at no point did I deny apples practices are shitty and anti consumer

but the history of how we got here is that microsoft spent time lobbying hard to make sure that companies like apple could do exactly what they are doing

apple is far from the only one who does it as well? Basically every modern tech giant flexes their anti consumer muscle every day. the one defense of apple is that you can basically avoid their shit by not buying it, as opposed to a company like google who are actively vying to utilize their extreme dominance in browser market share to change the internet forever to make adblocking impossible (very similar to 90s microsoft behavior)

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, etc etc

Sorry you were challenged to read what was roughly 3/4 of a page. Maybe this is more digestible for you

Funny enough, apples behavior was enabled by microsoft setting really shitty precedents in the 90s. oh whoops!

Seriously though microsoft was a force in the 90s and early 2000s. If you weren’t around for it you simply don’t realize how insane it was for something like computing to have come around and quickly take over the world with microsoft being the thing. you only had a pc (or maybe laptop). That pc ran windows over 90% of the time, and you used internet explorer over 90% of the time. Like I’m not making this up, IE, the worst browser of all time, peaked at 95% market share in 2002.

Nowadays edge is a minor contender but a distant third (chrome about 70%, safari about 17%, edge about 5, Firefox 2.5). Windows market share still dominates on PC but has fallen significantly from 90+% in the 1990s to 75ish% for windows 10 and falling. Plus nowadays people don’t use PCs nearly as much. I’m on a phone right now, which is the dominant computing device (and windows phone was a joke)

Anyway in true American capitalistic fashion when they had this undeniable monopoly apple was a joke at the time and Linux was for extreme hobbyists and servers and such. So what did microsoft do? Destroy competition, destroy any political machinations that could threaten their future with hefty lobbying, destroy open standards in favor of their own proprietary bullshit, etc. Europe attempted some antitrust stuff against them similar to what is happening to google now (to forcefully break off IE from windows) but it was unsuccessful

So when you’re frustrated about the fact that tech does not play nice together? Does not adhere to open standards, forces proprietary bullshit on you, open displays anti competitive and anti consumer behavior? Blame microsoft and politicians that were grossly ignorant to a rapidly changing world (although to be fair you don’t have to be a tech genius to understand that computers being forced to work with each other and have transparency in how they work is beneficial)

And the next time you see some dork praising bill gates for being the “cool billionaire” because he has a charity remember that his wealth is built on these destructive practices. He lead microsoft through this period and this doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed countless businesses that dared to compete by leveraging the size of his company (eg draining their resources with lawsuits) rather than competing fair and square.

He personally fucked the landscape of technological advancement for generations on top of that because he had the arrogance to think that microsoft knew how best to handle it. Now it’s blown up and he doesn’t care because he got his bag. His charity is the same problem: he holds his wealth and decides what causes are worthwhile, like a king. Fuck him, and fuck all the technocrats that have no sense of ethics aside from “make me more money and do whatever I want”.

What are you trying to find

Don’t encode lossy to lossy. The encoding will take forever and the image quality will suffer. If you want file size savings redownload your media in h265 or whatever. Or temporarily download a lossless copy, encode, and delete.

Working hard increases the chances of success is a better way to phrase it but networking is basically a necessity and luck is paramount

I wonder how excited these guys were when they found out horny goat weed is an actual thing

You’re seeing the end result of “boycott” problems right now though

They will simply take your money. They will pay you increasingly less, tax the little bit they pay you increasingly more, and use the money from the taxes they forcibly take from you to launder your money right back to the oligarchs. Why do you think musk is destroying shit? Why do you think they are pushing to privatize everything? That last little bit of power you have, to vote with your wallet, will become increasingly meaningless

iphone holds its value better I think is what they’re going for

chatgpt is stagnant, the newest model was lackluster despite using way more resources and costing a shitload of cash, Altman is floundering and on his way out he’s going to try do some lobbying bullshit

Copyright is bullshit and honestly if it disappeared it would help small creators more than anything but openai is not a small creator and guaranteed they will lobby for only huge corps like them to get such an exception. You and I will still get sued to shit by disney or whoever for daring to make $500 off of a shitty project that used some sample or something while meta and openai get free reign to steal the entirety of humanity’s creative output with no recompense

You can just say bluray, disc is implied

DVDs?? is this article from 2006?

I think it was the illness. Even without the illness based on the first games ending and the fact that Arthur was not mentioned or existed within it I was pretty sure I knew how rdr2 was going to end before I started but the illness gave it such a somber tone. Arthur recognized his mortality and really started to reflect.

It’s been ages since I played rdr1 but as far as I remember John was more “I’m doing this to be done, for my family!”. The tone was much lighter as a result even though there were moments that were heavy. And the characters weren’t as developed so I didn’t care as much. Dutch was just a fucking monster in that game, bill and Javier were just props. But rdr2 fleshed them all out so much

I remember so many people being furious at rockstar for not releasing dlc on the scope of gta4 but honestly with this game I don’t know what form that narrative would take that could be satisfying.

The main narrative is concluded decisively obviously. It’s a prequel so continuing with John would just be rdr1. Another undead nightmare is eh, zombies are so played out. I guess you could fill in what went on with Dutch or some of the others that show up in rdr1 but frankly I don’t really want to play as them. I suppose you could intro some new character that’s part of their new gang. I dunno. I get why they didn’t prioritize it (well that and more so that dlc costs a ton to develop for a pitiful return relative to something like gta online, which is kind of sad)

Depends on budget and storage options

That’s not much data

Listed in order:

Encrypted nas. For that small amount of data raid 1. A shitty e waste pc would suffice. A ups would be ideal. This is least ideal honestly as it requires power, a maintainer, and isnt truly backup

SSD of some kind, even a usb stick Enterprise hard drive like wd gold or ironwolf pro Redundant copies, 2-3 ideally, store in various cool dry locations

LTO tape - far more resilient than hard drives and cost effective per tb but downside is that you need a very expensive ($3-5000) tape drive to utilize them, also very slow to read/write, older/cheaper tape formats (I believe pre lto8?) don’t have the ability to act as an external disk where you can just drag and drop files and are more of a pain to use

Blu-ray M-DISK. Upside for these are that they are very resilient, can be stored basically anywhere assuming you put them in a sealed container, and will last many many years (probably longer than you’ll be alive). Downside is that storage per disk is very low (100gb), cost per disk is high, and write speed is low. so you will need ~ 50 for 5tb of data, each disk is about $25 (so $1225 though tbf there’s probably bulk pricing) and it would take 37.5 hours to burn them. But this would be the most resilient of all

Cloud storage - backblaze, tresorit, icedrive, etc

Hybrid solution - ideal scenario. Load a hard drive or two and lock them away somewhere. If you have access to a Blu-ray burner maybe burn a handful of m-disks of your most critical data (not all 5tb but the most important 1-200gb or so). If you can access a tape drive do that too. Ideally update the tape and hard drives monthly. Update the Blu-ray as needed. local nas and cloud for daily backups

Obviously encrypt your files. Veracrypt is a good solution in a political dissident situation - can create hidden volumes so that if you are caught you can give up passwords and reveal only the outer volume, keeping the inner volume hidden

I love this game. It has several drawbacks, some of the physics make things feel like you’re underwater the whole time, the wanted system can be extremely irritating at the worst moments, and for a game with a world that is extremely alive the missions are extremely on rails where often even doing something slightly off the developers intended path will fail you

But despite that I still love it. The game is gorgeous years later. They put so much effort into the world. It’s not just the graphics, it’s every detail that just makes it feel so alive. Walking around the town the npcs are so thought out, have so much dialogue. The animals too. I remember playing other open world games after and just noticing more so how lifeless they felt in comparison; that npcs would repeat dialogue after 2 or 3 lines, animals would run in circles, etc. and the story is great.

I hope that once gta6 is done they turn to rdr3. Its overall a much better series with a stronger narrative, better characters, etc. with red dead they seem to not be as overly concerned with shitting it up with online bullshit and microtransactions though so the series might be done for

Then you won’t browse about 20% of the Internet, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s disproportionately impacting sites you would generally want to browse

I posted to this effect in a Firefox alternatives thread: if you use an alternative low adoption rate FOSS browser you trade increased privacy via less/no data harvesting for decreased privacy via much higher susceptibility to browser fingerprinting by google/meta/etc. doesn’t matter if you resize your windows if your browser reports its one that only 5,000 people use. And something tells me the tech giants have a way around user agent spoofing

And now even if you don’t care about that? Fuck you. Cloudflare locks you out of the modern internet because of course anyone not using chrome or safari is a bot

I have pretty draconian privacy protections on my devices and home network. It makes the internet hostile. Captchas regularly fail and I have to try them many times. Embedded youtube videos always think I am a bot and refuse to play unless I sign in, I get weird interstitial pages with captchas on google search, yandex, etc (kagi and searx don’t so I use searx), etc.

Advertisers have pushed companies to make the internet openly hostile to anyone who wants to maintain privacy. And to be clear google and meta are advertisers first and foremost. Fuck them

Depends on how anal you are about file sorting. My nas is almost fully automated and for the most part I don’t really rename files except for music. That’s not renamed but it is fingerprinted and auto tagged because Jellyfin displays music based on tags and if the tags aren’t consistent and clean your library will be a goddamn mess. as a result seeding music can be a nightmare bc unlike changing filenames modifying tags changes the files hash so then you absolutely cannot seed it anymore and music trackers are generally the most anal about seeding.

Just make sure once you get a setup that works well for you that you back it up. If you’re grabbing all your media from torrents you generally can grab it again (though not always, torrents die and niche media can be impossible to find a few years later) but your Jellyfin db and config have to be set up from scratch if shit goes south

Also if you end up going with a Linux distro for Jellyfin (not a bad idea) and you run into problems just remember like 60% of the time it’s because you fucked up file permissions somehow. And if you’re using docker, which isn’t necessary but totally okay (I use it), you probably fucked up remote path mappings if things aren’t working right

https://trash-guides.info/

This doesn’t cover Jellyfin but the rest of the stack the gets files into it. And frankly I disagree with a number of the ways that they do things but if you want a guide that gives you a setup that works with a community that is helpful (they have a well populated discord) this is a good starting point

Jellyfin is basically install it, create a library within the app, point said library at a folder on a drive somewhere with media on it.

You generally want to follow reasonable naming conventions, eg showname.s01e01.mkv but these have gotten fairly flexible over the years. You don’t need to worry about the extra stuff like webdl.1080p.flux.proper etc, that is typically ignored, though there are always edge cases. The bigger headache is making sure your files match thetvdb or themoviedb as this is primarily what Jellyfin will use for scraping. If you use sonarr/radarr you can ensure the files are properly ordered and even rename them to scrape perfectly but this can be a headache for seeding if you torrent as renaming the files will break shit. This gets you into needing to hardlink if you want to keep things automated unless you want to manually go in and rename the files in your torrent client which is a chore, the trash guides describe how to set this up

Anime can be a chore, especially older releases, because lots of good shows were released by random people and not groups. As a result they decided to just release things with sequential numbered episodes (eg instead of s01e01,02, etc it’s just a folder with 1.mkv, 2.mkv, etc). Or they released them with episode numbering that differs from what tvdb has because they insist that some other source like anidb is gospel. Certain western shows can be a nightmare because of stuff like this too (American dad is the worst)

From there it depends on how you want to customize your Jellyfin install. I use a kodi as a front end so the only plugin I bother with is Jellyfin for kodi. But before that when I used native clients I used jelly scrub, introskipper, etc. but a lot of those plugins are redundant now because they’ve been built into native Jellyfin.

You also may need to set up transcoding. This depends on your setup. My setup direct plays everything (ugoos streaming box with Coreelec/kodi). This is really only necessary if you have a setup that benefits from the direct formats, eg a surround sound setup, oled screen that can play dolby vision or a led that can do hdr10+, etc. or if your server is really garbage and can’t handle transcoding. But really it has to truly be awful; intel quicksync going back years can handle most modern files pretty effortlessly (unless you start messing with stuff like av1 or vp9), nvidia transcoding also works fine even with relatively old cards (though using much more power by nature of needing a gpu installed). If you have an amd cpu video core next works too although quicksync is objectively superior, though not necessarily enough to justify buying a whole new setup and creating a bunch of waste when your amd rig will work well enough.

As you can see transcoding is in and of itself a diverse topic and how you set that up depends on your setup and needs: what’s your hardware, do you need tonemapping, how many concurrent streams do you anticipate having, etc.

It sounds like a lot but if you play with it for like a weekend you’ll be fine and then you’ll be free of streaming bullshit and the associated data collection

fwiw they restored the post and blamed it on a moderator being too strict in applying a policy regarding non consensual ai porn. It’s objectively good they have policies banning such things but it was completely obvious from context that this was not meant to be pornographic at all

As such, one could easily read it with cynicism as responding to backlash as they only reviewed said moderators actions after this article came out and the associated clamor

I wonder if this is a response to someone jailbreaking all kindles ever the other day

Fuck kindles, get a different brand of ereader that just runs stripped android