I still use DDG as my “daily driver” (I know there are better options for privacy and avoiding big tech, but I haven’t yet found anything independent that is good enough for me to switch to full time yet). I bookmarked Stract a while back, and it proved useful a few months back when Microsoft had an outage that took down Bing and by extension, Duck Duck Go. I do like Stract, their index seems to be enough larger than MoJeek (another independent search with their own index) that it gives me better results.

Stract might not be as open as I’d like, but it’s nice to have as an option, and I’m never going to complain about having more search providers with independent indexes.

I’ve been using Syncthing-Fork (on F-Droid) for the extra features it has. I wonder if that developer will be able to continue.

So more like Judas and Goliath then?

I had a nicer Acer monitor that I replaced with a similar Samsung model about a year ago. I still kinda miss the Acer. Both were 32" curved LCD and 1440p. The Acer had a much more uniform curve to it, and the Samsung has a bunch of firmware issues that sometimes can only be worked around by unplugging it and power cycling it that way. The only reason I “upgraded” was the Samsung had better support for PS5 and scaling 4K inputs down to the native 1440p without artifacts.

No way that’s the real reason, the real reason is taxes. So many California millionaires move to Texas for the low tax, only to realize once they’re there that it’s a shitty state with a barely-functioning power grid. Unfortunately it never seems to click for most of them that the low taxes is a big part of why they don’t have a competent state government.

If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you’ll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it’s been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it’s from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they’d actually be approved is so low it wouldn’t be worth their time.