I feel like pure demonization is such an easy path to distrust and abuse. For the longest time I didn’t know the difference between even weed and other drugs, just that it was “bad”, weed might as well have been crack. I sure as shit didn’t know the harder drugs make you feel unimaginably good and that this in specific was the danger.

I actually had a bad LSD trip that went worse than it should have due to this demonization, I couldn’t stop thinking of all the times I was told or overheard as a kid that such drugs drive you insane. I knew beforehand what I was doing and what that would entail, but it didn’t matter once I had jumped in, the paranoia from years of growing up hearing such things won.

For sure raise awareness, for sure drive home the notion that certain drugs will fuck your life up, but they need to seriously sit down and explain the nuances between all of them, they need to explain risks and dangers (the real ones, not the propagandist talking points) as well as the effects, they need to compare them to alcohol, tobacco, coffee, hell even food since even that is addictive. People will try stuff, they better try stuff with an informed perspective and know which ones are too much to consider.

I honestly don’t think I’d notice a real world difference between 4G and H+ in most scenarios except for, maybe, video. I never understood the hype for 5G, especially considering the horrendous frequency limitations that imply line of sight AND very small coverage radii.

The SSD price hike prediction is really fucking infuriating. Doesn’t seem like we’re aiming to replace HDDs ever at this pace.

90% of the sites I visit don’t abuse ads.

Damn so you don’t use YouTube?

The problem is the content being uploaded to these platforms serves a real and meaningful public, community purpose. Reddit has always been a knowledge base for a plethora of different subjects, YouTube has all sorts of content that has historical importance to the internet, as well as a trove of educational content that is unparalleled in size and quality.

I take issue with that, because it’s not the company’s content, it’s just their platform. The content is vastly more important than the platform, but the companies act as if it’s theirs. They do everything based off what the community has built on their platforms, it’s their true essence and what actually attracts people.

In the specific case of YouTube, I’d say that content is irreplaceable and indispensable. While it’s true that it is a privately owned platform and we don’t have much of a say on its direction, I truly believe the content is so important that the only viable path forward to prevent its loss, is to take said platform off private hands. I don’t believe it’ll ever happen, but it is what should happen, as it’s literally impossible to back up YouTube, just like it’s currently impossible to compete with YouTube.

Wait, when did this happen? I’ve been subscribed for years now and all I’ve ever seen on his channel are laptop and phone reviews.

For real, we need more phones that are compatible with GrapheneOS. Going to Google for THE De-googled phone is nothing shy of extremely ironic and borderline hypocritical.

Because it compliments existential dread quite fittingly. Check out exurb1a if you want more [very poetically narrated] existential dread [with a few bong rips or bottles of alcohol in between]. His last video, published hours before I wrote that, sort of touches on some of the ideas I wrote about (I watched the video afterwards, idk), but a lot more beautifully.

“then what” is also essentially our question. We can hypothesize about AGI taking over and having to deal with these existential questions. We could also theorize that we fend off aging and start living forever. What then? But why go so deep into hypotheticals when this exact scenario is what’s being played off by life itself in this world. Every single organism, Going back all the way when we were all the same thing, we’ve all been just replicating and fighting to stay alive to replicate some more. Plants, fungi, bacteria, even viruses, mammals, reptiles, birds, water bears and hydras, fishes and crustaceans, from intelligent all the way to not even recognized as life by us. All of it is just patterned noise trying to keep staying recognizable through time immemorial. Why? What’s the “what then” for life itself? What’s the endgame? Is there even an endgame, or does it just not matter?

Now life is no miracle, magical thing. It follows rules, the rules of the universe. If it exists, it’s because it’s possible for it to exist due to the very laws of the universe. Hence, it’s all just another complex process, just like every other complex thing that’s happened in this universe. So, why? Why does a universe exist, and why does life exist within it? Is it that the process we call life is just the universe trying to wake up and look in a mirror? Even if we argue that it’s a ridiculous and egotistical take, we are all still matter that understands what it is, we understand we are energy, we are matter, we are atoms, we are processes, we are a dance with death, we are the dancers, the living and the blueprint for more living, the experience of living, and the continuation of this in other copies of us. We’re the cells in our body, and the organelles within those cells. We’re the proteins, the fats, the DNA, we’re each neuron firing based on electrical impulses, we’re the synapses between the neurons, we’re the energy that courses through those synapses, and we’re the pattern that emerges from it. We’re the emergence of it all, and we’re the emergence of our society as well. We’re the person, and we’re the society, and we’re also the entire ecosystem. We’re the planet, as well as the solar system, and the galaxy it’s in, and the galactic neighborhood it belongs to, and the group, supergroup, cluster, and the supercluster. We go all the way down to the smallest things, and yet it wouldn’t be possible without the biggest things. We are built as individuals, and yet we emerge as something bigger than all of us, and something bigger than that, and that, and that too.

We’re made of universe, so we are universe, and when we look into ourselves, the universe does so too. So why? What’s the point? Does God wake up eventually after staring long enough in the mirror, and if so, what does he do about it? Why do we fight tooth and nail to be alive, to stay alive, when we don’t really know what to do next? Will our next versions know what to do? Will God know what to do, once he awakens and the egg breaks? Why is any of this… Even here?

So yeah, edibles are pretty good today.

Fuck it, I’m joining you. That sounds like a mentally healthy choice.

Crossing the snacks aisle and resisting the temptation to grab shit, like we’re legit ass adults and we ain’t going out to buy a whole ass cake to eat in a single seating. WHY.

I posted this in another comment, but during uni I did in fact write code in lucid dreams. A friend can vouch for a specific time when I woke up from sleep during an all nighter, to fix a very specific bug (which I just remembered, we didn’t even know it existed), then went back to sleep. On another occasion, I designed a recursive path-finding algorithm to replace djikstra’s algorithm, all in my sleep.

It definitely can be done (though I doubt it could be done consistently and without actually imagining shit up), but it really shouldn’t be done, I really doubt I was really resting while doing that.

I was also on the fence. Ended up jumping into it all a few months agk, and my plex server went from a very small and informal media repository that a few friends kept nagging me about because I always procrastinated downloading, categorizing, and adding media to it, to now a vast collection of thousands of movies and hundreds of shows, spanning about 50 users, around 40TB+ of content (which reminds me I need more drives soon…) and everyone requests whatever they want. There’s still work to be done, there always is, especially if your server grows and your peers start using it (wait to see that one person start requesting Korean stuff that never gets found automatically), but it’s a night and day difference for me, and the organization of it all helps me concentrate and tackle stuff quicker.

So the stack usually goes like this:

-sonarr, radarr, readarr, lidarr, etc. : they each specialize in a media format (series, movies, books, music, respectively), they will fetch Metadata from known Metadata sources, and will perform searches on whichever indexer you like (think piratebay for torrents, or nzbgeek for NZBs from usenet). They’ll connect to your download client and send torrents and NZBs to be downloaded, will know if a download fails and search again, and will import completed items automatically. They’ll organize everything, rename everything, and keep track of quality with constant upgrades to your media by parsing RSS feeds from said indexers. They won’t go out of their way to downloading things you didn’t ask for, you have to ask for everything. You can monitor collections for movies on radarr if you want future movies, but that’s about it as far as waiting for new content not explicitly requested.

-overseerr, requestrr, etc. : these are front ends that you can share with your friends and family. You only need one. They’ll be able to search for content as well as browse trending or new contenr, see if it’s in your library, request content, and follow the progress of the requested content. No need to tell anyone “this isn’t done yet”, they can just check what’s available and whatnot, and you can designate request quotas per user and decline requests.

-jackett, prowlarr, etc. : these helper services will make it easier for you to keep track of your indexers. They’ll communicate with the content handling arr services to provide them all the indexers they need. You only need one. You set them up once on these services rather than once for each arr service. They also have the ability to perform better manual indexer searches than the main arr stack services.

-honorable mention, bazarr: this little fella will integrate with your arr services to monitor all media and download subtitles for it all, set to your standards. It even has the ability to use a WhisperAI server (speech to text LLM developed by openai) as a source for subtitles, so you could create your own subtitles if you don’t find any. Of all of them, I find this one to feel the jankiest, but it does a decent enough job, even if not perfect by a long shot.

There’s other services that I haven’t messed with. For instance, there’s Tdarr which is used for automatic remuxing and conversion of media files to whichever format you prefer, in order to standardize your entire library. I feel like this is a destructive service that could easily backfire if I’m not careful (say, HDR H265 conversion to H264, buhbye dynamic range and color accuracy forever on that file if you don’t provide an accurate tone mapping which is usually not a one size fits all thing, so a lot of intervention anyway) , so I’d rather not even risk it.

Almost everything can be thrown into docker containers, and you can find some pretty decent guides on YouTube by searching for these services one by one. After the first one, you’ll get the gist of it all I think. Bazarr runs as a service (at least on windows) and has some bug with its front-end sometimes, which requires you to restart the service to get into the page at all, though apparently setting the service to delayed start fixes the issue, which I did and haven’t run into this bug since, so something to keep in mind.

As others mentioned, there’s guides to setting up qualities, filters, exclusions, and priorities on your content, and trash guides are usually where you go for that. I find that trash has a high standard for quality, which will eat through your storage like a bodybuilder eating 20 eggs for breakfast in a single seating, so you will always have to play around with your preferences and it will take some time to get things just right (some edge case scenarios on content are hard to spot at first, but you’ll get that one download of a very questionable release that will make you tear your hair off for a bit), but it will get better as you tinker around.

So to summarize, if you have even a little bit of trouble maintaining your media repository, these are a must. Even if you don’t, the process of searching stuff, downloading stuff, renaming and categorizing stuff, and then checking that everything is OK on plex by comparing stuff on thetvdb and whatnot, its a lot of time-consuming work even if you don’t notice it, and all of it can be automated by the arr stack easily. I have a couple of friends helping as admins of it all, and they’re just as freaky on management as I am, so we all just work together to get everything right, and it’s really helpful and easy to go down this route. Good luck and have fun!

Ah, final tidbit, if you don’t yet use the usenet, this is the moment where you will realize you have to spend money on it because it’ll help that much more than torrents once your arr stack is going at it. I’m at two usenet indexers and I think two usenet content providers. I want more. Help.

I mean I’ve been a pirate for a WHILE and you generally do see ads on opensubtitles subs. Generally it’s opensubtitles saying you can advertise with them, or credits for subtitles that stay on the screen for way too long, but this has been a thing forever now, I don’t recall a time when this wasn’t done.

I don’t think I can take the moral high ground on it seeing as…well, I am a pirate lol. We out here doing our best to stay afloat, opensubtitles included.

It’s a matter of who gets tired quicker at this point, YouTube, ublock maintainers, or users. We’re on the losing side, and alternative front ends sound like the “we’re cornered” solution. I imagine Google won’t take long to break them as well.

To be fair, there’s no real constraint to what a computer should look like, as long as it computes. You can build the foundational circuits of modern CPUs using dominos, and if you had the space you could build a one time use adder. It would compute the sum of two numbers, so it’s technically a computer. Your pipe and water example is technically also a valid computer if built as such.

How old are you? I feel like I started off being such an edge lord on the internet, and now at 30 I’ve never felt more aligned with left leaning ideologies. My father was pretty left leaning as well.

I mean, that is true of a ton of other, if not most, consumer goods

Yeah, I’m already automating my entire Plex configuration, got some friends as admins on my services to help me run it, and I’m sharing it with all my friends through secure connections with let’s encrypt. There’s no reason to keep giving massive companies our money, data, and freedom. Fuck the cloud, fuck these subscription services, fuck SaaS, fuck it all. It’s piracy all the way down from now on.

I’m Honduran, so the CIA can eat a pile of dicks for what they’ve done to my country and the whole of Latin America, but rushing to those kinds of “jokes” puts you on par with the right wingers who blame everything on Soros and the cabal of news. some reason is just being annoyed at stupid comments.