

I’ve been thinking about setting up Anubis to protect my blog from AI scrapers, but I’m not clear on whether this would also block search engines. It would, wouldn’t it?
Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
I’ve been thinking about setting up Anubis to protect my blog from AI scrapers, but I’m not clear on whether this would also block search engines. It would, wouldn’t it?
I had a job interview a few weeks ago where the lead developer straight-up said that he doesn’t have any tests in the codebase because “it’s just writing your code twice”. I thought he was joking. Unfortunately he was not.
I didn’t end up getting the job, perhaps because I made it clear that I thought he was very wrong. I think I dodged a bullet.
I don’t think there’s an official “way”, but here’s mine (which I love):
On start-up I open all the apps I usually use, one per designated workspace:
Workspaces 6-9 are left empty, ready for whatever app I need in the moment, but only ever one app per workspace.
With this setup, I’ve mapped Ctrl+Fx
to each workspace, so Ctrl+F4
takes me to PyCharm where I write the code, and Ctrl+F5
followed by another F5 takes me to Firefox and reloads the page. Ctrl+F3
is always the terminal, etc., so you quickly start building these shortcuts to mean Fwhatever is $APP_NAME.
I almost never use the mouse, unless what I’m doing is necessarily mouse-driven: browsing or drawing charts etc. Everything else is keyboard-driven.
I have a few interesting ones.
Download a video:
alias yt="yt-dlp -o '%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s' "
Execute the previous command as root:
alias please='sudo $(fc -n -l -1)'
Delete all the Docker things. I do this surprisingly often:
alias docker-nuke="docker system prune --all --volumes --force"
This is a handy one for detecting a hard link
function is-hardlink {
count=$(stat -c %h -- "${1}")
if [ "${count}" -gt 1 ]; then
echo "Yes. There are ${count} links to this file."
else
echo "Nope. This file is unique."
fi
}
I run this one pretty much every day. Regardless of the distro I’m using, it Updates All The Things:
function up {
if [[ $(command -v yay) ]]; then
yay -Syu --noconfirm
yay -Yc --noconfirm
elif [[ $(command -v apt) ]]; then
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y
fi
flatpak update --assumeyes
flatpak remove --unused --assumeyes
}
I maintain an aliases file in GitLab with all the stuff I have in my environment if anyone is curious.
I have much the same:
The only difference is that I’m using a Synology 'cause I have 15TB and don’t know how to do RAID myself, let alone how to do it with an old laptop. I can’t really recommend a Synology though. It’s got too many useless add-ons and simple tools like rsync never work properly with it.
Yeah this was a deal-breaker for me too.
TIL about using lsblk
instead of just reading through the output of journalctl
to find the disk and partitions. Thanks!
That’s not been my experience. It may be using a web view under the hood, but the functionality is quite different. Additional features, breaking the video call out of the primary pane, etc. To suggest that they’re essentially the same is not accurate.
Really? All I’ve seen is a Flatpak that’s really just a wrapped web view. Is there now a native version of Teams for Linux?
Yes. Tailscale is surprisingly simple.
# systemctl start tailscale
# tailscale up
This is what I get for posting at 1am. Thanks for the clarification. Yeah I just assumed it was the same situation as coreutils.
Granted, sudo isn’t in coreutils, but it’s sufficiently standard that I’d argue that the licence is very relevant to the wider Linux community.
Anyway, I answered this at length the last time this subject came up here, but the TL;DR is that private companies (like Canonical, who owns Ubuntu) love the MIT license because it allows them to take the code and make proprietary versions of it without having to release the source code. Consider the implications of a sudo
binary that’s Built For Ubuntu™ with closed-source proprietary hooks into Canonical’s cloud auth provider. It’s death by a thousand MIT-licensed cuts to our once Free operating system.
Is it GPL though? If this is a case of MIT-licensed stuff weaseling its way into Linux core utils, I’m not interested.
It’s funny, I flocked to Steam because I was under the impression that I was owning the games. While other companies were trying to get me to sign onto their “play everything” subscriptions and Google had their “Stadia” (remember them?), Steam let me download the game and install it on my (Linux!) computer with no license key checks, working offline etc. etc. I feel like the assumption that I was in fact buying my games, rather than a license to play them when Steam saw fit was a reasonable one. This discovery was quite enraging.
Yeah I’ve not looked into that before, but I’ll check it out. I just want to keep the flexibility of the Deck: scoop it out of the TV and hop on the train. If I then have to go through a painful process of switching from family mode to “just let me play my games” mode, I’ll still probably be annoyed, but I’ll give it a try.
Yeah I’ve recently started tinkering with GOG in part due to this issue. I’m using Lutris in Linux rather than Heroic. I’m not sure if there’s a benefit to one over the other, but either way the size of the library of available games is quite small by comparison and of course I have lots of games trapped in Steam now.
Thanks, I’ll look into that.
Absolutely. This is less a criticism of the Deck (which I love) and more about my own coming up against this annoying DRM that I never even knew existed because I only had one place to play.
This all appears to be based on the user agent, so wouldn’t that mean that bad-faith scrapers could just declare themselves to be typical search engine user agent?