You.com, Perplexity, UEFI, IPSec

1. You.com - Here is my final verdict: this organization is fundamentally incapable of delivering a basic, functional product. While the subsystems they use work just fine, their pathetic platform sits right in the middle, screwing everything up. Do not use You.com, and definitely don’t pay for a service that isn’t worth a cent and exists only to cause trouble and pain. - If you don’t believe me, go take a look at their support forum. And in case you need another reason to bail, let’s not forget they actively censor the place, scrubbing posts to hide any mention of the serious issues people are actually reporting. - The fact is that there's no way to fix broken companies or products. The flaw is a much deeper cultural and attitudinal problem within the organization. If their intention is not to make a working product, nor do they care about the results, it is what it is. The only sane option is to get rid of such services, because there's practically nothing else you can do. - The specs and price make it look like a good deal, but the company struggles with execution and their response to failures. The UX is so flawed it's difficult to list every issue. This lack of quality suggests there may also be underlying security concerns invisible to the user. Honestly, Perplexity is way superior

2. Perplexity.ai - Shortcuts, you can create and edit shortcuts, but you can't delete... What an UX. Well, you already know my opinion about that at this point. Typical "engineering", we can add data to database, but we've never thought that it would ever require any maintenance like pruning, reindexing, compacting/vacuuming etc. - So classic, with many projects. It almost seems like norm, that they don't think it through. Of course on optimized lean pipeline you can always say, that it's something, we're going to worry about later. I personally always think about data cleanup already when desinging the database layout, relations, and key fields which CAN be used to efficiently prune the database. - Yet in this case, it could be intentional dark pattern style push. Just like many retail stores here have great offers, but to use the offer, you have to show it from their mobile app. What a crappy move. Similarly Perplexity says that to delete shortcuts you'll have to install Comet Browser because shortcut deletion isn't supported with your current browser. - Lol, seems highly well targeted dark pattern. There's no technical reason. It's all politics. In this case it's even targeting paid users, which really sucks. - I just love it, when companies do everything they can, to deserve harsh criticism and bad mouthing. But it's based. - Maybe they can someday hire someone or even get an AI (duuh) which allows them to show list of entries, with edit and delete buttons. - Maybe they're aiming to you.com level, where you can just openly say that it's so bad, that only sane way to deal with such company is to avoid it completely and preferring other services. - 'Persistent UX friction like this often leads to negative brand sentiment, particularly among the "Privacy and Tech Expert" demographic who value granular control over their digital environment.'

3. UEFI boot - Lots of tinkering with EFI options, EFI boot, secure boot, yawn. Problem was that one old laptop wasn't booting Linux Mint, and it did lead to deep dive into the UEFI rabbit hole. Brain hurts, but it's not that complex after all. It's just annoying when you need to dive something somewhat complex to fix things, even if you wish that things would just work out of the box. UEFI (@ WIkipedia) kw: Shim & MOK, ESP, GPT, db, dbx, KEK, SBAT. initramfs, mokutil, mokmanager, efibootmgr

4. IPsec VPN - AI said: "The Trap: The IKE daemon (Charon) on the CPU is still running perfectly fine. It continues to send and receive DPD keepalives (which are IKE packets) with the remote peer. The Result: Both routers think the peer is "Up/Alive" because DPD is succeeding, but actual user traffic is being blackholed by the frozen offload engine." - Luckily this is not the case. It was enough to modify the router configuration slightly (commit change, not actually change) and after that it worked. Which probably means that the configuration was applied slightly differently when I recommitted basically the same config, without any meaningful change. I just turned hardware offloading / acceleration off, and when it worked, I turned it back on again, and it still kept working. - Normal day. IPsec (@ Wikipedia)

2026-11-01