tools to completely automate deployments.
Oh agreed entirely. You can also use different execution strategies to mitigate most performance issues, but it can require some tuning at full enterprise scale.
I do use Ansible, partly because it’s easier to tell people that’s how you do it rather than “I wrote a shell script, it took half the time to write, it’s 20% the size and runs several times faster”. To be fair to Ansible, if you’re configuring a number of servers at the same time, it’s not too bad speedwise as it’ll do batches of them in parallel. Configuring one server at a time is agony though.
He may have taken some ideas from there, but I still see more windows like ideas. We’re one bad decision away from systemd-regedit. If that happens, I might just give up completely.
cries It’s amazing how much damage they’ve done to the linux ecosystem. Not just badly thought out concepts, but the amount of frustration and annoyance they caused by ramming it into existence and the cynicism it’s created.
“everything is a file” is such a godsend. It makes absolutely everything so much easier and intuitive. I remember trying to get an old dot matrix printer to work using a parallel-to-usb adaptor cable. Without reading any documentation or having any prior experience I tried echo testing12345 > /dev/lp0 and it just worked lol. Meanwhile my friend spent like half an hour digging in windows gui settings trying to figure out how to print to a parallel printer.
I also posted about this before, but a while back I had to configure my system so that a non-root user could start and stop a root daemon without sudo. On a runit system all you have to do is change the permissions of some control files and it works. On systemd? When I looked it up, the simplest solution involved writing a polkit policy in javascript 🤮
That’s just dconf lol. It sounds great in theory – after all, isn’t bringing standardization to a chaotic battlefield of different formats a good thing? But in practice it’s absolute garbage. I would much rather just edit a config file. Heck, even if you program uses some obscure config format like xml or something language-specific like .lua or .py, I would much rather take a few minutes to learn the specifics of your format than fuck around with dconf. Fuck dconf.
Yes, yes, but now lets take that, make it dependent on the session management system and dns resolver for some reason, make the command longer and more convoluted and store the results in one or more of a dozen locations! It’ll be great!
/s
Dconf is bad, just imagine how bad a systemd version would be.
I try not to think about the things they’ve done, it’s not good for my blood pressure. They had a decent desktop distro, but they seem determined to trash it with terrible decisions.
To me it seems they followed the hdd UUID style, rather than sda0 or hda0 that can change at boot you now have a fixed UUID to work with. I can see this being important on larger server networks
But the SSD/HDD solution doesn’t replace /dev/[s|h]da# entirely, just adds a consistent way to set them in configs like fstab. You can still use the old device names so working with them at the command line is still easy for the most part.
I mean, you should be careful with destructive changes and commands whether the interface names can change or not… And since they won’t change outside of a reboot, I’ve yet to run into a scenario where that becomes a problem as I’m looking at and making sure I’m talking to the correct device before starting anyway
Yep, i always type the line and take a break, and check the drives in another terminal first, before committing, but the web is full of people “argg I just dd the wrong drive”.
Having consistent interface names on servers that have several is useful, but we already had that option. The interface names they generate are not only hard to remember, but not terribly useful as they’re based on things like which PCI slot they’re in, rather than what their purpose is. You want interface names like wan0 and DMZ, not enp0s2. Of course, you can set it up to use useful names, but it’s more complicated than it used to be, so while the systemd approach looks like a good idea on the surface, it’s actually a retrograde step.
You see this on a lot of products. This is because a lot of people simply don’t understand how cubic meters work, or need to think about it where they know pretty much how much floorspace they have. And in practice it doesn’t matter, most people have ceilings somewhere around 2.5 meters and these indicators aren’t that precise anyways.
There is absolutely a minimum size that doors need to be for almost any house. Yes you can incorrectly install other doors, but codes provide a minimum size for professionals to follow when installing. Which is 2.1m in most of the world. Other places will have their own standard size door, but yes every country absolutely has standard door sizes.
Why do you claim otherwise…? Just go look up any big box store door catalog lmfao, plenty of standard door options for even home owners. If you’re cutting a door to size, you’ve done fucked up in almost every case.
And it’s funny you say something like this while being completely off base about story heights… fucking lmfao. Sure we should listen to your “expertise” hahahah, you don’t even know how tall a room is, yet we should trust you know anything about doors? Really? Seriously… dude?
That’s usually from the previous home owner who thought they could install the previous door themselves and not knowing the difference between a rough opening and finished opening.
I might be wrong but I assumed it’s perfectly obvious to OP and it’s the kind of joke where something is funny because you stretch the meaning to read it literally. I chuckled actually, despite it making perfect sense.
Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?
I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.
What other options are there?
Edit:
For those who may be arriving now:
Kagi seems to be a good option for an alternative search engine; it is a paid service, for which I don’t have the €€€ right now. Many speak very well about it.
SearXNG is a thing as well, to my understanding a decentralized search system. Worth the try, in my opinion. If it’s something that is decentralized, it is worthy to support and divulge.
There is mojeek.com, supposedly not very good but any option that goes against the monopoly is worth the try! I’m going to try this one.
You should try Ecosia if you want to support reforestation efforts. Read somewhere in the thread it is part of the Bing ecosystem.
Yep is a thing as well. Somewhere in the thread, a lemmy points they use the search results for AI trainning. So… That is that.
And it seems there is a search engine by the name of dogpile.com.
Startpage is another search engine (portal?) suggested by another user. I’ve used it before and like it. Read somewhere it somehow piped a standard google search but removed tracking and ads.
and I just remembered Presearch.com. This is a really shady one (crypto warning!) that I suspect is a fork/collab with Brave Browser. I’ve used it, they have reward-per-search reward system (or had) where they give you crypto for every search. Good results, some that don’t come up neither on DDG nor Google.
p.p.s Should I start categorizing these from “shady” to “worthy”?
p.p.s 2 Does anyone remember StumbleUpon? I know it was never a search engine to begin with but it was the best source of good internet content I ever got acquainted to.
I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.
Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.
Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back
Yeah I was confused by that choice of words. Train is for ML and AIs. Search engines used to need crawlers to run regularly because, you know, shit changes.
I would use Kagi if it was free. It might be run by crypto bros but doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. Google and bing own 99% of the search engine market. Competition that doesn’t rely on those two is always good
I agree they were, but that’s the benefits of open source you can call out companies for doing stupid shit. Just like when Mozilla adds unnecessary telemetry.
Lumping in Bing with Google is just unfair. Google controls like 90% of search. Bing is ~3.5%. Choosing duck duck go and helping that 3.5% is wayyyy better of a choice than supporting crypto bros.
Personally I don’t want to support Microsoft bing either. This website you shared doesn’t lump together all the bing using search engines (DuckDuckGo and yahoo). How is supporting Microsoft a wayyy better choice. This isn’t some pump and dump scheme. Your criticism should be of the company (they added referall links to their browser and the owner has some nasty political takes on top of running another privacy invasive company).
It does not matter if it lumps them together or not. Google still has 90% and they’re not Bing. Yandax another ~3% and they’re not Bing. That means at max Bing is 7% if you combine the rest. 3.5% vs 7% does not change the root of my argument.
Those points you make against Brave are valid though. I just run into too many people who are in the Brave cult and it’s concerning.
I only tried one example, so the sample size is pretty small, but that search engine seems pretty bad. I tried looking up “rust bevy points” in both Google and Yep. The first Google result is a library to draw points in Bevy and the rest are pretty relevant. Yep simply doesn’t have that result at all and all of their results are just generic results about Bevy.
I tried DDG for the sake of comparison and it’s somewhere in-between. The results are mostly relevant and the “correct” result is still on the first page.
That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.
Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.
I run a searxng instance on my pi server, use it from all of my devices, honestly forget its a thing running from my office 99% of the time until I’m rebooting the pi for one reason or another and spend more seconds than I’d like to admit wondering why I can’t run a search 🤣😅
And next you know, someone cites them and concludes that coffee cures cancer.... Or causes it when drunk at exactly or above 41.33456 degrees Celsius or when.you drink more than 4 but less than 3 daily. Or was that chocolate? No! Red wine! It was red wine!
I work on a pretty neglected Neuroimmune illness ME/CFS (hence my username) with really low recovery rates whether treated or untreated (~5%).
And the number of “clinical trials” of things like “Graded Exercise Therapy” or “CBT” or “Acupuncture” or [insert random supplement] that claims to “cure” the condition is so large. Except these trials all rely on subjective outcome measures and none are placebo controlled, oh and ofcourse the results never last in long term followup.
Also, I think it’s downright absurd that MECFS gets ignored so much. That shit is way more common than we like to admit and it can turn a healthy person into a massive drain on everyone around them (ignoring their own suffering, of course). Like, you would think we’d be super motivated to fix this shit.
I fairly often drive 50,000m/h, except on the autobahn. There I usually go about 120,000,000mm/h.
And if I stack 1000 1cm³ blocks of water, the resulting 10m high column has a volume of 1l, weighs 1kg and exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. And to heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal, while 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
What I want to say is: Your point is stupid and your units are too.
They know how to manipulate you to do/buy stuff you weren’t looking for. That’s what makes a profit.
It has always been this way (also in tech) because those things are the products of companies (main goal: profit, usually under a sneaky slogan), but it is becoming increasingly invasive. Don’t be evil: think different.
It’s about minimizing the annoyance for the majority of users who will misspell some popular thing.
Also, I believe that showing actually interesting content is bad for the businesses because it might make the user stop to think and pursue something meaningful instead of continuing to use the product.
I don’t have YouTube Pro or whatever its called now and when I listen to music on my Google home it plays an ad after ever song. Since I have switched to Pihole and blocked googles DNS servers the only ads I get are to buy premium YouTube which I assume are hardcoded into something somewhere.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
We better be careful, with Googles track record they will be getting rid of YouTube soon and rolling it into whatever they are calling their Skype clone nowadays.
I think that five products are reasonably safe from Google’s euthanasia project:
YouTube
Google Search
Chrome
"core" Android system + Play Store (it counts as one)
AdSense
The common factor between them is advertisement: vulturing on your personal info (Chrome, GS, Android), serving you ads (YT, GS), ensuring that advertisers must pay the vassal tax to advertise (AdSense), and walling you in ways that you can’t fight back (Chrome, Android+Play Store).
Google stopped being a technology business a long time ago; pragmatically nowadays it’s simply an advertisement company that dabbles on tech.
Good catch on GMail - it’s at the same time a vector to invade your privacy and an additional barrier for people leaving the Google ecosystem battery farm.
Going to be called YouTube Podcasts. Soon to be spun off into Google Wallet + Podcasts, then to be renamed Podcasts Pay, then Pay Podcasts, then Google Chrome with Podcasts.
lemmy.world
Top