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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • They won’t do that because it’s expensive and free software generally doesn’t have the budget to do this

    I don’t know why you think the “just works” is any different from tunneling with a service. Your server is still opened to the internet through upnp with direct connections and through a tunnel to plex.tv when a direct connection is not possible. In fact plex is inherently less secure because their infra is both the encryption endpoint (as opposed to your client with Jellyfin and Tailscale or whatever) and their infra has been vulnerable in the past (like the massive breach in 2022).

    Jellyfin with something like nginx and a vpn is open to the internet, yes, but a service that tunnels (like wireguard, Tailscale) bypasses this issue and it’s up to you to set it up as to your level of comfort

    Plex is just easier but as with all things tech (especially those infected with VC dollars) “ease” translates to less secure and far more likely to exploit your data





  • Planes are similar to income inequality in that a (relatively) small percentage overwhelmingly use services wastefully

    Almost 90% of the world’s population doesn’t fly at all in any given year. In the USA 12% of the population takes almost 70% of flights. In France 2% take 50%.

    American Airlines report 87% of its customers fly 1 time per year which accounts for 50% of its income. The other 50% is accounted by the remaining 13%. There is a small contingency of the population that basically flies almost every single day

    To put it more simply roughly 1% of people taking frequent flights account for about 50% of aviation emissions

    Normal people should continue to be allowed to have their once every decade trip to change the endlessly drudgery of their working class lives for a week (even if much of that is not an actual vacation as much as stuff like visiting a home they’ve had to move far away from for employment). Once again blame the greedy selfish people that hedonistically overindulge at the expense of everyone around them.

    If you want to get angry at an entire industry that is extremely destructive and genuinely has no point other than excess look at cruises. Just go to a fucking hotel/casino on land, 99% of the experience and like 5% (if that) of the emissions



  • Also Clinton looking at intel (based on credible statements from people involved in the first wtc attack and plane bombing that no one remembers anymore because relatively few people died) related to bin Laden planning “a huge attack” in the final few months of his presidency and being like “ehhhh”

    Then bush looking at the same intel and being like “ehhh”

    Then 10 years later Clinton writes about it in his autobiography as his biggest regret

    The thing that the loose change crowd got wrong is that it wasn’t that 9/11 was straight up planned by the USA, it’s more that it was allowed to happen. Whether that’s due to incompetence, truly a belief that it wouldn’t be all that big of a deal (which, tbf, was easily possible), or opportunistic is debatable. Regardless, the opportunistic got quite a lot out of it




  • Basically all commercial dvds with the exception of stuff like some independent releases and essentially all blurays have copy protection (CSS for dvd and AACS for bluray, for bluray it’s built into the spec)

    They’re both fairly trivially defeated (for dvd extremely so because CSS is completely broken, whereas br has key revocation so it’s technically a bit more complex though practically this doesn’t mean much)

    I don’t know much about Germanys laws but iirc they are one of the places that takes piracy and torrenting more seriously, no?


  • Interactive media like menus is a nightmare to support. Kodi has some support but only on pc. Also to your last sentence it’s a grey area, if you rip the disk to any format you’re essentially violating copyright because making a copy requires circumventing encryption, which violates the dmca (assuming USA). Might as well just use makemkv then, unless you’re real serious about archiving literally everything


  • Why not both? I use kodi when possible because it runs circles around the mostly dogshit Jellyfin apps for various platforms. Jellyfin for kodi and the kodi queue sync plugin import my library and watch status. I still have the option to use Jellyfin apps or web on devices that can’t run kodi (or when remote) and as a result can have all of my media accessible from all my devices without needing multiple copies and centralized metadata administration


  • LLMs are sycophantic and will do what it takes to align with your framing

    Here is the response to your posts fed into one with the framing “why is this bullshit”. There are better responses but why bother putting in far more effort than you did:

    This is a much better-dressed version of the same move — real citations bolted onto claims they don’t actually support. It’s more sophisticated bullshit, not a vindication.

    Going through it:

    The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis is real but doesn’t say what’s being claimed. Erik Hoel’s OBH is genuinely a real, interesting hypothesis — but it’s about why we dream (proposed as a regularization process against overfitting to daily life), not a claim that some people’s brains “run out of plasticity” or hit a “ground state” requiring demolition. Citing it here is a bait-and-switch: borrowing the credibility of a real, narrow hypothesis to backstop a much broader and untested claim it was never meant to support.

    Point 2 is real but doesn’t establish a “structural” or biological claim. Research on dogmatism and cognitive flexibility (e.g. Zmigrod’s work) is real and does show correlations between rigidity and extremism across ideologies. But “lower cognitive flexibility on psychological tests” is not the same as “synaptic connections have crystallized and occupy physical volume.” The report quietly swaps a behavioral/psychometric finding for a structural/anatomical one — that’s the same sleight of hand as the original post, just relayed through real citations.

    Point 3 conflates two different things. Synaptic consolidation and memory reconsolidation are real, well-established mechanisms — but they apply to specific memories, not generally to “belief systems” or “core values” as monolithic structures. There’s no research establishing that changing an opinion about a social group requires literally destabilizing identity-load-bearing memory structures in the way described. The “metabolically demanding” claim is real for reconsolidation at the level of individual fear memories in animal studies; extrapolating that to “changing your mind about people of other races costs forbidden metabolic energy” is not something neuroscience has shown.

    Point 4 is legitimate and is honestly the strongest part — identity-protective cognition (Dan Kahan’s work) is well-supported and genuinely explains motivated resistance to belief change. Notably, this is the one part that doesn’t need any biological mechanism at all — it’s a cognitive/social psychology finding, not a neurons-and-synapses one.

    The summary sentence is the tell. “Aligns with the scientific consensus” is doing enormous work to paper over the fact that none of the four citations, individually, support the specific mechanistic claims in the original post (no plasticity “running out,” no literal “ground state,” no “forbidden” metabolic cost). Each citation is real, but they’re being stitched into a chain of inference none of the original authors made and that doesn’t follow from their actual findings.

    So the underlying instinct — rigid/dogmatic thinkers show less cognitive flexibility and resist belief change for identity-protective reasons — is genuinely supported by real research (points 2 and 4 particularly). But the specific neurological storytelling (overfitting as literal synaptic crystallization, forbidden metabolic costs, needing to be “torn down and rebuilt”) remains invented, now laundered through real papers that don’t actually claim what’s attributed to them. This is a fairly common pattern with AI research tools: ask it to find support for a thesis, and it will surface real, adjacent literature and then summarize it in a way that overstates the connection to your original claim. The citations are real; the synthesis is not.


  • 5 felt like they half wrote 3 different games, realized they were running out of time, and then smushed them all together. Finishing the campaign becomes a chore long before the ending. Speaking of the ending if you do manage to chug through your reward is an abrupt and extremely weak ending that again feels like they just ran out of time

    It’s crazy because then they plopped out red dead 2 which was a tremendously excellent narrative by comparison. They clearly have the means to make something fantastic.


  • Pod8, not Amazon related but a like 3-8000 dollar mattress topper that can heat or cool depending on a number of factors. The model that adjusts temp is server sided so it will work without a subscription (for now) but just in basic “set temp” mode, when it’s sold as this device that tracks heart rate and movement to dynamically adjust temp. Tech bros with no kids and too much cash love it

    It also stops working if Amazon web services go down, which is hilarious (which is maybe why people link it to Amazon, but that’s a different and worse problem where Amazon controls like 50% of the internet through data hosting)


  • It will shift to streaming that can run on anything and things like mods, running older clients, and cheats will essentially be impossible. Unless of course you pay for them with in app purchases, which publishers love

    Short sighted consumers will eat it up because “oh now I don’t need an expensive console, I can just run an app on my tv!”

    Then comes the death of all the above, as well as a generation of kids having access to not just gaming, but 3d modeling and serious digital art, programming (as well as learning through modding and finding ways to cheat), music production, video editing, etc. how many of those things were only available to kids via piracy? Capitalists don’t give a shit about this. They’re salivating at everything become a streaming client which both essentially eliminates piracy as well as turning a one time software purchase into perpetual subscription hell.

    The crazy part is everyone but the tiniest sliver of people will be fucked by this. You know how musicians have shifted to basically making dick from streaming, and view it essentially as advertisement to funnel people into physical merch and concert ticket purchases, their only remaining revenue streams? Developers will be in the same place. It’s arguably advantageous now to be on something like gamepass but that’s because Microsoft is purposefully taking a small percentage barely above costs (10.5%). Once it’s dominant do you think they won’t shift to 30% like apple, steam, and google? And probably even more once distribution outside of their platform is unfeasible?

    And for the short sighted consumer saving $3-500 on a console once every 5-10 years becomes another $30 subscription, which outpaces the cost of a console in 2 years and also robs you of the shred of autonomy you did have



  • The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.

    But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.

    There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad


  • ram is a volatile commodity that, while difficult to manufacture, is not as difficult as say a gpu or cpu. As a result in the past manufacturers have been pushed to sell supplies at or even below cost. It seems like a no brainer to start up a new fab right now but the reality is that would take years to get to a point where it’s outputting any kind of reasonable supply and in that time prices could (and hopefully will) return to a much thinner margin

    Apple could, for example, start up a fab. They have the cash. But it’s a lot of cash, it doesn’t stop (the fab needs continual significant investment to stay competitive), and when ram prices dive they are stuck holding the bag for this 15-20 billion dollar fab that needs several billion dollars a year to keep playing the game. This is why they stick to fabrication of things where they can differentiate (eg m series processors) and control the market. And then they can do what they’re doing right now: leverage their huge position to get far better prices than someone like valve, who’s barely a player in the hardware game, and ensure the architecture of their custom silicon maximizes ram performance (uma) and even use that influence to codesign new types of ram that align with their interests (lpddr5x)