cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What network hardware should I get for my homelab?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The short answer: For a router, either find an off-the-shelf Wifi router that is supported by OpenWRT (very nice and very easy), or (and this is my personal preference) build your own firewall mini PC which will be much more complex and powerful to the point of complete overkill but also fully controllable right down to the network stack (and what’s the point of a homelab if not fiddling around with such things?).

  You can run OpenWRT directly on full AMD64 PC if you want, or even just a Raspberry Pi (some people appear to have had good luck with the 4B and 5, though I don’t know the specifics of that approach) The famous PfSense would be another option, based on BSD. I used to use that, but I really wanted something directly Linux-based.

  Which brings us to the fact that you can also even use a standard Linux distro like Debian and install all the tools you want on top of that and set up all the firewall yourself from scratch. That is actually what I do, using Linux kernel’s nftables for NAT Masquerading/IP forwarding and managing it currently with foomuuri which is essentially just a very lightweight nftables configuration manager. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do directly with nftables, but even though it’s perfect for me but I’m not sure I would recommend it in general. They have some very simple examples, but the documentation is pretty sparse, you need to either understand nftables under the hood or infer what you can by reading between the lines of the few examples you can find. A more mature and traditional Linux firewall like firewalld might be preferable if you want. Either way, this is definitely a much more complex route though, and fighting with firewall rules to get things to work is not everybody’s idea of “fun”. It is powerful though, and infinitely flexible. If you want it to “just work” without hassle, stick to the single-purpose devices and use OpenWRT as the OS designed to do this. It’s way simpler.

  If you do decide do go the DIY firewall route though, all you really need for a firewall PC is at least a second NIC (some motherboards have two wired NIC onboard already, you can use one for WAN and the other + WiFi for LAN) or you can a PCIe network card that has multiple ports. I wouldn’t really recommend using one of your existing Mini PCs for this, as it’s really not a good idea to share the firewall/network appliance functionality shared with other services, both for security and for configuration complexity reasons. The firewall really works best and is easiest to configure when it is truly just a gateway for the network, putting traffic from one side out the other side, plus whatever fundamental network/firewall services you need to accomplish that. When you start also trying to selectively route some of that traffic to actual services on the firewall itself, it gets really complex and ugly really fast, and even if you can get it working which is often very nontrivial, it’s also very fragile and it’s easy to blow open holes in your security this way.

  I’ve actually now got a pair of mini-PC firewalls, both set up using foomuuri, uCARP and Kea to do failover with each other so if one goes offline the other takes over its IP and starts routing traffic until it comes back. It’s not perfect or completely bulletproof but it’s pretty good for an amateur! In a pinch (when my previous, non-redundant firewall died) I’ve also used an GL.iNet travel router as my network’s primary router temporarily and their routers support an expansion board with 5G/SIM support so that could be an option too. I have to say it worked perfectly and was actually pretty nice, my only hesitation is that the travel router (at least the one I have, Beryl AX) seems to run a bit hot and I’m not sure it’s really intended for 24/7/365 operation (plus I need it for when I travel). They do make home routers too though, so maybe worth looking into, they’re really nice hardware running their own fork of OpenWRT out of the box.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apparently Debian has alienated the developers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t really understand anything because they don’t really think. They just repeat what they’re told while convincing themselves its an independent thought that appeared in their head as if by magic. These are the people outsourcing most of their thinking these days to ChatGPT, because it’s not something they’ve ever really valued or been interested in doing themselves. Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have to think about much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The signatures are still coming and it's already making an impact⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It will be hardly any work once a law passes, because they’ll make sure it is. Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).

  Besides, no one is saying they have to open source it. To be honest, the outcome from this petition that I would most like to see is simply a blanket indemnity to the community attempting to revive, continue and improve the software from that point forward. If the law says that it’s legal once a software is shut down, for the community to figure out a way to make it work again and make it their own, and puts no further responsibilities on the “rights holder” at all, I think that honestly solves the problem in 99% of cases. It would be nice if they gave the community a hand, released what they could, and tried not to be shit about it, (and I know some of them will be shit about it, but we’re pretty resourceful), as long as they’re not trying to sue every attempt into oblivion I think we’ll make a lot of progress on game preservation and make the gaming world a much better place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just installed YunoHost -- domain not registering?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You will likely have to use a temporary alternative until the name is removed so you can reclaim it. No idea how long that takes, it might not even happen automatically at all. It seems like there is a forum thread for it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do I do -- Incorrect?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Aha I see you did the text-based install then? I’ve never done that myself but I just tried it now and it worked fine for me with the default password it mentions. Make sure caps lock is off. You will not be able to see the password when you type it, so be extra careful you are typing it correctly.

  Most of the same cautions about internet access still apply, if your networking is active on this VM there’s a non-zero chance you can get hacked right away when you’re in default passwords/initial setup mode. If you continue to have trouble getting in, you should reinstall it once again onto a fresh VM with network mode set to NAT if possible, or even disabled completely, and see if it works in that configuration. It really is critical to get the password set up before opening up the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do I do -- Incorrect?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure what you mean by “what was provided”… who is providing a username and password for your yunohost?

  You are supposed to create your own username and password during the “Begin” setup process after it first installs. “root” and “yunohost” are very insecure and if you use passwords that are copy/pasted from somewhere else on a machine connected to the internet it will be hacked, potentially almost immediately. People have bots that literally just try to connect using these common default passwords all day every day to every site on the internet. I have literally had machines with such crappy passwords hacked within minutes of spinning them up. The same thing can happen even when you are first doing the setup process. If somebody else can get in, they can (most likely with a bot) do the setup process themselves and set up their OWN username/password, and now it will ask you for that password that THEY set, which you have no way of knowing. The instance belongs to the first person to claim it, and if that’s not you, you have to wipe it and start over.

  Your yunohost VM interface should not be exposed to the internet during setup. Even briefly, or someone else can immediately compromise it like this. The only way to ensure you are the first person to access it is to make sure you are the ONLY person who can access it, until it is properly set up and secured. Bots are WAY faster than you can be.

  Use localhost console, VM port forwarding or some other secure method of making sure nobody but your own host computer can access the IP of the server where you are setting things up, until it has a strong, secure password (not “yunohost”) and make sure you have all its security features configured and working before you even think about making it accessible to the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨32, f. Are there any dating sites that are actually free and don't suddenly force me to pay to actually use the site?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  From my understanding (and experience) dating apps/online dating in general is dead, fucked up beyond repair by capitalism, toxic incels, predators, scammers, crooks and most recently AI. No technology can possibly survive such an onslaught and most of them wouldn’t profit from doing so. They have a financial incentive to attract repeat customers.

  In person meeting and dating should be the obvious alternative, but apparently nobody goes out socializing anymore since COVID and nobody can afford hobbies because of the economy and chronic social malaise and terminal online doomscrolling has broken people’s ability to form human connection anyway so I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.

  If there is a useful option I’d love to know what it is too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am looking to broaden my youtube channels that I follow. What female channel are you following?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In absolutely no particular order:

  www.youtube.com/@VBirchwood - historical fashion/lifestyle
  www.youtube.com/@EmmaThorneVideos - a self-described “silly little guy” (hint: not a guy) politely mocking religion and other stuff that deserves mockery
  www.youtube.com/@darbinorvar - woodworking and maker stuff
  www.youtube.com/@AtRachelGilmore - Canadian independent journalist
  www.youtube.com/@AnnaRudolfChess - originally chess (she’s an international master and chess commentator) and video games but after a long mental health hiatus, lately more mental health discussions and variety
  www.youtube.com/@LauraFarms - farming, obviously
  www.youtube.com/@SpaceMog - astronomy, astrophysics, space
  www.youtube.com/@karilawler - retro computers/video games and programming
  www.youtube.com/@acottonsock - Playing The Sims with sometimes inappropriate commentary
  www.youtube.com/@EngineeringwithRosie - engineering explainers with an emphasis on renewable energy
  www.youtube.com/@BeckyStern - electronics maker stuff
  www.youtube.com/@aprilclucks - incredibly deadpan sarcastic Australian life advice and mockery of everything and herself too usually

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many homes in rural areas have a front yard full of junk?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just because they look rusty and old doesn’t mean they’re junk, but even if they are, there will be no urgency to dispose of them. Most people who aren’t minimalists don’t dispose of things except for aesthetic reasons, unless they’re out of room. Many rural people have a relatively narrow scope for aesthetics that doesn’t include what you might call the front yard, and being rural, it’s really hard to run out of room. Therefore, there is no urgency to dispose of stuff that has become “junk”, and when you do, you will probably do it all at once, as a project, once you start feeling like you’re running out of room, which takes quite awhile, so you’re very likely to see the development of the junk pile in its intermediate stages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a term for something like Imposter Syndrome, but instead feeling like it’s other people conspiring to give you an illusory taste of success with intent to pull it away and screw you over?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s just called capitalism.

  For an actual answer, I’d turn to the idiom of dangling a carrot which evokes the idea of an animal chasing a carrot being held out in front of it on a stick by its own rider, unable to reach the carrot since it moves forward as they do, but chasing it forward anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So if we're just good with careening into fascism 2.0 what does the future look like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah people thinking the Democratic Party is going to save them are delusional IMO. They are part of it and many of them have been working towards the same goal. They are a false opposition at best. Not all of them, some of them are legit, like Bernie, and look how he has been treated by the Dem establishment. Any real resistance is marginalized.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Subnautica's Original Creators Have Been Removed From Unknown Worlds "Effective Immediately", As Krafton Makes Concerning Leadership Changes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh good now maybe the Subnautica developers can go independent to make a spiritual successor that isn’t called Subnautica and isn’t garbage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In Canada, Nintendo is increasing the price of the original Nintendo Switch.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuck Canada in particular, as usual. It’s starting to feel a bit personal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Russian Internet users are unable to access the open Internet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They are freely expressing their fear of dangerous western ideas which must be censored to protect the motherland /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  KSP1 is the bees knees and the modding community is still going as strong as ever. Still worthwhile even at full price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We don’t absolutely know what the future holds for our own planet much less the universe, so it’s impossible to answer this with any conviction, but based on my current understanding or the general scientific consensus, and the fact that the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating, no, by placing them at the edge of the observable universe and the effects of relativity, their hypothetical signals will never reach Earth and almost certainly not the Earth that we know of that’s orbiting Sol and full of humans patiently observing the universe for signs of their lost ancestors.

  But we don’t know with any certainty that the universe’s expansion or acceleration is going to continue indefinitely, we don’t even fully understand why it is happening. However, if the universe is infinite, and is going to last an infinite amount of time, well “infinity” is a very long time and you can’t rule out the fact that another wormhole could open and bring them (or their signals) home at some point now that you’ve proven such a wormhole can exist. So when you put all the things we do know and the things we don’t know together, I’d give them about 50/50 chances, with a margin of error of plus or minus 50%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Stellar Blades] This game completely broke them⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most game media/advertising/reviewing is garbage and cannot be trusted. I play games that look fun. I have a particular definition of fun specific to me alone. I’ll watch actual gameplay to decide if it looks fun to me. I might watch technical reviews and benchmarks that tell me if my hardware will be able to play it. IDGAF what culture war moralizing poop that some idiots want to headline it with and babble about to get views on their articles and channels.

  I don’t think Stellar Blade looks like the kind of fun I personally enjoy so I’m going to pass, but I’m not going to judge or shame anyone who’s enjoying the fuck out of it because there’s nothing to shame. It’s a game. It’s made to be played and be fun for people to play. Have fun. Don’t worry about the drama storms. They’re pointless and devoid of meaning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI wins $200m contract with US military for ‘warfighting’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, I see I’ve found a fellow member of la révolution. I applaud your scientific curiosity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI wins $200m contract with US military for ‘warfighting’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m really curious what brainrot is in that man’s head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With all the animals that die in the sea, is it possible they get pickled in there?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ocean salinity varies slightly but averages around 3.5%. Brackish water would be less than 3% as long as it’s saltier than freshwater, which is limited to 0.05%. Brine, which OP is asking for, is water with 5% or greater salinity. The ocean doesn’t get that high but salt lakes definitely can, the Dead Sea is almost 35% salinity. Also why it’s called the “Dead” sea, FWIW. Maybe you could pickle stuff there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm trying to understand a financial question in a video. A lady is saying that she will Payback equity when she refinances, but I'm not sure how that helps her in the context to the video.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From my understanding of this messed up situation:

  She has half of the equity in the house, he has the other half, maybe not exactly half and half, this is common after a divorce and the actual proportions are irrelevant. In order for HER to acquire full equity in the house (the house she lives in and considers hers and that the divorce has apparently assigned to her), she must pay his half of the equity BACK to him when she refinances. Thus, she both “has” equity and “owes” equity. Both are true. She has her half (which is money on paper and represents her ownership of the house, not money you can spend), she owes the other half which is also equity, just not hers (which is real money she DOES need to spend, and will be refinanced into the form of a larger mortgage with higher payments). Once she refinances, he gets the lump sum representing his equity, and she gets a bigger mortgage. He could then use that lump sum to pay back the alimony with. But that’s all in the future, and the future is an uncertain place that doesn’t help anyone now and that nobody wants to wait for.

  So she suggests that she’ll forgive his alimony if he forgives the equity she owes him, because that is probably a much bigger amount of money that she owes him and would then get to keep, compared to many many years of alimony that she might not even get if he’s not going to be around that long and isn’t working or goes bankrupt or whatever else might happen in the intervening years.

  The key moment in the video as far as I’m concerned is when she mentions her husbands “new wife and kids”. I think that if you strip away all the reasonable-sounding explaining and arguments, that’s what this is really about, she wants to get as much as she can in cold hard cash right away, even if it means cashing out some of her ex-husbands 401k now, so that the other wife and kids don’t get their hands on it and then she doesn’t have to worry about them anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube Will Add an AI Slop Button Thanks to Google’s Veo 3⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The “Unhook” addon (increasingly required for Youtube now, in my opinion) will still completely block this as it blocks all shorts. Fuck shorts anyway. Also as TechnologyConnections pointed out in a recent video, the subscription feed still and always has completely bypasses Youtube’s recommended brainrot anyway and allows you to subscribe to and follow the creators and topics you actually care about. Until we have a viable alternative to Youtube (and hopefully stuff like this will drive that to happen sooner rather than later) the other option is to stick to subscriptions as much as possible and only subscribe to creators that don’t abuse this or use shorts at all, preferably.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First time setting up a NAS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For RAID that’s pretty much it as far as I know, but I’m pretty sure it can be a lot simpler and more flexible using some of these newfangled filesystems that are out nowadays like LVM and ZFS and maybe BTRFS? I can’t pretend I’m super up to date on all the latest technologies, I know they can do some really incredible stuff though. I’m not familiar enough to recommend it, but it might be worth looking into what they can do for you if your NAS supports it. From what I understand they don’t use RAID at all, although they might be able to simulate it, instead they treat disks as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and use their own strategies to spread whole filesystems and partition structures across them in various safe and redundant ways that are way more flexible, that don’t care about disk size or anything like that, they’ll handle any shapes and sizes and I think they can be expanded and contracted pretty freely. I think ZFS in particular is really heavily used for this and supports some crazy complicated structures.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First time setting up a NAS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter so much if they’re in 2x 2 bays or 1x 4 bay that’s backing itself up. It might give a little extra redundancy and safety to have them on separate NAS but the backup software is what’s going to be doing the heavy lifting here and it shouldn’t really matter whether it’s talking to two different disks/arrays on the same machine/NAS (as long as the NAS allows you to split the 4 drives into 2 different arrays which from my experience they do)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First time setting up a NAS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know what kind of data this is but when you say the whole household’s data is going to be on it, I want to take a moment to point out that while RAID1 is redundant, it is NOT a backup. Both drives will happily delete, overwrite, corrupt, or encrypt all your data as quickly as you can blink the moment they believe something has told them to, and will both do it simultaneously to both “redundant” copies of your data. It also won’t help if your powersupply blows up and nukes both drives at once. It only guards against individual hardware failure of a single disk, nothing else. While that failure mode is quite common (and using RAID actually increases the risk of it) it’s important to remember that it’s also not the only cause of data loss.

  If any of this data is important and irreplaceable, consider whether you’d be better off spending your additional future budget setting up another pair of drives to maintain continuous backups. There are a variety of simple tools that can create incremental, time-machine-like backups from hard-drive based storage to other hard-drive based storage while using a minimal amount of additional space (I use this rock-solid script based on rsync but literally there are dozens of backup tools that do almost exactly the same thing, often using rsync under the hood themselves). This still won’t help you if say, your house burns down with both drive arrays inside it, but it’s an improvement over a single huge RAID NAS and gives you the option to roll back from a known-good snapshot or restore a file that was deleted or corrupted long ago and you never noticed.

  To answer your original question, it generally isn’t possible to do what you’re asking. You might be able to get away with starting the RAID array as RAID1+0 and pretending that half the drives (the RAID1 mirror side) have failed, but that will mean your two existing disks are running in RAID0 striping mode with no RAID1 mirrors, and a failure of EITHER one will lose all your data until you get the second two drives installed. And that’s super sketchy and would be tricky to even set up. You cannot run a RAID1+0 with only two drives in mirror mode because they’ll both be missing their striped RAID0 volume. In fact, if this happens on a live array, you lose the whole array in that case too. Despite having 4 drives, RAID1+0 is technically still only singly-redundant. Any single failure can be tolerated, but two failures can make the whole array unrecoverable if they happen to be the wrong two failures (both failures from the same stripe, leaving only two working RAID1 mirrors of the other stripe), and due to striping it really is unrecoverable. Only small chunks of each file will be available on the surviving RAID1 mirrors.

  In almost all cases, changing the geometry of the array means rebuilding it from scratch, and you usually need some form of temporary storage to be able to do that. The good news is, if you decide to add 2 drives to an existing 2 drive RAID1 setup, you have 4 drives, each 4TB. and you cannot possibly have more than 4TB of data because your existing two drives are RAID1 and only have 4TB capacity between them. You can probably use 3 of those drives to set up a 4-drive RAID 1+0 with a missing drive, after copying all the data from your RAID1 array onto drive #4 temporarily. Then once the 3-drive array is up, copy it back onto the NAS array. Finally, you can slot drive #4 into the NAS as well, treating it as a “new” drive to replace the “failed” one, and the array should sync over all the stripes it needs and bring it into the array properly. This is all definitely possible with Linux’s built-in software RAID tools (I’ve done stupider things) however whether your specific NAS box will let you to do this successfully is something I can’t promise.

  It’s important to keep in mind this is all sketchy as hell (remember what I said about backups and asking whether this data was irreplaceable? yeah. don’t stop thinking about that), but technically it should work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky is more open than you think.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It is, but it’s also necessary sometimes. If governments didn’t have any power and could just be ignored or openly defied without consequences, we wouldn’t have to care about what they want to censor. But they do have power, despite all our wishing that they didn’t, and we can’t organize a resistance to them without careful maneuvering and sometimes at least making an appearance of playing by their rules. Government censorship you can unsubscribe from is objectively better than censorship you can’t. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Child Welfare Experts Horrified by Mattel's Plans to Add ChatGPT to Toys After Mental Health Concerns for Adult Users⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “But first, we need to discuss the white genocide in South Africa!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What peertube channel do you recommend?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not Peertube, but as at least a step away from Youtube I’ve found a lot of my favourite creators immediately cross-post all their videos to Odysee (including electronics guys like Louis, Bigclive, GreatScott, etc) and I’ve also found some new channels to watch there. It’s not a great site, it’s marginally better than Youtube, which is not a high bar. For obvious reasons, I’m looking forward to finding recommendations in Peertube too though so I’ll be watching this thread.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “remove any thing that they might be able to do” is a hilariously broad brush to apply to three letter agencies in this day and age that were doing things like this 50 years ago.

  I’m not saying it’s realistic that OP is being targeted for such surveillance. But if they are, good fucking luck! Flashing your firmware ain’t going to do shit when they’ve just gone ahead and replaced the chips on your board with their own that act exactly like a normal chip but have extra code that doesn’t get flashed when they don’t want it to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do fancy cars look fancy and cheap cars don't? Can't you just slap a Lamborghini-style chassis onto a lawnmower engine if you want?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You absolutely can slap a Lambo body on anything (provided it fits) and there is a literal cottage industry that exists around doing so. It’s not popular because, let’s be honest, it’s pretty silly, and everyone involved acknowledges its pretty much just for fun and entertainment. The status symbol of “owning a Lamborghini” goes away forever the second you start the engine.

  There is a lot of psychology that goes into designing the appearance of cars. Like, an extreme amount. Car companies spend millions designing and refining body shapes and styles, and building brand images, and pushing commercials that seed these ideas into your head about their brand looking a certain way and that look therefore implying quality, they’re connecting all those dots in your head, one marketing campaign at a time, and it works because we’re honestly pretty gullible creatures at least when somebody wants to spend millions upon millions of dollars researching exactly how they can weasel their way into your brain.

  And this might surprise you, but the same “looks incredible but the worst piece of shit ever” can certainly apply to luxury vehicles. Aside from notorious reliability and repairability issues, Lamborghinis don’t usually win any races either. They won’t win a drag race, they won’t win an oval track race, they won’t win a rally race. They’re fast, certainly, but they’re not the fastest and for what you pay for a Lamborghini you could build a much, MUCH better purpose-built race car. You could probably build 10 purpose-built race cars. Hell, people build race cars out of junkyard parts that can beat Lamborghinis. They’re not the end-all-be-all of cars, nor are any of the other luxury brands. They have some nice features but they also have a lot of dumb features and yes, a lot of cut corners too. They’re designed to be desirable and profitable, not to be the best.

  So to answer your question, it absolutely IS the case for cars, in fact it’s probably even moreso the case than it is with computer parts. Unless you really need to roar down the highway towing a 10,000 pound trailer at 80 mph and still get up to that speed in 5 seconds flat, you really only need like probably 30-50 horsepower max for most of the daily driving that people do, but people’s driving habits and attitudes would have to change and they would hate the feel of gradual acceleration, so they would simply never buy such a car. I think we really underestimate how incredible even the cheapest “crappiest” cars are. We’re talking about machines cheap enough for almost everybody in our society to own, that can drive at high speeds, in perfectly dry, climate-controlled comfort, carrying many passengers and cargo, in almost any weather short of a tornado or flood, with excellent reliability for hundreds of thousands of miles, that provide constant lighting and electricity and entertainment, all while maintaining a high degree of safety for the occupants.

  If you’d rather putter around on a riding lawnmower with a Lamborghini body kit on it, you absolutely can do that, but you have to understand that once you start comparing the limited features and abilities it provides you will quickly find what you’ve constructed is the real “piece of shit” in comparison. Just don’t forget your slow-moving vehicle sign!