Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/

You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I’ve checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.

If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn’t automatically do it, the URL for that is: https://<searxng_url>/search?q=%s

I have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.

I’ve been using backblaze b2 (via s3fs-fuse container + bidirectional mount propagation to a host path) and a little bit of google drive (via rclone mount + the same mounting business) within kubernetes. I only use this for tubearchivist which I consider to be disposable. No way I’m using these “devices” for anything I really care about. I haven’t tried gauging the performance of either of these, but I can say, anecdotally, that both are fine for tubearchivist to write to in a reasonable amount of time (the bottleneck is yt-dlp ingesting from youtube) and playback seems to be on par with local storage with the embedded tubearchivist player and jellyfin. I’ve had no issues with this, been using it about a year now, and overall I feel it’s a decent solution if you need a lot of cheap-ish storage that you are okay with not trusting.

Devil’s advocate: if you do things the legit way, absorb the ads or go for the pay tiers, do you think there’s ever a point the advertisers and platforms say “this is the right amount of ads.” ? Seems like it’s an infinite process of cramming in more garbage. Personally I’m happy to engage in the arms race because it’s not bothersome to me personally, and I’m fine with some “theft” as long as I’m paying back into the creators by whatever their preferred support structure is.

Lemmy.zip and dbzer0 get recommended often for having similar federation stances.

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I have a feeling it would have ranked higher for me if I’d read it when I was younger. It’s not a maturity thing or quality of writing, but at some point it got harder for me to digest stories that have heavy doses of cruelty. I was really waiting for some kind of resolution very early into it.

I just finished reading The Eye of the Heron for the first time. To me it had a very similar feel, and in the back of my head I was thinking how you could totally headcanon your way into saying this could be another tale from Earth’s first (mis)steps into the cosmos and Hainish universe.

I’ve been running an n100 box as my main everything box for about 1.5 years. I capture metrics on it and can say the thing is nowhere near capacity. This box is running jellyfin, a dozen or so nfs mounts that are heavily utilized, a dozen or so lightly used samba mounts, grafana, prometheus, jenkins, and a handful of mysql instances. I maxed out the ram (32gb) from the start and it averages 8gb usage, and has never exceeded 10gb. Historically, the CPU usage averages 28% utilization. I think as long as the board has nvme storage you’ll not feel constrained by these little hosts for many years.

Similar thing applies to music. There are still web radio stations and web broadcasts of good FM stations out there, and what a relief it is to fall back on these, especially i f you’re getting playlist burnout. There’s something to be said for a queue of music that some person has just slapped together for the day that fits whatever the overall feeling of a station is. The original algorithms before the final algorithms took over, I suppose.