MudMan

I barely even remember what the specific dealbreaker was, honestly. I was just dabbling, considering expanding my NAS and maybe getting the gear to dump my 4K BluRays. I gave Jellyfin a try first, I went through the setup process and I remember it being a) confusing to set up, and b) very ugly.

I gave Plex a try to cover my bases and that looked better and got me up and running faster, so I just stuck with it. Easier remote access was a feature for me there, too, but the choice was made purely on the onboarding process, there was nothing activist to it. It’s maybe the most user-level, unresearched decision I’ve taken on software in a while, honestly. I was already trying to figuring out the ripping and encoding at the same time, so I didn’t want to put any additional attention on library management.

If anything I gave Jellyfin a bit more of a chance than I otherwise would have because I had heard a lot of angry chatter from people about Plex. I guess I came in after they made the changes that pissed people off and didn’t mind the state of the current product without a frame of reference. I would have bailed if there was a subscription, but they do have a one-and-done purchase, so now I’m set up, it’s working and I’ve paid them as much as I’m going to, so I’m fine with it. I do appreciate a free alternative existing, though.

Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that’s bad UX.

I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they’re not the same.

Hm. I gave Jellyfin a try and the UX was a turnoff, so I ended up in Plex. The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me, too, but maybe there’s a bit of sunk cost fallacy to that.

Either way it seems people are mostly fine with their choices and there is a viable free alternative, so… all good there.

It’s not just an issue with location. Canadians tend to think they’re a lot more… culturally and politically European than they are.

And, again, there are lots of other alternatives before having to incorporate a whole-ass North American country with a landmass twice as big as the entire EU and located ten time zones away into a political and economic union designed to let trucks move things around easily.

Well, we’d have to redraw a bunch of maps, so at least it’d one up the dumb Gulf of Mexico distraction.

This seems pretty silly. There are tons of intermediary states Canada could reach without the weird torturing of geography. As the linked piece acknowledges way at the bottom, incidentally.

Yeah, I guess that’s how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it’s quite the win/win.

Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.

A fun one to put in perspective how hideously power hungry modern desktop PCs are is that I have an old (ish) laptop running as a local Plex server that also has a LLM loaded in there and a few other docker bits and pieces and it just sits happily humming at 10W idle (which is as much as my TV draws when it’s turned off).

I’ve looked into building a small form factor PC to replace it at some point but all the spare parts I have lying around would draw as much idle as when that tiny thing is going full tilt and I just can’t justify it for something that just stays on waiting for me to feel like rewatching The Matrix or whatever.

Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.

Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?

I’m not American, friend. Anybody who could have voted for not-Trump and didn’t is a collaborationist with an opposing force in my book, and I have zero need to adjust that assessment.

I’ll let you know if anything changes my mind when people are digging bunkers in Greenland or I’m holidaying in the Gazan Riviera or whatever. In the meantime, this is real life now and the collaborationists can check if they’re cool with the outcomes of their collaboration in real time.

As opposed to… you know, the perfectly legal genocide, or…?

Hey, apropos of nothing, where are the “can’t bring myself to vote for Biden/Harris” crew? I shouldn’t even ask, should I? I don’t even want to know what mental gymnastics are happening at this point, let alone in the next however many years.

Man, it’s gonna be so hard not to comment on the nonsense if you guys keep putting Trump crap on World News. I really don’t want to block this as well as the US news channels, but I will if pushed.

Also, no, he didn’t assign everybody female, he made everybody non-binary, which is extra woke. At the point of conception no person produces any reproductive cells at all, so by his definition is neither male nor female. Plus it explicitly differentiates sex from gender identity, which I found rather woke, too.

I know nothing of the sort, and I honestly think it’s far less snobbish than the alternative.

I absolutely had nothing better to do than education, that much I give you. It’s a high bar, I was doing some really cool shit.

Thankfully, my government agreed with me on that one, and I’m more than happy to pay taxes for the rest of my life to make it keep being the case. And thankfully, my parents agreed as well. My dad was adamant I didn’t take a job on the side despite us not being particularly well off. Probably because he’s a left-leaning teacher himself and HE worked his ass off and paid all the taxes so we could all do that, not to have us drive living wages down by squatting at McDonalds, or whatever.

And sure, it was an investment in the way reading a book in my own time is an investment. It made me better at a thing and taught me things and gave me time to figure stuff out. It was certainly not an investment in my career. I haven’t submitted my degree with a job application once in decades of working for a living. Did alright anyway, wouldn’t have done as well without the things I lived and learned or the people I met and learned from.

Which is what education is for, in my book. If you’re looking at dollar input versus lifetime dollar output… well, you do need an education, so maybe you can get that while you’re making a fool of yourself getting that MBA or whatever.

I’m not Chinese, so I can’t answer that.

I can tell you that’s absolutely not how or why I got my own degree. For which I paid barely anything, so hard to picture it as an investment. And it didn’t seem to be much of an “investment” for my classmates, many of whom paid nothing or were paid to do it.

We did think it was cool, though. Got to meet very smart people, both as professors and as classmates, some of which I keep in touch to this day. Got to learn stuff I hadn’t even considered and access technical means I couldn’t have afforded. Zero regrets, even if my degree is only very tangentially related to my current job.

So… does that answer the question?

Was coming to say this.

It’s a very… anglo conservative view to see education as a financial investment to get a job (and a working class person with an education as a waste of resources).

There’s an argument to be made about the labor market in China and how its working class is remunerated in an economy designed for cheap exports, but this framing is probably not it.

I’m pretty sure that statement just made several history books in your vicinity spontaneously combust, but you should still try to see if you can find any of the remaining ones and take a peek inside.

I was born just after the toppling of a fascist regime. My parents were both left wingers during the regime itself. I have voted for left wing parties my entire life, with some success because… you know, fascism in living memory is a hell of an incentive. You’ll find out.

But no, please, by all means do tell me how it works, I’m very curious.

Case in point.

Turns out, it doesn’t matter why he won or who you personally blame for it, the consequences will be the same. Those people who weren’t “fine with genocide” (which is an entirely fallacious argument, for the record), will now be “fine” with a whole bunch of other stuff whether they like it or not.

And I do not care. Screw them specifically. If this guy does leave or die by 2029 and there’s anybody friendly left standing they can poke me then, we can compare notes on rebuilding post-fascism. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear it.

I mean… no. Unless you have a time machine stashed somewhere.

This sent me to the archives to see the hordes of posts from left-leaning people saying they “couldn´t bring themselves” to vote for Biden or later Harris, let alone the outright tankies (who, by the way, are doing great at not posting about this or anything Trump-related lately).

I am determined to minimize exposure to this stuff for as long as I can, but since it’s inescapable today, let me at least point out that this is America starting to toss and turn in the bed it made for itself. I have little empathy for it as a unit.

And yeah, sure, I get that half the country didn’t vote for these idiots, but honestly it shouldn’t have been even close and at some point the rest of the planet has to cut ties and focus on building a post-America world. If you excuse us, we’ll be digging bunkers in Greenland, because apparently that’s a thing now.

Yeah, I’m not doing this again. Not waiting to see what of his random unhinged nonsense he ignores, fails to do or does anyway.

I suggest keeping this guy out of World News unless he… you know, actually does something. I’m sure the US channels can track every time he misspeaks and then has to pretend aliens landed in Nicaragua or whatever.

See below, the idea is for rent control to take care of that, which is part of the package. Along with the government supposedly planning to build their own company to compete.

If they were able to manage getting this implemented, which is dubious for political reasons, it probably would work, but it’d take at least a few years and there are many ways the increasingly anarchocapitalist conservative forces around it can disrupt it. We’ll see. As a model for other places… it’s probably a good place to start looking, it just needs a legal framework where you can deploy all of it (rent control, direct government development and rental, fiscal pressure on speculative property purchases). Just one piece alone probably won’t do it.