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Creative Username said:
Not a fucking browser plugin, we don't need any more of those for fuck's sake.
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Ideally it would be built into the browser, but then you get vendor lock in with Microsoft providing it's own service and Google providing a different one.

I'm actually surprised that Apple hasn't offered this, they could charge a 10% fee for each purchase or subscription.
 
Betonhaus said:
Ideally it would be built into the browser, but then you get vendor lock in with Microsoft providing it's own service and Google providing a different one.

I'm actually surprised that Apple hasn't offered this, they could charge a 10% fee for each purchase or subscription.
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In the US there's privacy.com which lets you trivially make 'virtual' cards that can be time and/or amount limited. Not sure if they have plugins or not. I just paste the virtual card into the form.
 
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balupton said:
For search engines, I recommend Kagi. They run their own index, have customisable filtering, including one that promotes the small wide web, and do not filter kiwifarms.

Since 2012 or so I used DuckDuckGo, then used Brave Search for a few years, however:
- in the past 5 years both of them became as useless as all the rest with the onslaught of seo junk downsampling real knowledge
- both of them censor speech (which became a forefront of my attention in 2020-2022 with covid and russia/rt censorship)
- both are primarily just rebrandings of Bing.

Been using Kagi for a year now, and have zero complaints.

View attachment 5699425
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Brave uses its own index, including for images. They ditched Bing ages ago (which was supplemental to their index).

And it's impossible you used it for a few years as since it launched mid 2021 and which also doesnt reconcile with them censoring something in 2020 for covid as it didn't exist. Plus the founder of Brave is a rabid anti covid-vaccine and anti-mask advocate.
 
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Cascade said:
It's made by a private company and uses a weird ass cryptocurrency reward system. Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds, but I'd rather stay on Tor.

You mean when certain sites block exit nodes, or when the government fucks around with Tor connectivity?
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Lokinet is effectively dead and has been for many months now since Jeff (the lead developer) was fired over a payment dispute with the corporate overlords. There are no functioning exit nodes and the main site (on lokinet) is down, meaning you cannot find other sites to visit (if there are any left).
 
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Fata v3 said:
Brave uses its own index, including for images. They ditched Bing ages ago (which was supplemental to their index).

And it's impossible you used it for a few years as since it launched mid 2021 and which also doesnt reconcile with them censoring something in 2020 for covid as it didn't exist. Plus the founder of Brave is a rabid anti covid-vaccine and anti-mask advocate.
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Brave has some serious privacy concerns to answer to, in my opinion.
Example is all their unnecessary bundled crap in the web browser (which I don't use for this reason).
 
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sidekek said:
Browsers - Brave, Bromite, IceCat (lol)
F-Droid - FOSS appstore.
Termux - Some sort of a Debian chroot with it's own package repo.
Amaze - Basically the best file manager there is.
NewPipe - Youtube frontend, no account needed and no ads. There is also a easy "download" feature.
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I would like to add: ViMusic.

It is an accountless YouTube Music client that's only 2MB and Open Source. It will download songs locally after you like it or listen to it a few times. Absolutely amazing.

The UI is also good too, not an ancient looking piece of crap.
 
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I'd like to recommend another search engine with actually good results: https://vuhuv.com/

It's run by 2 university students in Turkey, they're also religious and don't like the West that much (the gayness of it).

They don't store anything and the site works well even without an account. Plenty fast for me since their servers are close to me. Don't know much about the latency in America though.

I've noticed that its English results are much much better than DDG's.

One thing I've also noticed is that it ignores canonical URLs, for example when I search "waybar default css config'", the second result is a direct link to the file in the GitHub repository. No other search engine does this (at least from my own experience). So you get the thing that actually matches instead of being canonical-cucked.
 
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Betonhaus said:
I was surprised to see it's a paid service, but I guess that makes sense. In a honest future we may have a lot of things move from advertising to subscriptions.

Would be nice if there was a subscription managing service, like a browser plugin service that you authorize payments and it gives you a monthly bill or a prepaid balance to cover it, so that random sites don't have your credit card information and only the initially agreed on fees will be paid by the browser plugin service.
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Doesn't your bank app already do this? Mine does, and it also exposes settings to deny payment requests from them, making unsubbing so much easier.

It also shows summaries and costs and increases and stuff, which is neat.
 
RGBCube said:
Doesn't your bank app already do this? Mine does, and it also exposes settings to deny payment requests from them, making unsubbing so much easier.

It also shows summaries and costs and increases and stuff, which is neat.
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I think I was mostly thinking of something where the subscription service only has a virtual account number that's unique to them, so if they sell that account number to someone else or starts making random charges those are flagged and blocked immediately.
I'm not familiar with the scenario where the bank app has a special screen where it tracks subscription services and automatically blocks unauthorized charges, and prevents the subscription service from having your actual credit card number.
 
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Betonhaus said:
I think I was mostly thinking of something where the subscription service only has a virtual account number that's unique to them, so if they sell that account number to someone else or starts making random charges those are flagged and blocked immediately.
I'm not familiar with the scenario where the bank app has a special screen where it tracks subscription services and automatically blocks unauthorized charges, and prevents the subscription service from having your actual credit card number.
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Oh, I didn't infer that from the post. I see.

Mine has a service that allows you to create single use (or for any amount of time) CC's for a super cheap price (it's free once per month as well). I don't use it that much as I only spend my money on the internet to order random items from a single site. But I can see how useful it can be.
 
@AmpleApricots I ran across something that may be of interest to those running on few cores/IO restricted devices in current year. There's a great utility called 'and'- AutoNice Daemon. I suspect it was originally created for angry administrators of multi-user servers used to run simulations in physics or math labs to stop really intensive simulations from affecting their NetHack sessions, or something like that, but I've found it useful for pushing down the priorities of 'ffmpeg' (as run by yt-dlp and JDownloader) and other processes that will just about lock a limited system if there are multiple processes running in parallel. All I had to do was enter some aggressive values for ffmpeg and turn down the CPUtime values at which the daemon would kick in to renice it.

The extreme IO from the ffmpeg conversions is the main issue on my low end systems, so in theory I could just launch the main applications with a lower-priority/higher nice value, but I don't want to fuck with the actual downloading side of things which never actually causes me problems. I suppose I could create patches for both applications to just launch ffmpeg with nice 19, but I don't care enough to deal with that.
 
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⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
AutoNice Daemon
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Interesting tool. The underlying "problem" (and I put it like that because calling it a problem really is a matter of perspective) is that Linux' CFS scheduler tries to be fair (it's in the name = completely fair scheduler) So everyone gets a fair slice of CPU time. In reality this has the potential to completely mog responsiveness on low-core or otherwise limited systems, as you have noticed. CFS has quite a few knobs to improve responsiveness and projects like liquorix/zen have tried to do exactly that. It's kind of arcane though and settings that might be good for some workloads are bad for others. (I'd also be careful with generally just copying patches and settings, the understanding of those by the people publishing them is often not great)

Over the years, there have been several projects and attempts to fix that in the kernel, with various success. One classic most people know in relation to that is the brainfuck scheduler by Con Kolivas. (not the CS type of guy btw., man is an anesthesiologist - he's abandoned development of it's successor MuQSS in 2021) Nowadays the approach is grouping tasks (autogroup kernel feature) and throwing more cores at it, and while
CONFIG_SCHED_AUTO_GROUP generally is good, it's not a huge help for low core systems. (If you have a system with many cores it also might make sense to pin long-running tasks to specific ones to help the scheduler in decision-making)

That said, there have been different schedulers since MuQSS with various amounts of complexity, functionality and bugs, some still in active development. One of such is BORE which I personally find the most stable, theoretically sound and least invasive. I use it myself on my lower performance systems where interactivity is priority. Impressions are of course always subjective but with my dual core machine I have stress-ng with --cpu 24 running as I type this and a load average of 11.59, yet typing this post and scrolling is smooth. The downside of this approach is you have to apply the patch to your kernel and compile it yourself, also you might want to tweak the settings a little to fit to your usage case. Playing around with PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY and PREEMPT & CONFIG_HZ while you're playing around with the kernel might also change results/help. (I wouldn't go to 1000 Hz like many guides recommend though)

Be aware though that all of this will lower throughput in general, I don't recommend it for servers. For servers where you are in full control of what task is ran, there's no inherent problem starting heavy-hitting tasks with low priority though; priority only becomes meaningful when resources start getting constrained, as long as there's enough CPU and IO to go around (remember there's also ionice) the nice value should not have an impact. These values are also inherited by child processes, so there's also that.
 
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⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
@AmpleApricots I ran across something that may be of interest to those running on few cores/IO restricted devices in current year. There's a great utility called 'and'- AutoNice Daemon. I suspect it was originally created for angry administrators of multi-user servers used to run simulations in physics or math labs to stop really intensive simulations from affecting their NetHack sessions, or something like that, but I've found it useful for pushing down the priorities of 'ffmpeg' (as run by yt-dlp and JDownloader) and other processes that will just about lock a limited system if there are multiple processes running in parallel. All I had to do was enter some aggressive values for ffmpeg and turn down the CPUtime values at which the daemon would kick in to renice it.

The extreme IO from the ffmpeg conversions is the main issue on my low end systems, so in theory I could just launch the main applications with a lower-priority/higher nice value, but I don't want to fuck with the actual downloading side of things which never actually causes me problems. I suppose I could create patches for both applications to just launch ffmpeg with nice 19, but I don't care enough to deal with that.
Click to expand...
How does AutoNice compare to running a RTOS kernel?
 
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AmpleApricots said:
Different planets, an operating system like Linux just can't give you these kinds of gurantees.
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I did have a look at the wikipedia page for PREEMPT_RT after @Betonhaus mentioned it, but in all honesty, I'm just being really fucking lazy about kicking down the priority on this one process that doesn't play nice on my old tablet-ass laptop.

I use both JDownloader and yt-dlp from the command line to download stuff on an old 2-in-1 Toshiba with Chromebook levels of RAM, and both those applications spawn ffmpeg to perform various very CPU and IO intensive purposes.

Things are still basically usable if there's only one ffmpeg running in the background, but when I'm downloading an hour long YT video and reencoding with subtittles/chapters/whatever built in, there's a good chance of overlap, and I am too lazy to just queue up a bunch of files.

I didn't want to potentially cause problems for those applications when they're actually downloading stuff, as opposed to remuxing it or adding thumbnails or chapters or subtitles or whatever by doing a regular nice or an ionice down on those parent apps, so I just installed 'and' and had a bit of a fiddle.

Now that I think about it, it probably would have been less effort just to set up a cron job that would run every five seconds and knock down the nice/ionice priorities of any 'ffmpeg' process. Might do that anyway. 'and' actually uses several seconds of CPU time each hour when you have it set up to cycle every five seconds and do whatever calculations it does.
 
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