100% this. Musk has dominated the news for the first month of his presidency, i bet he’s fucking furious

Oh I forgot that. We never got that here but I remember reading about it. Truly terrible

Plus who would possibly see a cyber truck and be like “oh okay it’s not a tesla phew”. that’s gotta be the most distinct car since like the Pontiac Aztec or the pt cruiser (both of which were also ugly pieces of shit)

This is not surprising at all, this is exactly what he did in the aftermath of Samoa. Instead of taking any accountability or reflecting on his actions for murdering 80+ children he blamed the populace for being malnourished and accepting vaccines (that’s why they died, of course) and then peddled this exact rhetoric word for word

They already are but just look into what you’re downloading. It’s been an issue with anime for years already. Even in the post HD era most anime is an odd resolution around like 900p. This led to many careless releases where uploaders either simply downscaled to 720p or upscaled to 1080p without any extra work, which created artifacts, ringing, etc. https://blog.kageru.moe/legacy/resolutions.html for more info

For legacy/pre-hd anime studios overwhelmingly lazily upscaled 480p or 576p dvd releases to 1080p for Blu-ray releases. This resulted in a lot of the problems you see with lazy AI upscales of non animation content: while the overall image appeared sharper there was a loss of finer detail, grain, etc. Some people prefer the sharper image over the more detailed image, some prefer the original with more fidelity. Of course, a proper remaster done with care by hand by an expert would’ve been great and probably balanced these issues but that’s not what they did 99% of the time, they just shit it through a hardware upscaler (as software ones didn’t exist yet). See azumanga daioh, love com, hunter x hunter 1999 version, etc

It sucks because it makes the whole automated stack downloading a bit of a pain

Self hosting pirated content wins again

And further he remained unrepentant for his role in murdering 83 Samoan children (most of which were babies). Instead deflecting blame onto the people of Samoa, saying it was because they were malnourished, or possibly because they had the audacity to get vaccinated during an epidemic that he had a direct role in causing (and thus the vaccines killed the unvaccinated children who died of measles, somehow)

My basic math skills have been terrible lately. I made a basic math error in a post the other day too. I was a strong student in math too

Is this cognitive decline? I’m not even 40

Tech was ruined in the 90s when capitalistic influences (microsoft being the dominant force but far from the only one) propagandized the industry and eventually populace at large with the idea that competition in the industry is what drives innovation.

Granted, much of their work was already done for them thanks to western influence perpetuating this ideal for ages. But when the frameworks for open standards, interoperability, and collaborative development were being proposed and put into place they were shot down and/or actively sabotaged

As a result 40 years later we have this mess. A landscape filled with nightmare tech. Fragmentation everywhere, design heavily influenced by a small handful of sociopaths with no empathy and active disdain for users, the idea of open standards is something that requires government intervention (and still rarely occurs), interoperability is something that has to be hacked around and frequently breaks as a means to encourage purchasing a competing product.

What could have been. Tech designed for people’s needs rather than tech designed to extract income

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

https://libgen.li/torrents/

Anna’s archive, as mentioned

Libgen has academic papers, which is really important. I’m not aware of any torrents that back up scihub, this is the closest thing

Stuff like kiwix gives you offline backups of Wikipedia

Bga is more about skill than equipment. I’ve done it with a cheap hot air gun and a toaster oven. Though it took many failed attempts to get right

But this isn’t always about your phone being repairable by you. It’s about your phone being repairable at all. Apple, google, samsung, et al have made it clear that they have no interest in refurbishing and repairing phones. That’s fine, they have the right to do whatever I guess. And further, this creates a great opportunity for many people to create small businesses.

America has very few markets left wherein one can create a business that is not utterly dominated by some conglomerate that will eat your shit. This is one where you can do so, with honest work (eg not just buying shit from Chinese manufacturers and reselling it on amazon for a profit).

However, the tech industry is openly hostile to small business and its consumers, so every business that has worked in this sector has been either destroyed or hollowed out to barely anything by big techs greedy bullshit in the name of security.

This would enrich communities: you would have another possible route where someone local could open a business within the community, that would hire locally within the community. But apple, samsung, microsoft, etc lobby extremely hard to make sure that they never have to stop pairing parts, providing spare parts, providing schematics, etc. and of course they’re not being asked to do this for free. They’re being asked to do this for a fair and reasonable cost, but they still refuse.

Now designing phones with user replaceable wear items like batteries or even common failure points like screens is obviously a good idea as well in theory but comes with challenges. However the challenges are mixed. Batteries can be user replaceable in thin and waterproof phones. The galaxy s5 is almost as thin and almost as waterproof as the s23 and has a user replaceable battery. If more engineering effort was put forth I’m sure it could be greatly improved. The issue is design; they (especially apple) don’t want to disrupt their “beautiful”glass back phones that 99.9999% of people slap a case on. User replaceable screens are more challenging to make waterproof but I’m sure they could figure it out.

But if the above was addressed, they wouldn’t necessarily have to. We could go back to the days of going to a small store next to your grocery store and getting your phone screen changed out for $150 while you do your shopping. except much more money because an iphone 16 pro max oled is ~ $700 just for the screen, which brings up the other issue of people don’t want to repair stuff anymore because component cost is outrageous. The phone is $1200 for the base model so if the screen and labor is $800 a lot of people will (foolishly) go “well for $400 more I can just get a brand new one!” even though it’s the same damn phone. However, these screen prices fall dramatically when the phones get even a few gens older and a bunch get recycled

Because it is. A quote from the linked page on asahi linux devs leaving twitter because of rising anti trans rhetoric

““Half of us are trans,” he says. Accompanied by a call to “fight back” against an imagined “genocide”, assumedly perpetrated by those who do not fully buy into his particular sexual fetish.”

The blogs author purposely misgenders Alyssa Rosensweig and refers to being trans as a sexual fetish, which makes their politics obscenely clear. Further, Alyssa has a resume of amazing accomplishments in reverse engineering the apple m1 and m2 chips and developing graphics drivers for their gpus. Lundukes resume is basically growing up as a nerd and being a “tech blogger” from early in the game and going full qanon a few years ago

Further in the article he references hector Martin saying that people demanding to keep politics out of tech is bullshit because tech is made by humans and anti trans rhetoric is going to kill his colleagues. His response to this:

“Of course nobody is trying to kill Hector’s colleagues.

And the vast majority of major corporations – not to mention the President of the country – are continually coming out in support of the Trans fetish. So declaring that there is a genocide occuring is beyond ridiculous.”

So that didn’t age well (from less than 2 years ago)

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

Silica gel says do not eat but it’s non toxic and generally harmless if eaten. Even if you eat a ton of it you generally only see mild GI symptoms like bloating and diarrhea. You typically pass it undigested.

Little kids can choke on it though, thus the do not eat. Also in rare situations it’s coated with cobalt which is toxic and will make you vomit but this isn’t used for consumer desiccant, especially so for food

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

He was always kind of a privileged scumbag who would throw tantrums when he didn’t get his own way. He literally twists words to support his narrative going back well over a decade

He heard fireworks once and saw a black jogger in like 2013. He decided with no evidence this was a crime so he chased the guy and detained him with a fucking shotgun. Sound familiar? 7 years later the same scenario resulted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. And as a result of that during his senate run when people dug this incident up he stated he was the “chief law enforcement officer”, which was bullshit. He was mayor, but he was also really buddy buddy with the cops (technically mayors in Braddock have admin power over the cops but he basically removed that to “make the cops jobs more efficient”, except when he needed the title 10 years later for damage control). He has never apologized for this incident and actively refuses to do so.

He also barely won the mayor position the first time (literally one by a single vote) and the second time influenced the election by using his power to release his opponents arrest records to defame him

The mayor of Braddock is also a small part time position that basically paid nothing. He was able to dedicate himself to it wholeheartedly because his rich dad paid him 50 grand a year to be mayor. He also used family money on several town enrichment projects early in his tenure to win favor. He still collected his meager mayor salary despite getting daddy money.

When he encountered roadblocks to projects he circumvented traditional means and as a result limited the ability for people who lived in the town to comment or intervene in his nonsense. This was probably by design because his plan was ultimately to gentrify the town. He only wanted you there if you were like his rich dad; if you weren’t then you could fucking leave. He wasn’t interested in serving you, he was interesting in “revitalizing the town” aka removing the undesirable elements and bringing in new desirable (read: rich and white) people to replace them.

In the meantime he scored brownie points by doing some gay weddings and having some nice community projects. Bc of course, he wanted the community to be nice. He just didn’t want you to live there if you were poor.

It is absolutely no surprise that he has aligned with neoliberals, with pro israel sentiment, and even with trump. Fuck fetterman. He’s always been a privileged, classist, and racist bully who will bend the rules if it means he gets his way. The stroke changed nothing.

Sure.

I’m not sure what the rules are about recommendations of specific providers here as you’ve said but I can certainly write about my experiences with providers

Emu streams is my current provider and they’re decent. The EPG is complete for us channels but not for some of the foreign stuff or for 4k. They have a pretty extensive vod library but the quality ranges, sometimes it’s 4k but sometimes it’s 480p, mostly 1080p, almost none of it has subtitles (but the channels do). I think they just grabbed shows as they came out and never updated them. Buffering is uncommon but does happen sometimes. I don’t watch sports but my partner does; the Super Bowl 4k stream had lots of buffering but the 1080 stream was perfect and basketball games work fine. Pricing was about 70cad for 7 months when I got it and they accepted paypal and crypto

I also tried earl hickeys iptv, very similar experience but more issues with buffering and not as many channels. However pricing was extremely attractive, 35gbp for 12mo

And not via that forum but another provider I found via a private tracker called media solutions that is similar to emu. Less issues with buffering but pricing and most responsive to support via telegram but priciest. I don’t remember the pricing offhand but like $140usd a year or so?