LLMs cost money, regular expressions are free. It really isn't so strange.

I have never really understood the systemd hate. It sure as hell beat the sorcery that was managing init.d scripts for everything.

I managed the distro upgrade on hundreds of remotely-managed nodes, porting our kiosk appliance from a pre-systemd debian to a post-systemd debian, and out of all the headaches we suffered systemd was not one of them, short of a few quirks we caught in our development process. It pretty much just worked and the services it provided made that upgrade so much easier.

Curious how you got burned, I hear a lot of complaining but haven't seen a lot of evidence

I don't understand the init.d script hate ;)

Can anyone recommend a good, energy-efficient, inexpensive dual-NIC SBC or miniPC? Last time I looked into this there were not many good options.

I've gone through quite a few embedded devices for exactly this use case. So far I've used:

- Soekris net4501 (x86, 486-class CPU) (discontinued)

- PCEngines alix2d3 (x86, AMD Geode LX800) (discontinued)

- PCEngines APU (x86, AMD T40E) (my current router/firewall) (discontinued)

I'm also currently using an APU2 as one of my wireless access points (with hostapd).

All of these have been solid machines that have given me zero problems.

The next system I plan to use is going to be a Banana Pi R4 (ARM Cortex A73), it's a solid choice for a simple router/firewall/DNS/DHCP box. It has a built-in 4-port gigabit switch where each interface can be used as normal Linux interfaces, as well as 2 SFP+ ports that are capable of supporting up to 10 gig ethernet.

It's also one of the few systems that offers true hardware offloading for connection tracking, so things like netfilter flowtables don't have to use any main CPU processing.

I'm currently experimenting with a Banana Pi R4 as a Wifi7 access point (running Debian with hostapd), however the current state of the wifi7 module for it (BPI-R4-NIC-BE14) and Linux driver (mt7996e) is still pretty young and a bit buggy (i.e., limiting transmit power to 6 dBm without patching the driver to override it, and there's apparently a lack of RF shielding which can contribute to low SNR on the receiving end). With the proper patches in place it makes a decent Wifi 6 access point. I'm hoping these issues get ironed out in the future and I can use it as a true Wifi7 AP. frank-w is doing outstanding work to help support the open source community with this new hardware.

It's hard to recommend one thing because there are so many options and they all have different trade-offs in terms of initial cost, ease-of-use, reliability, performance, etc.

A year or two back, I was able to get a brand-new fanless Intel N150 with 4x2.5G ports with 16 GB memory for about $150 from AliExpress. I run Proxmox on it, with OpnSense and a couple other things in virtual machines. These days, due to tariffs and the memory shortage, that is more like $440 now, unfortunately. I am kicking myself for not buying two, not so much because of the price increase, but because it would have come in handy multiple times to have a second one on-hand for random experiments.

Given that CPU performance does _not_ tend to be critical for firewall/NAS use cases, if I had to replace it tomorrow, I would go onto eBay and get the highest-spec'd used Dell or HP mini workstation I could find for $120 and plug in a USB3 1gig ethernet dongle for the WAN side.

A used Sophos XG 115. Has Intel Ethernet interfaces which is preferable for BSD compatibility. 8W idle. I power it off a 802.3af to 12V splitter.

If you want maximum speed a Lenovo Thinkcentre m720q has a desktop Intel CPU and a PCIe slot. You can add a 2x SFP+ NIC and PCIe riser to get 10G.

They aren't silliness, they are levers of control and loss of freedom

They are also a barrier to entry that keeps some of the riff raff out.

Yes let's just destroy so much of what makes computers great and freedom free so we can pander to the illiterates

> as though it were just another piece of corporate silliness,

It IS another piece of corporate silliness. Though silliness is an extremely charitable word for what it really is

Cheering on the loss of autonomy and control over our own computers under the guise of 'silliness' is disgusting

What's the chance this website is powered by postgresql?

Hopefully low, it's a static blog.

(I know this isn't the actual point of your comment, apologies!)

It's a WordPress blog & backed by MySQL.

So PHP.

Y'all just salty that DeepSeek et al are training their LLMs on yours

Both you and parent are making a lot of load-bearing assumptions.

As someone who likes to use a lot of em dashes in writing -- the 'heuristics' that AI 'hunters' like to use need a lot of further refinement before I would trust them with anything. And yet there are legions of anti-AI crusaders out there wielding them like weapons.

These folks are reinforcing a bias against all kinds of people, particularly those who are not native English speakers and were very likely taught 'globalized' English in their language training.

Where?

You can get even more vague and just generally describe the design of something, making sure it leaves exact measurements to parameters, and end up with something usable. ("Make me an openSCAD file for an pointed star with curved points and an inward taper. The number of points, thickness, and angle of taper should be configurable")